Captain America: Brave New World (2025)

Captain America: Brave New World arrives as the thirty-fifth installment of a franchise that has long since stopped asking whether it should exist and started asking how many more times it can. Julius Onah directs Anthony Mackie's Sam Wilson through a geopolitical thriller involving adamantium, a treaty, a mind-controlling song, and a president who turns red when he gets upset. The machinery is competent. The ambitions are modest. This is a film that wants to be a paranoid conspiracy picture and settles for being a Tuesday.

On the matter of cultural signalling, the film is more textured than its detractors claim and considerably less than its marketing implied. Wilson's tenure as a Black Captain America carries the weight of the Isaiah Bradley thread, a genuinely pointed inheritance about a Black super soldier imprisoned and experimented upon by his own government, though the film folds that inheritance into the conspiracy plotting and lets it resolve with an exoneration rather than a reckoning. The supporting ensemble is diverse in a manner that feels like continuity, not declaration. Ruth Bat-Seraph and Leila Taylor are capable women who are never asked to argue a thesis about gender. There is no queer presence of any kind, no climate anxiety, no body-image commentary, and Sterns's enlarged intellect is a mutation, not an identity.

Where the film does reach for something, it reaches for empathy. Wilson's superpower, we are told, is listening. The film delivers this through character beats instead of sermons, which is to its credit and also to its detriment, since a sermon might at least have been memorable. The adamantium race gestures at resource politics without ever locating a villain worth the name. It is a film about a good man doing paperwork in a cape. Harmless, handsome, and instantly forgettable.