Iron Man 3

Less a superhero film than a story about trauma. Tony Stark cannot sleep after what happened in New York. He has panic attacks, builds suits without stopping, and tells nobody anything. A series of attacks begins. The explosions leave no bomb residue and someone calling himself the Mandarin is said to be behind them. Tony challenges him on television. The same day his house is hit from the air and he ends up under the sea. From there the film strips him of everything. The suit does not work, the team cannot be reached, and Tony is in a strange town in midwinter, in a boy's garage. That section is the best thing in the film. Tony works with a toolbox and shows he is the same man without the suit. What the narrative is interested in is not an enemy but dependence: the film says Tony has turned the armour into a habit of protection, and builds its ending on giving that habit up. There is a surprise in the middle and it split the audience. What the Mandarin actually turns out to be upset a large part of the comics readership. The film is set at Christmas, a habit carried over from the director's earlier work. The sequence in which passengers falling from an aeroplane are caught was shot with real skydivers. Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Guy Pearce, Rebecca Hall and Ben Kingsley are in the cast. Shane Black directed and wrote the screenplay with Drew Pearce. Who it is for: anyone who wants a character study out of a superhero film. Who it is not for: anyone looking for fidelity to the comics; the decision in the middle breaks that expectation directly.