Thunderbolts (2025)

Score: 3.5 / 5

The MCU seems to be really struggling to continue moving forward, yet this year's Thunderbolts offers some promising signs about the franchise's direction. I won't recount the plot here because a) you've probably already seen it if you're interested, and b) as with most superhero films, the plot doesn't really matter. What does matter here is visual design, thematic conceit, manageable stakes, and a curiously weak introduction that almost fails before, impossibly, climbing up to a climax and denouement that feel significant and -- most importantly -- earned.

Taking as its cue a certain dim and bleak visual dynamic riddling recent MCU films, the film starts almost drained of warmth in its color palette. We are reunited with Yelena (Florence Pugh), emotionally numbed while grieving her sister (back in Endgame, if you can believe the timeline has gotten so wildly widespread yet gone almost nowhere linerar-ly since 2019) and contemplating suicide in a somewhat family-friendly way. Working as a sort of black-ops private agent for CIA Director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), Yelena is sent on a couple clean-up missions for her boss, who is under Congressional investigation, only to discover that she herself may be on the slate for deletion. Yelena teams up with others in similar shoes, and their secret collective is formed as a rogue faction of third-rate outcasts masquerading as antiheroes.

The union of Yelena with US Agent (John Walker, played by Wyatt Russell), Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) is well-written and shot here, fighting each other as they slowly realize that they are all pawns in Valentina's game. They are disposable in their world and in ours, as the sad, hard truth is that if you haven't been keeping up with the MCU series streaming exclusively on Disney+, you simply won't know or care about these characters. Heck, I've been keeping up, and I still need to scour the internet to remember who has done what and showed up where in alliance with whomever in what series titles. It's a nightmare. Thankfully, you don't necessarily need to know much about these characters beyond what Thunderbolts provides about them.

This allows the actors a lot of room to play and express themselves as discontented and dispassionate soldiers. Remember how the first Avengers were light-hearted white men slapping each other on the back while joking about cussing? This is a far cry from that, with each character dealing with crushing disappointment, shame, guilt, and self-doubt and allowing it to lash out at each other with snide, sneering humor and the uniquely aggravated impatience of boredom. They are, quite literally, heroes stuck in the shadow of their more famous counterparts, yet those counterparts have all but abandoned a world in need. Pugh is clearly the protagonist of the film despite its ensemble cast; she perhaps most clearly is struggling with the crushing void (read: depression) and goes through the best arc of the film, literally sacrificing herself while acting on full throttle. David Harbour's Red Guardian and Sebastian Stan's Winter Soldier join the team as well, rounding out the angsty mercs with macho gusto. 

The motif of shadows becomes literalized not just in the shadowy nature of Valentina's black ops mercenaries, as they start the film being, but also in its secondary antagonist, Bob. Lewis Pullman's awkward, anxious little man who had been subjected to human experimentation in Valentina's secret trials to create superhumans known as Sentries. He unexpectedly survived and was cared for by Yelena before being recaptured and brainwashed by Valentina, who effectively convinces him he's a god. Trying to kill him fails, and Bob becomes the Void, his destructive shadow-self who begins trapping all of New York City and its citizens in darkness and nightmarish dreams of their personal traumatic memories. This motif is showcased throughout the film, in pointed dialogue about depression, trauma, guilt, shame, and suicide, and in visual elements, including color desaturation, the opening Marvel logo, and the pretty cool special effects of the Void and his assault on civilians. Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo (You're Next, A Ghost Story, The Green Knight) really nails it here.

As with any superhero flick, there are unnecessary action flourishes and sequences that don't do much other than keep us locked into familiar narrative beats. Schreier doesn't always seem to know what to do with action scenes, so the fighting is often unclear and muddled, perhaps intentionally (as these are not the best or most polished Avengers ever) but also formally through editing cuts that don't always follow or flow. Thankfully, the action isn't really the focus of this film, so these issues are minimal. Thankfully, too, Schreier knows that the success of this film is in its characters and their emotional appeal, so he focuses mostly on Pugh, who plies her typically A-lister craft on a character that desperately needs to have real life breathed into her. She does with aplomb, making Yelena one of the most interesting, consequential, and worthwhile characters in the entire franchise.

As the end of MCU's Phase Five, Thunderbolts may not be the Avengers movie anybody wanted or asked for, but it might be what we need at this point. Instead of a climax relentlessly shoving debris-clouded CGI at us as entire planets collapse and aliens descend on war-torn cityscapes, this one features mostly plays of light and shadow, interspersed with equally visually dynamic dream sequences. With these smaller stakes -- visually, if not necessarily thematically -- we can connect better with the unique aspects of these characters and how they might change the general sensation of superhero movies in this series moving forward into Phase Six. One can only hope, anyway.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Wakanda forever! The much-anticipated and long-awaited sequel to Black Panther is bigger in almost every way, and some may find that a fault. It's long and thoroughly exhausting in its epic scope, expansive narrative, and heavy themes. The film opens with the death of King T'Challa (the late Chadwick Boseman, who is seen often in still images but thankfully not recreated digitally), who had an illness his sister Shuri (Letitia Wright) believed could have been cured by a special herb previously burned by Erik Killmonger. It's perhaps the best way to honor both Boseman and the characters (including Killmonger) given what was surely an extensive rewriting process after Boseman's untimely and unexpected death. The funeral sequence features perhaps the best display of costuming and editing yet in the franchise, as Shuri and Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), dressed in stark white, follow the coffin as Wakandan dancers and singers mourn and celebrate in slow-motion. My eyes were leaking so much at this point it was difficult to accept that, after the MCU logo appeared, we skipped ahead a full year.

Wakanda has had to become a defender of its valuable resource of vibranium from other world powers, to the point of almost closing itself off from the outside world again. When the US develops a vibranium-detecting machine and searches the oceans with it, the expedition is attacked and killed while suspicion immediately falling on the Wakandans. But this film doesn't really show too much of the geopolitics going on (because, you know, superhero movies generally don't go there), adding instead a new villain to the mix. Enter Namor (a hunky Tenoch Huerta Mejia), who rises from the waters of Wakanda to confront Queen Ramonda and Shuri in a private meeting. He has bypassed the extensive security of the kingdom, apparently breathes underwater, and sports wings on his ankles. Whereas comics originally featured the character as an Atlantean prince, here he is K'uk'ulkan, king of Talokan, an underwater realm of what used to be Mayans.

Clearly there are a lot of ideas in this film, very few of which would seem (at face value) to hearken back to the first magnificent Black Panther. A new secret kingdom? More extraordinary warriors and tech? Brown people fighting Black people over material resources hunted by white Westerners? But in the eminently capable and sensitive hands of Ryan Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole (American Crime Story: The People v. OJ Simpson), these new and potentially disparate elements coalesce into a complex and fascinating knot of plot points. I mean that in the best way, because they also carry us through some of the most dynamic character development in any MCU theatrical releases to date. Shuri is taken to Talokan to learn from Namor the reality of that kingdom's existence and the crucial matter of its secret vibranium cache. He wants to forge an alliance with Wakanda to protect the resource and their kingdoms from the rest of the world, but he threatens to destroy Wakanda if they do not agree.

White colonists are definitely the cause for conflict in this film, but they aren't the villains. Namor, as the antagonist, comes close to being villainous, but much like with Killmonger, it doesn't feel right to call him that, even when he kills a certain someone (and I'll never forgive him for it). Similarly, while the Talokan warriors are pretty unnerving to behold with their blue skin, they aren't cruel or malicious either. If anything, it's the demand for such a precious resource that is the real villain of the film. It makes everyone do crazy things, even if they seem rational in the moment. Coogler is exceptionally good at making each character's motivations clear and reasonable, and he empowers his actors to give the best of themselves in every frame.

That's not to say the movie isn't a little over-stuffed, much like many complained about Wonder Woman 1984 or some of the Avengers and Spider-Man movies. It's got a huge cast of characters, including a hilarious and eye-opening subplot with Martin Freeman's CIA agent Everett Ross and Julia Louis-Dreyfus's new CIA boss and woman of mystery Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who are revealed to be ex-spouses. It sets up Dominique Thorne as Riri Williams, an MIT student who invented the vibranium detector, who has built herself a unique Iron Man-type suit; we know she will be starring in the upcoming series Ironheart. It locates a new Black Panther, and without spoiling too much, Shuri is a pretty excellent choice. Do I wish Ramonda had taken up the mantle? Sure, who doesn't, but Shuri's journey -- especially by the climax when she revives a heart-shaped herb and travels to the ancestral astral plane to meet with a certain ancestor who made me jump with excitement -- is more than well-earned. But the numerous plots and characters is certainly daunting, even for tried-and-true fans.

Thankfully, Coogler is up to more than just franchise fan service. Apart from tying strands of this story to the MCU generally, he establishes (like Taika Waititi has done in this series) a unique tone to Wakanda Forever, setting it apart as one of the few movies period to embrace the theme of righteous anger and outrage, specifically for people of color. Bassett, in one of her first scenes, chastises the UN for their entitled expectations regarding her resources, and she's glorious in every breath. Shuri, Ramonda, and Namor each try to navigate stages of grief, and in that way the film also embraces their sorrows. It's really tricky to pull off such emotionally wrought characters in any film, but to do it with so many in a franchise film is astonishing. I wish there weren't quite so much happening so the film could breathe a bit more and let us sit with the weighty themes. Then again, taking anything out of this film would do it a cruel disservice. Plus, it gave us Lupita Nyong'o again and Danai Gurira in all their respective glory, and I will never be mad about that.

Onward (2020)

Score: 4 / 5

There's a lot going on in Onward, so much so that I found myself mindlessly swept up in its energetic adventure. While it's not got any genre-bending, mold-breaking, or especially innovative new ideas, this movie manages to do a lot of pretty cool things. It aims for a certain kind of fanbase largely overlooked by Disney animated features, finally cracks open the door for certain types of families and relationships, and strengthens the recent push from Disney movies to ignore romance in favor of lasting ties between siblings and family.

Set in a world of myth, populated by elves, centaurs, and pixies, this movie is a sort of fever dream for kids who grew up playing fantasy adventure games like Dungeons & Dragons. Or, at least, I can only assume as much based on comments I've heard and my own recent first experience with D&D. Of course it's a PG-rated version of that fantasy life, but it works hard to fuse that mythos with real suburbia. The story centers on two elf brothers, but this isn't Tolkien; these characters have cell phones and ramshackle vans. They try to fit in at school and spend their days worrying about helping their single mom in the town of New Mushroomton. Helping her, that is, but also steering somewhat clear of her uptight new boyfriend, a centaur police officer named Colt Bronco.

When, on Ian's sixteenth birthday, their mother presents the boys with a gift from their father -- who died shortly after Ian's birth -- Ian's older brother Barley is overcome with excitement. Barley's love for a certain roleplaying adventure game is something of an embarrassment to Ian, who just wants to fit in despite longing for a father he'll never know. But Barley's enthusiasm peaks when their father's gift is revealed: a magic staff and a spell that can bring dear old dead dad back for one full day. Barley works hard to activate the spell, but the magic just doesn't seem to work.

It's a potent opening crisis for the story, a heartbreaking foundation of hope: to see a departed parent again, even for a single day. Ian, crushed that his coming-of-age birthday gift was fruitless, casually attempts to use the spell when he's finally alone in his room. This time, it works! At least at first, that is, because his father materializes from the feet up. But the awe of real magic and the impossible dream of seeing dad are cut short when the special crystal is depleted and the spell is interrupted. They have half of dad -- precisely from the waist down -- and the clock has started ticking on their 24-hour timetable. Barley draws on his wealth of magical lore to launch them on a Quest to locate another crystal, finish the spell, and get 100% of their father back before their day is gone.

It's not the most original story, and as the plot careens kinetically from one fraught episode to another, the breakneck dialogue and abundance of visuals feel like perhaps too much icing on a cake. The sweet confections pile up quickly and although the film effectively balances the laugh-out-loud humor with genuine nostalgic adventure tropes, it can be a hard multi-layered dessert to swallow. It helps that the voice cast is so familiar and endearing: Tom Holland and Chris Pratt are eminently likable, as are Julia Louis-Dreyfus and an all-star comedic cast of bit parts that includes Lena Waithe, Octavia Spencer, and Tracey Ullman.

Funny and nice but somewhat standard, the movie whisks along until the finale, when a single heartrending scene wreaked havoc on my tear ducts. I don't want to spoil it too much, but let me just say that if Disney insists on more of these "true love is found between siblings" themes like in Frozen and Brother Bear, my heart will give out much too soon. It's such a quiet, profound, and ultimately devastating catharsis that it saved the rest of the movie from being somewhat forgettable. And yet, it's really not sad; in the way only the best Disney or Disney-Pixar flicks can be, the finale brings heartwarming affirmation and pure joy out of a dire situation.

Come for the cutesy cult-fanbase references and what-if premise. Stay for the emotional payoff you did not know you desperately needed. A new Quest awaits.