Film reviews: 'Captain America: Brave New World,' 'The Monkey,' and 'Becoming Led Zeppelin'

Captain America: Brave New World

Our new Captain America contends with an old enemy.

"The fourth Captain America outing is far from the best MCU movie, but it's also far from the worst," said Kyle Smith in The Wall Street Journal. It "makes for perfectly acceptable airplane viewing," even though "its dialogue and most of its action scenes are as generic as its subtitle." Anthony Mackie stars as Sam Wilson, who took up the shield as the new Captain America when his friend Steve Rogers walked away from the role, and while Mackie is "not nearly as charismatic" as Chris Evans, his Captain A is interesting because he has no superpowers, and Brave New World redeems all its shortcomings with "a vigorous finale" that mirrors present-moment America.

Mackie is a fine actor, said David Fear in Rolling Stone, but he was given more to work with in his previous appearances as the first Captain America who's Black. Here, he is put in the uneasy position of having to defend the villainous Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross, who's played this time by Harrison Ford and who is now the nation's president. Still, the movie "feels like a boilerplate '90s action movie that semi-mindlessly slogs its way from one set piece to the next."

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If you squint, you might "see the movie Brave New World maybe wanted to be," said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. It wanted to be like the Marvel movies of old that "staged action in fast, funny, creative ways, without alien invasions or heavy fantasy elements." A hero who uses just his wits and his courage "would have fit in nicely with that approach." Instead, the film devolves into CGI battles "so lifeless and tiresome that I felt my eyes drifting closed."

The Monkey

A cursed windup toy doles out random death.

"A vicious little horror-comedy," Osgood Perkins' first feature since he struck gold with last year's Longlegs "makes its farcical intentions clear from its opening scene," said Katie Rife in AVClub.com. A demonic-looking windup monkey is set on the counter of a pawn shop, and a blink later, a cartoonish sequence of events causes a spear to fly across the room, impaling the clerk in a hideously precise fashion. In this splatter film based on a Stephen King short story, that's the running joke: "We're all walking around with our heads in an invisible guillotine whose blade could fall at any moment."

Though Perkins has a flair for "hi-def gore," that doesn't redeem the film's "clumsy plotting" and "frat-boy humor," said Madison Bloom in Pitchfork. No matter how inventive the agents of death, which range from a harpoon gun to a stampede of wild horses, another witless comment is always just about to drop and "dull the edge of what could have been a tar-black comedy." Two adult twins, both played by Theo James, have been trying to destroy the monkey since boyhood. But Perkins, in focusing on the random cruelty of life, is "very clearly telling his own story," said Brian Tallerico in RogerEbert.com. The son of Psycho star Anthony Perkins lost his mother, photographer Berry Berenson, in one of the planes used in the 9/11 terror attacks. If death seems to have a sense of humor in The Monkey, "that could be because Perkins realized that the best way to stop crying is to laugh in the face of the Grim Reaper."

Becoming Led Zeppelin

The making of a legendary band.

"As any superfan will tell you, Becoming Led Zeppelin ends when things are just about to get interesting," said Joshua Rothkopf in the Los Angeles Times. A chronicle of the origins of one of rock's greatest bands, it's special because the three surviving members of the British quartet all sat for interviews, and they rarely participate in such legacy building. But stopping the story at 1969 leaves out the drug use, the bad decisions, and the danger that followed and somehow produced more terrific music. Sure, "only a hardened viewer with no ears will find this music a drag." But the band members' apparent desire to control their story has resulted in "a timid, far-from-revelatory film."

Still, the memories that Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones share about their early days "have a great charm and warmth," said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Drummer John Bonham, who died at 32 in 1980, is heard in archival clips, and none of the others talk about that loss. "Perhaps Part II is in the works" and will bring us there. For now, it can be enough just to share the excitement of the band's rapid rise, particularly in America. And "no doubt about it — once you hear the colossal opening chords to 'Whole Lotta Love,' no power on earth will stop you nodding along."