Category Archives: Slider

For the homepage slider

New In Theaters, Slider

All Rivers End in Waterfalls

Leave a comment

Tomb Raider

by Cat McAlpine

Halfway through the new Tomb Raider, I thought to myself: “Well, you can’t have this kind of movie without those archetypes.” You know the ones: reluctant hero, loyal sidekick, irredeemable bad guy, henchmen with machine guns.

And then I second guessed myself, “Can you?”

That’s Tomb Raider’s most damning feature—it’s so familiar that it’s forgettable.

It’s not that Tomb Raider ISN’T fun (it is) or exciting (bike races, waterfalls, and bringing a bow to a gunfight, oh my!). It’s just that the relentless action is tired. The few connections between characters are forced or thrown away.

Alicia Vikander (Ex-Machina, The Danish Girl) gets few genuine moments to act, and she crushes it, but director Roar Uthaug seems afraid of the intimacy between Vikander and the camera. Every time she connects with a real emotion, the camera cuts away to a wide shot.

The exposition and key plot points are repeatedly spoon-fed to the audience. Lara Croft (Vikander) has to repeat each clue out loud as she discovers the answer to a riddle. Ugh.

And I’ve never seen a flashback that couldn’t be replaced with better writing. Tomb Raider has a lot of flashbacks.

“But Cat!” You say. “You’re a notorious hater. Didn’t you like anything?”

I’m so glad you asked.

When I sat down in the theatre, I wrote down a few primer questions, betraying my predictions for the film. They were these:

Is the male gaze present? Are the fight scenes realistic or stylized? Does it accurately echo the video game? How is the dialogue? Is there romance or just action? Are there other women in the film? People of color? Is there comedy? Is it predictable?

Good news: the male gaze is noticeably absent and Lara Croft is a genuine badass.

All the hand-to-hand combat feels realistic though many feats are delightfully improbable. Those improbable feats crisply reflect the basic mechanics of a video game: swinging from a hanging rope, traveling hand over hand along a railing, moving quietly through an encampment unnoticed.

There are other women and more diversity than expected, but not enough. A story that starts out vibrantly quickly narrows focus to a bunch of white people (plus sidekicks) fighting over a mystery of the Orient, while laborers (POC) who don’t speak English are gunned down for dramatic effect. #yikes

While I was glad that Lara got to kick ass without any romantic entanglements, I was genuinely disappointed that there wasn’t any real tension between her and Lu Ren (Daniel Wu, a great addition).

In summation, if someone wants to go to the movies this weekend, Tomb Raider is a fine pick. There’s a badass heroine, a handful of chuckles, and enough action to numb your brain for an hour and a half.

But it doesn’t redeem nearly as many sins of its genre as it repeats. It’s a predictable action adventure. No more, no less.

New In Theaters, Slider

Secret Love

1 Comment

Love, Simon

by George Wolf

Some of the most tired young adult cliches – narration, idealized characters, the dreaded climactic essay reading – show up in Love, Simon. 

So why is it such a winner?

Heart, smarts, and humor for starters. But it’s also the rare movie that earns points just for being here in the YA crowd, and for rightly assuming there’s no reason it shouldn’t be.

Simon (Nick Robinson) is an upper middle class high schooler in Georgia, with some awesome friends (Katherine Langford, Alexandra Shipp, Jorge Lendeborg, Jr.), awesome parents (Jennifer Garner, Josh Duhamel) and a big gay secret.

But then another kid at school comes out anonymously online, which leads Simon to adopt a fake name and reach out by email. So while much of the student body is guessing who the “secret gay kid” might be, two online pen pals bond over the uncertainties of being themselves.

Director Greg Berlanti (Life as We Know It) keeps the film moving, wrapping it with a clean, welcoming shine that would be just too peachy-keen if not for the smartly self-aware script from veteran TV writers Elizabeth Berger and Isaac Aptaker.

Adapting Becky Albertalli’s novel, the duo delivers some solid laughs (don’t mess with the drama teacher!), but more importantly, a knowing vibe that refuses to wallow in self-absorbed teen angst. Current events have reminded us that many teens are more than ready to meet harsh challenges with strength and wisdom, and Love, Simon gives them some refreshing credit.

It can’t go unnoticed that the film treats homophobic taunting as more mischievous than dangerous, but even that misstep feels ironically right. Everything about Love, Simon, from the casting to the set design, is effortlessly likable and comfortable, feeding the notion that this is nothing more or less than another teen romance.

It becomes a sweet, entertaining one, and it just might make some audience members feel a little less alone.

That makes Simon pretty easy to love.

 

New In Theaters, Slider

Good Breeding

Leave a comment

Thoroughbreds

by Hope Madden

Directing his first feature, Cory Finley adapts his play about teenage girls planning a murder. It’s a buddy picture, a coming-of-age tale, Superbad, if you will. No, not really.

Finley draws us into the palatial estate where Lily (Anya Taylor-Joy) reluctantly tutors Amanda (Olivia Cooke). The two were friends in middle school, but that was a lifetime ago. Now seniors, Amanda is an outcast, having personally euthanized her family’s suffering thoroughbred horse.

Lily has her own problems.

Wicked, surprising, unapologetic, cynical and buoyed by flawless performances, Thoroughbreds is a mean little treat.

Amanda doesn’t feel. She’s not a sociopath, exactly. She just doesn’t feel anything—joy, sorrow, regret, fear. Empathy.

Lily, who tears up quickly and is forever retracting statements or pausing to perform the correct social cue at the acceptable time, isn’t sure whether she relates to or envies Amanda’s plight.

Not that Amanda sees it as a plight, exactly. She doesn’t care, does she?

Cooke mystifies, her observant but emotionally disinterested performance a magical thing to witness. Amanda has nearly perfected the art of pretending to be normal, pretending to care.

The fact that Lily can see the advantage of this is what sets this coming-of-age tale apart from others. Because, yes, from her perch inside the mansion, Lily is coming of age. Just not like the rest of us.

If Cooke is great, Taylor-Joy is better. An actor who wears her vulnerability in her every expression, she gives great depth to this character on the precipice of adulthood, learning, as she must, that to prosper in her world you need to rid yourself of human emotions and replace them with acceptably false facsimiles.

In the way that Oliver Stone, by way of Gordon Gecko, proselytized that greed is good, Finley uses Lily and Amanda to suggest that empathy is bad.

Their ultimate foil, the societal underling as disposable to their class as an animal—a horse, even—is Anton Yelchin, in his final role. Digging deep into an underwritten character and turning up more authenticity and personality than Finley can fit onscreen, Yelchin’s pathetic loser offers all the humanity lacking from this pristine world.

It’s a fascinating look at how the other class comes of age, blackly comedic and biting.

New In Theaters, Slider

Tamara’s Not Home. Leave a Message.

1 Comment

The Strangers: Prey at Night

by Hope Madden

Sequels are hard. Especially when you don’t understand what made the original so unnerving and memorable.

A decade ago, Bryan Bertino released the almost unbearably slow burn of a home invasion film, The Strangers. The underappreciated gem quietly terrified attentive audiences, beginning with the line, “Is Tamara home?”

Director Johannes Roberts (47 Meters Down) and screenwriter Ben Ketai (The Forest) pick up the story of three masked, bloodthirsty youngsters still looking for Tamara.

A loving but bickering family spends the night at a lakeside campground and trailer park. A great deal of exposition ensures that you catch on, but the main gist is this: problem child Kinsey (Bailee Madison) is at odds with her beleaguered parents (Christina Hendricks and Martin Henderson) and her golden-child brother (Lewis Pullman).

Yes, our three masked malcontents have also settled into that same lakeside trailer park, now mainly vacant in the post-season.

Where Bertino’s horror had the languid melancholy of the old country blues tunes scratching away on a turntable, Roberts prefers the power ballads of the early Eighties. In fact, instead of the cinema of the Seventies that inspired Bertino, Roberts prefers 80s fare, from the early MTV soundtrack to the Argento-esque title sequence to the campground setting.

This is a self-conscious slasher with jump scares, frequent bloodletting and a marauder who is profoundly difficult to kill.

Roberts borrows a lot. Not just from Bertino’s original, but also scads of other horror gems from across the eras (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Town that Dreaded Sundown, Friday the 13th, Bava’s Carnage and so many more).

And while cinematographer Ryan Samul cannot grip you with dread the way Peter Sova’s creeping camera and quiet wide shots did ten years back, he can frame a shot.

That shot 1) has usually been lifted from another source, and 2) often contains a nearly-ludicrous image. Still, there are more than a few beautifully macabre sequences in this movie. One poolside episode is particularly impressive.

Still, the main problem with The Strangers: Prey at Night is that it gets comfortable in clichés, where the stinging original subverted them. That doesn’t make it a bad movie. It’s not. It’s a nasty little piece of entertainment, unoriginal but competent.

And you cannot expect originality from a sequel, of course. You just hope it can be memorable. The Strangers: Prey at Night is not.

New In Theaters, Slider

Believing Takes Practice

Leave a comment

A Wrinkle in Time

by Hope Madden

It was a dark and stormy night.

With this cheeky line, Madeleine L’Engle began an odyssey that entertained and emboldened, taught us to take responsibility for our own choices, highlighted the drawbacks of conformity and showed us how to be warriors for the light.

L’Engle’s novel, A Wrinkle in Time, though massively popular and never out of print since its 1970 publication, had its critics. Not Christian enough to be Christian, too Christian not to be, it was also among the first SciFi novels with a female point of view. This wasn’t taken super well by adults in 1970, but it was immediately and forever beloved by its intended audience.

A Wrinkle in Time was smart and groundbreaking, which, of course, makes it the ideal tale for Ava DuVernay.

Can the filmmaker who landed two near-perfect punches of social commentary in the last four years (Selma, 13th) bring this imaginative, vibrant, lovely classic of adolescent literature to life?

Yes and no.

With the help of scripters Jennifer Lee (Zootopia) and Jeff Stockwell (Bridge to Terabithia), DuVernay remains faithful enough to L’Engle’s vision without being limited by it. But she stumbles to translate some of the more dated concepts in the book, creating a conclusion that feels a bit rushed and confused.

Her picture looks glorious, though, conjuring images and movements vibrant enough to stand up to our own imaginations.

Of course, the casting is where DuVernay, with little fanfare and no disruption in the story, breaks the most ground. Storm Reid (Sleight) turns out to be the best choice the director makes, offering the perfect mix of adolescent self-loathing and smarts as our reluctant hero, Meg.

On the fourth anniversary of the disappearance of her NASA scientist father, Meg is called on a mission across time and space to find him. She’s joined by her genius little brother Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe, perfectly precocious and/or creepy, depending on need), a cute (and, let’s be honest, needless) boy from school (Levi Miller) and three unusual women (Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, Mindy Kaling).

Their adventure is colorful and beautiful. It’s also full of lessons that feel less like a sledgehammer than reasonable nudging. (“You can do this. You’re choosing not to.”)

The supporting cast—Zach Galifianakis, Michael Peña, Chris Pine and Gugu Mbatha-Raw—balance the fantastical with the heartfelt. Galifianakis is particularly impressive.

Yes, there are more than a few corny, too-precious moments, but it is a kids’ movie. DuVernay can be credited with keeping that audience in mind to create a lovely film unabashed enough to bear-hug L’Engle’s message of positivity.

New In Theaters, Slider

Isn’t She Lovely?

Leave a comment

A Fantastic Woman

by Hope Madden

Four years ago, Chilean filmmaker Sebastián Lelio graced us with the nearly flawless coming-of-middle-age character study Gloria, the magnificent observation of a particular woman’s battle to truly participate in life.

A similar approach and another utterly stunning lead performance guarantee that his latest, the Oscar-winning A Fantastic Woman, is also a triumph.

The grace that envelopes every moment of Daniela Vega’s turn as the fantastic woman in question is very nearly magical. This is aided by surrealistic, Almodovar-esque flourishes, but it’s mainly the result of Vega’s quietly fiery performance. Resolutely uncommunicative, her deeply interior character demands your attention, refusing to surrender her dignity even as forces pummel it from every direction.

The film opens as the sixtyish Orlando (Francisco Reyes) meanders through a day leading to an audience with Marina, a trans singer (Vega). Then it’s on to Marina’s birthday dinner and home, to the apartment they’ve just begun sharing. The evening is lovely in its run-of-the-mill newness, and though Lelio appears to be setting up the coming conflict in rather broad strokes, the truth is that every moment so far has been a type of misdirection.

When Orlando dies, the assault begins: at the hospital, where Marina’s treated with suspicion; with the family, whose contempt cannot be contained; with the police, whose baseless investigation is perhaps the most degrading moment of all.

There is an aching tenderness to the first act as we begin to understand the nature of Marina and Orlando’s relationship, and we grieve the loss of that tenderness along with Marina. In Vega’s lovely performance we see not only her strength and resilience but also the courage it must have taken Orlando to be himself.

There is a drawback to such a quiet performance, though. In detailing the harassment and abuse Marina suffers from all sides without offering a clearer look inside the character, Marina becomes a symbol rather than a character, an object of sympathy rather than empathy.

Even if Lelio and Vega don’t let you truly know Marina, you cannot help but respect her.

New In Theaters, Slider

Sexy Collusion

Leave a comment

Red Sparrow

by Hope Madden

Jennifer Lawrence could use a hit.

Though few could throw shade at the film star’s talent—one Oscar and two nominations in a three year span!—she’s made a series of critical and commercial missteps. The slide began with David O. Russell’s weak biopic Joy, then wallowed in all that can be wrong with a superhero movie in X-Men: Apocalypse before hurtling through space with the underwhelming Passengers, and ending with the flaming disaster (though bold and compelling) mother!

Can her sexy espionage thriller Red Sparrow turn that luck around? Doesn’t seem likely, does it? I mean, come on—you’ve seen the trailer.

And yet, surprisingly enough, the film has some style, some queasying violence and unrepentant perversions, and Jennifer Lawrence. It could be worse.

Lawrence plays Dominika Egorova, a Bolshoi ballerina (yeah, right) who breaks the wrong leg, is related to the wrong uncle (the always welcome Matthias Schoenaerts), makes the wrong compromise and winds up in a nasty state.

Writer Justin Haythe, working from Jason Matthews’s novel, has never written a film worth seeing. This is no masterpiece, but it is the kind of material director Francis Lawrence (no relation) manages well.

The helmsman of the last three Hunger Games films knows how to take what amounts to dreary, ugly, mean tales of human bondage and slick them up with a plucky female lead, good costuming, a talented supporting cast and smooth camera movement.

The ugly, demeaning sexuality, though, that’s mostly just Red Sparrow.

Lawrence’s steely, emotionless mask of an expression suits this performance even more perfectly than it did her Hunger Games franchise, but the lacking chemistry between the star and her co-stars keeps the film from ever reaching the sexy thrills it hopes to achieve.

Joel Edgerton, playing the good-hearted American, can’t generate any believable connection with Lawrence’s Russian sparrow, and the crissing and crossing of teams and tales and sides and stories feel forever superficial and convenient.

It might at least be a fun time waster if Charlize Theron hadn’t done that better with last year’s Atomic Blonde.

So, no, this won’t be the film to point Jen’s career back toward true north. But she does have another X-Men coming up. That’s sure to be a winner, right?

Outtakes, Slider

Fearless Oscar Predictions Here!

Leave a comment

Rarely is the Oscar ticket quite so easy to fill out. This year’s set of nominees offers more clear-cut front runners across the board than most previous broadcasts, but the other aspect of note is that the actual quality of the work is tighter than in years past. In nearly every category, the likely winner is fairly simple to predict, but category after category we find ourselves saying that we’d be pretty pleased no matter the outcome.

The talent and work being recognized this year is that impressive.

Best Female in a Leading Role

Sally Hawkins, The Shape of Water
Frances McDormand, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Margot Robbie, I, Tonya
Saoirse Ronan, Lady Bird
Meryl Streep, The Post

Will win: Frances McDormand

Should win: McDormand. Sally Hawkins, always wonderful, was amazing in The Shape of Water. We’re so happy Margot Robbie got the notice she deserves for I, Tonya. Saoirse Ronan will certainly win an Oscar or two at some point in her phenomenal career. Meryl Street—is Meryl Streep. But there is no denying McDormand’s fiery, fearless Mildred Hayes. The performance is a career high for one of the most talented and formidable performers working today.

Best Male in a Leading Role

Timothée Chalamet, Call Me by Your Name
Daniel Day-Lewis, Phantom Thread
Daniel Kaluuya, Get Out
Gary Oldman, Darkest Hour
Denzel Washington, Roman J. Israel, Esq.

Will win: Gary Oldman Darkest Hour

Should win: Timothee Chalamet. Or Oldman. Either way, we’re good. We’d take Daniel Kaluuya, to be honest. And you can never go wrong with Denzel Washington or Daniel Day-Lewis. No, this is an impressive set of performances right here, and while Oldman is a near shoe-in (for good reason, after a long and impressive career, for an impeccable performance), Chalamet’s turn announces a breathtaking talent and he may have outperformed them all.

Best Supporting Female

Mary J. Blige, Mudbound
Allison Janney, I, Tonya
Lesley Manville, Phantom Thread
Laurie Metcalf, Lady Bird
Octavia Spencer, The Shape of Water

Will win: Allison Janney I, Tonya

Should win: Laurie Metcalf, although we will not weep when Janney takes the Oscar. Janney is a veteran character actor, one who leaves a mark on every single film, whether drama or comedy. She should have won at least one Oscar by now. But if, by chance (and it’s a long shot at best), Metcalf takes this one home for her fearless and faultless work as a piece-of-work mother in Greta Gerwig’s astonishing Lady Bird, well, we’ll be cool with that.

Best Supporting Male

Willem Dafoe, The Florida Project
Woody Harrelson, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Richard Jenkins, The Shape of Water
Christopher Plummer, All the Money in the World
Sam Rockwell, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Will win: Sam Rockwell Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Should win (GW): Rockwell

Should win (HM): Willem Dafoe. Too close to call for us, really, between Rockwell and Dafoe, two astonishing and under-appreciated American actors who should have several Oscars between them at this point. Rockwell’s racist volcano of a redeemable small-town cop gave the actor hundreds of opportunities to shine, but Dafoe’s understated, caring motel manager offers an emotional center of gravity for Sean Baker’s The Florida Project and we’d love to see him recognized.

Best Original Screenplay

The Big Sick, Emily V. Gordon & Kumail Nanjiani
Get Out, Jordan Peele
Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig
The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro, Vanessa Taylor
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Martin McDonagh

Will win: Martin McDonagh Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Should win: Pick ’em. Honestly, whether this award goes go McDonagh and his sharp observation on anger and compassion, or whether it goes to Greta Gerwig’s pitch-perfect coming of age tale Lady Bird, or Jordan Peele’s epic piece of social commentary Get Out, or Emily B. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani’s revelatory romantic comedy The Big Sick, or Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor’s monster love story The Shape of Water, there can be no complaint.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Call Me by Your Name, James Ivory
The Disaster Artist, Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber
Logan, Scott Frank & James Mangold and Michael Green
Molly’s Game, Aaron Sorkin
Mudbound, Virgil Williams and Dee Rees

Will win: James Ivory, Call Me by Your Name

Should win: James Ivory, Call Me by Your Name. Although we would cheer if the under-appreciated Mudbound picked this one up, there’s no denying the powerful storytelling in Ivory’s script and the way it drove Luca Guadagnino’s sumptuous direction.

Best Documentary Feature

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, Steve James, Mark Mitten, Julie Goldman
Faces Places, JR, Agnès Varda, Rosalie Varda
Icarus,  Bryan Fogel, Dan Cogan
Last Men in Aleppo, Feras Fayyad, Kareem Abeed, Soren Steen Jepersen
Strong Island, Yance Ford, Joslyn Barnes

Will win: Faces Places

Should win: Of the nominees, Faces Places, but this year’s biggest snubs are in the documentary category. No love for either Whose Streets? or Jane? Wow.

Best Foreign Language Feature

A Fantastic Woman (Chile)
The Insult (Lebanon)
Lovelss (Russia)                                                                                    
On Body and Soul (Hungary)
The Square (Sweden)

Will win: The Square

Should win: The Square, by an eyelash over A Fantastic Woman.

Best Animated Film

The Boss Baby, Tom McGrath, Ramsey Ann Naito
The Breadwinner, Nora Twomey, Anthony Leo
Coco, Lee Unkrich, Darla K. Anderson
Ferdinand, Carlos Saldanha
Loving Vincent,  Dorota Kobiela, Hugh Welchman, Sean Bobbitt, Ivan Mactaggart, Hugh Welchman

Will win: Coco

Should win: Coco. It’s a pretty weak year in animated features, to be honest, so—like so many categories this year—the likely winner is pretty clear. Both Loving Vincent and Breadwinner are strong contenders, though no one saw either. Both Ferdinand and The Boss Baby are unworthy of the nomination. Coco is not Pixar’s strongest, and that can sometimes weigh too heavily on a film. You can’t put out a Toy Story or Up! every time, and Coco offers a touching, vibrant, skeleton-filled cultural extravaganza that is joyous to behold.

Best Director

Dunkirk, Christopher Nolan
Get Out, Jordan Peele
Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig
Phantom Thread, Paul Thomas Anderson
The Shape of Water, Guillermo del Toro

Will win: Guillermo del Toro

Should win (GW): Jordan Peele

Should win (HM): Any of them. This is the most gorgeous set of nominees we have possibly ever seen. We will celebrate no matter who wins because we adore every single one of these names: del Toro, Greta Gerwig, Jordan Peele, Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan. In a wild variety of efforts—from taut, ensemble-driven war to period character studies to horror—the style, tone and detail in every one of these films showcases a master at the helm. Yes, it is a weird turn that Martin McDonagh didn’t get a nomination, but we wouldn’t drop anyone from this group.

Best Picture

Call Me by Your Name
Darkest Hour
Dunkirk
Get Out
Lady Bird
Phantom Thread
The Post
The Shape of Water
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
Will win: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. In a dogfight with The Shape of Water, we think the compromise will be a director/film split decision.

Should win: So many great ones here, but we’ll say Dunkirk. (Or Get Out, or Lady Bird, or…)

The Academy Awards — again hosted by Jimmy Kimmel — will air live on ABC on this Sunday, March 4.

New In Theaters, Slider

The Fault in Our Selves

Leave a comment

Annihilation

by George Wolf

Alex Garland’s work as both a writer (28 Days Later…, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go) and a writer/director (Ex Machina) has shown a visionary talent for molding the other-worldly and the familiar. Annihilation unveils Garland at his most existential, becoming an utterly absorbing sci-fi thriller where each answer begs more questions.

A strange force of nature dubbed “The Shimmer” has enveloped the land near a remote lighthouse, and is spreading. Years of expeditions inside it have yielded only missing persons – including Kane (Oscar Issac). When Kane suddenly returns home and almost immediately falls prey to a life-threatening illness, his wife Lena (Natalie Portman, perfectly nailing a desperate curiosity) is detained for questioning by the military.

Lena, a biology professor with years of Army training, volunteers to join the new, all-female exhibition into “Area X,” hoping to find any shred of information that could save her husband’s life.

Adapting the first novel in Jeff VanderMeer’s “Southern Reach Trilogy,” Garland has found a perfect scratch for his psychological itch.

Garland builds the film in wonderful symmetry with the hybrid life forms influenced by The Shimmer. Taking root as a strange mystery, it offers satisfying surprises amid an ambitious narrative flow full of intermittent tension, scares, and blood – and a constant sense of wonder.

Just his second feature as a director, Annihilation proves Ex Machina was no fluke. Garland is pondering similar themes—creation, self-destruction, extinction—on an even deeper level, streamlining the source material into an Earthbound cousin to 2001.

Utilizing wonderfully strategic splashes of color, and a shifting timeline that drops purposeful breadcrumbs, Garland gives us a mystifying new world from the comforts of our own. Annihilation is the work of a top-tier genre filmmaker, and a challenging journey offering many rewards for those with no appetite for spoon feedings.

New In Theaters, Slider

Say It Loud

2 Comments

Black Panther

by Hope Madden and George Wolf

Ryan Coogler’s stunning first feature, 2013’s Fruitvale Station, proved his instincts as a storyteller. It also made apparent the force of nature that is Michael B. Jordan. That the two could go on just two years later to craft the fresh and vibrant Creed from the tired Rocky franchise showed that the blockbuster was as much in their mastery as the indie drama.

But a Marvel superhero action flagship? That’s Big. Big budgets. Big canvas. And with Black Panther, big expectations. Are Coogler and Jordan up to the challenge?

Hell yes.

Just when you’ve gotten comfortable with the satisfying superhero origin story at work, director/co-writer Coogler, co-star Jordan and the stellar ensemble start thinking much bigger. And now, we need to re-think what these films are capable of.

The action—whether air battles, hand-to-hand or via car chase—is breathtaking.

Wielding a palette of colors and visuals unseen to this point inside the MCU—this set design is glorious, situating a SciFi tech metropolis easily within a world that still embraces ancient tradition, an isolated world that evolved in its own course rather than being led by the evolution of the world outside. Wakanda looks unlike anything we’ve seen in the Marvel Universe or any other.

Not a minute of the film is wasted. Coogler manages to pack each with enough backstory, breathless action, emotional heft and political weight to fill three films.

The cast shines from the top down, but there are some stand-outs.

Chadwick Boseman, all gravitas and elegance, offers the picture perfect king—one who’s respectful of tradition yet still ready to open his eyes to the plight of his brothers outside his hidden nation of Wakanda.

Side note: is there anyone more effortlessly badass than Danai Gurira? Trick question, there is no question—the answer is no. And though she has remarkable range (if you haven’t seen her 2013 indie Mother of George, give yourself that gift today), her General Okoye is here for the beat down.

Lupita Nyong’o is also characteristically excellent in the role of the conscience-driven liberal. In a scene where she expects Gurira’s general to commit what amounts to treason, Coogler expertly reinforces an amazingly well-crafted theme mirrored in other pairings: the friction between surviving by force or by conscience.

This theme is most clearly outlined by the conflict between Boseman’s King T’Challa and his new nemesis, Jordan’s Killmonger.

Michael B. Jordan, people.

Coogler hands this actor all of the most difficult lines. Why? Because it is material a lesser actor would choke on, and Jordan delivers like a perfectly placed gut punch. He sets the screen on fire, and though every single performance in this film is excellent, Jordan exposes the artifice. His castmates are in a Marvel superhero movie. Jordan is not. Instead, he is this rage-filled, broken, vengeful man and he is here to burn this world to the ground.

His scenes with Boseman provide a cunning twist on the battle between a struggling hero and his evil twin. Usually a tired staple of sequeldom, BP adds an undercurrent of Shakespearean drama to the inevitable showdown of two characters who could easily represent the dueling inner conflict of one.

Coogler works with many of these basic themes found in nearly any comic book film—daddy issues, becoming who you are, serving others—but he weaves them into an astonishing look at identity, radicalization, systemic oppression, uprising and countless other urgent yet tragically timeless topics. The writing is layered and meaningful, the execution visionary.

Blistering social commentary, brilliant escapist fantasy, eye-popping visual wonder—Black Panther has it all.

Your move, every other superhero.