Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings

Essential as the introduction of a character the franchise is still building on, and it is among the better Phase Four films. It needs nothing before it beyond a passing familiarity with the joke about the Mandarin from Iron Man 3, which the film retroactively repairs.

The first hour is the reason to watch. A bus fight in San Francisco and a sequence on scaffolding in Macau are the best hand-to-hand action Marvel has staged, choreographed by people from Hong Kong action cinema and shot wide enough to see. Simu Liu does a large share of it visibly himself.

Tony Leung is the film. Wenwu is a thousand-year-old warlord who stopped for the woman he loved, lost her, and is now being spoken to by something pretending to be her voice, and Leung plays him with a stillness nothing else in the franchise has. The courtship flashback, a wordless fight that becomes a dance, is the most romantic scene here.

The third act is the familiar problem: two large digital creatures over a village, with the specificity of the first two acts replaced by a beam. Awkwafina is good value and the final twenty minutes are not what the film earned.