SDG picks the best MCU movie
My favorite film critic, Steven D. Greydanus, has announced his pick — and I’m quite happy with it.
I’m at a retreat center in the Texas Hill Country, leading a film seminar, so I’m not writing film reviews at the moment. (My review of Disclosure Day is coming soon, I promise. I’ve had a week to think about it now.) But I wanted to share a post that came to my attention this evening after the day’s workshops were over.
If I announced my favorite MCU movie, many readers would shrug and say, “You’re biased. You know the director personally.” Or, they’d shrug and say, “You’re biased. Ten years ago, you looked a lot like the main character.”
Both are true.
I’ve interviewed the director on several occasions, and we had actually corresponded about movies early in his career, long before his MCU appointment.
And when my students kept making jokes about my resemblance to the superhero, and bringing me MCU merch with his face on it, and asking me to put on the costume, I was greatly amused.
But now, my favorite film critic, Steven D. Greydanus, has announced his pick — and I’m quite happy with it. Enjoy these nine reasons that my favorite MCU movie might just be “the best MCU movie.”
By the way — the thing that I miss most since I left Substack? The capacity for including footnotes. I had begun to publish annotated versions of old reviews, versions in which the footnotes became a major and entertaining element. Ghost doesn’t provide a footnoting function — not yet, anyway. Greydanus makes spectacular use of Substack’s footnote capacity. That’s half the fun of this article.
Oh, and if it matters to you: There are more MCU movies that disinterest me than there are MCU movies that interest me. But I’ve enjoyed some of them, and there are even a few I admire. Here are my five favorite MCU movies:
- SDG’s favorite.
- The Avengers
- Black Panther
- Spider-Man: Homecoming
- I don’t know — probably Guardians of the Galaxy.
*FOOTNOTE: If we’re including the Sony animated Spider-Man films and/or the early Jon Favreau Spider-Man films, that changes everything. Into the Spider-Verse is my favorite superhero film of all time, and Spider-Man 2 is my favorite Marvel film with actors in front of cameras.