Thor: Ragnarok

Thor: Ragnarok will (re)introduce fanboy-metal heads to Led Zeppelin's screeching opus Immigrant Song (1970) in a new but not necessarily unrelated context. Kiwi director Taika Waititi (Hunt for the Wilderpeople) takes the sword 'n' sandal aesthetic that's always been part of Thor's Marvel mythology (and Zeppelin's more fantastical compositions) and blended it with time and space travel, netherworld apocalypse and sibling rivalry -- all to a headbanger score and a laugh track.... (More on that in a minute) In this film, Chris Hemsworth's Thor is reunited with two of his favorite sparring partners -- Tom Hiddleston's Loki (Thor's adopted brother and eternal foil) and Mark Ruffalo's Hulk on a planet that stages gladiatorial contests between prisoners. The meetings, like much of this film, are played for laughs -- and the broader the better. Jeff Goldblum, a veteran actor with Swiss watch comedic timing, is a scream as the Grandmaster of the games. The villain(ess) for this edition is a scene-chewing Cate Blanchett as Hela, sister to Thor and Loki and goddess of death, a title she takes most seriously. The siblings reunion is brought about by the passing of Asgardian king Odin (Anthony Hopkins), who had imprisoned Hela for showing too much gusto in her work. Now she's back and ready to claim what's hers, i.e., all life in all realms of existence. Joining Thor, Loki and Hulk is a besotted Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson), who adds a fresh level of spice to the heroic concoction. Much has been written about the comic tone of this film, and it's undeniable, but I think film promoters and early reviewers may have primed the pump a bit much. Most of the laughs are honestly earned, a good many are forced and there are a few that, to me, were too shticky for the proceedings. Still, audience members at the screening I attended were laughing from credits to credits. Fans will love Thor: Ragnarok and it will make everyone involved with it even richer than they already are.

American Made

Director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) is a master of finding the humor in even the most dire situations. When he teamed with the eternally affable Tom Cruise for the sci-fi "Groundhog Day" feature Edge of Tomorrow, the result was a major scre. Liman's American Made adds to that mix the nearly unbelievable story from the '70s and '80s of hot shot commercial pilot Barry Seal, who is hired away from TWA by the CIA (Domhnall Gleeson) to conduct secret airborne surveillance o...f rebels south of the border. He is later coerced by the Colombian Medellin drug cartel to smuggle cocaine into the U.S., and then blackmailed by the CIA to transport rebel fighters to the U.S. for training and then, later, to smuggle arms to Contras in Nicaragua. The backdrop, of course, is the American-backed, Latin America-based "anti-communist" crusade of the Reagan era that evolved into the Iran-Contra conspiracy. By that time, Seal had already amassed millions of dollars in cash, while building a family with his lovely and fertile wife Lucy (Sarah Wright) in a small Arkansas town known for nothing before the Seals moved in, bringing a smuggling operation and mountains of money with them. It's a tale well told and Cruise is as breezy and winning as ever.

Marshall

In "Marshall," television director Reginald Hudlin (known to many black-film audiences as the director of House Party and Boomerang) delivers an entertaining though at times frustrating bio pic on the Civil Rights lawyer and later Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, a film that will be a welcome palliative in these "take-a-knee" times. South Carolina's own Chadwick Boseman plays Marshall with a bluster not often seen in portrayals of African American historical figures. ...It's a refreshing take but in some scenes gives the great man a brutishness that belies the delicate work he was engaged in as the NAACP's only attorney in the 1940s. I suspect that for some, Marshall, the man, will come across as pretty unlikable. In his dealings with Jewish attorney Sam Friedman (a terrific Josh Gad), Marshall is portrayed bullying the diffident Friedman into being co-counsel for a black man in Bridgeport, Connecticut, (another great performance by Sterling K. Brown), accused of raping his white employer (Kate Hudson) and tossing her into a reservoir. Marshall and the NAACP (represented by Roger Guenveur Smith as Walter White) needs to win the case to demonstrate to donors the organization is still vital. Though the film is about the trial, of which I was not familiar, it is mostly about the dynamic between Marshall and Friedman, who would go on to become an important civil rights attorney in his own right. True to Hollywood tropes, racist whites are portrayed as menacing specters that emerge out of the mist to terrorize. This characterization, of course, plays well for motion pictures but ignores the true perniciousness of systemic racism and turns it into simple villainy.

Brawl in Cell Block 99

That S. Craig Zahler's Brawl in Cell Block 99 ended up in a cineplex with little fanfare belies its grindhouse sensibilities -- there is nothing subtle or understated about the film. This story of a decent bad man who takes a wrong turn while trying to do better by his wife is as artful as a crowbar but its bluntness is what makes it so entertaining. Vince Vaughn plays Bradley Thomas, a stoic bruiser-bagman who winds up on the wrong side of a botched drug deal and is sentence...d to prison. His humorless partner in the deal (Dion Mucciacito) wants restitution and kidnaps Bradley's pregnant wife (Jennifer Carpenter) to get him to do a favor behind the wall. It's a given the favor is wetwork but Bradley will do what he must -- facedown the sadistic warden (Don Johnson), snap bones, pummel and mutilate. Vaughn as the Bradley beast is fun to watch but the brawling might be excruciating for some.

Brad's Status

Mike White writes keenly observed film stories about people struggling with those small but indelible moments in life when they feel emotionally exposed (Chuck and Buck, The Good Girl, Year of the Dog). White's latest, Brad's Status, which he also directed, stars Ben Stiller as Brad, the neurotic father of a high school senior (Austin Abrams) on a college visit weekend to Cambridge so son can interview at Harvard and Tufts, Dad's alma mater. Brad's neurosis, which is deeply ...rooted in an entitlement that he's blind to, leads him to question the rightness of nearly every person, thing or event in his life. His insufferableness, which is mostly interior throughout the film, does boil over on occasion, leading to some wonderfully uncomfortable exchanges. Brad is by most measures a successful man, living in Sacramento with his dutiful wife (Jenna Fischer) and his son, a talented musician whose emotional makeup bears little resemblance to his flinty and judgmental father. Brief encounters with Brad's estranged posse of college buddies (all of whom are wealthy and living the life) leads Brad to some realizations but not those the audience might hope. Stiller's performance as this insecure and selfish man is one of the best I've seen this year.

Blade Runner 2049

Denis Villeneuve (Arrival, Sicario) is an undisputed visionary whose best pictures feature stunning camerawork and breathtaking tableaux in service of complex narratives that never lose sight of the human element. Villeneuve's Blade Runner 2049 is a near-epic sequel to Ridley Scott's masterpiece from 1982 that is as thoroughgoing an exposition on humanness as I've seen in a while. It stars Ryan Gosling as an LAPD detective in 2049 who, like Harrison Ford's character 30 years earlier, is commissioned to track down replicants (artificial humans) originally created to slave for real humans but now deemed defective and when found are to be destroyed. Gosling's "K" is himself a replicant, an obedient model, who answers to a severe police lieutenant he calls "Madam" (Robin Wright) and lives alone in a teeming and desolate post-apocalyptic La La Land with a holographic companion named Joi (Ana de Armas). While "deactivating" a rogue replicant (Dave Bautista) on a remote farm, K discovers bones buried beneath a tree and this discovery opens the door to a trail that leads to replicant manufacturer Wallace (Jared Leto), his deadly enforcer Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) and eventually Ford's Deckard. Villeneuve uses 35 years of cinematic advancement to expand Scott's original vision and explore with greater effectiveness, IMO, central questions about truth and authenticity, human connectivity and memory. Blade Runner 2049 is both visually and intellectually arresting but it might be too long and deliberately paced for some tastes. Highly Recommended.

Mother!

The degree to which viewers will be horrified by Darren Aronofsky's boffo, bloody cringefest fable, Mother!, will correspond directly to how much the viewer fears uncertainty and losing control -- which is to say a pretty good number of us. Few will be able to resist sympathizing with the befuddled and manic "Mother" of the title (Jennifer Lawrence), though her pregnancy isn't introduced until the second act. Before that, she's just manic and frustrated because her poet husband (Javier Bardem) is blocked -- both on paper and, apparently, in bed. One afternoon, a mysterious man (Ed Harris) and his fantastically inappropriate wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) show up at the couple's spacious Victorian-era country home that she's restoring herself, bringing with them all manner of horrors. Again, depending on your level of OCD, you will either find Man and Woman (as they're called in Aronofsky's screenplay) a nightmare or just weird. But shortly after them come their feuding sons (real-life brothers Domhnall and Brian Gleeson) whose bloody battle ends the first act. The film's second half is what some critics are extolling as visionary filmmaking and, to me, it is indeed extraordinary. The mother's descent into hell (actual or psychological) is chaotic and unnerving and mesmerizing and provokes all manner of conjecture about the meaning of her miserable trip. For one, I think Mother! is another of Aronofsky's musings on love and obsession and how easily they are mistaken for each other. But interpretations will surely vary from person to person. Highly recommended.

It

The Stephen King I've enjoyed most showcases the horrors we do to one another rather than the horrors of the undead -- though those are duly represented. In Andy Muschietti's It, a rag-tag band of pre-pubescent outcasts must contend with their hellish homelives while running from Bill Skarsgard's toothy and voracious sewer rat clown, Pennywise. As the manifestation of many a moppet's nightmares, Pennywise is a fine fiend who finds the group of youngsters, led by the fairly intrepid but mopey Bill (Jaden Lieberher) and the mouthy and vulgar Richie (Stranger Things' Finn Wolfhard), in the last reel, formidable foes -- made so by the coldness, abuse, neglect and manipulation they've suffered at the hands of their parents and schoolhouse bullies. And that's really what this delightfully twisted scarefest is about -- facing your fears and kicking their asses. It's not child's play. Recommended.

Wind River

Taylor Sheridan wrote the gristly screenplay for last year's Hell or High Water, an outstanding Texas cops and robbers flick that was terrifically scripted and scorchingly intense. He also wrote the equally masterful Sicario (2015). Sheridan wrote and directed the bitter but brilliant Wind River, a worrying mystery set in the snow of the eponymous Wyoming reservation. The reliable Jeremy Renner stars as a federal wildlife hunter who is recruited by a young and overwhelmed FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) to track down a suspect in the sexual assault of a young woman found dead in the snow. The wintry landscape is both beautiful and unforgiving, and the native people on the reservation are depicted as decimated in number and spirit. Wind River is an engrossing and troubling study of arrested lives and suspended hopes. Highly recommended.

Detroit

Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit is an important film that dares you not to like it. Although I appreciate Bigelow's craftswomanship, the film plays with form more than her most celebrated works -- The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty -- and I found that disconcerting. The opening sequence that features artistic renderings of the Great Migration and the subsequent deterioration of Detroit sets a different tone from the newsreel excerpts that document the urban uprisings and the murky set piece that depicts the Detroit police in 1967 shutting down an unlicensed night spot and parading patrons out of the front door and into police vans in front of agitated bystanders. Each is individually interesting but together seem disjointed. These are followed by the shooting of an unarmed looter by the film's villain, the satanic Officer Krauss (a remarkable Will Poulter)and the fateful confrontation between Krauss and his murderous cohorts and the patrons of a downtown motel. Three young black men were killed during the encounter; two were shot in the back. The officers were tried but not convicted. To alleviate the pressure built up by lengthy passages of violence and chaos with musical scenes feels forced, uneven and distracting and detracts from the power of a fairly uncompromising film. Bigelow pulls fine performances from the young actors John Boyega, Algee Smith and Jacob Latimore and veteran Anthony Mackie. Recommended but unspeakably grim.

Dunkirk

Director Christopher Nolan's penchant for the unorthodox ensures that his films will be challenging, if not always totally satisfying viewing. In Dunkirk, Nolan, who is best known for the Batman trilogy that starred Christian Bale, explores the fluidity of time and perspective in his telling of the valor that went into the Dunkirk beach evacuation during World War II. To me, the genius of this surprisingly compelling battle tale is the crafty way Nolan telescopes time and ratchets up the intensity while blending and overlapping viewpoints and locales. Some might argue that the möbius narrative is too clever and a bit distracting. I loved the approach and found each of the primary performances -- especially the young, gritty soldier played by Fionn Whitehead, with whom we spend most of the film -- perfectly pitched, intense without being grating, and sympathetic without being cloying.  Highly recommended.

The Big Sick

Judd Apatow's motion picture production company specializes in high calorie, goodhearted comic fare that's heavy on the cringe (see for example Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping and Trainwreck).  The Big Sick -- a wonderfully tender and outrageous film -- is not as preoccupied with sex and excretions as one's typical Apatow feature and has a pretty serious Second Act, when one of the two romantic leads becomes gravely ill. Written by the film's star Pakistani comedian Kumail Nanjiani and his wife, Emily Gordon, the film, based on the writers' own courtship, blends the angst of classic "mismatched" lovers with Apatow's signature masculine arrested emotional development and familial dysfunction to explore human connections and love in all of its manifestations. Nanjiani and co-star Zoe Kazan make a sweetly neurotic couple but Holly Hunter as Emily's mother is remarkable and sure to get a supporting actress nomination come awards season. Highly recommended.

Sleight

J.D. Dillard’s Sleight shares more than a passing similarity to 2015’s Dope but veers away from the story of a rising mind using the drug trade to even out his chances of success into the land of science fiction and beyond. Both films star winning, fresh faces: Shameik Moore (Malcolm in Dope) and Jacob Latimore as Bo, a street magician whose secret owes as much to STEM education as it does to his own ingenuity and mother wit. When we meet Bo, he and his sister (Storm Reid) have recently been orphaned by the death of their mother. Bo has taken over his sister’s care. He does mindbending, David Blaine-type illusions during the day and sells Molly to annoying hipsters at night. He’s also taken up with a ruthless though sartorially challenged kingpin named Angelo (a convincingly menacing Dule Hill). Bo gets a hand from a kind neighbor named Georgi (Sasheer Zamata) and finds an eager companion in a battered young waitress named Holly (Seychelle Gabriel). As he tells Georgi, he’s dealing drugs to save up enough money to get his sister out of the neighborhoood and into a better school. His plans go sideways when his involvement with Angelo takes a brutal turn and desperation leads him to make a few (more) bad decisions. Dillard has a real star in young Mr. Latimore, and his performance as Bo holds what is at its core a sincere but pretty ridiculous story together.

The Dinner

Congressman Stan Lohman (Richard Gere) and his boorish, seemingly bipolar brother, Paul (Steve Coogan), are having a five-course meal in an impossibly posh restaurant with their wives (Rebecca Hall and Laura Linney, respectively) to talk about a pressing matter just hours before a piece of legislation the congressman is promoting comes up for a vote. Stan Lohman is also running for governor and needs the legislative win and the resolution of an incident involving the couples’ sons if he’s to move forward. Though the food being served in Oren Moverman’s dyspeptic filmThe Dinner looks divine, the bilious bickering between the brothers and the horrific doings of their sons make for especially difficult viewing. The film has layers of sickness and dysfunction and a startlingly abrupt ending.

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Young British actor Tom Holland (The City of Z) has such a sure command of the role of Peter Parker / Spider-Man that Marvel fans will undoubtedly feel safe with him. Set in that precarious world of high school rivalries and crushes, Jon Watts’ Spider-Man: Homecoming merges the drama of those uncertainties with larger threats and shows the young hero – whose drive might outstrip his nascent abilities – struggling with doing the right thing for the right reason in the wrong way (perhaps). Holland is joined by high wattage co-stars Michael Keaton as the villainous Vulture, Robert Downey Jr. as Parker’s “mentor” Tony Stark / Iron Man, Marisa Tomei as Aunt May and a host of colorful younger actors that keep this clever and kinetic story about alien-arms dealers grounded in what’s important – Academic Decathlon and School Dances.

Baby Driver

British director Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead) commits boatloads of exuberance, wit and musical savvy to the ridiculously entertaining Baby Driver, a film fueled by the adrenalin of its oh-so-winning cast, led by the brilliantly nimble (and preternaturally adorable) Ansel Elgort (The Fault in our Stars) and featuring Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm and Kevin Spacey. Elgort stars as the oddly monikered Baby of the title, who is the iPod-addicted getaway driver for a crew run by Spacey’s Doc. Baby is working off a debt with hopes of going straight after one last job – then he meets diner waitress Debora (a wonderful Lily James) and things get, as they say, complicated. Wright’s direction matches the precision and daring of Baby’s driving, which is breathless and thrilling. But on top of some award-worthy camera work and editing is a seamless musical storyline the likes of which I’ve not heard used in such a way in a film. If you love a good cops and robbers story and sharp, creative moviemaking, you’ll no doubt find Baby Driver quite a ride. And you’ll want the soundtrack, without question.

Wonder Woman

Patty Jenkins' Wonder Woman is a bombastic estrogen rush of an origins pic that, frustratingly, must have its demi-goddess heroine (Gal Gadot) succumb to the charms of a man. Sure, the man is uber-stud Chris Pine, but still. Must feminine empowerment in film always come with deflowering? Was there fear that coming from an island of women that she was not into men and had to prove otherwise? The picture scores a few points for its ragtag, multi-culti band of World War I henchmen -- an Arab, a Scotsman and an American Indian -- but loses a couple for a pretty startling -- and perhaps Freudian -- WW skewering of the movie's high-wattage but unarmed baddie played by Danny Huston. The last big battle of the gods is an electrifying display of the power of love -- a message that's reiterated in the film's epilogue and treacly voiceover.

Alien: Covenant

The Aliens franchise always drew me with its nightmarish incubation premise and social contexts about godless industrialists, the impotency of the military option in battling a cagey and ghostly enemy and its array of supremely ballsy women. Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant is more of the same but with amped up space tech and more onscreen eviscerations. Michael Fassbender stars as Walter, the synthetic crew member in a colonization expedition that goes bad after a cosmic disruption wrecks part of the ship, kills the ship's captain and tosses other crew members out of their hypersleep and into an ill-advised but essentialy plausible detour to a habitable but craggy planet fans first visited in director Ridley Scott's Prometheus (2012). There's blood in them hills.

Easter movies

Only one of these five favorite Easter movies features Jesus as the central on-screen characters. Maybe I find the more compelling Easter stories show how the message of the carpenter from Nazareth affected others. Jeffrey Hunter was a Hollywood handsome Jesus in King of Kings in 1961, one of the more entertaining portrayals on film, IMO. The same year Anthony Quinn, not Hollywood handsome, starred as the criminal who was released by Pilate in exchange for Jesus. Although nobody knows what happened to the man after he was released, in Hollywood Barrabas, himself, would end up on the cross.

In 1959, Charlton Heston was still riding the wave for starring as Moses in The Ten Commandments three years before when he was cast as Judah Ben-Hur, in the film that included, according to some, a veiled gay subtext in the relationship between Ben-Hur and his boyhood friend, Messala, played by Stephen Boyd.

In 1953, Richard Burton played the ambitious Roman tribune who was ordered to oversee the Crucifixion and was haunted either by guilt or Jesus until his martyrdom, with Jean Simmons, in the last reel. I'm still not sure why she gets into heaven for just loving her man but ...

And one year after The Robe, Victor Mature reprised his role as the tribune's Christian slave in Demetrius and the Gladiators, in which Demetrius, who has inherited the robe from his martyred master, becomes a champion in the arena but falls away from the faith before realizing his error and returning to the fold as a choir of angels sings.

The Last Supper

Many Christians observe the Thursday before Easter as the day of the Last Supper -- quite likely one of the most painted (and parodied) events in Christian Scriptures. Here are a few of my favorites -- the traditional with an especially wan St. John leaning into Jesus' lap, a contemporary homies rendition, Anthony Falbo's cubist dream, the cast of Battlestar Galactica in an homage, and a most righteous gathering of brothers.

The Crucifixion

I believe for many in the Christian tradition, The Crucifixion is the central emblem of sacrifice and forgiveness (or expiation as I learned in Catholic school). Others might view it as simply evidence of human sinfulness or corruption. And others have used it to condemn Jews. (Using the Crucifixion to persecute others is ironic and tragic.) I'd only recently discovered George Bellows' striking painting but it has become one of my favorites. It contains the abjection of that sad day but other intangible qualities as well. I'm especially drawn to the purple figure at the foot of the cross. Such loss and despair. Peace

Life

Daniel Espinosa’s Life has enough claustrophobic tension and alien weirdness to make it a diverting but not groundbreaking entry in that sci-if sub genre of film that warns of reckless poking and probing of things best left alone. They differ from those films that depict alien intervention in our destructive nuclear build up (The Day The Earth Stood Still) or nuclear experimentation (Godzilla). Life’s message seems to be that curiosity – in this case wondering about life on Mars – can kill a bunch of cats, especially if they are trapped in a $200 billion tin can orbiting the Earth. The cast playing the international space station crew includes Ryan Reynolds doing his glib alpha dog thing as project engineer, Jake Gyllenhaal doing his pensive beta male thing as the medical officer and Rebecca Ferguson as a lovely crew member with no discernible duties. Things go bad for the crew after they retrieve a Mars probe carrying soil samples and the project’s biologist (Ayrion Bakare) jumpstarts some dormant cells that develop an unhealthy attachment to the crew. The story might not be original but the alien is a pretty cool creation. The ending might be a bit too cynical for some however.

Logan

James Mangold has a crafted a surprisingly introspective film in Logan, as the X-men universe closes the book on The Wolverine – for now. Hugh Jackman returns as an aged and battered version of the endearing, metal-clawed badass Logan, who is now holed up in an abandoned oil field in Mexico with an occasionally demented Professor X (Patrick Stewart) and the peevish albino mentalist Caliban (Stephen Merchant). It’s 2029, and mutants are all but wiped out, their powers essentially neutralized by biological weaponry. Logan’s own regenerative abilities are just about gone although he is still metallically enhanced. These events have brought Logan to point where he’s saving to buy a boat, so that he might load up his shipmates, and set off for the distant horizon, leaving humanity to its own devices. The plan is interrupted by the appearance of a 10-year-old girl (Dafne Keen) whose dour demeanor and retractable claws suggest she and Logan have something in common. She is being chased by the miserable Dr. Rice (Richard E. Grant) whose potions are responsible for the mutant extermination and whose experiments South of the Border have created an army of “gifted” children who he hoped to turn into fighters. Mangold doesn’t hold anything back in this swan song for the beloved Wolverine as he and the nimble moppet slash, disembowel and decapitate like there’s no tomorrow. And, in the end, that’s the film’s real poser: How does one measure the value of a life when it’s been spent taking the lives of others. Does one such as the Wolverine deserve to sail off into the sunset?

A Cure for Wellness

Gore Verbinksi, the visionary behind the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, is the mind and eye behind A Cure for Wellness, a convoluted tale of madness and quackery that he wrote and directed, set in a mountaintop aqua-therapy sanitorium in the Swiss Alps. The film stars Dane Dehaan as Lockhart, an ambitious and unscrupulous New York investment officer who is dispatched by his board to retrieve one of their own (Harry Groener) from the Alpine retreat, from whence the absent member has dispatched a puzzling note saying he won’t be coming down from the mountain. Once in Switzerland, Lockhart meets the sanitorium’s medical director, a winningly oily Jason Isaacs of The OA (who does creepy better?) and his young ward Hannah (Mia Goth), a pouty and unconventional barefoot beauty who wanders the grounds aimlessly. Of course, little is as it seems, and after an auto accident (the lately ubiquitous deer vs. car crash), Lockhart finds himself confined and doesn’t like that one bit, as he is eager to get back to New York. His encounters with the oddly cheery patients and the facility’s Stepford staff lead him to believe there’s something up with “the treatment.” There is indeed, but one must sit through two hours of not entirely satisfying build-up to get to the big – baffling – reveal. Still and all, if you like beautiful scenery – Verbinski has poured breathtaking vistas into this watery movie – and a story with a couple of unanticipated shocks this film might be your cup of tea.

John Wick: Chapter 2

Chad Stahelski’s John Wick: Chapter 2, as the title suggests, picks up the story where its predecessor left us – with the bruised and bloodied but seemingly indestructible Wick (Keanu Reeves in a role that demands very little acting but a lot of close-contact sparring) intent on reclaiming his purloined Mustang from a Russian mobster whose son nicked it in the first movie (and killed Wick’s dog) and was eviscerated by Wick for his trouble. The opening sequence sets the muscle-and-mayhem bar pretty high as Wick pulverizes automotive and human bodies that are in his way. By the end of the opening 10 minutes of Chapter 2, the body count is already approaching 50 with bullets flying through flesh and crania and blood covering walls, floors and furniture. It’s a riot. But there’s no rest for the weary because even after deciding to retire from the assassin’s trade, a visit from an effete Italian mobster (Riccardo Scarmarcio) pulls Wick back in. The sequence that follows Wick as he gets outfitted by assorted specialists in the Italian weapons and sartorial underground is great fun, played tongue-in-cheek, but not as amusing as the gunfight in the Roman catacombs or the fight on a New York subway between Wick and fellow killer Cassian (Common) or the one in a mirrored exhibit in an art museum. Yes, it’s all deafening and numbingly violent but so outlandish that you can’t help but go with it. It’s Grand Guignol theater but at least they don’t kill the dog this time.