‘Adagio’
Manuel (Gianmarco Franchini) is in trouble. The corrupt police commissioner, Vasco (Adriano Giannini), is blackmailing Manuel, a 16-year-old, to infiltrate a drug-fueled party and engage in a sex act, on camera, with an attending politician. When the boy gets cold feet, abruptly fleeing from the party, he searches for protection; his father, Daytona (Toni Servillo), a former crime boss with dementia, provides some refuge. But it’s the terminally ill mobster Cammello (Pierfrancesco Favino) who really steps up.
In the second half of “Adagio,” the director Stefano Sollima’s Rome-set action crime thriller, Cammello and Manuel pair together, racing against these dirty cops over a vaguely apocalyptic landscape afflicted by fires, blackouts and oppressively high temperatures. Their troubles culminate in a bloody, sweaty chase through a train station, punctuated by rapid-fire bursts by Cammello, who must decide whether to live or die on his own terms.
‘Darkness of Man’
The veteran action star Jean-Claude Van Damme hasn’t lost his touch. In the director James Cullen Bressack’s “Darkness of Man,” he plays the gloomy Interpol agent Russell Hatch, who two years earlier watched his informant (Chika Kanamoto) die in a vicious shootout. Now he cares for her rebellious 15-year-old son, Jayden (Emerson Min), with the help of the boy’s grandfather, Mr. Kim (Ji Yong Lee), and underworld uncle, Dae Hyun (Peter Jae); both are in conflict with Lazar (Andrey Ivchenko), a Russian gangster aiming to take over Los Angeles’s Koreatown.
As the washed-up Hatch, Van Damme is wry and brittle, providing a ruminative narration to a grisly noir whose action and tone often mirrors the “John Wick” franchise. Hatch, in fact, strolls with a huge gun toward a mobster pinned in an overturned car for a sequence visually reminiscent of the first “Wick” film. With this new loner wrinkle added to Van Damme’s persona, the actor remains effortlessly cool yet relatably flawed.
‘Golden Kamuy’
Still dressed in his military uniform and toting his rifle, the Immortal Sugimoto (Kento Yamazaki), a survivor of the Russo-Japanese war, works to help Asirpa (Anna Yamada) recover a lost trove of gold belonging to her Ainu tribe. Its whereabouts can be found via a map, whose sections have been tattooed on the bodies of former inmates scattered across Japan. The Immortal Sugimoto and Asirpa, nevertheless, aren’t alone in their search: A faction of disaffected soldiers and retired swordsmen is also in hot pursuit.
Based on the same-titled manga, the Japanese director Shigeaki Kubo’s “Golden Kamuy” is a fierce war flick that loves scale. The opening conflict at Hill 203 features more extras than one can count. Later brawls involving killer bears and a loyal white wolf are also expansive. Though clearly a first part to an eventual longer series, this impressively shot, vast film stands on its own.
‘The Last Kumite’
The director Ross W. Clarkson’s film plays like the best Van Damme movie that was never made. From its throwback 1980s R&B and hair metal soundtrack to its gory premise, it follows many of the conventions of martial arts films. Here, it is Mathis Landwehr taking the reins as Michael Rivers, a single father who is forced to fight when the sadistic Ron Hall (Matthias Hues), the owner of a deadly gladiatorial ring, kidnaps Michael’s daughter, Bree (Kira Kortenbach). With the help of other conscripted fighters and the retired brawler Loren (Billy Blanks), Michael works to get in shape to save his girl.
“The Last Kumite” features plenty of nostalgic wonders: copious training montages and a hulking final fighter named Dracko (Mike Derudder) suggests kinship with the “Rocky” series. While the matches themselves are vicious affairs — one fighter snatches an eyeball from a guy’s head and swallows it — Landwehr’s physicality is a noted highlight. He sells the punches with grace. Balletically spinning his body through the air, he proves himself a worthy heir to Van Damme.
‘The Mob’
Set in Shanghai, 1928, the Chinese director Zhao Cong’s movie is a majestic gangland period piece about two ambitious young men fighting for their family’s honor. The youngest of the Zhou clan, Fang (Fangzhou Xu) is roped into an escalating turf war when Yu Yang (Chen Jun Xi), of the rival Zheng outfit, murders Fang’s father, the chairman of a gangster confederate. Yu Yang, however, isn’t just out for power or the right to sell opium — a drug banned by the council from distribution — he wants to impress his own father, who holds his adoptive son, Lin Hai (Zhang Junran), in higher regard.
The simmering tension between the two clans leads to cruel assassinations and other savage reprisals, peaking with an all-out street fight between gangland armies belonging to the Zhou and Zheng families. The sequence is stylishly shot in slow motion in the rain, with puddles becoming impact craters for battered bodies and for the hypermasculine angst that gives “The Mob” its vengeful edge.
