Black Panther: Wakanda Forever

Essential, and it is a film made under circumstances no sequel should face. Chadwick Boseman died in 2020 and the production chose not to recast, so the film is about the absence of its own protagonist and opens with a funeral that is plainly also a funeral.

That decision gives it an emotional weight that the plot cannot always match. The opening twenty minutes, almost wordless, with a procession in white, are the best thing in Phase Four. Angela Bassett's performance as a grieving queen addressing a council is extraordinary and was nominated for an Academy Award.

The plot around it is overloaded. There is a new underwater civilisation to introduce, a vibranium detector, an American student, a CIA subplot, a succession crisis and a war, in a hundred and sixty-one minutes. Tenoch Huerta's Namor is a good antagonist with a colonial grievance of his own, and the film does not have room to let the two nations' argument breathe.

Letitia Wright inherits a film that was not built for her and does what she can. The final act is a battle on a ship. Watch the first film first; this is entirely a reply to it.