Masculine Melodrama

The Rocky cinematic universe gets another bona fide knockout.

IN CREED III, Jonathan Majors has the body of a god and the face of a man who's just barely holding back tears. It's a juxtaposition that the movie, directed by its star, Michael B. Jordan, takes its time setting up. Majors's character, Damian "Diamond Dame" Anderson, arrives onscreen tucked protectively inside a hoodie. He's fresh off an 18-year prison stint and looks tender and raw, like someone who needs a few cushioned layers between himself and the outside world. Adonis Creed (Jordan)-"Donnie" to his wife, Bianca (Tessa Thompson), and to pretty much everyone else who doesn't just call him "Champ"-assumes that his childhood friend has come to him for help. Yet when Dame works out alone in the grim by-the-week motel room he's been living in, running through a ritual of curls and push-ups with single-minded determination, there's nothing fragile about him. When he finally steps into the ring, he unveils muscles that look chiseled out of granite. He's no supplicant. He's Donnie if Donnie hadn't been scooped from the foster-care system as a boy and brought to Bel Air by his adoptive mother, Mary-Anne Creed (Phylicia Rashad).