Movies

Let’s start where the air gets thin and the coliseum fills with water: be honest—did you ever expect Ridley Scott, the master of “muscular history,” to burst gladiatorial combat wide open with the introduction of actual sharks? Gladiator II, for all its sweat-drenched howls of reverence toward the original, is less Maximus’s solemn march to myth than a glittering, full-throttle fever dream—part sequel, part spectacle, and not altogether sure which side it wants to fight for.

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.

There’s a certain kind of preemptive relief that washes over you when you enter a theater (or, as the streaming era mandates, your living room) already anticipating disaster, and then discover the film in question is just—well, not quite as calamitous as you’d braced yourself for. “Under Paris,” Xavier Gens’s new entry in the ever-indestructible shark-ploitation genre, is that rare specimen: a movie aiming squarely for the gutter, yet content to wallow in the predictable muck of mediocrity rather than launching itself into the fireworks of glorious failure. Reader, I was steeled for a catastrophe; I got something amusingly, frustratingly in-between—a B-movie so determined to be ‘meh’ that it wound up swimming in place.

You sit down with a movie like Dominique the way you’d order a late-night plate of bar wings at a dive bar: you know what you’re in for, and all you’re hoping is that it brings enough heat to be worth gnawing on. As action programmers go, this one checks all the boxes out of sheer necessity rather than finesse. We’re basically in the realm of “Die Hard by way of Bogotá,” or maybe, more honestly, as if John Wick lost her passport and was forced to improvise with whatever household hardware happened to be lying around—a Ukrainian takeout menu, heavy on grit, low on budget, zestily unconcerned with nutrition.

Let’s talk about “Wake Up,” the latest would-be horror satire directed (or, more accurately, jury-rigged) by François Simard, Anouk Whissell, and Yoann-Karl Whissell. This is a picture with ambitions lodged somewhere between eco-activist screed and cut-rate slasher—imagine if “Mall Cop” crashed head...

Every now and then, Hollywood hatches a marketing campaign so clever it's almost tempting to review the movie poster and be done with it. “Longlegs,” the latest generation of viral internet bogeyman, slithered into theaters on a fog of clickbait. It arrived, stuffed to the gills with promises—a “new Silence of the Lambs,” “the scariest movie of the century!”—as if mere dread could be manufactured wholesale, like bootleg perfume. I kept waiting for the stench of brimstone to hit me in the nose, but mostly all I caught was the distinct aroma of overbaked expectation.

Steve Buscemi’s Animal Factory wants very badly to be that scalding, claustrophobic plunge into America’s penal underbelly—shadows slithering across dank concrete, sorrow corroding the air, all the usual tropes rattling their chains. But what you actually get is a drab shuffle through the same old cellblock, a movie so enamored of its own grimy surfaces that it forgets to find something compelling lurking beneath. It postures as neo-noir, but it might be the most ordinary thing ever dragged through a barred window.

Well, I settled into my seat for Alien: Romulus prepared for a ride that might soar or clunk—either way, I was ready to have my nerves worked over. You go to an Alien movie these days with more than just popcorn and a sense of dread; you come armed with a small arsenal of skepticism. Fede Álvarez, bless him, shoulders the Sisyphean task of giving the xenomorph mythos another go, determined to please both sweaty-palmed newcomers and the crusty acolytes who have studied Giger’s monsters as if they were cave paintings. What we get isn’t a catastrophe—far from it. But if your idea of greatness means trembling, wide-eyed awe, Romulus won’t have you seeing gods in the horror flicker. It’s good, yes—just not unforgettable.

There is, let’s be honest, a certain adolescent joy in being bad for the sheer, unlaundered thrill of it—a kind of cackling, slippery impudence most modern horror movies outgrow in favor of handwringing, pious detours into “trauma,” and a double-locked justification for every sharp object. Watching Terrifier is like giving a chainsaw to the class clown and seeing how many teachers he can send packing: it doesn’t care about lessons, or roots, or the sob story behind the mask. It’s a daft, dangerous revel stripping horror down to the giggle you stifle when you know you shouldn’t laugh, but can’t help yourself.

Is there any modern screen fantasy more seductive than the con artist—our era’s answer to the movie gangster, only happier to work out of a hotel bar than a speakeasy, and more at home lifting watches or hearts than gunning anyone down? In Focus, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa try to fine-tune that old grift-and-romance two-step for the millennial crowd, trotting out Will Smith as a slick virtuoso of deception, whose real legerdemain ends up being the ability to keep Margot Robbie (who, here, has the sparkle and bounce of a new convertible) on her toes, and, at least for a while, the audience on theirs.