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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Thunderbolts (2025)

I think Florence Pugh is great as Yelena Belova, the main character in a thrown-together-by-chance superhero ensemble called "Thunderbolts", a sort of rough-around-the-edges Avengers group ('the Bvengers') whose first movie outing cleverly takes on movie audiences' superhero fatigue by trumping it - the characters here are worldweary, eye-rolling rejects, and that includes the always terrific Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the cumbersomely named Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, an unflappable corrupt agent navigating career turmoil of her own callous creation.

★★★★☆

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Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

My finger hovered over the OFF button right the way through the first half hour of this umpteenth Deadpool movie, one with long-dead Wolverine brought back to life and injected into the story for what proves very little reason, but then something Ryan Reynolds says made me laugh despite my wariness of wanton pop-song-accompanied violence and all of a sudden the credits were rolling, I'd laughed out loud multiple times and enjoyed what felt most like an extended comedy skit rather than a superhero movie full of nerdy superhero details to geek out on (it is that, but it is possible to ignore it)..

★★★☆☆

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Madame Web (2024)

This much maligned Marvel superhero flick isn't so bad if you are not fussed by its relatively small (for superhero movies) budget or by its lack of male muscle and brawn (instead we have female teamwork and clairvoyance), and you need to be able to look past some weird dubbed voice acting that is never explained, but Dakota Johnson, a presence as light as a feather (like her mum in Working Girl, you feel she might blow away in a wind) is captivating as Cassandra Webb, a paramedic experiencing strange things in the lead up to her discovering by movie's end that she is a spider-enhanced superhero. 

★★★☆☆

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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

This Marvel superhero series distinguishes itself from all the other Marvel superhero series with its catalogue of immature characters exhibiting only the basest of functions, so the space-adventuring troupe of GotG number 1 and 2 continue to do 1s and 2s in this number 3, and like Groot's one note repeated ad nauseum (*i am Groot"), we see these base character-identifiers over and over again over two hours, and it is tiring - adults like me might like to daydream about more interesting things like what is behind the movie's central thesis, expounded gently but repeatedly, that, "Good dog," is better than, "Bad!"

★★★☆☆

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Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

The uprising that takes place in this third Ant-Man movie against new villain Kang, an uprising that starts with the Ant-Man family suddenly being sucked into Kang's subatomic-sized Quantum universe, spans the family's meeting the tiny world's inhabitants and choosing to side with them in a long-running conflict, and an uprising that ends with the family's takedown of Kang in a dizzying film-final cgi battle, all seems to happen in a narrative time of about twenty minutes, which isn't to say the movie is exciting - it is written so that everything happens in the time it takes to shrug your shoulders and is in fact the least interesting of the three movies of the series.

★★☆☆☆

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Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness (2022)

Given the empty hero-versus-villain plots and interchangeable cgi-action sequences of all these movies, Marvel seems to believe simply striking upon different skins and tones, for example giving Thor IV an 80s-rock theme or setting Venom in a noirish San Francisco or making it horror-lite or nanosized or snart-arsed is the best way to perpetuate its exponentially-growing raft of superhero movies and in the hands of director Sam Raimi, this sequel to Doctor Strange is certainly a unique look horror-lite Marvel entry with a very Carrie-like witch, oodles of risen-dead bad guys and evil souls reincarnate and so is perhaps for a slightly older than usual Marvel viewer....say ten.

★★★☆☆

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Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Wakanda Forever, this 2022 sequel to Black Panther, certainly goes forever, told with the sweep of a grand war saga after Homer, which is a feat given almost the whole of its nearly three-hour runtime revolves around a single battle, and even though this conflict — between a deep-sea kingdom and Wakanda — seems easily-avoidable and founded on a misunderstanding, and even though two-and-a-half hours of not terribly interesting political exposition is spent trying to explain how and why it is avoidable to a Homeric catalogue of overwrought characters, the epic CGI fight goes ahead in the end.

★★☆☆☆

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Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Taika Waititi's Thor episode dresses up the same old same old 'superhero battles a supervillain' plot in an 80s rock opera skin and fills it with big-name cameos, Taika Waititi's trademark kooky humour, and schoolkid-pleasing nonsense, but it is like this particular Marvel franchise is a hammer of God and try as he might Taika Waititi simply isn't able to lift it.

★★☆☆☆

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

Some of these superhero cartoons feel especially lightweight, like an eight-page comic that is opened, flipped through, closed and discarded in almost one motion, like this sequel to the original Venom featuring a villain who is vividly brought to life by an oddly-wigged Woody Harrelson but only for a few moments — a moment involving chickens, one about a dinner date, and a sfx-laden car-ride moment — before he is dispatched in a climactic sfx spectacle, chomped by Tom Hardy's symbiot (investigative journalist Eddie Brock and his cartoony, toothy alien parasite, Venom, who leaps out from between Brock's shoulderblades) and then the credits roll, before we learn anything interesting — or anything at all —about Brock, about Venom (he eats chickens), about that villain, or about Brock's three "in-the-know" allies: a shopkeeper, a former lover, and the former lover's new man. 

★★☆☆☆

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Morbius (2022)

 

This vampire superhero hardly endears himself to viewers when, early on, he slaughters a roomful of people, but somehow we are still asked to sympathise with him and gun for him as he enters into a battle with a similar bat-bite-influenced villain in what is, dreary-start-to-dreary-finish, a lethargic entry into the Marvel universe with the only thing less charismatic than the lead character being Jared Leto, the lead actor himself, whose appeal as a Hollywood superstar completely eludes me.

★☆☆☆☆

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Black Widow (2021)

We learn more about Natasha Romanov's childhood in this action thriller that is thankfully, refreshingly a Marvel superhero movie made with adults in mind with the sort of globetrotting locations and over-the-top hi-tech-villainry (and then some) found in James Bond movies.

★★★☆☆

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Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings (2021)

The baffling appearance of Ben Kingsley - he turns up about halfway through playing a Shakespearean actor who believes real monkeys were cast in the Planet of the Apes - marks where this, until then by-the-numbers Marvel superhero movie, unravels, descending from that point into a Disney mess aimed at pre-teens involving a massive flying threadworm, ludicrous bow-and-arrow mastery, flip-flopping bad-no-good-no-bad-no-good guys, a headless turwomken (a turkey, wombat, chicken cross) and other cgi Star Wars-style creatures trying to make interesting a lengthy middle stretch of exposition, vague ten-ring powers, and a hero whose martial arts prowess goes viral (but whose friends don't seem to know) and whose early childhood years of training as a ruthless assassin are breezily referenced (but which have no obvious effect upon the present) - all up, a mess of too many hasty, childish ideas in a movie which, like Black Panther, ends without it having been firmly established why the superhero origin story is the lead character's movie and not the movie of one of the other more interesting, more impressive characters (but certainly not that embarrassing Ben Kingsley one).

★★☆☆☆

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Spider-Man: Far From Home

In the Avenger hiatus after Endgame, the world needs a hero refresh as much as the Marvel franchise needs its ageing fanbase refreshed, so it stands to reason Far From Home delivers up a Spiderman doing a better but still far from perfect job meeting global demand for his superhero powers while the story, this time featuring a tech-enhanced villain whose tricks recall those of Batman's The Scarecrow, takes on the tone of a Spy Kids sequel.

★★★☆☆

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Avengers: Endgame (2019)

The remedy for all of the chaos Thanos caused at the end of Avengers: Infinity Wars is time travel, so lickety split Tony Stark creates that - a kind of Fitbit, stop asking questions - and that out of the way, the rest of Endgame's three-hour runtime is able to focus on fan-pleasing stuff that has series' devotees tweeting how many times they laughed and cried and has them marvelling at which superhero did what, where and why, and who can now use whoever else's weapon and which two hugged - totally awesome - but none of it likely to jazz anyone who hasn't invested heavily in a bulk of the preceding twenty-one Marvel space opera cartoons which culminate here, for these non-fans, in a not-very-fun nor satisfactory cinema experience that wallows in the depressions and anxieties, traumas and mother- and father-complexes of myriad morose superheroes suffering in the aftermath of Infinity War, including, in what turns out to be the most peculiar and depressing story arc of the entire franchise, the thorough ruination of the character of Chris Hemsworth's Thor.

★★☆☆☆

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Captain Marvel (2019)

I'm suffering study fatigue in my neverending Masters of Marvel course and if there were exams tomorrow I'd struggle to answer questions on the finer plot points of this Marvel superhero movie and how it fits with all the others, except to say it is set on Earth in the 1990s before (all?) the other movies, Samuel L Jackson's Fury is a young man with two-eyes who hasn't even dreamt up the Avengers yet, and a good running joke in the movie is how slow dial-up internet is, especially for the technologically advanced Captain Marvel, a low-affect hero but great female role model who in the face of male detractors keeps getting up, dusting herself off, and keeps on getting on with her job as a, um, Krull saving the Earth from invading, er, Skrees?

★★★☆☆

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Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018)

The antics of Marvel's goofiest, most family-friendly superhero continue in this not-as-good sequel of Ant-Man chronicling Ant-Man's encounters with a mysterious time- and space-shifting "Baba Yaga", and while most of the humour falls flat this time around (except for one "previously on..." sequence narrated by Ant-Man's sidekick and tech-guy, Luis) this is easy, undemanding and family-friendly superhero action enlivened by a couple of great action sequences and by Evangeline Lilly's appearance as Wasp, a wing- and blast-gun-enhanced hero who fights alongside Ant-Man but who could easily do it on her own.

★★★☆☆

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Venom (2018)

Like the title character, Venom, a deep-voiced cartoony many-toothed alien parasite with a permanently protruding tongue that somehow doesn't get bitten off, this Marvel superhero genesis story is in a desperate race to reach symbiosis: Tom Hardy's Eddie Brock, Venom's host, is one minute sitting with a deathly pallor in a restaurant fishtank eating live lobsters and the next is exchanging wisecracks with his new partner in fighting street crime — I didn't want to watch it, but the movie needed twenty more minutes to calmly set things up instead of quick-sticks racing to a scribbly mess of a climax because, presumably, there are more episodes to make.

★★☆☆☆

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Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)

It starts a little confusingly for anyone like me who doesn't know exactly where, chronologically, it fits in the Marvel canon - opening scenes reference Iron Man and alien debris in a ravaged city - and it is very long and drags in the middle section, but Homecoming is a mostly fun and often funny Spiderman reboot that sets up Tom Holland's Spiderman as the newest, youngest Avenger with superhero ambition that exceeds his experience and abilities.

★★★☆☆

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Thor Ragnarok (2017)

As a standalone superhero movie, this third Thor outing, a distinct departure from the previous two, doesn't really hold together - it is a messy, sprawling space adventure a bit like Flash Gordon with lots of 80s synthesizer but at times goes a bit The Fifth Element with Jeff Goldblum playing a flamboyant leader of a colourful planet of haves and havenots but at other times again transforms into Spaceballs with a new (to the Thor series) 'anything goes' hammy comedy that grows steadily more tired as the movie goes on and on - but as a series segue between Marvel's Avenger blockbusters and the space adventure Guardians of the Galaxy, Thor Ragnarok is a clever exercise that serves to bridge disparate Marvel franchises ahead of the Infinity War movie that brings them all together.

★★☆☆☆

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