The Critical Corner

          The Marvel Cinematic Universe's Disney+ experiment has been interesting to say the least. With their first two forays with "WandaVision" and "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier", we saw the MCU willing to experiment with its format and add extra depth to characters that were at best the side focus to the main coarse. At the same time, the shows were plagued by obvious flaws, like a lot of side stuff that was left frustratingly underserved by the time the show's came to a close, and an inability to bring their respective series to both a satisfying close and a sense that what we just watched would feel entirely essential once we started diving back into the movie realm, particularly after their positioning in importance to the next few phases of the franchise. It was the big question hanging over the third MCU show this year, "Loki". Would it follow the same pattern established by the previous two series?      "Loki" is an interes

When Marvel announced their initial slate for the MCU's Phase Four, the project I was looking forward to the most from the initial offerings was definitely "Falcon and the Winter Soldier". Even before the pandemic shuffled things around (this was going to come out after "Black Widow" and before "The Eternals" and "WandaVision"), I was looking forward to this simply because both "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" and "Captain America: Civil War" are my top two favorite movies of the entire MCU. The later movies of the "Captain America" trilogy stood out to me not just because they were some fine action movies, but married their action to thrilling, thought provoking themes you don't see elsewhere in the MCU. Anchoring those movies obviously was Chris Evans' Steve Rogers who proved to be the heart and soul of this shared universe. With "Avengers: Endgame" essentially retiring the character seem