Movies

Vengeance is no simple business, as anyone who’s ever sat through a Park Chan-wook film with their fingernails dug into the armrest can attest. If “Oldboy” is a primal scream—rampant violence, delirious Freudian nightmares, crimson-drenched corridors—“Lady Vengeance” is the hush that follows, the cruelty made coldly mathematical, the retribution so artfully calculated you can taste the copper in your mouth. In his trilogy’s closing chapter, Park trades in the electric fury of testosterone for something subtler and, paradoxically, more lacerating: the slow-burn agony of the wronged woman forced to knit her own soul back together from the unravelled threads of innocence lost.

There’s something bracingly cold in the Korean morning after, and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance unspools as if Park Chan-wook had gathered up every post-war trauma, every splintered family, and boiled them down to their reasonless elemental grudge. If the opening salvo to the so-called “Vengeance Trilogy” feels like an autopsy of the revenge thriller, it’s only because Park is dissecting not just genre, but the black, sodden heart of the human condition itself. How often do we watch films about vengeance and walk out, buoyed by the giddiness of catharsis? Not here. Here, you stagger out like you’ve come from a wake, the taste of rust clinging to your tongue.

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.

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.

There’s something almost illicit in the surprise of “Sleeping Dogs”—as if you’d gone to the usual midnight mass of generic thrillers and, in the half-light, found the sermon delivered by Russell Crowe, voice ragged, eyes veiled with embers of regret. In his hands, or more aptly in the shuffling gait and battered dignity of Roy Freeman, Adam Cooper’s directorial debut morphs, unexpectedly, into a meditation on the porousness of memory and the sleight-of-hand of self-forgiveness. If the movie pulls you forward with the sticky taffy of psychological suspense, it’s Crowe who gives the confection its bite.

If you’ve ever been so bored in the opening minutes of a film that you nearly jettisoned it into the in-flight void, you’re in the ideal state for TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY—a valentine slipped to those of us who remember when ‘spy movie’ didn’t mean Tom Cruise careening down Burj Khalifa on a dental floss. I confess: I nearly passed it by. I have the attention span of a dog in a squirrel sanctuary, and when I first met Tomas Alfredson’s version of Le Carré’s labyrinth, I almost bolted. But once I resolved to commit—strapped three hours’ worth of expectation and peanuts—I found myself confronted with a piece of sustained, high-stakes espionage art that refuses—politely, dourly—to pander to anybody’s need for instant payoff.

Is it possible for a corporate thriller to wear its adrenaline on its sleeve and still sneak in—amid the boardroom jousting—moments of sly vulnerability? Sitting down to The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch, I was bracing myself for the usual tidied-up action pulp, clipped of imagination, and dully reverent to its source material (the Belgian comic series, in this case). Instead, the film lured me in with its mixture of shameless melodrama and genuinely clever backroom shenanigans. Director Jérôme Salle concocts a movie that is a brisk, terrifically twisted chess match masquerading as a summer blockbuster—an entertainment with both gloss and glimmer, if not quite bite.

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.

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.

If there’s a pleasure to be found in a political thriller set within the velvet-draped echo chambers of the Vatican, it’s in the sense that every well-pressed cardinal is one false move away from revealing the bit of spinach stuck to his soul. Conclave is a high-stakes ecclesiastical procedural that wants to show you the secret arteries and clogged veins of the Catholic Church—not just a pageant of holy men, but a great, labyrinthine chess game shot through with acid and lamp oil. And if sometimes the chessboard feels more like a conference call where everyone has a different point to make but no one’s listening, the movie at least has the gall to try.