Movies

From its first, brash wink at the audience—Clive Owen, all gallows cool, staring right through the screen and telling us, with devilish confidence, how he will commit the “perfect robbery”—Spike Lee’s “Inside Man” broadcasts what so many lesser heist films merely whimper: this one is playing a totally different game. What Lee is pulling off here, working with Russell Gewirtz’s Rube Goldberg screenplay (which, for once, doesn’t collapse under its own cleverness), is a kind of conjurer’s trick—not just a “how did they do it?” but a “what are they doing, and why?” And, miraculously, by the end you might just feel like an accomplice, too.

If “Inside Man: Most Wanted” were a painting, you’d see the fingerprints of more talented artists beneath a slapdash coat of knockoff red—Money Heist jumpsuits, borrowed swagger, and all the desperation of a studio aching to wring one more drop from a well gone dry. What’s most astonishing is how a sequel about robbing the Federal Reserve manages to steal absolutely nothing from the intelligence, suspense, or style of Spike Lee’s superb original.

Every few years, a movie comes along so eager to don the tarnished crown of “epic fantasy”—to conquer, to astonish, to graft itself onto the sagging limbs of a post-Lord of the Rings landscape—that it forgets the very sinews that hold stories together. Into the Lost Lands, Paul W.S. Anderson’s latest incursion into genre upheaval, is not so much an adventure as it is a protracted reminder that the land of cinema has indeed been lost.

There’s nothing quite as dispiriting in cinema as a film that mistakes product placement for dramatic architecture, and with iHostage, director Bobby Boermans seems to treat the glass walls and minimalist spaces of Amsterdam’s Apple Store as if they lend themselves to the gravitas of Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon. But iHostage only proves that you can’t transcend your ingredients by virtue of logos and lighting alone. This movie—as colorless as the inside of an after-hours Apple showroom—manages to turn a genre built on suspense into an extended exercise in waiting for the Genius Bar to call your name.

There are films that scrape so close to the bone—so unflinching in their autopsy of the young and desperate—that you exit not just shaken, but wobbled, a little raw around the soul. In Youth We Trust, Puttipong Nakthong’s feverish plunge into the bruising world of teenage lockup, is this kind of movie: a tightly-wound cry set behind the gritty cinderblocks of juvenile detention, a kind of Bangkok Scum cooked in the pressure cooker of loyalty, despair, and institutional doom.

There’s the art of magic, and then there’s the art of the movies — and sometimes, as in Neil Burger’s The Illusionist, you get the blessed, fizzing collision: a celluloid conjuring act so elegantly constructed, you half expect the film canisters to vanish into a swirl of sepia smoke. Here, the camera purrs through the gaslit wunderkammer of 19th-century Vienna, and history itself is spun into a stylish web of intrigue, murder, and—naturally—a little heartbreak. We’re so used to historical dramas treating events as window-dressing or, worse, solemn ballast, that it's a small miracle when a film like this one uses the sweep of real history—the Mayerling incident, no less—as a vital pulse beneath its rolling sleeves and hidden doves.

The Ides of March is George Clooney’s bloodletting of the American campaign trail—a lacerating little melodrama disguised as a modern-day Julius Caesar for the cable-news set. Clooney, that ever-affable, silver-tongued wolf, teams up with Grant Heslov and Beau Willimon to spin a silky, venomous web that looks like hope and tastes like old, cold heartbreak. Watching this film, you don’t just witness the sausage of democracy being made; you’re tossed straight into the meat grinder and asked to pick which bit of your conscience you’d like to keep.

God help me, I got dirty thoughts watching this movie. That’s as fitting a confession as any because “It’s What’s Inside” operates on the queasy, ticklish nerve where comedy, anxiety, lust, and a weird species of social dread all mingle together in the trunk of an Uber, hungry for a fight or a kiss. I love when a film makes you wonder, in the cackling recesses of your mind, “What would I do if I were dropped inside someone else’s body for a night?” Not just the old switcheroo, but the real, squirming, terrifying, exhilarating thing—and not with anonymous ninnies, mind you, but your oldest, most untrustworthy friends.