Spider-Man: No Way Home

A film about a hero whose identity has been exposed. The previous film announced Peter's name to the world. This one starts there: a crowd of cameras, a court case, university applications rejected, and his friends paying for it. Peter goes to a sorcerer. He wants everyone to forget. He changes his mind during the spell and adds conditions, and the spell breaks. From there the film deals with visitors from other universes. Enemies who know Peter's identity fall into this one. What the narrative is interested in is not action but responsibility: instead of sending them back Peter decides to cure them, and that decision produces the heaviest cost in the film. The middle section is a reunion. The narrative brings back two earlier actors, which became the most discussed thing about it; the scenes do not settle for nostalgia and turn to all three characters' own losses. The ending takes place not at the school but on scaffolding, and is built as a farewell rather than as a fight. The close of the film leaves the character far more alone than he was at the start of the series. The production was unusually strict about secrecy; actors denied their involvement until release. It opened during the pandemic and took an unexpected amount at the box office under those conditions. Tom Holland, Zendaya, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jacob Batalon, Alfred Molina, Willem Dafoe and Marisa Tomei are in the cast. Jon Watts directed. Who it is for: anyone who has seen the earlier films and the older adaptations. Who it is not for: anyone looking in from outside; its feeling rests entirely on twenty years of viewing history.