Avengers: Endgame
The payoff. Twenty two movies of set up converge on a three hour funeral, heist, and revival that functions as both a war picture and a victory lap for the biggest ensemble ever assembled. The boldness is in the first…
Tag what to watch tonight
Captain Marvel
The amnesia picture. Carol Danvers crashes into a Blockbuster Video in 1995 with no memory, powers she can’t explain, and a Kree handler telling her to control her emotions, and the movie spends its first hour as a sci-fi detective…
Ant-Man and the Wasp
The palate cleanser Marvel scheduled between the two heaviest films it ever made, and it plays like exactly that: a light, quick, slightly anonymous caper about a house arrested dad, his ex, and a rescue mission into the quantum realm.…
Avengers: Infinity War
Ten years of buildup cashed in one bet: make the villain the protagonist. Avengers: Infinity War is Thanos’s movie, and Josh Brolin’s motion captured Titan is the most fully inhabited CG performance of the era, a fanatic who believes he…
Black Panther
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…
Thor: Ragnarok
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…
Spider-Man: Homecoming
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…
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
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…
Doctor Strange
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…
Captain America: Civil War
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…