The Critical Corner

          The Marvel Cinematic Universe's Disney+ experiment has been interesting to say the least. With their first two forays with "WandaVision" and "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier", we saw the MCU willing to experiment with its format and add extra depth to characters that were at best the side focus to the main coarse. At the same time, the shows were plagued by obvious flaws, like a lot of side stuff that was left frustratingly underserved by the time the show's came to a close, and an inability to bring their respective series to both a satisfying close and a sense that what we just watched would feel entirely essential once we started diving back into the movie realm, particularly after their positioning in importance to the next few phases of the franchise. It was the big question hanging over the third MCU show this year, "Loki". Would it follow the same pattern established by the previous two series?      "Loki" is an interes...

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 crazy to think 2020 was the first full year where the Marvel Cinematic Universe didn't release a single piece of content since 2009. With the COVID-19 pandemic closing down theatre chains across the globe, and Marvel's production pipelines being halted mid production, the start of the MCU's Phase 4 didn't go according to the original plan. If things had gone differently, by now we would have already seen movies like "Black Widow" and "The Eternals", and we would have gotten the MCU's first TV show under the Marvel Studios umbrella, "Falcon and the Winter Soldier" with the fourth show in the schedule, "WandaVision" next in the pipeline. As we all know, the order of things ended up being way different. And to Marvel's credit, "WandaVision" works surprisingly well as the opening salvo for their new phase of content. If there is anything you can takeaway immediately from "WandaVision", is that th...

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 ...