Movies

To paraphrase that old Greco-Roman epigram, blessed is the film that knows how to quit while it’s ahead. For the first forty minutes or so, Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite turns the otherwise stultifying business of Situation Room protocol and nuclear hair-trigger bureaucracy into a kind of collective nervous breakdown, cross-bred with a heist film’s mounting tension. It’s the closest she’s come to her Zero Dark Thirty high, a surgical re-immersion in the world of men and women doing “the job”, capital letters implied, even if that job looks, from without, like holding conference calls and watching red blips crawl toward American soil.

Let’s skip the salute and call it what it is: “Greyhound” isn’t here to make you feel safe, or inspired, or even—God forbid—sentimental. No, Aaron Schneider’s relentless, nerve-needling orchestration, with Tom Hanks multitasking as both star and the hand sanding the script, is a straight shot of adrenaline distilled from the brine and gunmetal of war. Forget mothball nostalgia—this is war by way of a stress test, and every ping on the sonar is a test of your pulse-ox.

I went into “The Six Triple Eight” with the hungry anticipation of someone starved for history not just dusted off, but spun into living, breathing cinema. I wanted to see whether Tyler Perry—a director more haunted by melodrama than most soap operas—could swing the emotional sledgehammer of the 6888th’s story without demolishing its nuanced bones. Uplift and disappointment wound themselves together in ways I hadn’t quite bargained on. This is a film that, like the letters our heroines deliver, manages to arrive at its destination—but the journey is messier than the postmark might suggest.

Settling into my seat for Schindler’s List, I felt a nervous charge—equal parts anticipation and foreboding, as if I were about to audit a master class in empathy while simultaneously standing trial for the history of my own species. Spielberg has, over the years, proven himself a virtuoso in the theater of the heart, but with this film he trades in his usual sentimental coin for something far harsher, sharper—a shank, not a valentine.