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.
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.
There’s a moment in Abel Ferrara’s “King of New York” when Christopher Walken strolls through a gloomy, blue-lit hallway, hair slicked, cheekbones gleaming, eyes burning with the privilege of a man who’s read the end of the story and knows he’s the only one left standing. Walken gives a performance so electrically odd you half expect the camera to tilt, or for the rest of the movie to collapse into a pile of glittering dust. And at times it almost does, but not for the reasons Ferrara might have intended.
There’s a mordant joke running through “The Killer”—practically a pulse, arranged with the precision of a Smiths beat—that might be missed by anyone still taking their assassins straight and their directors at their own promotional word. Here is David Fincher, once the feverish chronicler of men unraveling in the glow of green computer screens and kitchen fluorescents, now orchestrating a liturgy of control and cold-blooded process so sharp it’s almost a parody of itself: the assassin as Ikea monk, building murder out of flat-packed routines and hide-in-plain-sight anonymity. Nothing, not even the violence, is ever allowed to descend into real chaos—not while there are yoga stretches to be done and a running tally of BPM on the Apple Watch.
This review contains spoilers.
King Ivory comes packaged with all the signifiers and promises that Hollywood (or its independent outposts) have learned to wield like weapons: “Based on extensive research”, the first phrase that glimmers in the dark like a parolee’s tattoo, ready to be flashed for credibility before the first shank hits the yard. John Swab, the director, claims proximity, he knows this world, these corners of Tulsa, these prison phone banks and gangland protocols. But proximity is not the same as revelation. King Ivory isn’t the first to slip you a look behind the penitentiary curtain and, unfortunately, it still leaves you peering through the mesh.
Sony’s “Kraven the Hunter” doesn’t so much pounce as lurch onto the scene—a feral miscalculation, claws unsheathed but utterly declawed by its own stupidity. If cinema is indeed a jungle, this is the lost, mange-ridden coyote wandering the outskirts, yapping for attention and finding only echoes. What’s left of the Marvel-machine’s dignity is here chewed up and spat out with a wet, unceremonious plop.
Why is it that M. Night Shyamalan, who once roped us in with dead people whispering in the suburbs and left us breathless with a simple color-red, now insists on leading us into suspense-free rooms where the walls seem made of cardboard and the only thing at stake is your patience? Knock at the Cabin (2023) is his latest parlor trick gone flat—a film that opens the curtain on big, end-of-the-world parables only to serve up a dish that’s tepid, tidy, and quietly deflating.
Is there anything more perversely thrilling in American cinema than the spectacle of watching a tough man—whose life’s been varnished in blood and bad decisions—suddenly confronted with the plummeting black-out of his mind? “Knox Goes Away,” Michael Keaton’s brooding directorial vehicle (and, yes, he pilots this thing from both sides of the camera), is, at heart, a haunting, slow-burn elegy for the hired gun as the light in his memory flickers and gutters.