There's a new Marvel out that's supposed to be nuts.
That line from Friendship proved prescient, as Thunderbolts* — which, as fate would have it, was released one week earlier than Andrew DeYoung’s twisted bromance — was actually worthwhile in a way no Marvel has been in years. Though hardly the best movie released this month, it was an auspicious enough start to blockbuster season. The movies will be getting bigger and bigger throughout the summer, but time will tell how often that translates to them being better.
Finally something worth marveling at: a supervillain whose origin story is gazing too long into the abyss and the abyss gazing back into him. You don’t need to have seen 30 prior movies to know why and how Bob (Lewis Pullman) becomes Sentry, just as you don’t need a head full of freshman psychology to understand that the real villains in Thunderbolts* are shame and depression. Despite how literal the depiction of battling one’s demons is, the message proves poignant enough — thanks in no small part to the visual of Sentry (also known as Void) blinking his victims into a black cloud of nothingness. This is the superhero genre at its most existential, a feat director Jake Schreier achieves without ever mentioning the multiverse.
Those factors combine to make Thunderbolts* the never-ending franchise’s best movie in ages, with the eponymous Avengers-adjacent team — Yelena (Florence Pugh), the Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan), Red Guardian (David Harbour), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and John Walker (Wyatt Russell) — assembling into something more than the sum of of its familiar parts. Few of them are especially interesting on their own, but Pugh, who’s only slightly less compelling here than she is in movies like Midsommar and Little Women, makes you understand why they’re following Yelena into battle.
Surfing, according to every movie ever made about it, is a lot like life. In The Surfer, that has less to do with the larger lessons to be learned from catching a wave and more to do with the inherently hostile, territorial nature of man. “Don’t live here, don’t surf here,” the unnamed protagonist (Nicolas Cage) is told upon attempting to show his teenage son the Australian beach where he grew up. Now run by a group of decidedly un-chill surfers calling themselves the Bay Boys, said beach and the parking lot overlooking it are where the entirety of Lorcan Finnegan’s film unfolds. The most interesting action, however, takes place inside the title character’s unraveling psyche. It isn’t long before you’ll begin to wonder if what he’s experiencing — namely, having most of his possessions taken one by one as he appears to morph into the elderly “bum” all the locals make a sport of mistreating — is what’s actually happening.
The Surfer is the latest in a long line of Australian movies seemingly intent on dispelling the notion that the famously relaxed country is actually as friendly as its reputation suggests; though it isn’t as delirious as, say, Wake in Fright, it is increasingly trippy as it progresses. It’s also a sneakily ambitious meditation on everything from localism to father/son relationships and how we treat those less fortunate than us, all in the guise of a single-location psychedelic thriller. Cage, the California boy who’s acquainted with both ends of this particular spectrum (think Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Valley Girl on one side, Mandy and Color Out of Space on the other), is uniquely qualified to prevent the film from wiping out.
Not for nothing has Zhao Tao been described as her husband Jia Zhangke’s “immortal muse.” She’s now appeared in nine of his movies, and their latest collaboration might be their boldest. A cinematic assemblage more than two decades in the making, Caught by the Tides combines scenes from their previous works, previously unseen footage, and new sequences to create a hybrid whatsit that’s easier to experience than it is to describe. There’s little dialogue, but there is plenty of music and an intention-setting intertitle at the beginning: “Not even a wildfire can burn all the weeds; they’ll grow back in the spring breezes.”
Jia, a leading figure in China’s sixth generation of filmmakers, is among the foremost observers of the rapid pace at which his country has grown since he first began directing in the mid-1990s; working within (and around) China’s censorship while still producing world-class films is an achievement in and of itself. Anyone unfamiliar with Jia’s prior work might have trouble adapting to the rhythm of Caught by the Tides, but that’s all the more reason to finally watch Still Life or The World. Even so, the power of some moments needs no context. To wit: a high-tech robot in a supermarket saying it can’t read Zhao’s face before telling her she looks sad and quoting Mother Teresa: “If you love until you hurt, there can be no more hurt, only love.”
Tornado is a samurai/Western hybrid set in the British Isles circa the 1790s, which is another way of saying that its mere existence captures attention. Writer/director John Maclean mostly holds that attention throughout his sophomore feature, even if it occasionally feels as though he merely transposed his 2015 debut, Slow West, onto a new setting. This is very much a spiritual successor to that film, with all the off-kilter ambition implied by that lineage. Tim Roth leads a band of brigands who, after stealing a bag of gold, finds that their plunder has now been stolen from them by the unlikeliest of thieves: a teenager who performs a samurai-themed marionette show with her father as part of a traveling circus.
That girl is Tornado (Kôki), a name she promises her audiences will remember. The baddies pursuing her have names like Kitten, Little Sugar, and Lazy Legs that belie their ruthlessness; luckily for her, they’re as likely to turn on each other in hopes of securing a larger share of their ill-gotten gains as they are to actually capture her. But while the windswept plains and sparse dialogue evince an evocative atmosphere, everyone seems so resigned to their fate that there’s little tension in this constantly shifting game of cat and mouse. Tornado herself is the exception, refusing to go down her preordained path and instead blazing her own bloody trail. The movie might not be as strong a force of nature as its title suggests, but at least she is.
Were I the kind of person who makes mental lists of the best slasher-movie villains (which I am), Final Destination’s would be near the top: death itself. The series has always been both sillier and cleverer than most of its genre peers, with the Rube Goldberg–like manner in which “death’s design” collects its victims being the main draw since the first movie came out in 2000. The very nature of its premise — that, after avoiding death via a premonition of a horrific accident, every “survivor” is picked off one by one — infuses a mounting sense of dread into even the most mundane scenarios. You’re always trying to game out what will lead to the next victim meeting their gruesome end, and most of the time there’s enough misdirection for the result to surprise you. At the center of Bloodlines is an exceptionally long-living survivor, an elderly woman whose premonition some 50 years earlier kept her alive long enough to alienate everyone in her life because none of them could handle her debilitating obsession with death.
This time it isn’t a group of friends trying to outsmart death’s design but an entire extended family descended from that woman who, per death’s rules, never should have existed in the first place. That’s a nifty enough premise for one of these movies, even if 2011’s Final Destination 5 had such a perfect ending that there was really no reason to continue the franchise. But whenever a new Final Destination movie comes out, the question isn’t whether it’s good in the conventional sense; almost none of them are. It’s whether the elaborate means by which its characters are dispatched are ghoulishly entertaining. Judged by those standards — an admittedly low bar, but one horror fans are certainly familiar with — Bloodlines is a worthy addition to the mythos.
