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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Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)

When mythological monsters run amok in Philadelphia and among them are angry unicorns only placated by handfuls of Skittles, things in this DC-related superhero movie start to teeter at my "switch off" point, especially given up to that point I'd already tired of a superhero movie that wants to champion a true mythological hero while also making him an annoying teen only as strong as each of his six team members, not to mention all those uncomfortable scenes showing teenaged boys holding hands and being romanced with 6000-year-old women. 

★★★☆☆

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The Flash (2023)

Even The Parent Trap in 1961 does a better job of duplicating its star (Hayley Mills, playing twins) than this peculiar 2023 DC exercise that randomly turns the second-versions of lead actor Ezra Miller into a weird slack-jawed cartoon - sometimes completely unnecessarily, like at times when there is only one Ezra Miller on screen! - and these NQR Polar Express doppelgangers distract from an already uninvolving Back To The Future time travel multiverse superhero origin story, one about a super-super-fast, red-lycraed Flash.

★★★☆☆

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Blue Beetle (2023)

It took me four or five sittings to get through this looong DC superhero movie that tells, with a glossy magazine look, the origin story of a superhero called Blue Beetle, a human teenager enhanced with a glowing blue parasitic alien technology that effectively disappears the movie's biggest asset, the young and good-looking Xolo Maridueña into a Power Ranger suit.

★★☆☆☆

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The King's Man (2021)

Are there people in the world, really, who weren't immediately repelled by this series' titles' shifting, changing spacing and punctuation, who in fact watched and so enjoyed the tiresome teenage-boysy action of the first two cartoons they thought what was needed, yawn, was a wartime period backstory that awkwardly combines Saving Private Ryan-style solemn battlefield war history with high-camp devil-may-care superhero derringdo?

★★☆☆☆

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Black Adam (2022)

The acting's a bit wonky in this one, not just from the kid (but from the kid in particular) and it features a bunch of cheap-working superheroes collectively called the Justice Society that most audience members won't know or care about (the group includes a particularly unhelpful 'swirling wind' girl and her sidekick, a lumbering dope who grows to giant size but can't think of anything to do with this skill to help out), but check it out: the tone adopted is interesting, Dwayne Johnson's title antihero behaves in a most unsuperherolike fashion, mercilessly killing bad guys in a cgi fury, and it is also interesting to think about how this fits with other episodes of the so far mostly lugubrious DC Universe series of movies.

★★★☆☆

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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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Spider-man: No Way Home (2021)

I wasn't always rivetted, as evidenced by the fact I was able to make to-do lists in my head as the dizzying cgi-action sequences went on and on, but there's no denying the cleverness of this Spider-man movie (the sixth Marvel film to feature Tom Holland as the webslinger but the first to characterise him as a mature agent of salvation, not a juvenile wannabe meter-out of violent justice), one that makes all the previous iterations of Spider-man, the ones with Andrew Garfield or Toby Maguire or even, say, Shinji Tôdô an extension of this movie, neatly rendering moot any and all past inconsistencies in plot or character or circumstance that may have niggled at viewers of umpteen versions, making everything connected and sensible and, get ready for it, ripe for multiple concurrent Spider-man releases.

★★★★☆

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Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)

This superhero action thriller on a mega-scale makes a couple of mistakes: 1) teaming the hero, Captain America alongside team mates with abilities that seem to one-up his own, and 2) ending with a glimpse of what is to come in the next inevitable instalment, leaving viewers exhausted at the thought of the whole tumultuous thing happening all over again, only with villains with a different skin...but, still, this is a very good superhero action from Marvel.

★★★☆☆

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