After a few years of relative quietude from the highbrows, becalmed by the pandemic’s rocky release schedule, the elitist film critics began speaking up again last summer. They have a lot to say about movie quality.

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Alternate universe stories give us a chance to see what the characters in the narratives we love are really made of. Strip away the trappings of their circumstances, put them in different hardships and opportunities, and what do they become?…

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There’s a real seduction to multiverse stories. Seeing how all the same pieces rearrange themselves into a recognizable but different whole; seeing who these characters really are by removing the trappings; watching how a tiny choice made in a tiny…

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Marvel is trying to put Reel World Theology out of a job with phase four of their cinematic universe. In our little corner of the multiverse, it’s not exactly news that every story is about something; but over the past…

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In three movies over nearly seven hours, Captain America is showcased at length, and if you actually watch the movies and think a little bit, every detail that matters makes total sense. Clickbait abounds, though, and a recent piece by…

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Around the middle of the decade, Harper’s critic Charles E. Whittaker gave a scathing film review. Art is supposed to be expressive, he said; but the idea of “art” is far from the movie… …not merely in absence, but in…

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I am now four days out from my first and, so far, only viewing of Avengers: Endgame and I have thought about it every single day. My mind keeps drifting back to it, mulling it over, remembering moments that moved…

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Last year’s Avengers: Infinity War was quite a unique film. Part cliffhanger, part villain-as-protagonist character piece; the movie had all the makings of standard superhero epic, and assembled the most powerful characters that really matter to most of the moviegoing…

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Please note: this article does contain spoilers for Avengers: Infinity War and Ant-Man and the Wasp, as well as every MCU film leading up to them. But none of the films after them, because nobody has seen them yet. Anyway,…

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In Infinity War, Thanos takes us on a trek back through the last ten years of the MCU and its heroes. Beware: spoilers within.

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