Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Winter Soldier inevitably succumbs to the weight of grand-finale spectacle, but it stays buoyant for quite some time, and its merits are undeniable. It is a widescreen movie that has actually been composed for widescreen, a fact immediately apparent in the carefully framed opening… It has lucid, tense set-pieces, including an artfully set-up and staged melee inside a crowded glass elevator, for which much credit must be due to fight choreographer James Young (Raze).

The Winter Soldier has some of the usual problems. It’s frankly overlong at 136 minutes. The climax is thrilling but still seems implausible, given that Cap’s mission is to change the servers on three heli-carriers… But why quibble, when the film is so solid? On this evidence, Captain America is the Marvel franchise that goes off in bold, unexpected directions to disguise the fact that its hero is so boring. Could be worse.

By bringing in Redford, a titan of the so-called New Hollywood, to shore up its ensemble cast, the studio shows that it hasn’t forgotten about the grown-ups in the audience. And by tweaking this sequel to play more like a cloak-and-dagger thriller than a special-effects blowout (though of course there’s plenty of that, too), directors Anthony and Joe Russo have delivered an unusually satisfying and substantive superhero movie.