The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

You would think setting The Fantastic Four: First Steps on a kitsch Austin Powers alternate Earth (after the 90s cartoon series (but with monochromatic blue replacing the lurid Austin Powers palette)) would help make this Marvel superhero movie a nostalgic joy, but rather than zing, it feels inert, ponderous, empty even, despite the cartoonish action, but helping fill the time is Julia Garner in another steely performance as a surfboarding metal bad guy, and while Pedro Pascale never fully inhabits his character, he is easy to look at as Reed Richards, the mild-mannered brainiac head of a superhero family.

★★★☆☆

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A Quiet Place: Day One (2024)

Given the first and second movie told us everything we needed to know about the marauding monsters with hypersonic hearing - from their arrival on earth (via comets, I think) to their being bested by high-pitched sound - an additional entry into the series like this - this is number three, a prequel - serves no real purpose except to extrapolate, for fanboys maybe, on established themes, so we see more heel-to-toe quiet walking, more alien stampedes, more held breath and bridges taken out by fighter jets; an impossibly well-behaved service cat doesn't mix things up very much in this dutiful extra ninety minutes.

★★★☆☆

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