Thor: The Dark World
The low point of the first two phases, a movie that feels assembled by committee in a hallway. Thor: The Dark World sends the God of Thunder after Malekith, a dark elf who wants to plunge the universe into darkness…
Tag new on Disney+
Iron Man 3
Shane Black came in and made a Shane Black movie that happens to wear the armor: Christmas settings, deadpan voiceover, a broken hero, and a buddy structure that pairs Tony with a kid from Tennessee for the middle stretch. After…
The Avengers
The gamble that paid. Six leads from four separate movies, one writer director asked to make them talk to each other, and a studio betting the whole blueprint on it working. Joss Whedon’s The Avengers is still the most purely…
Captain America: The First Avenger
Joe Johnston’s period piece is the most old fashioned movie in the canon, and it profits from it. Steve Rogers starts as a four foot nothing kid from Brooklyn played by a digitally trimmed Chris Evans, and the movie’s smartest…
Thor
Kenneth Branagh brought his Shakespeare training to the God of Thunder and it mostly works. Thor opens in Asgard with golden spires and Anthony Hopkins booming like a stage king, then grounds itself in the dirt of New Mexico, where…
Iron Man 2
The rushed sequel, and it wears the rush. Tony Stark outs himself as Iron Man, watches his blood poison him, drinks too much, fights a Congress hearing, and juggles a revenge plot, a rival arms dealer, a new assistant who…
The Incredible Hulk
The forgotten middle child of Phase One. Edward Norton plays Bruce Banner as a wired fugitive hiding out in Brazil, learning to control his pulse rate while searching for a cure, and the performance is more interesting than the movie…
Iron Man
The one that started the whole machine still plays better than most of what followed it. Robert Downey Jr. walks into Tony Stark with a standup comic’s timing and a memoir’s worth of damage, and the franchise was cast in…
Doctor Who (2023)
The Disney era handed Russell T Davies the biggest budget in the show's history and Ncuti Gatwa the keys to the TARDIS, and the result is the most confident Doctor Who has looked in a decade. After three 60th anniversary specials gave David Tennant a victory lap, The Church on Ruby Road properly introduced Gatwa's Fifteenth Doctor on Christmas 2023: a flashier, flirtier, more emotionally open Doctor with Millie Gibson's found family orphan Ruby Sunday alongside. The production upgrade is immediate, with cinematography and score that finally match the ambition the scripts always had.
Wonder Man
Marvel’s strangest swing in years is a Hollywood buddy comedy with almost no superheroing in it. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Simon Williams, a working actor who cannot catch a break, and Ben Kingsley returns as Trevor Slattery, the washed up…