Doctor Strange

A film in which a surgeon loses everything. Stephen Strange is a neurosurgeon. He is very good and reminds everyone of it. One night he crashes his car. His hands are destroyed; the operations do not work and he cannot practise again. He spends all his money on treatment. Finally he hears of a place in Nepal and goes there. From there the film is a training story. Books, discipline, other dimensions and gateways opened with a movement of the hand. There is a former student on the other side. Kaecilius is trying to defeat time and death with a stolen page. What the narrative is interested in is not magic but arrogance: Strange is the same man at the start and the end, but he learns to use his ability for someone else rather than himself. The ending is not a fight. Strange enters an endless loop and accepts dying over and over in order to win, an unusual solution within the genre. The visual design is its real strength. Cities folding, mirroring and turning into themselves were made by computer and were the most noticed effects work of the period. There is a criticism about the casting. Giving a character who is Asian in the source material to another actor caused argument, and the director later accepted that the decision was a problem. Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rachel McAdams, Tilda Swinton, Benedict Wong and Mads Mikkelsen are in the cast. Scott Derrickson directed. Who it is for: anyone watching for visual design. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a new structure; the plot repeats the template of the series' first films almost exactly.