BLACK PANTHER

PG-13, 134 minutes. Niantic, Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Stonington, Westbrook, Lisbon. Believe the hype: “Black Panther” is easily Marvel’s best film to date. This exhilarating, beautiful and genuinely moving superhero film is firmly rooted in the point of view of director and co-writer Ryan Coogler, a tremendous example of the radical possibilities to be found in Afrofuturism. Coogler builds a thrilling, exciting world, and threads throughout it a story filled with pathos and real-world gravitas. Although our hero, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), hails from the African country of Wakanda — a technological wonder powered by the natural resource vibranium — “Black Panther” is Coogler through and through, with a storyline that originates on the streets of Oakland, Calif. The conflict of the film lies in the gulf between the experiences of the Wakandans, who have been shielded from the world’s inequalities, and those who have been colonized, enslaved and oppressed. T’Challa, who becomes king of Wakanda at the beginning of the film, has to decide how he’s going to position Wakanda to aid in the liberation of black people throughout the world while also protecting his country. — Katie Walsh, Tribune Content Agency

DEATH WISH

1/2 R, 107 minutes. Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon. Since everything old is new again, it stands to reason that the 1974 Charles Bronson vehicle “Death Wish,” based on a 1972 novel by Brian Garfield, would be dredged up and remade for new audiences. But what resonated in the 1970s takes on a different tenor 44 years later. Context is everything, and the problem with this “Death Wish,” starring Bruce Willis, directed by Eli Roth, written by Joe Carnahan, is the concept would have always sat uneasy in our current state of affairs. “Death Wish” was postponed from its fall 2017 release date, presumably because it fell too close to the events of the October shooting in Las Vegas, in which 58 people died. The new release date is now unfortunately close to the events of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., where teen survivors have pushed gun control to the forefront of the national conversation. It says so much about the epidemic of gun violence in this country that there is simply no weekend far enough away from a gun massacre to comfortably open a film about a lone vigilante gunman. The lone gunman is a character archetype that goes back to the beginning of cinema. But it’s increasingly clear, as many of these films push the envelope on violence, that glorifying lone gunmen as heroes who are morally above the law is simply irresponsible. — Katie Walsh, Tribune Content Agency

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