The Critical Corner

When Marvel announced their initial slate for the MCU's Phase Four, the project I was looking forward to the most from the initial offerings was definitely "Falcon and the Winter Soldier". Even before the pandemic shuffled things around (this was going to come out after "Black Widow" and before "The Eternals" and "WandaVision"), I was looking forward to this simply because both "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" and "Captain America: Civil War" are my top two favorite movies of the entire MCU. The later movies of the "Captain America" trilogy stood out to me not just because they were some fine action movies, but married their action to thrilling, thought provoking themes you don't see elsewhere in the MCU. Anchoring those movies obviously was Chris Evans' Steve Rogers who proved to be the heart and soul of this shared universe. With "Avengers: Endgame" essentially retiring the character seem...

It’s always special when you get this feeling. This feeling we may have witnessed history. History where we will tell our kids and grandkids what it was like to live it, how old we were when it happened, and where we were when we experienced it. This is the feeling I was left as soon as the credits finished rolling for Avengers: Endgame. Make no mistake, what the Russo brothers, executive producer Kevin Feige and writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely were able to accomplish with Avengers: Endgame is a miracle unto itself. Not only were they able to live up to the promise of what last year’s Avengers: Infinity War provided, but they also managed to tie up an overarching narrative that started all the way back in 2008’s Iron Man and pay homage to many of the movies that came along the way. Can you find nitpicks in this three-hour endeavor? Absolutely. Does it take away from the achievement? Not in the slightest. Originally conceived as ...