Movie #23 of 2026: The Punisher: One Last Kill (2026) Somehow actor Jon Bernthal convinced Disney to greenlight two different passion projects for him to cowrite and star in this month, taking established characters he’d played for years in an ensemble and delivering an hour-length special about each of them in turn. Neither the Gary …
Continue reading “Movie Review: The Punisher: One Last Kill (2026)”
TV #21 of 2026: Daredevil: Born Again, season 2 The first season of this MCU revival series was a notoriously Frankensteined affair, with its writing staff fired and replaced midway through production but all the footage filmed up until that point incorporated into the next version, which leaned more into the darker tone of the …
Continue reading “TV Review: Daredevil: Born Again, season 2”
TV #5 of 2026: Wonder Man, season 1 This Marvel miniseries is a little shaggy in its storytelling — did we really need an entire episode devoted to the minor character Doorman, in a season with only eight installments in total? — but it pulls its various threads together enough to satisfy me in the …
Movie #4 of 2025: Thunderbolts* (2025) Very much the Marvel answer to DC’s Suicide Squad, starring a motley crew of operatives from the grayer side of the heroics business. In fact, some of these characters were villains in their original on-screen adventures, albeit roughly sympathetic ones. And as usual for the MCU at this stage, …
TV #15 of 2025: Daredevil: Born Again, season 1 Even for Marvel, this is a wildly uneven show, although the tonal clashes make sense when you know a little about the production process behind it. As a sequel to the Daredevil series that originally ran on Netflix from 2015 to 2018, this revival brings back …
Continue reading “TV Review: Daredevil: Born Again, season 1”
TV #12 of 2025: Agatha All Along, season 1 I had initially brushed off this show — an unnecessary-seeming spinoff of Marvel’s WandaVision, with the villain now reframed as an antihero — only to belatedly circle back to it on the basis of a few rave reviews. Ultimately I think it was better than I …
TV #5 of 2025: Marvel’s The Punisher, season 2 This was the last piece of Netflix’s old Defendersverse (2015 – 2019) that I hadn’t seen before, both because I hadn’t felt very invested in the first season of the show and because at the time, the parent company seemed to be drawing a hard line …
Continue reading “TV Review: Marvel’s The Punisher, season 2”
Movie #1 of 2024: The Marvels (2023) A bit of a strange sequel to 2019’s excellent Captain Marvel film. In addition to teaming up the returning cosmic superheroine with the now-adult Monica Rambeau (introduced and given powers on WandaVision) and teenage fangirl Kamala Khan (introduced and given powers on Ms. Marvel), this title takes place …
TV #1 of 2024: Echo, season 1 I’m torn in my reaction to this premiere ‘Marvel Spotlight’ production — a designation meant to indicate a series that, while canonical to the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe, should stand on its own for any audience and focus on smaller-scale personal stakes that don’t majorly affect any ongoing …
TV #62 of 2023: What If…?, season 2 Not nearly as impressive as the first year, which was a neat concept for a show but already had some issues in the execution that are worsened here. I swear, I’d feel so much more favorable towards this series if it truly were the anthology that it’s …
The Lesser Joke: book reviews and more