BLACK PANTHER
Directed by Ryan Coogler

Before the recap of the story, be it known that it is an insult to 40 years of top-draw black actors to have children spout rubbish that "it's good to see people of my color on the screen."  Bilge.  What about Denzel?  Sidney Poitier?  Wesley Snipes?  Diana Ross?  Top singing trios, Richard Pryor?  Beyoncé?  Even blaxploitation stars who held sway for a decade or more?  Will Smith?  Jamie Foxx?  Even O.J.?

Or were they all Caucasian, but we just didn't notice?

So though most people will have heard the story to death in trailers and TV guest appearances, by star Chadwick Boseman and his cohort from BP: Young T'Challa is the newly anointed king of the remote (mythical African) nation of Wakanda, nonetheless amazingly technologically advanced while cut off from the rest of the squalid world.  Wakanda is somewhere near Kenya and Zimbabwe.  After T'Challa's wise though flawed father dies, and the new king is announced, he is challenged from afar in his ascension by a foreign and vengeful outsider bearing a longtime grudge against the now gone king for his erroneous behavior back decades.

Boseman is fit but scarcely attractive, and not all that charming in this megahit.  He does not command your fealty except in a clinical sense, easily bested by more charming females in the cast, including Angela Bassett as the imperious queen mother.

Earning already close to a billion dollars, this film, taking place largely in a fantasy Africa, is a racist; overstuffed; and often, yes, boring mess.  Every tribal stereotype seen for the past decades in National Geographic, including plate-mouth tribal people, ring-around-stretched-neck women, and many more can be found here in stepped up fashion-forward fiery tribal dress, the equal of Cinemascope and Technicolor tropes, as opposed to the originals.  Eight visits to African countries tell this reviewer that the costumers took liberal license in the scenic design and the fanciful costumery.

The set design for this overlong film is like those holiday cakes sodden with too many sugared fruit bits: loaded with calories, with questionable healthiness, taste, and edibility.

The plot involves generational transition for the young king of Wakanda, a mythical country somewhere around Kenya and Zimbabwe.  Women figure strongly in the proceedings, as younger siblings of the "black panther" king, mostly bald-headed, and displayed in remarkable arrays of beadings and finery, headgear and spears.

Spear fights proliferate, too many of them, interrupted by escapades involving American challengers and car chases and changes of venue to London and elsewhere, lest a moment go by without a meme for some viewer somewhere.

Aside from a clinical interest in watching what has become such a phenom, I found it tedious and uninspiring, another Batman in clingy instantaneous magic bodysuit, copying Robert Downey, Jr.'s Iron Man's, but tighter.  Truth to tell, after an hour or so, I did what I never have before: I hauled out my cell phone and caught up with emails.  The film simply appealed to my yawn instinct.  As much as the several set pieces were lushly designed and mind-blasting – I was bored.

True to expectation, the film is rich with racialist and stereotypical notions of Wakandan high-tech ingenuity in the form of super whizz-bang Vibranium, with its endless energy supply and force.  Spear fights and encircling female warrior scenes are accompanied by gorilla grunts and earth-poundings.  The sole Caucasian character who figures in the proceedings is a skinny, wimpy nerd (Martin Freeman), a CIA operative who compares in no way to the brawny blacks who decide his fate, save him, and repair him after he is lethally damaged.  Vibranium again, doing the magical work of regeneration, blah, blah.

To be sure, some virtue-signaling is available in some lip service to doing good,  providing other countries with the benefits of Vibranium and the high tech produced in Wakanda, but the rest of the script dismisses these banalities in fights, acrobatic clashes, special effects, bad-mouthing enemies and the like.

It is mystifying why this peacock of a fake history actioner has beguiled so many people into separating from their $20.  Aside from Angela Bassett as the Wakandan Queen mother and Forrest Whitaker as the  somber Merlin character in Wakandan affairs, few protagonists stand out beyond their iffy "African" accents.

I've been to all the countries in that section of Africa. They are nothing like Wakanda.  The comparison is not complimentary.  And the film is a vanity production, having little value as an imaginary fictional could-be history.

Happily, a film one can be easy of mind at missing.  It's no Darkest Hour or Dunkirk.  Not even a Big Fish romance or Three Billboards.

RED SPARROW
Directed by Francis Lawrence (no relation to Jennifer)

Even with its several shocking scenes, when audiences gasped in empathy for the tortures undergone by Jennifer Lawrence and her American CIA handler-lover (Joel Edgerton), this movie held one's interest throughout.  It is apparently fictional, but one does not doubt that such "spy schools" probably exist, though without Charlotte Rampling as mistress-trainer and dom-at-arms.

The narrative holds, it seems a tight script, and the initial negative critical reception seems...wrong, at least to the audience we sat with.

The first few minutes of the film, Lawrence is a Bolshoi ballerina, and she executes lifts and pirouettes she trained long months to execute.  She is no Natalie Portman in Black Swan, however.  When she sustains a cataclysmic accident to her leg, she can no longer perform for the Bolshoi, and her housing; her medical coverage; and care for her ailing mother, played by Joely Richardson, are all withdrawn.  She is forced by her Putin-like uncle (a chilling Matthias Schoenarts) to enroll in the "sparrow" institute.

It's even worse than Olympic training under handy now disgraced gymnastic doctor Larry Nassar.

The intel training she is sent to, a school for "sparrows," is little more, in Lawrence's character, Dominica Egorova's words, than "whore school."  The star had to do some of her acting, even hand to hand combat, unclothed or in icy water.  Not an easy role.

We follow her as she learns to survive the precipices of satisfying her minders in Moscow, her uncle, and her growing love interest with a handsome American CIA agent bent on installing a mole deep within the Kremlin.

How Dominica manages to avoid being shot by the Soviet minders, and tries to do her task as honey-pot spy, is involving and  engrossing.  Lawrence is effective with her Russian accent, as is Jeremy Irons, Ciaran Hinds, and the rest of the  cast.  Some of the scenes, as indicated above, are hard to take, shocking and grim, but the film  holds one's interest throughout.

Even when your hands are covering your eyes in revulsion and disbelief.

HONDROS
Directed by Greg Campbell

This  documentary follows the war correspondent and career trajectory of honored war photographer Chris Hondros by showing the poignant and often unexpected, thoroughly unglamorous backstories behind this award-winning photojourn's best known captures.  Spurred by his strong reaction to the events of 9/11, he was driven by a commitment to bear witness to the wars of our time. Chris was among the first in a new generation of war photogs since Vietnam, many of whom we see as they  trudge through the minutiae of permits, schlepping from  dusty outpost to bullet-riven front in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

Hondros examines the complexities inherent in covering more than a decade of conflict, trying to maintain a "normal" life.  It also examines the unknowable topographies inherent in making split-second life-and-death decisions – before, during, and after his prize photos were caught.  Told in vivid retrospect, through interviews with friends, colleagues, and family, the film chronicles the sensibilities and loving reactions of his fellow photographers, as, almost inevitably – given the risks of  where photographers have to emplace themselves, hide, jump out at "opportune" moments  – Chris was killed in Libya, back in 2011.  He left a lasting impact and a significant body of important witness on his profession and his colleagues in arms that are still felt today.