Movies

If you had told me last year that Darren Aronofsky the celluloid high priest of psychological torment, chronicler of dancers, addicts, and whales perpetually spiraling into their own obsessions, would stage a Guy Ritchie caper comedy, “with a cat,” I’d have assumed you’d been drinking what the denizens of Paul’s Bar are serving. Yet here is Caught Stealing, a film so unrecognizable as Aronofsky’s that your main clue to his involvement is the perverse glee with which the violence arrives not with the velvet caress of fate, but like a sledgehammer wrapped in Pop Rocks.

There’s a curious electricity that runs through Copycat, a film too calculating in its own self-regard to ever really slip the leash and become what you want it to be—a nervy thriller or a macabre descent or even a sly commentary on its own genre-mad duplicities. But isn’t that late-‘90s Hollywood for you? They always want to have a clever setup, the air of psychological sophistication, and Sigourney Weaver locked in a crystal palace of agoraphobic terror—yet heaven forbid they ever let too much chaos creep in. Copycat is the sort of movie that blows a kiss in the direction of Silence of the Lambs but recoils from Hannibal’s chill. The difference, of course, is that Jonathan Demme’s movie had an actual pulse beneath the politesse and a villain who seemed to spiral out of the cracked American psyche like a bad dream. Here, the nightmares all come from old clippings.

There’s something very contemporary about Companion, that sense of ordinary people, lacquered in anxiety, stumbling into catastrophe by way of a Silicon Valley fever dream. Drew Hancock, no hack, has made a movie that wants to stare at the icy void where technology and human vanity collide, then crack a joke so the void doesn’t stare back too hard. It’s a science fiction thriller in horror makeup, but with the nervous giggle of a dinner party gone off the rails.

Say what you will about Martin Scorsese, the man can squeeze new blood from a dead body, even when that corpse is the gangster film itself. With Casino, he revisits the operatic, violence-soaked terrain so memorably realized in Goodfellas. But this is no mere retread. Here, in the sun-baked, gaudy playground of Las Vegas, Scorsese paints with brighter neons and darker shadows, as if the moral decay is more lurid for being so thoroughly lacquered in gold. And, confession time, this is the one that tops my list, staking a claim even above Goodfellas in the Scorsese firmament.

Carjackers is the cinematic equivalent of a fast-food burger eaten under fluorescent lighting: nothing poisonous, nothing memorable, just diet mediocrity slouching in a wrapper that pretends at rebellion. You might stumble on it, buried in the streaming bin of shame—one of those algorithmic offerings recommended after midnight when the platforms think your standards (and will to live) have flagged. The premise ought to be piquant enough to keep us awake: a ragtag band of valets and bartenders, moonlighting as amateur Robin Hoods, targeting the swollen wallets of the rich who can afford bland hotel restaurants and overpriced whiskey. When their moonlighting collides with an ill-advised “big score”—and the hotel director sends a hitman after them—you'd hope, or at least pray, for some pulse-raising chaos. Instead, buckle in: this getaway car is stuck in reverse, and the ride is more padded than perilous.

Just when you think you’ve seen every action movie variation—a relentless barrage of bullets, a battered hero bleeding patriotism in the dust, evil men with nicknames like “The Stinger”—along comes Counterattack, a film that throws itself into the jungle firefight with reckless abandon, only to get pinned down by the most familiar artillery in the screenwriter’s arsenal. If the action genre has become the cinematic equivalent of a well-worn pair of combat boots, this international effort polishes the leather but never changes the tread.

You sit down to Cold Wallet expecting slick Netflix-bait, a digital-age caper that promises to surf the froth and confusion of the cryptocurrency world—and you get exactly that, for better or worse. It’s a thriller with a gamified conscience, a morality tale dressed up in meme-charged adrenaline, hustling for attention like a day-trader chasing the next meme coin. Cutter Hodierne’s direction thrusts us into a jittery, claustrophobic world where Redditors become bumbling revolutionaries overnight, and the real drama isn’t wealth lost or gained, but the feeble, ever-shifting ground on which contemporary ethics stand. The irony? The lesson is larger—infinitely larger—than the story.

I never thought I’d live to see Jean Reno in the twilight of his career forced to act opposite a snowdrift and lose. "Cold Blood Legacy" (also known simply as "Cold Blood," a name with all the intrigue of a tax filing) is the sort of movie you hope to find by accident at 2AM on cable—a tired assassin in a picturesque cabin, a mysterious young intruder, a snowstorm of clichés drifting in through every frame. What I didn’t expect: a genre film so inept, so embarrassing, that its only claim to suspense is whether any of the cast will make it to the next scene conscious.

You know the apocryphal story about critics who walk into an action movie wishing for a glimmer of difference—a splash of personality amid the prefab booms and glowering hostage negotiators? “Carry-On” waltzed onto my screen promising nothing new except a Christmastime setting and a Netflix logo, and about fifteen minutes in, I realized my cynicism had been mugged. Here is a film that doesn’t just meet the genre’s half-hearted handshake; it throws its arms around every cliché in the terminal, spins them twice, then has the nerve to wink.

If there’s a pleasure to be found in a political thriller set within the velvet-draped echo chambers of the Vatican, it’s in the sense that every well-pressed cardinal is one false move away from revealing the bit of spinach stuck to his soul. Conclave is a high-stakes ecclesiastical procedural that wants to show you the secret arteries and clogged veins of the Catholic Church—not just a pageant of holy men, but a great, labyrinthine chess game shot through with acid and lamp oil. And if sometimes the chessboard feels more like a conference call where everyone has a different point to make but no one’s listening, the movie at least has the gall to try.