It’s hard to think of a superhero franchise that has struggled on the big screen more than “The Fantastic Four.” Its first movie was a low-budget write-off that never got released, the so-so 2000’s movies paled against their more successful peers, and 2015’s “Fant4stic” was staggeringly bad.

Much of that futility has been attributed to the wrong people holding the franchise rights, so with the Fantastic Four back in the Marvel stable, fans are hoping the fourth time is the charm. The verdict? Despite some struggles, “First Steps” mostly succeeds where its predecessors came up short.

Set on an alternate Earth from a parallel universe, “First Steps” takes place a few years after the titular four have become established as the planet’s superhero protectors. Some flashbacks and exposition explain how the quartet flew off into space and got their powers, but “First Steps” isn’t an origin story.

Thanks to those previous movies, the characters should be familiar. The leader of Marvel’s so-called “First Family” is Reed Richards (Pedro Pascal), whose ability to stretch like a rubber band feels like less of a power than his scientific intellect. Reed’s wife Sue Storm (Vanessa Kirby) can turn invisible and use some telekinetic powers, and her brother Johnny (Joseph Quinn)—the Human Torch—can manipulate fire and fly. Finally, Reed’s BFF Ben (Ebon Moss-Bachrach)—AKA “The Thing”—has mutated into a powerful rock monster who gives off Professor Hulk vibes.

As the film opens, Sue has become pregnant after years of trying, but the prospect of a super-baby feels ill-timed when a mysterious metallic woman on a surfboard shows up in New York City to announce the impending destruction of the planet. The Silver Surfer (Julia Garner) is essentially the Hype Man for an ancient being named Galactus (Ralph Ineson), who uses a massive—but luckily slow-moving—starship to eat planets from the inside.

Reed and co. set out to nip the problem in the bud, but following an unsuccessful battle in outer space, they return with a diabolical offer: Galactus will spare the earth if the Four give up Sue’s unborn child.

What follows is one of the more enjoyable recent Marvel films, and certainly one of its most unique voices. Setting the film on an alternate Earth allows director Matt Shakman to give “First Steps” a fun, retro future vibe out of the 1960s (when the comics originated), and it feels like the best use of Marvel’s multiverse concept. Combined with some dramatic space visuals and a tense score, “First Steps” checks the spectacle box.

The story racks up wins and losses. The plot is pretty straightforward, and even predictable in its final scenes, and some liberties with scale and timing might raise a few eyebrows. Combined with some hit-and-miss humor, the tone in its best moments achieves a genuine comic book feel, but some of the more cartoonish bits—like Reed Richard’s Stretch Armstrong routine—can feel jarring against the film’s more serious elements, such as an obvious Christian sacrifice theme that is only loosely explored.

Some fans have lamented Marvel’s gender-swap in the case of the female Silver Surfer, which creates a curious romantic dynamic between the character and Johnny Storm. More viewers may be taken aback by the obvious similarities to Pixar’s “The Incredibles”—which was reportedly inspired by the Fantastic Four, and may still be the best Fantastic Four movie. And regardless of your level of fandom, audiences in general will cringe at some rough CGI once Sue’s baby officially joins the cast.

Taken together, these issues don’t ruin “First Steps,” but they do suggest this is a movie best enjoyed at arm’s length. It isn’t so obviously rough that you have to “turn off your brain,” but where most modern superhero movies try to ground their stories and characters in a more believable reality, it helps to think of this one more in terms of its comic book origins. It’s a backhanded compliment to say “Fantastic Four: First Steps” is the best Marvel effort of 2025, but compared to its dour predecessors, it is a breath of fresh, if not fantastic, air.

“Fantastic Four: First Steps” is rated PG-13 for standard superhero action mayhem and some scattered profanity.

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“Thunderbolts*” is Marvel’s version of “Suicide Squad,” which was DC’s version (versions?) of “The Dirty Dozen.” So if this story about a rag-tag bunch of outlaws banding together against a common foe sounds familiar, now you know why.

In this case, the outlaws are at least a little more familiar, having popped up in half a dozen Marvel outings over the last five to ten years. Yelena (Florence Pugh), Black Widow’s sister assassin from the 2020 movie of the same name, is the closest thing to a main protagonist. As the film opens, she’s getting bored running black ops missions from CIA honcho Valentina (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), but agrees to the traditional “one last job” before making some career changes.

The job in question takes her to a secret vault, where she encounters a few other not-ready-for-prime-time heroes. John Walker (Wyatt Russell) is still reeling from the failure of his five-minute stint as Captain America, Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) is still in action after playing the misunderstood heavy in the second Ant Man movie, and speaking of five minutes, brainwashed Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) gets her first screen time since the Black Widow movie.

When Yelena and co. figure out that Valentina sent them all to the vault to have them killed, they team up with assassin-turned-congressman Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), Red Guardian (David Harbour) and a mysterious character named Bob (Lewis Pullman) to take their down their former employer.

The result is good enough to feel like Marvel is firing on most of its cylinders again, but a film that feels like less than the sum of its parts, especially once the third act starts to play setup for future installments. There are plenty of good elements—a first-act stunt from Pugh that is apparently 100% real, and Harbour’s performance as Red Guardian injects an energetic comic vibe that pushes against the movie’s bleak color palette. “Thunderbolts*” ultimately ranks above many of the post-“Endgame” Marvel movies, but that’s like saying taking a football to the groin is one of the better gridiron injuries.

Like many recent Marvel outings, “Thunderbolts*’” strength doubles as its weakness. Coming to theaters 17 years after 2008’s “Iron Man” kicked off the MCU, director Jake Schreier’s film is built into an existing universe, drawing on existing pre-established characters in a familiar and comfortable world. But that also means the movie can’t entirely stand on its own, and inevitably must be compared to everything that came before. It also means that the film must grapple with a tone that initially feels grounded and real, but later has to accommodate more supernatural content and characters.

Weirdly, Yelena’s early movie malaise feels like an apt reflection of many non-superhero movie diehards—at least the one writing this review—who need more than hints about peripheral movie team-ups to get excited about spending another two hours with characters they don’t really know and don’t care about yet. “Thunderbolts*” is far from bad; it just doesn’t bring anything all that new or worthwhile to the table. It’s routine. It’s content.

Is “Thunderbolts*” a decent way to kill a couple of hours in the theater? Sure. Does it restore some of Marvel’s pre-2020 glory? Kind of. Will it land on anyone’s Top 10 MCU offerings? Not mine, though I suppose it doesn’t really have to. Are you wondering why I’ve been putting an asterisk at the end of the title through this whole review? I’ll let you either see the movie or turn to Google for that one.

“Thunderbolts*” is rated PG-13 for standard CGI mayhem and violence, as well as some profanity and frightening moments.

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The first time I reviewed a Deadpool movie, back in 2018, I found it refreshing—a term that didn’t go over well with my editors at the time. Yes, it was violent and vulgar, but like “Thor: Ragnarok” and the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies, it provided a much-needed pushback to the relentless bravado of the unstoppable superhero movie genre.

Six years later, “Deadpool & Wolverine” still offers some of that same swagger, but times have changed. For one thing, Disney bought 20^th Century Fox, which owned the rights to Marvel heroes like Deadpool and the X-Men. More importantly, the MCU has fallen far from its lofty profit-producing perch. Spider-Man joined the MCU in its heyday; Deadpool is arriving to sift through its bones.

This review is coming on a bit of a delay, since I was stuck in the Chicago suburbs around O’Hare airport during the press screening for “Deadpool 3.” So I’m well-aware that Ryan Reynolds’s long-awaited team up with Hugh Jackman is performing better than most anything that has come out of the genre in the last five years. And now having watched it myself, I can understand why.

And yet…something is off.

The basic premise is promising: Everyone’s favorite foul-mouthed anti-hero joins everyone’s favorite occasionally foul-mouthed anti-hero to save Deadpool’s loved ones from a nefarious bad guy. Disney is finally bringing together the two most beloved Fox heroes on screen, and welcoming them into the MCU in the process.

So far so good, except to pull off that last bit, “Deadpool 3” has to get immersed into the same incomprehensible and inane multi-verse garbage that has made recent MCU films even more irrelevant than movies about indestructible beings fighting each other were in the first place.

The reason Deadpool’s loved ones are threatened is because their “universe” has been scheduled for destruction by a rogue bureaucrat at official multi-verse headquarters. And since the Wolverine in Deadpool’s universe has already offered the ultimate sacrifice (see 2017’s “Logan”), they have to recruit a different version from a different universe to make the team-up work.

Mind you, the preceding isn’t nearly as clear to follow in real time, and to be fair, being Deadpool, Reynolds takes ample opportunity to point out the absurdity of it all (“Deadpool & Wolverine” may set a record for both fourth-wall breaking and surprise cameos). But in spite of all the transparency and self-awareness, you get the sense that the Marvel people are just trying to paper over their own problems with some Deadpool brand band-aids, but they can’t quite stop the bleeding. Sometimes admitting that you’re doing something silly lets you get away with it, but eventually it gets a little tedious.

If you can look past all the horrible exposition and the logistical loop-de-loops, and just focus on the irreverent buddy movie this wants to be—not to mention a heartfelt tribute to Jackman and co.’s early-era Fox Marvel—“Deadpool & Wolverine” is a good but not great experience. And from the box office receipts, plenty of people have. But the subtext here is that even though the heyday of the superhero genre is long gone, Disney and co. are going to keep hammering the audience until morale improves (see: Robert Downey Jr. returning as Dr. Doom).

In other words, decent Deadpool movie (3 stars) plus 2024 MCU meddling (2 stars) = 2 ½ star verdict.

“Deadpool & Wolverine” is rated R for considerable bloody violence, profanity, and vulgarity.

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For the “Thor: Love and Thunder” soundtrack, director Taika Waititi uses Guns ‘n Roses the same way he used Led Zeppelin for “Thor: Ragnarok” in 2017. Guns ‘n Roses was a great band, far superior to most all its peers, but it was no Led Zeppelin. And “Love and Thunder,” for all its zany chaos, is no “Ragnarok.”

“Love and Thunder” picks up in the aftermath of 2019’s “Endgame,” which left the titular demigod hero teaming up with the Guardians of the Galaxy for some outer space adventures. When we catch up with the gang, a cheeky voiceover from rock monster Korg (still voiced by Waititi) tells us how Thor (Chris Hemsworth) has shed his post-“Infinity War” beer gut and now acts as a literal Deux ex Machina for the Guardians whenever they find themselves overmatched against some interstellar foe.

The story gets going once the crew decides it’s time to part ways, and the Guardians set off on what will presumably form the plot of their third movie. Thor, for his part, has a more personalized foe to deal with. A mysterious villain named Gorr the God Butcher (Christian Bale) has been slaughtering Thor’s fellow demi-gods, and even kidnapped some of the Asgardian younglings. So our blonde-locked hero recruits some old friends—like Korg and Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson)–to face the new threat.

In the process, he meets up with his old girlfriend, Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who has taken up Thor’s old hammer Mjolnir and transformed into a new hero dubbed The Mighty Thor. What Thor doesn’t know is that Jane is dying of cancer, and only using the hammer to postpone the inevitable.

In the meantime, everyone is getting in on the weapon game. Thor is still swinging his Stormbreaker axe, and to take on Gorr, he and Valkryie conspire to get a magic lightning bolt from Zeus (Russell Crowe) when their appeal for the Greek god’s help falls on mocking ears. Even Gorr is weapon-dependent. He’s only able to slaughter demigods because of a magic sword that came to him when his own deity let his daughter die of starvation.

What’s strange about all this underscores one of “Love and Thunder’s” weaknesses. One of the main points of “Ragnarok” was to show Thor that his powers weren’t rooted in his hammer, or any other weapon. The power was in himself. Yet throughout “Love and Thunder,” the fixation on Stormbreaker, Mjolnir, and the others—while it lends plenty of opportunity for laughs—seems to ignore that point.

The bigger issue is the way the humor—which reinvented (and arguably saved) the Thor franchise in “Ragnarok”—feels so jarring against the attempts for serious moments in “Love and Thunder.” Maybe it’s just because those “serious” moments try to carry more weight this time around—the mourning Gorr is substantially more imposing than “Ragnarok’s” megalomaniacal Hela (Cate Blanchett) on an emotional level—but the back and forth clashes awkwardly.

Even with those shortcomings, “Love and Thunder” still stands as an example of why Waititi and the Thor franchise loom head and shoulders above so much of what Marvel is producing in its post-“Endgame” meanderings. There are still plenty of references to other characters and situations, but witty dialogue and narration go a long ways toward keeping the audience on board, and the result is nowhere near the encyclopedic mess we just got with “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.” Waititi still seems to be having a great time taking the piss out of the superhero genre, while simultaneously offering some of its most triumphant and outrageous moments. Even if “Love and Thunder” feels more like a sequel than a revelation, fans should enjoy the ride.

“Thor: Love and Thunder” is rated PG-13 for chaotic superhero mayhem and violence, as well as some sexual content (Hemsworth’s bare backside, played for laughs).

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