Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures | Release Date: February 16, 2018 | CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
|
Positive:
55
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
|
Watch Now
Critic Reviews
RogerEbert.comFeb 15, 2018
One of the year's best films, and one that transcends the superhero genre to emerge as an epic of operatic proportions. The numerous battle sequences that are staples of the genre are present, but they float on the surface of a deep ocean of character development and attention to details both grandiose and minute
Read full review
Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther is the film that will change everything. When you see it, you know that from here on in, everything will be different. Whilst a Marvel story through and through, fitting perfectly into the MCU post-Captain America: Civil War, Black Panther stands alone as a masterpiece of filmmaking.
Read full review
While the themes are deep, Black Panther is at the same time a visual joy to behold, with confident quirkiness (those aforementioned war rhinos), insane action sequences and special effects, and the glorious reveal of Wakanda, whose culture is steeped in African influences but which also offers a jaw-dropping look at what a city of the future could be.
Read full review
There’s talent in every corner of the film, and it elevates Black Panther beyond so many of its superhero contemporaries even as it exhibits some formulaic tendencies. It’s a sterling example of formula done exceedingly well, however, particularly in the ways it uses the familiarity of that formula to tell a new kind of story.
Read full review
It’s gripping, funny, and full of spectacle, but it also feels like a turning point, one where the studio has finally recognized that its movies can be about more than just selling the next installment. In the process, the studio has ended up with one of the most enthralling entries in its entire universe.
Read full review
[Coogler] infuses nearly every frame with soul and style, and makes the radical case that a comic-book movie can actually have something meaningful — beyond boom or kapow or America — to say. In that context, Panther’s nuanced celebration of pride and identity and personal responsibility doesn’t just feel like a fresh direction for the genre, it’s the movie’s own true superpower.
Read full review
Energized to a thrilling extent by a myriad of Afrocentric influences, Black Panther showcases a vivid inventiveness that underscores the obvious point that we want all cultures and colors represented on screen because that makes for a richness of cinematic experience that everyone enjoys being exposed to.
Read full review
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 full review
Unlike many of its more hollow predecessors, Black Panther has real, honest-to-goodness stakes. As the most earnest and big-budget attempt yet of a black superhero film, Black Panther is assured of being an overdue cinematic landmark. But it's also simply ravishing, grand-scale filmmaking.
Read full review
There are hiccups in its ambition, but it’s hard not to get swept up in all the technologies, characters, and politics crammed into the movie’s compelling dramatic conflict, which casts the charismatic Michael B. Jordan—the star of Creed and Coogler’s debut, Fruitvale Station—as the most complex villain in the post-Dark Knight cycle of superhero blockbusters.
Read full review
The PlaylistFeb 6, 2018
The murky moral dimension of the Black Panther world is wonderfully rich and complex and it gives great pause for its new king to reconcile. And yet, all this intricacy is resolved in rather simplistic fashion in the end. It’s just a superhero movie, one might say, but if you’re going to set up this fertile ground, you might want to really follow through.
Read full review
IndieWireFeb 6, 2018
Black Panther is different. It’s the first one of these films that flows with a genuine sense of culture and identity, memory and musicality. It’s the first one of these films that doesn’t merely reckon with power and subjugation in the abstract, but also gives those ideas actual weight by grafting them onto specific bodies and confronting the historical ways in which they’ve shaped our universe.
Read full review
While Boseman does what he can with the ever-noble hero, Jordan is so relaxed and so unstiff that, if you’re anything like me, you’ll wind up rooting for the baddie when the two of them battle it out. Jordan has swagger to spare, with those rolling shoulders, but there’s a breath of charm, too, all the more seductive in the overblown atmosphere of Marvel. He’s twice as pantherish as the Panther.
Read full review
Handsomely mounted by Creed director Ryan Coogler and starring an enviable slate of black actors that makes cameoing comics godhead Stan Lee almost seem lost, the film is provocative and satisfying in ways that are long overdue, like its ornate, culturally dense production design and the deeper subtexts of honor, compassion and destiny.
Read full review
Historical significance aside, what superhero fans want to know is how “Black Panther” compares with other Marvel movies. Simply put, it not only holds its own, but improves on the formula in several key respects, from a politically engaged villain to an emotionally grounded final showdown.
Read full review
Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed) has fashioned a slightly more earnest variation on the typical MCU movie — one that is still fun and funny, but also rooted in a desire to speak meaningfully about racism, global culture clashes, and the tension between hiding behind one’s borders and helping outsiders in need.
Read full review
The actors are all seen to very good advantage. Boseman certainly holds his own, but there are quite a few charismatic supporting players here keen to steal every scene they can — and they do, notably the physically imposing Jordan, the radiant Nyong'o and especially Wright, who gives her every scene extra punch and humor.
Read full review
The TelegraphFeb 6, 2018
As with Jordan Peele’s Get Out, or Coogler’s 2015 Rocky spin-off Creed, Black Panther isn’t a novelty, but a fresh perspective on a well-worn format. Not to get all Rosa Parks about it, but the film walks into the multiplex like it’s insane that it hasn’t been allowed in there all along. And it is.
Read full review
Black Panther fights constantly and bitterly against the familiar constraints of Disney's superhero industrial complex. At every turn, the expectations of the genre, the bland sameness that breeds cinematic comfort for the millions who line up to fill Marvel's coffers, are met by the director with resistance and creative intensity.
Read full review
Current Movie Releases
By MetascoreBy User Score