Mehnificent

There’s a particular sound that reverberates in the mind when you realize that even your dependable genre heroes have begun to phone it in, a sort of dull, metallic clank, like the start of a fight scene you hoped would end differently. With Diablo, Scott Adkins charges in alongside Marko Zaror for a billed “assassin-laced redemption movie on steroids.” But what crashes onto the screen isn’t a revelation or even a sturdy brawl in the rain; it’s more like a day shift at a cookie-cutter action factory, misfiring on every cylinder except, occasionally, the one that relates to punches and kicks.

Bill Duke’s Deep Cover wears its neon-lit grime like a badge of honor—a garish, stylized crime thriller dressed up in the trappings of hardboiled noir and early-’90s urban anxiety. If the movie’s mood—the slick rain on Los Angeles streets, the burnished cathedrals of vice, and the snaking synth-and-hip-hop soundtrack—is its raison d’être, then what we get, ultimately, is exactly that: a heady, immersive surface that is always beckoning, yet never really giving.

Is that a penis? No, really—is that Ralph Fiennes’s penis? I suppose we have to start there, because in Uberto Pasolini’s sepulchral take on the Odyssey, we’re given not just emotional bareness but the full-frontal variety—Ralph, exposed to the elements and the audience, and you do a little double-take in your seat. It’s the sort of unblushing exposure that might’ve stirred old Homer to put away his lyre and blink into the firelight. “They show you everything these days,” you can hear the gallery whisper—a groin-level “welcome home” that’s somehow more shocking than gods or monsters.

You sit down with a movie like Dominique the way you’d order a late-night plate of bar wings at a dive bar: you know what you’re in for, and all you’re hoping is that it brings enough heat to be worth gnawing on. As action programmers go, this one checks all the boxes out of sheer necessity rather than finesse. We’re basically in the realm of “Die Hard by way of Bogotá,” or maybe, more honestly, as if John Wick lost her passport and was forced to improvise with whatever household hardware happened to be lying around—a Ukrainian takeout menu, heavy on grit, low on budget, zestily unconcerned with nutrition.

Fasten your spandex—Marvel’s most obnoxious court jester has stormed the palace and, with an exhausted growl, dragged along cinema’s most battered—if not beloved—mutt: Wolverine. Ryan Reynolds, as Deadpool, doesn’t simply arrive in the MCU—he crash-lands, splattered across the screen with the sort of anarchic acid you expect when a franchise finally stops playing spin-the-bottle and just licks the wounds. Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine, back from the grave, looks at once chewed up and feral—he’s the aging gunslinger who’s realized the last bar’s happy hour is over and the piano man’s dead.