Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Our Review

The best film Marvel has made, argued with a straight face by a large chunk of the fandom. The Russo brothers took the star spangled man out of the period piece and dropped him into a seventies paranoid thriller: surveillance states, compromised agencies, old men in conference rooms deciding who counts as a threat. Robert Redford playing the inside man is the whole thesis in one casting choice.

Steve Rogers versus SHIELD is a fight about principles, which is why the punches land. The elevator brawl, eleven guys against one man in a glass box, is the franchise’s best choreographed fight, and the highway ambush that reveals the Winter Soldier remains a shock sequence of the first order. Sebastian Stan barely speaks and gives the film its haunted core.

Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow gets her best showcase, trading banter and carrying the plot’s moral question, and Anthony Mackie’s Sam Wilson earns a decade of screen time with one falcon dive. The finale tips into CG aircraft carrier mayhem like every Marvel movie must, but even that stays tethered to the theme: you cannot put a price tag on freedom, and the film means it.

Watch it even if you skip everything around it. Our score: 9/10.