Movie Watch: ‘Marveling’ at the new Captain America, and favorites from Sundance 2025

Marveling at Marvel again this week. In Captain America: Brave New World, the MCU has:

— Charming, charismatic Anthony Mackie as a title character who must battle both bad guys and dull writing for two hours.

— Harrison Ford as an unpredictable, populist President who survives an assassination attempt, takes an expansionist approach to mineral wealth outside U.S. borders, and in mid-press conference, unveils his inner bully and wreaks havoc on all of Washington D.C.

— A White House security head whose Israeli intelligence background in Marvel comics made her controversial for a split second before the film was released, but who I mostly noticed because other characters kept pronouncing her name, Ruth Bat-Seraph, as “Ruth Bets-are-off.”

— Indie director Julius Onah, who gives the film a dark, paranoid-thriller vibe until he gets Marveled to death by FX battles that get progressively sillier and less persuasive. A shame. I admired his most recent drama, Luce, a lot at Sundance a few years back.

Speaking of Sundance, at the Festival that ended two weeks ago, I caught 16 films in four days and was blown away twice…by:

— Clint Bentley’s staggeringly beautiful Train Dreams, a portrait, in stately Terrence Malick mode, of laborers in the Pacific Northwest at the start of the 20th century and the age of the steam locomotive and westward expansion. Robert Grainer (Joel Edgerton) is a taciturn logger in a story crammed with incidents – a Chinese coworker tossed off a bridge, a felled tree killing three loggers, a comet streaking in the night sky, a forest fire laying waste to dreams, memories made and lost. It’s breathtaking. Netflix bought it at the festival, so it’ll be available soon.

— Charlie Shackleton’s satirical meta-documentary The Zodiac Killer Project. Shackleton had already scouted locations and started storyboarding a doc based on California patrolman Lyndon E. Lafferty’s Book “The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up” when he learned he was being denied the rights. Having gone that far, he couldn’t bear to let it go, so he made a film about the film he would have made and, in the process, managed to send up the whole true-crime-doc genre. Wry, precise, earnest, bemused, and forthright about both the manipulative clichés of the genre and also the shortcuts he’s taking — “this is actually a library, not a police station” — he gets to the very heart of what makes these docs so compelling. There’ll be chances to see it on Feb. 27 at the True/False Fest in Columbia Missouri, and March 8 at SXSW in Austin Texas.