I liked Winter Soldier up until about the halfway point where it just abruptly shrugged off all its 70s conspiracy thriller trappings to be another slam-bang affair. I actually had a similar sensation with Guardians of the Galaxy, which was like a great D&D campaign of people who didn't really give a shit about any…

Civil War might be the most ham-fisted effort at arc welding since Spectre retroactively decreed that all the new James Bond films were linked.

The Stark connection seems to be there to wedge this film into the MCU as abruptly as possible, which seems unnecessary - there's plenty of hot ensemble action in there already, so it's not like they have to rush through the motions with Spider-Man to get him into a team.

Maybe I've been just innoculated by the awful Cyborg CGI in Justice League, but this didn't stand out all that much for me. Spider-Man films have always leaned on the conspicuous side of CGI - like in 3, with that god-awful American flag or when he's attending the public ceremony.

Of course not, but the sheer glut of the market diminishes the 'event' status of each individual film, and it's also impossible to escape when so much pop culture discussion revolves around them. It's like the post-Twilight vampire craze, or the zombie mania that culminated in The Walking Dead; sure, no one's forcing…

I haven't seen Ant-Man or Doctor Strange, but Age of Ultron was bafflingly incoherent and suffered from a very weak villain with a very hackneyed motive, while Civil War was a total cheat which turned into Iron Man IV rather than the superhero clusterfuck it promised.

I would actually prefer it if trailers were entirely footage that wasn't in the film but accurately represented its quality and feeling.

The second part was better, albeit still padded out. If they hadn't insisted on their ridiculous, money-grubbing scheme to partition the final film, Mockinjay could have easily as been as good as Catching Fire. Absurdly, despite two-thirds of the last two films being padding, the ending still feels very rushed.

Marginally better than WatchMojo on an "actual genuine analysis vs. random footage from the film" ratio, although that's a low bar to clear.

As a genuine tea-and-biscuits Britishman, that accent grates on my tits. I'm trying to triangulate what part of the North causes people to say "Fox" as "Fucks".

The fact that the female protagonist is called "Jake" makes me unreasonably angry.

This is a terrible, terrible comparison to make, because none of the anti-Fascist street fighters like the Rotfrontkamperfbund did anything to prevent Hitler's rise to power. If anything, they helped Hitler, because at the end of the day, the conservative classes who were not initially supportive of the Nazis ended up…

That's right - Oxford's a complete dump!

Are you really going to die on the hill of claiming that less than 50% is not a negative rating?

To be fair, isn't this more of a problem with the ridiculous grade inflation of video games criticism than with Metacritic's scale?

I'm not sure your friend's group is a representative sample. In my experience, people make up their minds on films the first time they see the trailer or discover the premise. It can get a torrent of shit from critics but they'll still go see it anyway.

I can think of several great shows which I actually enjoyed but whose protagonist I was indifferent or even hostile to (e.g. Seth Bullock in Deadwood).

I just don't buy the "15 minute rehearsals" thing. It sounds like an excuse they've trotted out to immunise Finn Jones from criticism.

My 'supposition' is a matter of historical record. Roy Thomas has stated that the direct inspiration for Iron Fist came from watching a 70s kung fu film, that he himself had already pushed through the Master of Kung Fu at this time, and that Iron Fist was intended as "a superhero approach to Kung fu in our comics, as…

I have indeed spent the past three days glued to my laptop, brow furrowed in concentration, perfecting my pithy put-downs for some rando on the internet whose desperate for confrontation over decades-old Disney films, of all things…