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Here’s a roundup of the most noteworthy action movies and TV shows to watch right now, as covered by The Wall Street Journal’s critics.
It’s more of a custom than a rule, but American action-thrillers often begin in gripping, adrenaline-fueled, roller-coaster fashion and then accelerate to the point they can’t move. The wall of inanity has been hit. Viewers can and do check out. So blame
Allison Janney
for making us linger so long over “Lou.”
The actress inspires considerable devotion for bringing a believable earthiness to her roles, for having thrived as long as she has in a youth-and-glamour-obsessed industry, and for having plied her trade in so many genres—from TV’s “West Wing” and “Mom” to “I, Tonya,” for which she won her Best Supporting Actress Oscar. “Lou” adds something novel to the Janney CV: a fugitive ex-government operative, living a quasi-survivalist lifestyle in the woods of San Juan Island in the Pacific Northwest. Ramba, so to speak.
Read the review
The Gray Man (Netflix)
Playing the most insouciant action hero since
Sean Connery
last ordered a martini,
Ryan Gosling
marks the end of a four-year disappearing act with “The Gray Man,” his first feature since the underappreciated “First Man” of 2018.
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Top Gun: Maverick (available on multiple platforms)
The short review of “Top Gun: Maverick” is that it’s half videogame, half car commercial—which may be exactly what audiences want from their big-screen experience now, frictionless storytelling with special effects. They may also want Tom Cruise who, as most readers are likely aware, returns as Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, chronically insubordinate Navy captain and the best pilot anyone’s ever seen—even the crusty Rear Admiral Cain played by Ed Harris, who’s on hand to inject the proceedings with a bit of the right stuff.
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The Northman (Peacock)
Robert Eggers isn’t one for brightness, but the brooding images he favors are more than a matter of photography. They evoke darkness in the human soul. In his startling 2015 debut feature, “The Witch,” a fanatically religious farmer in 17th-century New England inflicts his obsession with sin on his loved ones like a plague. In the filmmaker’s 2019 “The Lighthouse,” an enthralling—and funny—nightmare fantasy set a couple of centuries later, a veteran lighthouse keeper and his young assistant struggle toward symbolic and literal enlightenment on a desolate island off the coast of Maine while driving each other crazy. Yet neither film fully prepares us for “The Northman,” a Viking action extravaganza that begins in A.D. 895, depicts battles and rituals of surpassing ghastliness, and—love it or leave it—constitutes a horror classic.
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The Batman (available on multiple platforms)
Murmuring while he’s journaling, the latest incarnation of the Dark Knight, played by
Robert Pattinson,
sounds like a worrywart: “I must choose my targets carefully. It’s a big city. I can’t be everywhere.” Then a nutjob: “They think I’m hiding in the shadows. But I am the shadows.” Then he’s a Gloomy Gus, a tall, brooding presence barely distinguishable from those shadows: “I wish I could say I’m making a difference, but I don’t know.”
Is Batman going bonkers? No, but he’s going through a dark night of the soul in “The Batman,” which
Matt Reeves
directed from a screenplay he wrote with
Peter Craig.
The film is very long, relentlessly intense, murmured more often than spoken, and photographed, by
Greig Fraser,
with a glowering gorgeousness that must be seen to be felt. It’s also enthralling and tailored to our time, an extended rumination on finding one’s moral compass in a world of all-encompassing evil.
Read the review
The Adam Project (Netflix)
No one really watches a time-travel movie for an explanation of time travel—it’s time travel, after all; we’re already on board. Still, writers have provided theories and speculations aplenty over the years, from H.G. Wellsian trans-dimensional hopscotch to jacked-up DeLoreans. “Maybe it works like the multiverse,” speculates one of the two lead characters in “The Adam Project” on
Netflix.
“God, we watched too many movies,” sighs his older, exasperated companion.
We?
Yes. “The Adam Project”—funny, fast-paced and surprisingly tender—is not just about one character violating the time-space continuum. It’s about two characters discovering himself: The 12-year-old Adam (
Walker Scobell
) finds the 40-ish Adam (
Ryan Reynolds
) hiding in his late father’s office, dressed in a flight suit and nursing a bullet wound.
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Everything Everywhere All at Once (available on multiple platforms)
“Everything Everywhere All at Once” may be the most literal film title since
Georges Méliès
made “A Trip to the Moon.” This ingenious dazzler—half-poignant epic, half-prank—by filmmaking duo
Daniel Kwan
and
Daniel Scheinert
(aka The Daniels) introduces us to one woman, Evelyn Wang (
Michelle Yeoh,
of “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”), and her multitudes, the infinite Evelyns scattered across the multiverse whose decisions, big and small, peeled their life trajectories apart from the Alpha Evelyn, a brilliant scientist who invented a technique to leap between her counterparts.
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Reacher (Amazon Prime Video)
Size matters, at least when you’re playing Jack Reacher. The hero of more than two-dozen crime thrillers by the prolific
Lee Child,
the former military policeman is described in one Child novel as having “a six-pack like a cobbled city street, a chest like a suit of NFL armor, biceps like basketballs, and subcutaneous fat like a Kleenex tissue.” When Tom Cruise took on the role for what would be two films, a hue and cry was heard across Jack Reacher Land.
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