Eternals

Skippable, and it is the most divisive film Marvel has released. Nothing since has referred to it in any load-bearing way, and the characters have not reappeared.

What it attempts is genuinely unlike the rest. Chloé Zhao shot large parts on location in natural light with wide lenses, the pace is slow, and the film covers seven thousand years of ten immortals living among humans and arguing about whether to intervene. The premise, that they were forbidden to interfere with human conflict and have therefore watched every atrocity in recorded history, is the strongest idea in Phase Four.

It does not come together. Ten protagonists in a hundred and fifty-six minutes means nobody gets an arc, the flashback structure keeps interrupting itself, and the central revelation about what the Eternals are actually for arrives as a monologue. The emotional weight is carried almost entirely by Gemma Chan and Richard Madden, and by Angelina Jolie's character, whose mind has been damaged by millennia of memory.

The ambition deserves more credit than it got. Watch it if the register appeals and skip it without any loss to the wider story.