Critics reviews

Black Panther both enacted success and staged a comic-book drama where, instead of the usual weirdly deracinated clashes and hand-wringing, it actually felt like something was at stake: the survival of an independent black culture, taking the form of Wakanda in the film but resonating widely in terms of representation.

Cartoonish-archetypal performances swirl around Boseman and Lupita Nyong’o, each one more interesting than the two leads are allowed to be. . . . Michael B. Jordan, the tragic villain who emerges as a true threat to Wakanda, hits his conflict hard, hams it up but not Loki-style, and emerges as the first bad guy in movies who is handsome hunk and matinee idol at the same time.

The affecting intimacy of Fruitvale Station emerges in a vision-quest-slash-flashback that so fully humanizes the story’s villain that the surrounding superhero clichés feel stretched to a breaking point. Not a perfect movie — or even the explosion of Marvel formula its biggest champions claim — but impressive all the same.

Just as Kirby and Lee brought the Black Panther into the world of comics at the right time, Coogler, Disney, and Marvel have brought the Black Panther into the world of film at the right time. Without the technological accomplishments in film that predate Black Panther, its captivating beauty, breathtaking views, and edge-of-your-seat moments would not be possible.

We rarely get to experience the spectacle of a superhuman body in motion, which in other films offers viewers the occasion to rediscover our own bodies through the dynamism of another. Here, the character's potential panther-like animorphism is underexploited. . . . The lack of such superhero conventions also makes certain sequences, like the one set in Busan, stand out.

There are martial-arts combat scenes set at the lip of a waterfall that have Coogler and Jordan re-creating kinetic Creed magic, while a sinuous long take in a casino follows Okoye, dressed in a flowing red gown, as she pulls off a series of acrobatic stunts with impeccable grace. . . . The film's subversive energy, however, is heavily constrained by the context of the Marvel franchise in ways that starkly illustrate the shortcomings of the big-budget studio model.

There are several things that Coogler can hang his hat on early in his directorial career, but the Ryan Coogler fight scene is almost a character unto itself. As we saw in his stunning work in the Rocky franchise reboot Creed, the fight scene through his eyes is almost an act of intimacy. It isn't tender, but the violence is nearly perfunctory. The fights in Black Panther are romantically choreographed tornadoes of limbs.

Killmonger's rage and potential liberation comes from a uniquely complicated place, but we've yet to conjure a word for the pain of that proximity. Understandably, Black Panther only has room for so much politics, but it is important to acknowledge that it is in this selection that it reaches and abandons so many people. . . . The film's righteous anger is grounded in a real America with real problems, while its hopes lie in a fictional country distinctly removed from the reality of Africa.

Wakanda, as everyone keeps reminding us, doesn't exist. This gave Ryan Coogler free rein to create a country in the subjunctive mode: what if…? . . . Black Panther is Shakespeare meets Shaka Zulu, Too $hort in Timbuktu. The film mingles myriad cultures, fashions, geographies, and (a quibble) accents from across the black diaspora. But even my skepticism about the casting of non-Africans fell away in the face of this glorious Pan-African cornucopia.

As much as I enjoyed being in its cosmos visually, and as warmly as I felt Wakanda welcomed me, Black Panther ultimately left me feeling cool by its end. This was largely because I couldn't get myself to root against its antagonist, Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan) and because I found its ending political message far more conservative than the revolutionary possibilities teased by anything with "Black" and "Panther" in the title.

The spectacle of black adversaries, connected by continent and by blood, takes the film's struggle to a deeper register. Killmonger is wrong about many things, but he, like Nakia, is right that there is suffering around Wakanda. . . . A more censorious film—ruled by the politics of respectability, the impulse for narrative tidiness—would have shied away from such a fiendishly appealing villain, but Coogler knows that escapism is rarely so pure.

Ryan Coogler's thrilling and moving "Black Panther" is a rare superhero fantasy that's plugged into the real world, even as it mirrors it in an inconsistent and distorting way. It's sure to inspire scrutiny as deep as that which greeted the TV version of "Roots" four-plus decades ago, and that swirled about "Get Out" this time last year.