Watch What You Want (We Need Junk Food Stories)
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.
The Unavoidable Allure of Alternate Universes: Right Place, Right Time
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?…
The Unavoidable Allure of Alternate Universes: Women in the Room
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…
The MCU is Trying to Kill Reel World Theology
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…
10 Things That Make Perfect Sense About The Captain America Trilogy If You Actually Watch It
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…
Editorial: Martin Scorsese and the Marvel-Go-Round
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…
Beautiful and Necessary: The Empowerment of “That Scene” at the end of Avengers: Endgame
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…
Losing the Endgame: How the Avengers Deal with Failure
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…
What will the Marvel Cinematic Universe look like in 2020?
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,…
Heroes, Villains, and the Past: Avengers: Infinity War
In Infinity War, Thanos takes us on a trek back through the last ten years of the MCU and its heroes. Beware: spoilers within.