THUNDERBOLTS* - ****

I bugged out of the Marvel Universe after GUARDIANS 1. Too many movies. Too many big bads blowing up cities. Too many sardonic quips from Iron Man. It just all became so same.  But for whatever reason I decided to watch THUNDERBOLTS* and thoroughly enjoyed it!  

The first phase of the MCU is over. The po-faced Captain America type characters are gone.  This is a post-Avengers world. And we are dealing with its detritus and emotional baggage.  I like the beaten up, jaded look of the characters. Florence Pugh's little sister to Scar-Jo's deceased Black Widow looks she's coming off a bender.  The millennial, I-hate-my job-angst is both hilarious and relatable. I like the idea that rather than saving the world she's just a mercenary. I really like the idea that despite all the tedious fight scenes what really matters is having mates with whom one can be vulnerable and tackle all the demons that haunt us. That's a nice message.  

And it's wrapped in a genuinely very funny script Eric Pearson and Joanna Cala and SUPERB line delivery from Florence Pugh and David Harbour as the most ridiculously messed-up and adorable father-daughter superheroes seen on screen. We haven't seen the name Bob deployed for this much comic effect since Blackadder 2.  I also LOVE Julia Louis-Dreyfus in basically anything. Here, she's a billionaire arms-dealer - kind of like the successful version of her character in Veep - who wants to control the mercenaries.  She manages to pivot so quickly it takes your breath away.

Kudos to director Jake Schreier for pulling off a genuinely enjoyable, funny and moving Marvel film. It's certainly a handbrake-turn away from his wonderful ROBOT & FRANK but I am here for it.

THUNDERBOLTS is rated PG-13, has a running time of 127 minutes and is on global release.

SELMA

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SELMA is a handsomely made, beautifully acted and devastatingly searing movie about the 1965 Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama.  It's also a movie about the difference between having a right in theory and having a right in practice, and as such, is a profoundly important and timely film.  What it isn't, and thank goodness for that, is a conventional hagio-biography in the Great Man does Great Things genre.  This isn't, and sorry to keep going on about it, as dumb as THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING.

The movie opens with Martin Luther King already a major political force. He has the ear of President Johnson and wins the Nobel Peace Prize. But despite the end of segregation by Federal Law, in Governor George Wallace's Alabama, African Americans are still subject to extreme racism.  In an elegant, swift and brutal opening triptych we are therefore given King's Nobel acceptance speech; the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing; and Annie Lee Cooper being denied her application to register to vote on the most spurious and humiliating of grounds.