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.
Some films put you in a vice and tighten, click by click, until you’re not sure if you’re gasping from shock or from the giddy pleasure of being so expertly, so utterly manipulated. “Gone Girl,” that lurid psychothriller by David Fincher, wears its heart (if one can call it a heart: more like a bloodied, glinting knife) on its sleeve. This is the rare mainstream film that seduces us into collusion with its sociopath, pats our leg, and whispers, “Let me show you how deep the rabbit hole goes, don’t be squeamish, darling, it’s just your happily ever after with its throat slit.”
There’s something peculiarly demoralizing about watching a movie desperate to be clever—a kind of Netflix-age puzzle box that delivers nothing but more boxes, and each lid is glued on with the icy sweat of someone who thinks the riddle is its own reward. Philip Koch’s “Brick” (and has a contemporary German film ever worn a lamer Anglo title with such self-importance?) throws its benighted cast through every doomsday apartment-escape cliché you can think of, as if J.G. Ballard and J.J. Abrams had teamed up for a group project and then swapped out their last pages for a tech manual, all in the forgotten hope of stealing a march on “Black Mirror.” If there’s a greater argument for the superiority of television’s brisk forty minutes over the joyless slog of a two-hour feature, I haven’t seen it.
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.
There’s a curious electricity that runs through Copycat, a film too calculating in its own self-regard to ever really slip the leash and become what you want it to be—a nervy thriller or a macabre descent or even a sly commentary on its own genre-mad duplicities. But isn’t that late-‘90s Hollywood for you? They always want to have a clever setup, the air of psychological sophistication, and Sigourney Weaver locked in a crystal palace of agoraphobic terror—yet heaven forbid they ever let too much chaos creep in. Copycat is the sort of movie that blows a kiss in the direction of Silence of the Lambs but recoils from Hannibal’s chill. The difference, of course, is that Jonathan Demme’s movie had an actual pulse beneath the politesse and a villain who seemed to spiral out of the cracked American psyche like a bad dream. Here, the nightmares all come from old clippings.
David O. Russell’s Amsterdam is a whodunit that can’t stop tripping over its own borrowed shoes, a picture so prodigiously crammed with stars and incident you’d swear the “business plot” at the heart of the movie was actually some meta-industrial scheme to drive a stake through the heart of Hollywood ensemble films. Oh, how they come: Bale, Robbie, Washington, Rock, Taylor-Joy, De Niro, and (lest we forget, though the film nearly does) poor Taylor Swift, scattered about like confetti thrown before a funeral. Amsterdam is an impeccable study in grandeur curdling to the merely grandiose, a gathering of so many fine elements and name-brand trappings that one finds oneself—slack-jawed, faintly bored—wondering what on earth happened.
If there’s a chill in “The Stranger”—and there is, a gray-blue, suffocating fog that seeps in under the doors and seeps, ultimately, into your bones—it is not the chill of intellectual rigor, or even of well-honed genre machinery. No, what Thomas M. Wright (whose name, one suspects, is stiflingly respectable but also suspiciously absent from the pantheon of directors who actually terrify us) gives us is a thriller so restrained in its horror, so unsure of its own human subjects, that it might have been devised by police proceduralists who, after a long day filling out forms, briefly remembered they had souls. “The Stranger” is heavy with atmosphere, but the air is so thick it deadens more than it haunts.
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.
From its first, quietly clinical shot—a warehouse of flickering screens and the glazed-over faces behind them—American Sweatshop aims not to shock, but to seep under your skin, repellently but irresistibly, like a light leak in an otherwise airtight coffin. Every so often you see a film that doesn’t just depict the contemporary horror show, it lets you marinate in it. This is one of those.
There’s a particular horror only dreamt up by the American psyche—a suburban quiet punctured by a bang in the night, an inexplicable exodus of children, doors creaking open into bottomless dread. One can almost smell the musty carpet and the creeping anxiety that sinks in with it. Weapons, Zach Cregger’s vigorously anticipated follow-up to Barbarian, turns that queasy dream into a waking nightmare, and just when you start to think you’ve mapped out where it’s taking you, it flashes a mad grin and tightens the screws another turn. I hated horror movies once, almost on principle, but Cregger’s deviously entertaining sensibility—his ability to lace his darkness with a grim, cackling wit—has pried open a new door in my head.