Movies

If only blasphemy could be a cinematic genre, then D.J. Caruso’s Mary would stand as its gaudy gold-plated altar—an epic exercise in misdirection, confusion, and tasteless embellishment. I approached this Netflix offering (the Nativity, retold as a streaming event!) with a faint, foolish hope: the epic biblical narrative is one of the inexhaustible wells of the popular imagination. My hope lasted exactly as long as it took for the credits to fade and for the first flagrant absurdity to rear its cartoonish head. If the soothsayers said Megalopolis would be the turkey of the year, they failed to foresee this bird—a toneless monstrosity that squawks when it ought to sing.

Dev Patel, that gangly charmer who skip-traced his way into our hearts in “Slumdog Millionaire,” comes roaring through (or is it swinging through?) with his directorial debut, “Monkey Man,” and I have to admit, I went in with my soft spot for him already exposed. But what I found wasn’t just a talented actor flexing his new muscles—it was Patel unleashing a ferocious, turbo-charged vision, as if he’d been storing years of performance energy in his bones and it finally detonated behind the camera. What a high.

What a joyless, magnificent mess of unintended comedy this is, a late-period fever dream so overloaded with Significance and “cinematic history” that it’s hard to know if Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis comes to us as a time capsule from the future of movies, or as the smoldering effluence of Hollywood’s oldest, dearest delusions.

Is Guy Ritchie the last true showman of our smirking age, or is he just the only one shameless enough to relight the fuse on the old war-comic dynamite? With The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, he hauls his bag of cheeky tricks to World War II—history, for Ritchie, is less a backdrop than a soundstage for swagger, shootouts, and blokes with accents sharp enough to slice through Nazi brass.