Shows You Should Be Watching
Honest reviews. Zero hype.
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…
Taika Waititi took the series’ most solemn hero, fired the Shakespeare, and made the funniest film in the canon. Thor: Ragnarok opens with Thor cracking jokes in a monster’s cage and never looks back: the haircut, the gladiator planet, the…
The high school movie Spider-Man deserved after a decade of webshooters played by grown men. Tom Holland is genuinely fifteen here, and the film builds his world correctly: decathlon practice, a crush he can’t talk to, a crummy apartment in…
The daddy issue movie. Where the first Guardians was a discovery, Volume 2 is a victory lap that knows it has an audience and tests how much shtick that audience will absorb. Kurt Russell arrives as Ego, a living planet…
The origin story hits autopilot, but the visuals refuse to. Benedict Cumberbatch plays Stephen Strange, a superstar surgeon whose hands are ruined in a car crash, as a more brittle cousin of Tony Stark: arrogant, brilliant, insufferable, then broken. The…
The movie that broke the universe in half and made the argument feel real. After a mission goes wrong, the world’s governments move to regulate the Avengers, and the team splits down the middle: Tony Stark, drowning in guilt, signs…
The little heist movie that survived its own production chaos. Edgar Wright developed it for a decade and left over creative differences months before shooting, and Peyton Reed stepped in and kept the script’s heart: a cat burglar trying to…
The overstuffed one. Joss Whedon’s second and last Avengers film tries to advance every character, launch three new ones, set up two future movies, and stage a doomsday finale, and the strain shows in every seam. It is still a…
The movie that should not have worked. A talking raccoon with a machine gun, a sentient tree who says one word, a cast of nobodies from a comic strip nobody read, and a director best known for schlock horror. James…
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…