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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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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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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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 Marvels (2023)

There's a lot of "well, just because" logic in the plot of this superhero movie which teams Brie Larsson's Captain Marvel with two other characters with similar names - I don't remember who they are or what they are called but can tell you one was young and annoying and the other serious and dull - and this threesome must prevent a villain finding a powerful pair of stones/rocks/keys, but apart from that and the bemusement I felt (I never understood for example why or how the three heroes were physically interchanging during fights, or why it made any difference), nothing else about this run-of-the-mill superhero  business stuck in my mind beyond the end credits.

★★☆☆☆

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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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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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The Batman (2022)

When the topic of The Batman came up, a teenager I tutor summed it up perfectly as a movie about a "miserable Batman with miserable friends fighting a miserable villain in a miserable city", and he wasn't wrong, because this brooding restyling of the franchise positions Robert Pattison's Batman as a sullen emo and has him, Zoe Kravitz's slinky Selena, the mobsters and Gotham street crims, the justice system, and in fact the entire city of Gotham sunk in a psychotic depression while The Riddler, a Heath Ledger-Joker-echo, murders public figures and taunts authorities with tightly scripted David Berkowitz-style codes - all of which oppressive heaviness is fine - it's Batman, afterall - until the final act reveals the supposed root of the city's decay and it feels, in comparison, almost trivial.

★★★☆☆

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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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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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Brightburn (2019)

Brightburn flips the Superman origin story, making the baby delivered by spacepod to a couple on a remote farm the villain, not the superhero, but in the end, after the movie resorts to gore - glass shards to one character's magnified cornea and a steering wheel to another character's head - to distinguish itself and pad the runtime, all that can be said is yes, this spacepod boy is a real villain, not a superhero - and that is the extent of it.

★★☆☆☆

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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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Dark Phoenix (2019)

All we want from these X-men movies are some scenes in which the mutants pool their resources and unleash their powers in imaginative combination and this 2019 episode, one of the "Muppet babies" ones of late, delivers lots of that - we especially liked the  train carriage scene - and we also get some more of poor Jean Grey's backstory, though after some new details about how she came into Professior Xavier's care as a child, her story becomes the same old same old one about her reckoning with her awesome powers - it seems the only new thing that can be done with this character is adding different adjectives to her name.

★★★☆☆

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Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)

It didn't help that an hour in our internet cut out and my viewing partner accidentally drummed up the original 2017 cut, not this 2021 refashioning by Zack Snyder, leaving us perplexed by scenes we'd already seen playing out of sequence, but even once we got back on track this unnecessarily long re-release stretches a bad two-hour movie to an interminable four-hour slog: a first hour and a half of false starts, a muddled middle split pointlessly between Batman's Justice League recruitment drive and Steppenwolf's "mother box" raids (the raids are doing the recruiting, making Batman's story redundant), and a finale that comes only after too many musical lamentations (each time Wonder Woman appears), too many dopey Flash close-ups, far too many little-boy shrugs from Superman, and way too much of that cyborg character so stiff and miserable we never once connect — four hours later, it isn't Justice League so much as Justice beLeaguered.

★★☆☆☆

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WW84 (2020)

Towards the end of this sprawling, goofy superhero almost-cartoon, one surely modelled on Superman II and III, Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman has trouble pushing her way through a maelstrom of wind and swirling A4 papers — I don't know why — and her plight mirrors that of her audience who have at that point struggled for nearly three hours with this sequel's maelstrom of unclear ideas, left asking questions like, "Whose wishes have been granted and whose wishes have been renounced?", "When a wish is renounced, what shifts in reality take place?", "Why wasn't Steve Trevor simply magicked to 1984 in his own body instead of this movie's convoluted Oh God! You Devil! bodyswapping nonsense?", "Was that schmuck (this movie's Oh God! You Devil! original rockstar) ever missed by anyone?", "What is a broadcasting machine and how is it that a boy on a freeway can communicate with his father via it?", "Why can't today's sfx technology make superfast running look good?" and, the question that most preoccupied me during WW84's exceedingly long runtime: "Do superhero movie studios deliberately ride this wave of excellent originals followed by overcooked, cheap sequels, seeing what they can cheaply get away with once audiences have bought-in?"

★★★☆☆

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