‘Cleaner’
Rent or buy it on Apple TV, Fandango at Home or Amazon Prime Video.
When eco-activists crash a party thrown by executives of a dirty energy company, Joanna (Daisy Ridley), a fearless window cleaner and former soldier, and her autistic brother, Michael (Matthew Tuck), are plunged into a hostage crisis. With Michael wandering the besieged building unattended, Joanna, suspended high above the air, leaps into action.
Like with his mountaineering thriller “Vertical Limit,” the director Martin Campbell relies on heights to draw out tension: Joanna spends the first half of “Cleaner” dangling from the skyscraper looking for a way inside. Once she’s in the building, Martin crafts acrobatic set pieces, such as a confrontation in a multistory basement that shows off the physical ability Ridley honed in the “Star Wars” films. With each fluid kick or leap from Ridley, you come to hope she does more altitude-defying movies like this.
‘The Devil and the Daylong Brothers’
Stream it on Tubi.
The director Brandon McCormick’s Southern Gothic action musical is an exciting genre mishmash steeped in religion and gore. It follows the three contract killers Abe (Jordon Bolden), Enoch (Nican Robinson) and Ish (Brendan Bradley) — brothers with different mothers aiming for revenge against their father (Keith Carradine) for selling their souls to the devil.
The film’s big stomping songs (by the film’s co-writer, Nicholas Kirk) accompany the trek of the brothers across dirt back roads, where the men fulfill contracts taken out against a nefarious preacher and an evil barfly. When they find their mark, they’re a ruthless trio who often moves together like one organism. Not shying away from violence, the movie proudly devolves into vicious silliness. That mood is intentional. McCormick shows with incredible clarity the damage that happens when men do not cleanse anger from their souls.
‘In Youth We Trust’
Stream it on Netflix.
Putthipong Naktong’s “In Youth We Trust” is another movie about the dangers of masculine anger. In it, Puek (Nat Kitcharit) is sent to a Thai prison after he murders the bullies who impugned his mother’s name. While incarcerated, Puek and a gay man named Fluke (Bhumibhat Thavornsiri) are tormented by a prison gang led by the sadistic Beer (Arak Amornsupasiri). It is only because of a rival faction guided by Bung (Itkron Pungkiatrussamee) and Golf (Benjamin Joseph Varney), who adopt Puek, that he survives Beer’s cruelty.
This is a slick, well-devised film whose flashback scenes to Puek’s tough childhood are shot in wistful black-and-white, while the contemporary jail scenes are portrayed in grimly low light. A full-on battle in a prison yard displays an impressive scale when the hand-held camera lunges viewers into the middle of the melee. The movie ends with a knife fight that lays bare the hurt behind the young men’s rage.
‘Out Come the Wolves’
Stream it on AMC+.
The first half of Adam Macdonald’s “Out Come the Wolves” is a pensive drama. Sophie (Missy Peregrym) and her boyfriend, Nolan (Damon Runyan), are staying at a woodland cottage when her rugged friend Kyle (Joris Jarsky) arrives to spend the weekend. Though Sophie doesn’t know it, Kyle still has feelings for her. The uncomfortable tension among the trio nevertheless doesn’t explode until Kyle takes Nolan hunting. A bloodthirsty wolf attacks Nolan, and Kyle leaves him for dead, forcing Sophie to venture out to save him.
The second half is a schlocky and gory survivalist action movie whose intensity relies on the cinematographer Christian Bielz’s immersive lens. Whenever the wolves attack, the camera gets up close as the canines rip apart limbs, causing geysers of blood to burst from their victims. And while three people head cautiously into the woods, no one leaves unscarred.
‘Zero’
Rent or buy it on Apple TV, Fandango at Home or Amazon Prime Video.
In Jean Luc Herbulot’s elaborate geopolitical action thriller, an American businessman (Hus Miller, who shares writing credit with Herbulot) awakens on a bus in Dakar with a bomb attached to his chest and an earpiece spouting commands. A voice (Willem Dafoe) explains to the man that, to disarm the bomb, he must complete five missions in the next nine hours, like stealing a phone from a professional fighter on a beach. Eventually the American teams with another man (Cam McHarg) burdened by a bomb too.
Though we spend the duration of “Zero” with these two men, the film leaves them nameless, only listing Miller as One and McHarg as Two in the credits. Herbulot, whose African action western “Saloum” is also worth seeking out, poses the two hostages as symbolic of the greed and violence the West inflicts on Africa. As the pair careen across the city, they leave explosions in their wake that are covered by news as terrorist attacks. And though Herbulot does imbue each man with a back story, it’s not to make either one sympathetic. Instead, the details further explain the rot at the heart of Western imperialism.
