Prime minister as party animal and top dog

Those familiar with the work of director Paolo Sorrentino (Great Beauty, Youth and HBO's The Young Pope) know that the director creates images of startling beauty and resonant suggestion. Sorrentino brings his full visual powers to Loro, a look at the life of former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, played here by Sorrentino regular Toni Servillo. Sorrentino begins the movie by focusing on a character named Sergio Morra (Riccardo Scamarcio), a low-level hustler who aspires to become a recognized Berlusconi sycophant. To achieve his goal, Sergio rents a villa in Sardinia, the island where Berlusconi has gone to regroup. Sergio stocks his villa with beautiful young women and prays that his sybaritic neighbor will take notice. Scenes at the villa, heavy on nudity and sensual choreography, are perhaps intended to show the pornography of power with an ample helping of La Dolce Vita-style emptiness. Just as Berlusconi eventually will do, Sorrentino pushes Sergio aside to bring the film's full focus onto Berlusconi, a man of amorality, charm, and flashes of ruthlessness. Elene Sofia Ricci portrays Berlusconi's wife, a woman accustomed to overlooking her husband's massive philandering -- but who may have reached the end of a very tolerant rope. Loro -- Italian for "them" -- immerses in the personality and aura of a man who seems to regard the world as his personal pleasure palace. References to the suffering of ordinary folks crop up at the movie's end but aren't enough to diminish the feeling of a film enamored with a rogue who built a TV empire and who specialized in humiliating his foes. Besides, we get the point long before the movie's two hours and 30-minutes wind to a halt. Still, Servillo delivers another masterful performance and Sorrentino paves the movie with the kind of images that seduce, reveal and create their own sense of mystery. How much of the story is true? Sorrentino hedges a bit with an opening title card, but his movie may have more to do with the atmospherics of rampant corruption than with a play-by-play look at Berlusconi's career.

He's back -- and brutal as ever

Keanu Reeves reprises his role as John Wick, a reluctant hitman who piles up a staggering body count, and keeps fans of the series happy..

In John Wick: Chapter 2, Keanu Reeves -- as the title character -- amasses a staggering body count with a pointed efficiency that befits his status as a professional hitman. And when Wick fights with his fists (and legs), the ensuing symphony of hyper-grunts creates its own gritty eloquence.

Reprising his work in the 2014 hit, Reeves takes a substantial beating as the film progresses, and Chapter 2 boldly whirls its way through car carnage and carefully orchestrated mayhem spread across a variety of intriguing and well-selected locations -- from the catacombs of Rome to the subways of New York City to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Picking up where the first movie left off, the movie concocts a scenario in which hitman Wick quickly finds himself pulled back into the action. He's asked to pay back a debt. In Wick's world, this means he must return a favor by assassinating someone.

Chad Stahelski, who co-directed the first installment, goes solo in this effort, pushing the action into new corners, and following a philosophy that insists that no amount of violent action qualifies as too much.

Another hitman, Santino D'Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio), supplies the villainy. D'Antonio tries to manipulate Wick, and eventually to kill him -- with an assist from every hitman in New York.

Ian McShane portrays the urbane head of the Continental, a Manhattan hotel where hitman can relax (no slaughter allowed); a deadpan Lance Reddick works the hotel's front desk, and Laurence Fishburne, who appeared with Reeves in the Matrix, enjoyably chews as much scenery as possible as head of a team of hitmen who pose as New York City street people.

The Continental's sommelier (Peter Serafinowicz) adds a Bond-like touch, dispensing weapons while employing the vocabulary of a wine connoisseur.

You'll also see Common as another hitman. Like Wick, he's a pillar of stoicism. Little in this second chapter relies on expressive acting -- at least from the movie's hitmen. Killing without discernible affect might be the movie's idea of the noblest of human virtues.

Perhaps so that women don't feel excluded from this cinematic wild ride, Ruby Rose has been cast as a deaf-mute killer who communicates with Wick by signing.

From the movie's opening prologue -- Wick drives a Mustang that becomes a target for other cars -- it's clear that this second installment will rely on battering overstatement. A far-fetched plot about a global network of assassins provides a frame on which to hang the action, which, by the end, even resorts to the shopworn Hall of Mirrors effect -- and pretty much pulls it off.

Be assured, the violence never shies away from brutality of a kind that occasionally elicited audible gasps from a preview audience, a recognition that being shot or stabbed in certain areas of the body qualifies as excruciating to the max.

Reeves's barely buried fury sets a tone of semi-seriousness that director Stahelski maintains, creating a giant, grind-house conspiracy between the audience and a movie that loads up on chaos. We all know the movie is preposterous, so it doesn't have to wink at us.

And, yes, Wick once again has a dog, a conceit that forces us to worry over the animal's fate. And, yes, the door is open for another sequel, which I'm guessing will become inevitable after this chapter finishestearing up the box office.