The last third of Spider-Man: No Way Home is excellent. There is some wonderful closure for a few characters who never got any in their previous appearances, while this version of Peter Parker gets some agency largely disconnected from the rest of Earth’s mightiest heroes.

It’s dumb. It’s loud. It barely makes a lick of sense. But unlike its predecessor, Venom: Let There Be Carnage is also a heck of a lot of fun.

Shang-Chi kicks butt, just not enough of it to fully satisfy.

The fun of Spider-Man: Far from Home is watching the younger members of its cast agreeably interact with one another, and if the actual heroic parts of the tale could have generated maybe a third of that same intoxicating ebullience maybe I’d have found this latest MCU effort to be a bit more memorable.

There is something new about Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse that can be traced squarely to the injection of this fresh blood into the proceedings. Miles is a hero anyone and everyone can relate to, making his animated debut a family-friendly present worth heading to the closest theatre to unwrap at any point throughout this holiday season.

Venom is a bad movie.

Ant-Man and the Wasp is a breezy, fast-paced sequel that goes out of its way to provoke buckets of laughter and massive sighs of wide-eyed awe in pretty in equal measure. It’s a fun film, and other than that I have little more to say.

Spider-Man: Homecoming might just be the most adorable motion picture I see all summer.

Ant-Man proves to be one of the more enjoyable entries in Marvel’s so-called Cinematic Universe (MCU). Unlike Avengers: Age of Ultron, the script by Rudd, Wright, Adam McKay (The Other Guys) and Joe Cornish (Attack the Block) is beautifully self-contained, rarely utilized to set up coming events that are going to transpire inside Thor: Ragnarok or Avengers: Infinity War – Part I. It runs less than two hours, tells its own origin story and, while acknowledging the bigger comic book world it is a part of, isn’t beholden to it.