Take Cover — the title suggests a mad dash and a hearty thud behind the nearest flaming oil drum, but what you get, with Scott Adkins at the prow, is something slyer and more self-aware. This is action cinema with a sly wink—half tactical ballet, half armchair philosophy, and more than a few swigs of that fizzy stuff called character charm.
Let’s be honest: no one needed another “Ben-Hur,” certainly not in 2016, and yet here comes Timur Bekmambetov storming the gates, CGI in one hand and the weight of a dozen cinematic ghosts in the other, determined to prove that this saga still matters. Does it? Well, not always in the way the greats hoped, but it moves like mad, flashes prettily, and—God help us—actually tries for some feeling amid the dust and digital splatter.
When I first boarded Snowpiercer, I didn’t brace myself for a study in controlled chaos on rails—a high-concept apocalypse that whips by so quickly, you barely have time to clutch your sensibilities, let alone your popcorn. If, in the first ten minutes, you thought you were signing up for just another dystopian drudge, Bong Joon-ho’s locomotive vision, at once fevered and hermetically sealed, sets you straight: settle in, there are no real stops, and derailing is not on the menu.
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.