A Sexy Blog

“Woman of the Hour” tries to do the near-impossible: juggle the grubby spectacle of 1970s television, the queasy horror of a serial killer stalking the vulnerable margins of American womanhood, and the exhausted genre reflexes of true-crime drama—all in a scant hundred minutes, and as Anna Kendrick’s directorial debut, no less. The result, I’m afraid, is something like a psychological profile by way of a production meeting: just enough distress and commentary to call itself “important,” but too unsure of its identity to settle into anything worth remembering.

When George Clooney and Brad Pitt show up together in a movie these days, it’s like old royalty strutting through Times Square in sunglasses: you don’t care why they’re there, you just want to watch them soak up every inch of spotlight. That’s Wolfs—Jon Watts’s breezy, over-familiar caper where the plot is more a rumor than a skeleton, but the charm is thick enough to swim in. Was I enthralled? Not exactly. But did I have a hell of a time? Absolutely. This is the sort of picture that glides on charisma and the friction of two megawatt stars shoulder-bumping through a city that knows how to keep its secrets tucked behind neon and hotel doors.

Remakes are Hollywood’s solution to not having an idea. But there’s a difference between creatively riffing on the bones of a classic and crawling out of the swamp with a sludge-soaked carcass, propping it up Weekend at Bernie’s-style, and calling it War of the Worlds. This “modernization”—a screenlife spectacle starring Ice Cube as the world’s most bored Department of Homeland Security desk jockey—isn’t so much an adaptation as it is an accidental satire of everything cheap and vacant in our streaming age. If the aliens had any taste, they’d have vaporized the production server before the rest of us were subjected to this deranged corporate sizzle-reel.

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.

When the curtain rises (or, more accurately, the CGI Alps blink awake) on Nick Hamm’s William Tell, we brace for that hot prickle of cultural muscle, the promise of rebellion, the ice-pure Swiss myth being cracked open and gutted on the grand stage of the epic. Instead, we find ourselves wading ankle-deep through a fog of déjà vu, draped in armor already rusted and patched, the cinematic equivalent of a Renaissance fair where nobody can remember why they’re there.

The war film has always been something of a contract with the audience, a pact that says: come, and I’ll show you the heat of heroism, the terror behind the steel, the struggle of boys made old by violence. What Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland have dared, in Warfare, is to tear up that contract and write something new and starker in its place: this is what it feels like to be trapped in someone else’s war, to be battered by noise and confusion, to never quite know who your enemy is or why you’re here, beyond some abstract equation of duty and disaster.

You could say that WarGames: The Dead Code is an object lesson in Hollywood’s special gift: draining the life out of a semi-classic property, embalming it in digital gloss and algorithmic plotting, and then casting it back onto the market in hopes we’ll confuse the bluish afterglow for old-fashioned excitement. If the original WarGames was a deft adolescent fever dream about the nuclear terrors and computer-age naiveté of Reagan’s America, Gillard’s 2008 “sequel” is a reminder that nostalgia is sometimes best left in mothballs. Watching The Dead Code is like sitting through a pop quiz on modern surveillance anxiety written by copy editors who just discovered what phishing is.

WarGames belongs to that rare class of Hollywood entertainments that seem, almost accidentally, to have tapped straight into the anxieties—and hopes—of an entire era. John Badham’s 1983 techno-thriller opens in a haze of early computer geekery: modems squeal, dot-matrix printers grind, and a Seattle teenager named David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) sits hunched over his blue-glowing screen. Within minutes, what begins as an innocent search for a few pirated video games erupts into a pulse-cranking race against nuclear oblivion—a transformation so swift and seamless it’s as if the movie itself is racing the clock.

Let’s not kid ourselves: if you buy a ticket for a Jason Statham vehicle directed by David Ayer—co-scripted, for heaven’s sake, by Sylvester Stallone—you know what ride you’re strapping in for. “A Working Man” is another raucous plunge into the shark-infested waters of the action-thriller genre, humming with the familiar bass of vengeance and sweat. The surprise, perhaps, is that there is almost no surprise at all.

With a title that should promise whiplash-inducing emerald spectacle—witches crooning, spellbooks ablaze, and enough glitter to bankrupt a drag parade—I traipsed into Jon M. Chu’s “Wicked” salivating for a good bewitching. Stacked with a director who once spun “Crazy Rich Asians” into a fuchsia daydream and fronted by the goddess-voiced Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba) and pop pixie Ariana Grande (Glinda), this screen adaptation had every excuse to split the difference between “The Wizard of Oz” and a Manhattan karaoke bar at four a.m. But you know the old line: Don’t judge a broomstick by its bristles. Within minutes, I could tell this wasn’t the yellow brick road—just a treadmill in Technicolor.