Diminishing returns. The first half hour is magnificent, picking right up where the last movie left off—Wick bounding, injured, across New York, the clock ticking down to open season—and featuring two nearly series-best fights, including one that caused me to involuntarily utter "Oh shiiiiiit." But once Parabellum shifts out of pure survival mode, and the "plot" kicks in, it starts to become clear that all involved are running out of ideas of what to do with this world and character.…

Double meanings of a double life: an ingenious con-artist thriller that's also about the desperate loneliness of playing rich and straight, respectively. Does Matt Damon do his best work as men faking their way to high society? It's a theme that resonates at least superficially with his movie-star backstory as an ordinary dude from Bahstan, and which finds its own double in The Departed, another con artist story of sorts, featuring a (possibly closeted) character self-actualizing up the ladder through…