Superhero Archives - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

July 26, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Comedy, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Superhero

**½/****
starring Ryan Reynolds, Hugh Jackman, Emma Corrin, Matthew Macfadyen
written by Ryan Reynolds & Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick & Zeb Wells & Shawn Levy
directed by Shawn Levy

by Walter Chaw What’s legitimately fascinating about Shawn Levy’s Deadpool & Wolverine is how much of its humour is based on idiotic producer’s notes and franchise-killers. It’s essentially the manifestation of the concept of irony, and it relies entirely on an individual’s knowledge of the last twenty years of “Access Hollywood”/TMZ culture: the public and private failures of the rich and famous, like who Jennifer Garner’s ex is and how Marvel hasn’t figured out how to launch another Blade movie even though Wesley Snipes and Guillermo del Toro are both right fucking there. You don’t need to have watched all of these latex flicks and their television spin-offs or to have read the comics, but it helps in appreciating the Shrek-ness of it all, I suppose, absolutely the lowest form of endorphin-mining. We have reached tentpole filmmaking as micro-transactional phone game: 99¢ to unlock a new costume, another $1.99 to play as Lexi Alexander’s Punisher–you know, the good one. It works to the extent it works because you’re like me and you watched the X-Men cartoon in its first run and have always lamented that they couldn’t figure out how to make Gambit cool in the live-action universe. The entire midsection of Deadpool & Wolverine, in fact, takes place on The Island of Misfit Toys for nerd detritus (remember that appalling multiverse sequence in The Flash? Like that, but with living actors), more or less, and manages, against every expectation, to be a little bit touching. The film works like a roast/eulogy for thinking we wanted a Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s as if we’re all Regan waking up with a bad Pazuzu hangover. What the fuck did we do? What the fuck is wrong with us?

Madame Web (2024)

February 17, 20242024, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller

**½/****
starring Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor
screenplay by Matt Sazama & Burk Sharpless and Claire Parker & S.J. Clarkson
directed by S.J. Clarkson

by Walter Chaw S.J. Clarkson’s Madame Web is a rare and specific variety of disaster, which is interesting because it’s largely centred around a rare and specific variety of spider. That is to say, not “interesting” so much as unintentionally ironic or something. Rain on your wedding day, 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife, you know? The mass-appealing, notes-driven, “for dummies,” not-entirely-accurate pop-cultural definition of a literary conceit. This reminds me of the swoony, heartthrob moment where Ethan Hawke defines “irony” perfectly in Reality Bites. I don’t actually remember what he says, though, because I haven’t seen that movie since its 1994 release–about ten years before the events of Madame Web, the screen debut of Marvel mutant Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), who’s named after the Greek archetype who can see the future but no one listens to her and Marc Webb, director of the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies. Just kidding. She’s named Webb because spiders spin them, with an extra “b” to throw you off the trail but not so violently that you don’t know it’s fucking with you. Madame Web (one “b,” because the picture is more invested in making sure you know it’s related to the lucrative Spider-Man franchise than in being such a tedious asshole) opens in 1973, with Cassandra’s super-pregnant mom Constance (Kerry Bishé) tromping around the South American rainforest like Sean Connery in Medicine Man in search of a super-spider when…okay, that’s enough of that. Anyway, 30 years later, Cassandra is a paramedic who can sometimes see the future, but nobody believes her. You might have deduced that by her name is all I’m saying.

Superman: 5-Film Collection (1978-1987) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

June 25, 2023****/****, 1970s, 1980s, 2023, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Canada, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, UK

Note: all framegrabs were sourced from the 4K UHD discs

SUPERMAN (1978)
****/**** Image B+ Sound A- Extras A-
starring Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman, Leslie Newman and Robert Benton
directed by Richard Donner

SUPERMAN II (1981)
***/**** Image A+ Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN II – THE RICHARD DONNER CUT (2006)
***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve, Ned Beatty, Jackie Cooper
screenplay by Mario Puzo, David Newman and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN III (1983)
**½/**** Image A+ Sound A- Extras B-
starring Christopher Reeve, Richard Pryor, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure
screenplay by David and Leslie Newman
directed by Richard Lester

SUPERMAN IV: THE QUEST FOR PEACE (1987)
*½/**** Image A- Sound C Extras B
starring Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Jackie Cooper, Marc McClure
screenplay by Lawrence Konner & Mark Rosenthal
directed by Sidney J. Furie

by Walter Chaw The split in Superman–his faultline where he’s the weakest, the most vulnerable to attack–is there from the beginning. He is a Zen kōan whose existence represents the essential riddle at the heart of any mythology for an infallible, omniscient, omnipotent being. He is an eggshell’s impregnable yet permeable surface: incredibly strong and prone to shatter; seamless but filled with life; unknowably alien and a reflection of everyone’s secret self. An incubator and vessel, the source and the end. He is the immovable object and the irresistible force, the “eternal boy scout,” branded at various times by the terminally unempathetic as “boring”–the rejoinder to which is that he’s been the centre of thousands of stories (tens of thousands?) in uninterrupted serialized adventures since his first appearance in Action Comics on April 18, 1938. Superman has persisted through every era of the United States from the Great Depression to now and every war since WWII, through the fall and rise again of the Ku Klux Klan and every form of mass media, in endless rejuvenating cycles bleeding into each other until their borders become a meaningless melange coalescing into a logo that is as archetypal in the West as the outline of a mushroom cloud. He is the literal “super” man, and somehow he means the most to the bullied and the broken–not as a fantasy of retribution, but as hopeful indication that even the most perfect of us are beset by doubt and alienation. He is the essential shining metaphor for post-modern existentialism.

The Flash (2023)

June 16, 20232023, Action, Adventure, Australia, Authors: Walter Chaw, Canada, New Zealand, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Time Travel

*½/****
starring Ezra Miller, Sasha Calle, Kiersey Clemons, Michael Keaton
screenplay by Christina Hodson
directed by Andy Muschietti

by Walter Chaw Andy Muschietti’s jittery, frenetic The Flash has about it the feeling of someone getting away with something. Some of that’s extratextual, given the tribulations of its ingratiating star Ezra Miller, who went on a mini crime spree–caught on camera choking a female fan, accused of grooming/kidnapping an underage girl and exposing an infant to a firearm, and so on–and some of it is due to Miller’s performance, by turns irritating and overblown, which again is either on purpose or just who Miller is. Lots has already been written about this movie being allowed to go forward under David Zaslav’s anti-art reign over the storied Warner Bros. brand while other, largely minority-led films and television shows get vanished into the tax write-off cornfield. Even more has been written about the delays that greeted this tentpole as the studio waited for Miller’s name to dissipate from the news cycle. Everyone has their redline, and I’m not equipped to judge people who won’t watch a Roman Polanski film yet own the entire Led Zeppelin discography. Everyone has a blind eye, and we turn it according to personal instructions hypocritical, mercurial, and mysterious. It is what it is. I am of the belief, however, that only the bad guys burn books.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

June 2, 2023****/****, 2023, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Family, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

****/****
written by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller and Dave Callaham
directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, Justin K. Thompson

by Walter Chaw Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is fucking spectacular. Taking the baton from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse‘s Oscar-winning team of Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman, new co-directors Joaquim Don Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson have created something that feels like a chi-chi art gallery in uptown Manhattan, where geniuses who make things you can’t believe you’re seeing are all exhibiting their mind-blowing riffs on the same pop-cultural theme. I even thought of Peter Greenaway’s work in how the characters have colour-coded costumes to exist in mood-specific settings that transition from one to the next at a dazzling, dizzying, breakneck pace. Every inch of Across the Spider-Verse is filled with light and detail without being overcrowded. It’s a sensory amphetamine, kaleidoscopic, exhilarating, yet somehow not exhausting. I sometimes forget why I ever loved superheroes and comic books, given the direness of the flavourless gruel parade masquerading as outsider art nowadays. Then along come Into the Spider-Verse and now Across the Spider-Verse to remind me how important these stories are when they’re told in the voices of the oppressed rather than through the stock portfolios of the oppressors. In the hands of the people who are hurting, comic books can be and often are fantasies of hope. In the hands of the wealthy seeking to become wealthier, they’re fantasies of exploitation, colonization, and fascism.

Boston Underground Film Festival ’23: Smoking Causes Coughing

March 29, 20232022, 2023, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Film Festivals, France, Horror, Satire, Sci-Fi, Superhero

Fumer fait tousser
***/****
starring Anaïs Demoustier, Gilles Lellouche, Jean-Pascal Zadi, Oulaya Amamra
written and directed by Quentin Dupieux

by Walter Chaw French provocateur Quentin Dupieux’s eleventh film Smoking Causes Coughing is an anthology picture organized around a framing device in which five costumed idiots forced to go on a team-building retreat tell each other horrifying tales around a campfire. I’ve been decidedly lukewarm on Dupieux’s films. They’re the very definition of an acquired taste, and I suspect they’re hit-or-miss even if you’re dialled into their frequency. His best-known film is probably Rubber (2010), a creature-feature about a car tire that causes folks’ heads to explode using “telepathy.” That’s the punchline to the long setup of a tire rolling around to tense music, which Dupieux punctuates with dialogue that’s knowingly campy, dedicatedly stupid, and ramped up with vein-bulging sincerity. It’s the kind of conceit that attracts viewers who like to laugh at movies. I think Dupieux’s sense of humour relies a lot on exaggeration and repetition, with the former landing like grossly performative sarcasm and the latter like the most irritating person you know milking a joke until the doggedness itself becomes the joke. For the most part, Dupieux’s movies don’t think much of the genres they’re mocking and, by extension, they don’t think much of the audiences for them, either.

The Batman (2022)

February 28, 20222022, Action, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Drama, Mystery, Superhero, Theatrical

**/****
starring Robert Pattinson, Zoë Kravitz, Paul Dano, Colin Farrell
written by Matt Reeves & Peter Craig
directed by Matt Reeves

by Walter Chaw I love Matt Reeves. I think Cloverfield is exceptional, that I underestimated Let Me In upon its initial release, and that, for as popular as it was, the Planet of the Apes trilogy–to which he contributed two entries–remains underappreciated for how cogent and incisive a satire it is of the doomed trajectory of our irredeemable state. Reeves appears to be the rare bird who can work within the framework of franchise and intellectual property and still manage to produce largely uncompromised pieces, unbeholden to stock set-ups and happy pay-offs. I had the highest of hopes for his turn at the wheel of the Batman machine: if anyone was going to do a down Batman in defiance of the jealous protectors of a billion-dollar money tree, it was Reeves. Alas, The Batman is overlong, over-serious, poorly-paced, and the first of Reeves’s films to show obvious production interference in the sort of narrative post-script–delivered via world-weary Blade Runner voiceover, no less–that is never not embarrassing for its awkward pandering. Any sins of structure can at least be attributed to Reeves and co-writer Peter Craig, who lean heavily on the “detective” part of Batman’s “Dark Knight Detective” moniker in an earnest, all-in go at neo-noir. But the grafted-on epilogue suffers an instant, gaudy tissue rejection. It’s sap in a movie that, for all its gravid clumsiness, has decidedly not been sap.

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)

December 17, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Marisa Tomei
written by Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Jon Watts

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Peter Parker (Tom Holland), having just been outed to the world as Spider-Man by a dying Mysterio (Jake Gyllenhaal), finds himself besieged by press and angry mobs mistaken in their belief that Mysterio was a very handsome hero. This pushes Peter into hiding with his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), girlfriend MJ (Zendaya), and bestie Ned (Jacob Batalon). The kids need guards when they go to school (why are they still going to school?) and are trying to focus on applying to MIT because they’re all three of them brilliant, in case you’ve forgotten. Recognizing the toll of his exposure on the people who have remained loyal to him, Peter asks Dr. Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to cast a spell on the universe so that people forget him. How this might be achieved in the age of social media and pocket cameras is dismissed as “magic,” which is also how it’s explained that a hole in the multiverse opens up, allowing a bunch of villains and other versions of Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield) to cross over into this one’s reality. At least the film has the self-awareness to constantly call out the facility of “magic” as a catch-all, layering its characters’ incredulity in a running joke about a “wizard’s dungeon” and one character’s “You have magic here?” As wit goes, it ain’t much, but I’ll take it.

Eternals (2021)

October 27, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

*/****
starring Gemma Chan, Richard Madden, Kumail Nanjiani, Angelina Jolie
screenplay by Chloé Zhao and Chloe Zhao & Patrick Burleigh
directed by Chloé Zhao

by Walter Chaw Chloé Zhao’s follow-up to her Oscar-winning Nomadland is one of those movies that is more interesting to talk about than to watch–which, in the final analysis, may be the poet laureate of South Dakota’s most distinctive auteur hallmark. Despite that it’s the twenty-some-odd instalment of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Eternals is defiantly a Chloé Zhao picture, and the amount of subversion required to make it so highlights both MCU overlord Kevin Feige’s desperation to shake the diversity monkey off his back and his fatal lack of understanding of women creators at the most rudimentary level. In theory that doesn’t matter much if all these folks are asked to do is direct the parts that aren’t generic action scenes, committee-generated in the house style and dropped into the middle of whatever flaccid drama is possible under the narrative conditions like dead paratroopers into a live warzone. What you see in Eternals is a result of what feels less like a partnership with its attendant compromises than like a quiet war waged in the spaces between a boss who thinks he knows what’s happening and a hired gun who’s pretty clever about having her way no matter the amount of oversight. By the third or fourth laborious exposition dump by the least comfortable, least seasoned and natural actor in the loaded cast (that would be 14-year-old Lia McHugh), it’s pretty clear that Zhao’s empathy for unaffected performers rambling in lingering magic-hour landscapes has won the day. Good one, Zhao.

The Suicide Squad (2021)

August 8, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Sci-Fi, Stallone, Streaming, Superhero, Theatrical

***½/****
starring Margot Robbie, Idris Elba, John Cena, Viola Davis
written and directed by James Gunn

by Walter Chaw James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad is weird. It’s explosively, hilariously gory, profane, ridiculous, and, best of all, lawless. As much as I love Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, the darkness–the grittiness–he brought to the DC Universe has proven difficult to shake due to its commercial success. In contrast, The Suicide Squad looks and acts a lot like the Adam West “Batman” TV series, a piece fully embracing the elasticity of both its mediums and, though it seems silly to say, one bracingly unafraid of literal colour. I also felt this way about Gunn’s still-dour-but-colorful-by-MCU-standards Guardians of the Galaxy—but this film feels very much like something, from character and production design down to the choice of members for the titular squad, allowed to be whatever it was going to be, damn the torpedoes. Have I mentioned that it’s weird? It’s exquisitely strange, and not just because of the obvious ways in which things are strange, but because it says the bad guys are the colonial-/meddling-minded United States, the military-industrial complex is reliant on the enslavement of the carceral state, and the best test of manhood is not facility with firearms and sociopathy. A billion-dollar IP that isn’t trying to skate the middle line of absolute, frictionless equivocation? Weird, right?

Black Widow (2021)

June 29, 20212021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Disability, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

**½/****
starring Scarlett Johansson, Florence Pugh, David Harbour, Rachel Weisz
screenplay by Eric Pearson
directed by Cate Shortland

by Walter Chaw You know it’s gritty because of the gritty cover song interrupting the bucolic prologue–Think Up Anger ft. Malia J‘s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” this time instead of Rose Betts’s “Song to the Siren.” Too on the nose, perhaps, although they’re both pretty on the nose, let’s be honest. Another clue is a montage under the opening credits that shows rows of little girls abducted not for sex trafficking (because Marvel is more comfortable suggesting sex trafficking than, you know, consensual adult eroticism), but for the purpose of creating a Whedon-fantasy team of Dollhouse assassins. I spent most of my childhood reading comics and have watched and reviewed almost all of the MCU films to this point. I’ve seen none of the TV/streaming shows and don’t intend to remedy that because life is incredibly short and also full to bursting with things I desperately want to see that I still won’t be able to, no matter how smart I am at managing whatever time I have left. I have no idea what’s going on in Black Widow, and I think that once you get bucked off this horse, there’s no getting back on. So here’s Cate Shortland’s Black Widow, the 24th MCU flick, if only the second centred around a female protagonist–one we know has sacrificed herself for the sake of the least interesting/worthy of her male counterparts, meaning this one takes place in either the past or an alternate timeline or something. It doesn’t matter. In the comic-book world, there are new #1s every few cycles that are reboots or speculative storylines or something. It’s how they get you to keep buying them. What matters is, the more you humanize this character you’ve already made abundantly clear you don’t really care about, the worse her already-loathsome sacrifice feels.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital Code

April 9, 20212020, 2021, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Spain, Streaming, Superhero, UK

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

WW84
½*/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal
screenplay by Patty Jenkins & Geoff Johns & Dave Callaham
directed by Patty Jenkins

by Walter Chaw At some point, someone in some boardroom should have pushed away from the table and asked whether it was a good idea to have a subplot in their new Wonder Woman movie about a person in the Middle East wishing that colonizers would be expelled from occupied territories. (The granting of said wish subsequently leading somehow to nuclear holocaust.) I mean, with or without an Israeli actress in the lead role. Not to say it’s not geometrically worse with an Israeli actress in the lead role, because it is. Look, the real wonder of WW84 is that this maybe isn’t the worst thing about it. Neither is how flat it looks, or how it starts with 45 minutes of poorly-timed slapstick before shifting into absolutely deadening action sequences, a weird body-possession intrigue, and a horrifying message about how you should never wish for things because everything has consequences attached to it. With so much riding on its shoulders, the burden to be all things to all people has resulted in a vivisected monstrosity of plastic inauthenticity. WW84 additionally has one of the most beautiful people in the world–who’s playing an immortal superhero–tearfully proclaim that she wants something to go right for her for once in her life. What I’m saying is, WW84 is a very particular, very limited kind of fantasy gratification that also happens to have fantasy gratification as its needlessly magical plot.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)

March 19, 2021****/****, 2021, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Streaming, Superhero

****/****
starring Ben Affleck, Henry Cavill, Gal Gadot, Amy Adams
screenplay by Chris Terrio
directed by Zack Snyder

by Walter Chaw It opens with soundwaves visualized as ripples in the air–Superman’s (Henry Cavill) death cry touching every part of a blasted world as the protection and decency he represents is murdered. I have historically hated Zack Snyder’s vision of this universe because it felt grimdark in a weightless way, the posturing of an emo teenager who hasn’t earned his weariness and cynicism. It felt like a put-on. Immature. When the worst parts of comic fandom coalesced to demand a director’s cut of a genuinely abominable film, Justice League, I, partly out of self-protection from a hateful horde and partly out of a sense of moral superiority, looked upon the project as first impossible, then misguided. I thought myself better than all this, which is unforgivable. I guess I wanted to believe that in a world in which I have figured nothing out, I had at least figured out that anything championed by trolls and incels could have no possible value to someone like me–who, of course, has nothing in common with these troglodytes except, you know, for the loneliness and the self-loathing and the suspicion of corporate-think. Maybe it’s just fear that makes me as hateful as they are. And maybe it’s just fear that makes them as hateful as they are, too. I think what’s most surprising to me about Zack Snyder’s Justice League (hereafter ZSJL) is how skillful it is as a diagnosis of the horrific, unfillable void that drives the very population most responsible for its existence. If the messages of the film are internalized, it may even help.

Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

December 23, 20202020, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Spain, Streaming, Superhero, Theatrical, UK

WW84
½*/****
starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal
screenplay by Patty Jenkins & Geoff Johns & Dave Callaham
directed by Patty Jenkins

Birds of Prey (2020)

February 10, 20202020, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Crime, Superhero, Theatrical

Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn
Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey
**/****
starring Margot Robbie, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Jurnee Smollett-Bell, Ewan McGregor
written by Christina Hodson
directed by Cathy Yan

by Walter Chaw When I used to teach Hitchcock, I’d ask students what the term “bird” refers to in British colloquial slang. “Women,” yes? So, immediately, Cathy Yan’s Birds of Prey: And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (hereafter Birds of Prey) carries with it an obvious secondary, didactic meaning, announcing itself as a piece about women who are predatory at most, not to be fucked with at least. I’m all-in. What kind of idiot wouldn’t be? The time is right for a film about women assuming agency, flipping the script on predatory men, and making a DC comic-book property into something very much like an extended rape-revenge horror movie. I love rape-revenge horror movies. Ms. 45 is seminal. Ditto the original I Spit On Your Grave. I even love Neil Jordan’s widely-derided The Brave One, which hung issues of assault and miscegenation on the framework of what is essentially a superhero origin story, years before it was stylish to do so. The time is right, too, for more female-led action films–what better than one starring a popular actress playing a popular antihero? Pity, then, that Birds of Prey is more Captain Marvel than Wonder Woman.

Spider-Man: Far from Home (2019)

June 28, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Theatrical

*/****
starring Tom Holland, Samuel L. Jackson, Zendaya, Jake Gyllenhaal
written by Chris McKenna & Erik Sommers
directed by Jon Watts

by Walter Chaw Burdened by the need to be the epilogue to Avengers: Endgame, Jon Watts's Spider-Man: Far From Home (hereafter Far from Home) trundles along awkwardly, lurching like an overburdened, top-heavy beast of burden bearing an unwise payload of poorly-packed goods. Its pacing is atrocious-approaching-deadly, and there's a notable lack of chemistry and timing between the leads made that much more glaring for the gloriously fleet and endlessly inventive Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which immediately precedes this film on the Spidey timeline. Compared to the most leaden entries in the MCU, Far from Home doesn't look any better, either. It leans into the teen comedy of Spider-Man: Homecoming with little success and, like it, can only be a teen comedy for half the time anyway–the other half given over to world-building in an endless slog of soapy Act 2s.

Dark Phoenix (2019)

June 6, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical

***½/****
starring James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Chastain
written and directed by Simon Kinberg

by Walter Chaw So downbeat it plays like a dirge, or a riff on Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone" (which Dylan described as ten pages of self-loathing prose "vomit" that needed to be set to music), Simon Kinberg's Dark Phoenix ain't got nothing and so's got nothing left to lose. Subject to numerous delays and a now-notorious reshoot in response to Captain Marvel beating them to the proverbial punch with a space-set finale, it is, against all odds, a tidy, thematically-succinct capper to Fox's X-Men saga–which, at its best, was always explicit about how these films were metaphors for not fitting in, not being accepted for what you were born as, and the importance of building families when your biological ones turn out to be frightened and faithless. Bryan Singer handled the first two instalments before leaving to do Superman Returns. Those three films–X-Men, X2: X-Men United, and Superman Returns–comprise a trilogy of mythologies for disaffected loners, brutalized by disappointment and betrayal, looking within themselves for value in a universe that sets them eternally, pointedly apart. There's an interesting paper to be written on why the radioactive Singer was so good at telling these kinds of stories. Or maybe not so interesting. After Brett Ratner's pitiful conclusion to the original trilogy, X-Men: The Last Stand, the series began to play with its timelines in exactly the same way reboots of the comics do–jumping ahead decades, sending series favourite Wolverine back in time to stop a mutant genocide–and consequently delivered a few gems along the way in X-Men: Days of Future Past, The Wolverine, and Logan. In the battle between continuity and quality, I guess I don't care if these characters never seem to age.

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

April 24, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Scarlett Johansson, Sci-Fi, Superhero

**½/****
starring Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Josh Brolin
screenplay by Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely
directed by Anthony and Joe Russo

by Walter Chaw Marvel has a gender and diversity problem and it tries to address this, in real-time, in Avengers: Endgame, the last of their “Broadway Melody” cavalcade-of-stars studio extravaganzas (or so they say). In the end, though, it’s still a solemn pageant of white saviours and their Christ-like sacrifices. The interesting thing about this storyline is that it explores both Christ the martyr and Christ the family man; there’s enough blue-eyed soulfulness here to present both paths of the Choose Your Own Judeo-Christian Epic. By doing so, there’s something for literally everyone in the film’s target audience of men of a certain age and predilection to get emotional about. Yes, the tragedy of masculinity is to be misunderstood: we, Captain Americas (Chris Evans), all, shod in the clothes of Sisyphus and, in this iteration, literal God of Thunder Thor (Chris Hemsworth), who gets a dad bod, a bad case of alcoholism, and enough self-immolating insecurity and self-loathing to make legions of mediocre men misty-eyed in recognition. It’s true, all of it, but underneath this disgusting robe and a hundred pounds of ugly fat is a Greek Adonis who loves his mother. It would be more enlightening to spend time with T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) on the question of loss, or with Natasha (Scarlett Johansson), or, even better, how about Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson)? Instead, here’s an extended comedy sequence where Thor drinks beer, eats pizza, and plays video games with his slovenly buddies. Bros feeling sorry for themselves, completely alone, drinking beers at the Gas-N-Sip with no women around. A recent poll told the story of how men aren’t getting laid much anymore. In its way, Avengers: Endgame is a curious commentary on why that might be–and one way of many to look at its title.

Shazam! (2019)

April 5, 20192019, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Comedy, Disability, Superhero, Theatrical

***/****
starring Zachary Levi, Mark Strong, Asher Angel, Djimon Hounsou
screenplay by Henry Gayden
directed by David F. Sandberg

by Walter Chaw The thing David F. Sandberg's Shazam!, the Captain Marvel I actually like, has going for it is that, like the recent Aquaman (which it takes a jab at during a mid-closing-credits sequence), it doesn't take itself too seriously. Not to say that it doesn't tackle some heavy topics–foster children, domestic abuse, sexuality, race, disability–but that it does so with a kind of good-natured bonhomie that finds one of its kid characters (the Asian one) calling a couple of bullies "assfags." In that sense, Shazam! plays a lot like Michael Ritchie's The Golden Child: another fantasy film with a charismatic lead pitched at children but packed with stuff just over the line of appropriate. There are a couple of nasty murders in this cheerfully self-aware send-up of Big (note a memorable scene set in a toy store), and there's a perfectly-landed recurring joke about a strip club–neither of which, let's face it, as inappropriate as the pedophilia that serves as the emotional centre of Big. Shazam! is, in other words, a shaggy-dog superhero flick that happily checks several boxes while unapologetically indulging in its chaotic silliness. Funnier would have been if schlumpy Seth Rogen had played the adult Shazam rather than hunky Zachary Levi, but there's intellectual property to respect and all. A shame The Rock already did a version of this role in the Jumanji sequel. At least he's rumoured to be cast as Captain Marvel's arch-enemy Black Adam in some film down the line.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) – 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray + Digital

March 19, 2019****/****, 2018, 2019, 4K Ultra HD, Action, Adventure, Animation, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Coming of Age, Family, FFC Must-Own, Sci-Fi, Spider-Man, Superhero, Teen

Please note that all framegrabs are from the 1080p version

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A-
screeplay by Phil Lord & Rodney Rothman
directed by Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, hereafter Spider-Verse, is a game-changer. It’s American anime, essentially, an Akira moment for our film art that will sooner or later be identified as the definitive event where everything tilted forward. I hope sooner. More than beautiful, it’s breathtaking. More than kinetic, it’s alive. And more than just alive, it’s seething with possibilities, self-awareness, a real vision of a future in which every decision in Hugh Everett’s quantum tree produces an infinite series of branches. It’s a manifestation of optimism. There’s hope in Spider-Verse, along with a reminder that more people in these United States believe in progressive values than don’t, no matter who the President is. Empathy and compassion hold the majority; there’s a recognition we are essentially the same–the same desires, the same disappointments. When a father tells his son he’s proud of him, it makes us cry because we identify with the entire spectrum of complexity such a conversation entails. When it happens in Spider-Verse, the son is unable to respond and the father is unable to see why, and the visual representation of the distance that can grow between fathers and sons is astonishingly pure. Turgenev never conceived a more graceful image on the subject. It’s perfect.