Black Panther

Our Review

The cultural event and the pretty great movie underneath it. Ryan Coogler built Wakanda into the most fully realized place in the franchise, an Afrofuturist city where maglev trains run past thatched spires, and let the fiction carry a real argument: what does the world’s most advanced nation owe the people it hides from? The film never flinches from the question, which is what separated it from every entry around it.

Chadwick Boseman plays T’Challa as a young king already doubting his inheritance, and the film keeps testing him. Michael B. Jordan’s Erik Killmonger is the series’ best written antagonist, a child of Oakland raised on loss who carries a legitimate critique of Wakandan isolationism and a monstrous plan to fix it. “Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors that jumped from ships, because they knew death was better than bondage” is the sharpest line ever spoken in one of these movies.

The women run the show around him: Lupita Nyong’o as the spy with the plan, Danai Gurira’s Okoye delivering the film’s best action beats, Letitia Wright’s Shuri making fun of everyone. The South Korea casino sequence and the car chase are top tier staging. The CG rhino finale goes muddy, the one stretch where the film becomes a standard Marvel climax.

Our score: 8/10, and the cultural weight was earned on screen.