Movie #4 of 2023: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (2023) Another rollicking cosmic thrill ride, and one that doubles as an apparent farewell to this creative corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Never say never where comic book characters are concerned, but with visionary director James Gunn now working for the DC competition, this …
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Movie #3 of 2023: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023) It looks like I’m out of step with the critical consensus on this one, based on the early reviews, but whatever: I really liked the latest piece in Marvel’s increasingly complex cinematic universe! Maybe I’m just riding the high of being back in a movie …
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Movie #2 of 2023: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) Perhaps inevitably, this sequel is not as strong as its rather extraordinary 2018 predecessor. But it nears that level of quality at times, and might well be the best possible follow-up given the awful loss of original star Chadwick Boseman to colon cancer in the intervening …
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Movie #19 of 2022: The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022) At 42 minutes from start to post-credits scene, this second Marvel Studios Special Presentation is…. fine. It’s fine. It’s in no way essential to any ongoing series plot, but it’s a decent check-in on the various Guardians of the Galaxy characters, I guess. …
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TV #48 of 2022: She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, season 1 Origin story. Spinoff. Legal comedy. Rom-com. Fourth-wall-breaking commentary on typical TV and comic-book tropes. Straightforward MCU entry itself. Feminist critique of chauvinism in fandom. This first season of She-Hulk is trying to be a lot of different things all at once, and they unfortunately cut …
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Movie #17 of 2022: Werewolf by Night (2022) This is a weird one! Marvel Studios dropped the hour-long “special presentation” on Disney+ today with very little fanfare, but it is apparently an official Marvel Cinematic Universe release. I say apparently because, like the Moon Knight miniseries earlier this year, there are exactly zero explicit canonical …
Movie #14 of 2022: Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) Another Marvel feature that’s solidly entertaining in the moment but pretty disposable in the long-term franchise view. Leaning heavily on the space-rocker tone set by director Taika Waititi’s earlier Thor: Ragnarok, this sequel slides into the status of second-best Thor movie more or less by default. …
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TV #33 of 2022: Ms. Marvel, season 1 The back half of this season stumbles a bit, both in setting up / dealing with its various villains and in the messy narrative transition from Jersey to Karachi to an episode-long Partition flashback and back, at which point a few dropped plot threads have to be …
Movie #11 of 2022: Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) This is generally another fun Marvel movie, but it’s one that feels frustratingly both overstuffed and understaffed. True to its title, there is a lot of universe-hopping, yet only to realities we’ve never seen before (after Spider-Man: No Way Home, for all its …
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TV #18 of 2022: Moon Knight, season 1 I’ve enjoyed the first half of this six-episode miniseries as a character study of a meek man coming to realize his blackouts and sleepwalking are the result of undiagnosed Dissociative Identity Disorder — and that his opposite persona is a confident ex-mercenary who’s also the superpowered avatar …
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