Movies

Is there anything sweeter than a genre picture that tries to sneak a love story past a firing squad of monsters, bioweapons, and the apocalypse itself—and half-succeeds not by brute force, but by the sheer force of its leads? Hollywood, that eternal laboratory of hybrid creatures, has never tired of shoving its pretty faces into the trenches of the end times, but Scott Derrickson’s The Gorge practically begs to ask: if the world was ending, wouldn’t you fall in love if you could? (Especially if Miles Teller was across the way with a rifle and Anya Taylor-Joy was the voice in your headset?) Well, how could you not.

You walk into The Meg half ready to sneer, armed with all your righteous cineaste skepticism: here comes Jason Statham wrestling a dinosaur fish, and if that’s not enough to send you running for Bergman, nothing is. I wanted to hate it. Honestly, I did. And so, the first surprise: it’s possible, in this perverse landscape where studios toss millions at shark movies, to actually enjoy yourself despite yourself. The shame isn’t the ludicrous premise or the overblown CGI — it’s how you’re grinning by the time the third aquatic monstrosity explodes out of the Pacific, Statham bracing himself for another winking one-liner.

Is it possible, even now, for an old master to turn the American epic inside out and force us, blinking, into the full view of our own historical obscenities? With “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese—half a century after Mean Streets, still careening down the byways of national guilt—gives us a film that arrives not like a gift, but as a reckoning. Even coming in at a prodigious three-and-a-half hours, the movie—anchored by Scorsese’s sure hand, thrilling, raw-silk visuals, and a cast so fine-tuned they seem to bleed right off the screen—never feels like indulgence. It’s a sustained, merciless symphony of American sin.

When George Clooney and Brad Pitt show up together in a movie these days, it’s like old royalty strutting through Times Square in sunglasses: you don’t care why they’re there, you just want to watch them soak up every inch of spotlight. That’s Wolfs—Jon Watts’s breezy, over-familiar caper where the plot is more a rumor than a skeleton, but the charm is thick enough to swim in. Was I enthralled? Not exactly. But did I have a hell of a time? Absolutely. This is the sort of picture that glides on charisma and the friction of two megawatt stars shoulder-bumping through a city that knows how to keep its secrets tucked behind neon and hotel doors.

What kind of mad, magnificent nerve does it take to thread blues, Jim Crow, juke joints, and bloody fanged vampires into a single, haunted hymn, then have the whole thing vibrate with a weary, unvarnished soul? In “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s blood-spattered Delta opera, the answer is: more nerve than most directors have in their little fingers. For a movie that starts off with the horror bag’s oldest two-bit trick, jump cuts and sulfurous flashbacks, as if auditioning to be the next entry in The Conjuring Industrial Complex, this one slinks out of its corner, trades its fangs for a microphone, and spins its story so slow and deep you could fall into it and drown in its music. Ten minutes in, I nearly scoffed. Ninety minutes later, I was reeling, what fuckery is this?

Sequels, by design, are inheritances, too often, like any suspect will, they squander the family fortune on wasted violence and reheated melodrama. For a while, Inside Furioza looks set to repeat the pattern: the first act unspools with the weight and momentum of last year’s pierogi, and you fear it’ll languish in the shadow of its predecessor’s best moments. But then, almost as if the movie itself sobers up, the violence starts to matter, the betrayals burn, and the familiar bruised psychology of this franchise kicks in hard.

There’s a certain kind of movie poster, bald head gleaming, tattoos crawling across the chest, a scowl carved with care, like granite beneath floodlights that comes on like a challenge. It dares you not to take it seriously, to file it away with the endless parade of hooligan pulp, football thugs, or East End bruisers with the personality of a discarded can. And so Furioza, by all appearances, looked ready to step right into that gutter. But what a joy, what a rare, mean-spirited joy to be proven so gloriously wrong.

There’s a moment in Steve Jobs, one of those dangerous little intervals between a volley of Sorkinian wit and the next bracing clash of egos when you realize: this is not, and never has been, about computers. It’s about the performance, jobs (no pun intended) as theater, invention as drama, genius as soliloquy. The curtain rises, the orchestra tunes, and our hero snappish, mercurial, blazingly single-minded, takes center stage, a maestro of microchips who can’t solder a wire but can bend the collective will of a room as if it were his own personal instrument. Aaron Sorkin has never met a conference room he couldn’t set aflame with words, but Danny Boyle, all kinetic energy and pulsing light, turns these corridors and backstage wings into a kind of nervy, flickering proscenium. Forget the dreary rest of the “biopic” genre; Steve Jobs isn’t here to teach you the story of Apple. It’s here to make you feel that strange, unholy exhilaration of watching the right mind crash mercilessly, ecstatically, against the world.

Is there any scene in “The Social Network” that isn’t about performance? Not just Eisenberg’s brittle, arms-folded, owl-eyed Mark Zuckerberg, a man so locked in his own circuitry he might as well be the world’s first AI pod person, but the entire film, with Aaron Sorkin’s words snapping like the coldest branch on a Cambridge winter, and Fincher’s camera gliding, unsmiling, over the asphalt and brains of Harvard. Everyone’s playing at something: friendship, genius, vengeance, American myth, and, inevitably, wealth. And the show they put on, fifteen years later, still fascinates, even as the history recedes into legend and legend ossifies into yet another “origin story” for the streaming age.

There’s a moment in Empire of the Sun if you’re not too numb or calloused to notice it when eleven-year-old Jim Graham, perched amid the rubble of wartime Shanghai, tries to recall his parents’ faces and can’t quite conjure them up. That blankness, that terror, is like an air raid siren going off inside a child’s mind, and Spielberg, whose name floats above this adolescent epic like some well-meaning guardian angel lets us feel every jagged pulse of it. There are dozens of war films, even more coming-of-age stories, but it’s not often that a director with Steven Spielberg’s technical bravado and Disney-nursed heart contrives to put a child (and the audience) through the meat grinder of history with the open-eyed panic that Empire of the Sun delivers.