Black Panther (2018)

Black Panther (2018) 

IMDB Rating : 6.8 (as on 14.02.2018)

PG-13 | 2h 14min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi 

T'Challa, after the death of his father, the King of Wakanda, returns home to the isolated, technologically advanced African nation to succeed to the throne and take his rightful place as king.

Director: Ryan Coogler

Writers: Ryan Coogler, Joe Robert Cole

Stars: Chadwick Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, Lupita Nyong'o

IMDB link Here

Movie Rating ★★★★☆  

 A self-contained marvel

Wendy Ide

Even if it had nothing else going for it, Black Panther would still be the best-looking Marvel movie yet. Supersaturated with vivid afro-futurism and as bold and riotous as a rack of dashiki print shirts, it looks like a particularly excitable Sun Ra album cover. Fortunately, the film doesn’t trade on looks alone.

The score, by Ludwig Göransson and Kendrick Lamar, combines primal beats with the growling purr of a pack of big cats. Cannily, and unusually for a Marvel picture, Black Panther unfolds in a pretty much self-contained world. There are no smirking cameos from the likes of Tony Stark. The closest we get to acknowledging the Marvel universe is a reference to the death of the father of T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), an event that happened in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, and a bad guy who first popped up in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

T’Challa inherits the throne of Wakanda, the secretive techtropolis that has concealed itself from the rest of the world. And he assumes the mantle of Black Panther, complete with an impenetrable battle suit engineered by his genius kid sister, Shuri (Letitia Wright, who gets to play with most of the best lines as well as all the cool kit).

Peril comes from Andy Serkis, great fun as Ulysses Klaue, a piratical South African with a grin that looks as though he chews lightbulbs for breakfast. Plus there is a challenger to the throne: Erik Killmonger (Michael B Jordan) is the cousin that T’Challa never knew he had. And this is a weak point – Erik’s backstory doesn’t seem to fully explain the frothing hate machine he becomes. The film also falls into the traditional Marvel third-act trap: for all the attack rhinos and the tribal factionalism, it’s still just a big, noisy CGI battle climax.

 Read  complete review at The Guardian

Movie Rating ★★★★☆ 

A superhero movie with serious muscle and style

Robbie Collin,

Sometimes you have to see a thing in all its glory before you realise it’s been missing all this time. Black Panther, the 18th instalment in the Marvel saga, is far from the first black comic-book star to get a film of his own: that would be Spawn in 1997, followed by Wesley Snipes’s Blade the following year, both of whom landed long before the genre mushroomed.

It has taken perhaps the safest commercial bet in cinema today – a new Marvel film – to finally give Afrofuturism its blockbuster due. Directed by Ryan Coogler with serious muscle and style, and magisterially imagined by production designer Hannah Beachler and costume designer Ruth E Carter, Black Panther makes you rue that it took this long for a studio to try it.

The shimmering towers, bustling streets and sprawling grasslands of Wakanda, the fictional east African country presided over by our hero King T’Challa (a suitably regal Chadwick Boseman), look almost nothing like Star Wars or Blade Runner – and in the current Hollywood sci-fi canon, that makes its sights virtually unique. A dream-savannah sparkles under rainbow starlight. Holographic read-outs hang in the air like three-dimensional sand paintings. Pilots steer their hover-ships in a Kemetic meditation pose straight from an old papyrus scroll. Costumes and weapons are tribal finery with a space disco edge.

For one thing, an entire subset of younger cinema-goers are only just about to experience the dizzy uplift of watching a title character in a superhero movie who looks like them under the costume. For another, more voices means better art – pop art included.

Coogler and his co-writer Joe Robert Cole are attuned to the echoes of real-world colonialism and plunder, and use a little politics to salt the pot. There is a tart exchange at the Museum of Great Britain, whatever that is, when a curator objects to the evil duo stealing some Wakandan relics. “How do you think your ancestors got them?” Killmonger asks.

You can see Jordan offhandedly weighing the line in his mind like a rock he’s about to lob: it’s one of many nicely judged moments of performance here from a wildly appealing ensemble cast without a weak link. Foremost among them is Lupita Nyong’o, who takes to the genre with silken ease as the Wakandan spy Nakia, and in one of the film’s more surprisingly spiky gambits, is introduced rescuing Nigerian girls from a Boko Haram-like militia.

Then there’s Danai Gurira’s brusquely no-nonsense and endlessly meme-able warrior woman Okoye, and T’Challa’s younger sister Shuri – a pint-sized, one-woman Q Branch winningly played by the young British actress Letitia Wright. (Black Panther seems to overcome the genre’s long-standing neuroses around creating rounded, exciting roles for women by just getting on with it.)

Another Brit, Oscar nominee Daniel Kaluuya, pops up as a Wakandan courtier tending to what can only be described as a Chekhov’s rhinoceros, while a third, Martin Freeman, returns as the American agent Everett K Ross, who ends up swathed in local fabrics, immersed in the culture, and generally on the superhero movie equivalent of a gap year.

Ten years ago, when Iron Man first sparked up his chest reactor, the above cast list would have read like a pipe dream. But Marvel’s creative risks – if anything the studio does even still counts as such – have a funny habit of looking like sure things in retrospect.

 Read complete review at The telegraph

‘Black Panther’ Shakes Up Marvel Universe With Feeling 

MANOHLA DARGIS 

A jolt of a movie, “Black Panther” creates wonder with great flair and feeling partly through something Hollywood rarely dreams of anymore: myth. Most big studio fantasies take you out for a joy ride only to hit the same exhausted story and franchise-expanding beats. Not this one. Its axis point is the fantastical nation of Wakanda, an African Eden where verdant-green landscapes meet blue-sky science fiction. There, spaceships with undercarriages resembling tribal masks soar over majestic waterfalls, touching down in a story that has far more going for it than branding.

As with all Marvel screen ventures, the story has a lot of moving parts, but in general the results don’t register as the same-old superhero busywork, the kind that makes for forgettable stories and strenuously overinflated running times. Written by Mr. Coogler and Joe Robert Cole, “Black Panther” brings T’Challa’s story up to the present, sketches in his past and looks to his future, all while clearing room for the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its other unitard-wearing warriors. (Black Panther was first wedged into the forgettable “Captain America: Civil War.”) The movie also rather too breezily establishes Wakanda as a militaristic monarchy that is nevertheless fair and democratic.

Part of the movie’s pleasure and its ethos — which wends through its visuals — is how it dispenses with familiar either/or divides, including the binary opposition that tends to shape our discourse on race. Life in Wakanda is at once urban and rural, futuristic and traditional, technological and mystical. Spaceships zoom over soaring buildings with thatched tops; a hover train zips over a market with hanging woven baskets. In one of the most striking locales, an open-air throne room is horizontally lined with suspended tree limbs, creating a loose pattern that pointedly blurs the divide between the interior and exterior worlds and is echoed by the fretwork in costumes and other sets.

The rejection of the either/or divide extends to Killmonger, whose emotional, fraught back story gives the movie more heft and real-world friction than any of Marvel’s other superhero blowouts. Like a lot of adventures, “Black Panther” turns on a familiar father-and-son drama — there’s an assassination, a power vacuum and a somewhat reluctant heir — a patrilineal intrigue that is filled in here with intense face-offs involving questions of ancestry, identity, the African diaspora, the new world and the old. One particularly moving narrative thread features Sterling K. Brown, a tremulous, vibrantly sensitive actor who conveys entire chapters of grief. (He could out-weep Juliette Binoche.)

Mr. Jordan is a terrifically charismatic presence and there are times when you wonder if he might have made a better Black Panther. Mr. Boseman’s magnetism is more slow-burning and his performance is more physically restrained than Mr. Jordan, even deliberate, though he has his splashier, freewheeling moments, including some hand-to-hand grappling. (Wrestling is big in Wakanda, hence a few sexy smackdowns featuring acres of bare skin and jumping muscle.) Like many other Wakandans, he speaks in English with a South African lilt, an accent that vividly summons up Nelson Mandela and suggests that T’Challa will soon be assuming the role of international diplomat.

It’s important to the movie’s politics and myth-building that he is surrounded by a phalanx of women, among them a battalion of women warriors called the Dora Milaje. These aren’t moviedom’s irritatingly token strong chicks, the tough babes with sizable biceps and skills but no real roles. For all his father issues, T’Challa is enveloped by women who cushion him in maternal, military, sisterly and scientific support. A female general (Danai Gurira) stands by his side; his baby sister (a vivacious Letitia Wright) provides gadgets and withering asides à la Bond’s gadget guy. Angela Bassett swans in as the royal mother, while Lupita Nyong’o, as a spy, makes the case for her own spinoff.

Buoyed by its groovy women and Afrofuturist flourishes, Wakanda itself is finally the movie’s strength, its rallying cry and state of mind. Early on, a white character carelessly describes it as “a third world country — textiles, shepherds, cool outfits.” Part of the joke, which the movie wittily engages, is that Wakanda certainly fits that profile except that its shepherds patrol the border with techno-wizardry, and its textiles and costumes dazzle because of the country’s secret vibranium sauce. More critically, having never been conquered, Wakanda has evaded the historical traumas endured by much of the rest of Africa, freeing it from the ravages of both colonialism and postcolonialism.

Race matters in “Black Panther” and it matters deeply, not in terms of Manichaean good guys and bad but as a means to explore larger human concerns about the past, the present and the uses and abuses of power. That alone makes it more thoughtful about how the world works than a lot of mainstream movies, even if those ideas are interspersed with plenty of comic-book posturing. It wouldn’t be a Marvel production without manly skirmishes and digital avatars. Yet in its emphasis on black imagination, creation and liberation, the movie becomes an emblem of a past that was denied and a future that feels very present. And in doing so opens up its world, and yours, beautifully.

 Read complete review at New york Times

Movie Rating ★★★★★

‘Black Panther’ is exhilarating, groundbreaking and more than worth the wait

Ann Hornaday

“Black Panther,” an adaptation of the iconic comic book that has been decades in coming, proves to be more than worth the wait. This lush, impressively well-acted film, about an African king learning how best to marshal the superpowers with which he’s been endowed, comes draped in anticipation, not only from hardcore fans of the source material, but filmgoers already steeped in breathless hype. Director Ryan Coogler, working with a script he co-wrote with Joe Robert Cole, doesn’t just meet but exceeds those expectations, delivering a film that fulfills the most rote demands of superhero spectacle, yet does so with style and subtexts that feel bracingly, joyfully groundbreaking.

The difference with “Black Panther” is that, while observing the outlines of the traditional comic book arc, Coogler and his creative team have enlarged and revitalized it. Drawing on elements from African history and tribal culture, as well as contemporary and forward-looking flourishes, “Black Panther” pulses with color, vibrancy and layered textural beauty, from the beadwork and textiles of Ruth Carter’s spectacular costumes and Hannah Beachler’s warm, dazzlingly eye-catching production design to hairstyles, tattoos and scarifications that feel both ancient and novel.

Although that universe might not seem to need yet another origin story, this one possesses urgency and genuine propulsive interest most others lack. Once T’Challa’s true challenge is revealed, “Black Panther” becomes something deeper than the mere formation of one superhero, engaging such subjects as: the legacy of co­lo­ni­al­ism; collective memory and interior geography; the tension between autonomy and social conscience; and the need for solidarity within an African diaspora at political and cultural odds with itself.

Make no mistake: Coogler doesn’t use “Black Panther” as an awkward delivery system for such Deep Ideas. Rather, he weaves them in organically and subtly. “Black Panther” is great fun to watch and shot through with delicate threads of lighthearted humor, mostly delivered from Wright’s cheeky, sarcastic whiz kid and Martin Freeman, who shows up midway through the film as an earnest if unlikely ally.

Gracefully photographed with a gratifying un-frenetic touch by Rachel Morrison (nominated for an Oscar for her marvelous work on “Mudbound”), “Black Panther” succeeds far beyond Coogler’s directorial chops (which are prodigious), striking visual design and thematic depth. As a showcase for many of the finest actors working today, it proves how essential performance is, even in movies that on their surface demand little more than fitting into a latex suit and affecting a convincing grimace.

Boseman, who strides through “Black Panther” with unforced, charismatic ease, assumes almost Shakespearean levels of doubt as his character is challenged by an unexpected rival. Nyong’o, Wright, Sterling K. Brown and Daniel Kaluuya bring poetry and gravitas to roles that transcend mere support. Michael B. Jordan, who broke out in Coogler’s debut film “Fruitvale Station,” brings scrappy, street-smart volatility to his performance as a character with whom T’Challa has a karmic connection, and Gurira steals every scene she’s in as an indomitable warrior trained in the art of spearcraft.

It’s these actors — their faces, their commitment, their attention to craft and detail — that elevate “Black Panther” to stirring heights, whether they’re surfing on top of speeding cars through the colorfully lit streets of Busan, arguing against the backdrop of a teeming, futuristic city or communing with their deceased elders on the ancestral plane. And, as they dominate the screen in a movie rooted firmly in their own history and narratives, they provide an exhilarating, regal rebuke to the chronic absence and denigration of black bodies in American cinema. “Black Panther” may be grounded in the loops, beats, rhymes and hooks of contemporary film grammar, but it feels like a whole new language.

 Read complete review at   Washington Post