Black Widow

Marvel met more than sixty five women directors before hiring Cate Shortland in July 2018, and Scarlett Johansson pushed for her personally after admiring her 2012 feature Lore. That choice shows on screen. Shortland built the fight scenes from real combat references rather than wrestling style choreography, and she called the result the most violent Marvel film made up to that point. The structural catch matters more than the plot does. This is a prequel about a character whose death audiences have already watched, so the question of whether Natasha survives carries no charge at all. What the film delivers instead is a handover, and the post credits scene passes the franchise to Yelena without pretending otherwise. Pacing follows from that. The middle of the hundred and thirty four minutes stops being espionage and turns into a family dinner comedy held together almost entirely by David Harbour as Alexei, which is exactly where trailer driven expectations stall. One more departure is worth knowing in advance: the masked antagonist Taskmaster is not the comics character Tony Masters here but Dreykov’s daughter, rewritten because the writers judged the original a poor fit for this story. Not for: viewers who find child conscription, forced sterilisation and mind control hard to sit through.