The Killer’s Game is a dumb-fun pinball machine, a high-calorie action caper that’s all elbows and B-movie brio, careening between pulp gags and neon guts, knocking you around for 90 minutes, and then blowing you a kiss on the way out the door.
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.
If you ever wanted to see American family dysfunction tiptoe right up to the precipice, peer over, consider taking a leap into delicious manic farce, and then, ever-so-polite, decide it’d rather just shuffle a little awkwardly for ninety minutes “Adulthood” is your movie.
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.
If there is one thing the Netflix machine does better than most of the Hollywood conglomerates that blunder through genre as if they’re bobbing for apples in a vat of clichés, it’s churning out the kind of shredded comfort food that coaxes out your half-remembered adolescent idiot grin. Night Teeth is exactly the sort of movie you suspect you’ll find yourself loathing on principle—supermodel vampires, neon-L.A. nightlife, and a plot straining to be both “gritty urban” and “Instagram ready”—but, half an hour in, you’ve stopped counting the script’s shortcuts and started absent-mindedly tapping your foot to a bass-bloated, mortifying soundtrack. So: maybe you feel a little ashamed to admit how much you’re enjoying it. I wouldn’t blame you.
Wes Anderson has never been interested in narrative momentum, not really—he’s always preferred the aromatic whiff of narrative, the barest hint of plot beaten into candy glass and served up in a diorama, with the flavorings drawn from a Boy’s Own Adventure half-remembered in French. With “The French Dispatch,” he takes this already rarefied style and, with the enthusiasm of a ten-year-old let loose in the stationery aisle at Agnès B., multiplies it, refracts it, permutes it like a box of Ladurée macarons spilled across a New Yorker back-issue. It would be tempting, if you are not careful, to call this his ultimate film—the ur-Wes, the platonic ideal of his own butterfly-souled unreality—until, of course, you remember that this particular train has only gained steam over the years. If Anderson follows this path for another decade, we’ll need not a theater but a clockmaker’s bench and an electron microscope just to glimpse the latest nesting doll.
Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel is that rare confection—delicate in the details, unashamedly artificial, and yet so lovingly precise that each shot seems to have been placed by a court jeweler. Watching it, I found myself seduced, not by plot in the traditional sense, but by the madcap energy of images that kept assembling themselves before my eyes like intricate pastries in a display window. Every frame could hang comfortably—if not always respectfully—beside the garish masterworks of the fictional Zubrowkan aristocracy. To call Anderson’s style a signature is almost too tame; the man works in flourishes, borders, and uproarious symmetry, composing each sequence as if it’s to be beamed through time, immune to the half-life decay of fashion. I can say, with a degree of confidence seldom afforded to contemporary cinema, that The Grand Budapest Hotel will look as good—and taste as odd—in a century as it does today.
If the original Happy Gilmore was the cinematic equivalent of being blindsided by a pie in the face. A pie filled with golf balls, beer, and genuine pathos, then Happy Gilmore 2 is what happens when someone throws three pies at you at once, turns the sprinklers on mid-swing, and then asks if you remember the taste of the original filling. It’s a legacy sequel that, for all its Frankensteinian splicing of silly and serious, still manages to resurrect Sandler’s battered but buoyant Happy with enough vigor to remind us why we ever rooted for this idiot savant and his primal swing.
How delicious, in this era of franchise bloat and less-than-simple sequels, to be handed a second helping that leaves you sated rather than queasy. If Paul Feig's Another Simple Favor is a cocktail, it's one shaken with a confidence, a dash of vermouth and a twist of lemon, sipped poolside in Capri while the bodies float by (sometimes literally, sometimes, more enjoyably, in spirit). Rarely does a film invite the audience to marvel at its gorgeous surface and still let them dive, giggling, into its undertow. Here, we have that rare, effervescent tonic: a thriller that dresses up as a comedy, or the other way 'round; a parade of “thrills” that remembers to be, above all, fun.
There are films that, like a splashy dinner party hosted between power surges, seem to teeter joyfully on the brink of self-immolation: too bright, too eager, altogether too much. A Simple Favor, Paul Feig’s giddy, knowing leap into nonsensical noir (with quotation marks around both “noir” and “knowing”), belongs to that breed. One watches it, if one watches it at all, and I admit I was blissfully unaware of its existence until the 2025 sequel crept up like a podcast auto-play, and feels at once the tug of modern anxieties and the shriek of a fashionista’s ringtone: Are we to be shocked, amused, or both at these women’s deadly games of friendship and deception?