Amid a climate in which most fans sense that Marvel Studios just isn’t as fun as it used to be and that the most beloved characters in the franchise have been exhausted, the company drops a movie that’s essentially about heroes who struggle to leave the shadows of their more famous counterparts. And it (mostly) works.

“Thunderbolts*” is an odd duck of a superhero flick, one that almost leans into the skid of the MCU, and, by doing so, might actually straighten it out. It can’t quite shake loose of the consistent problems in the MCU’s recent output (turn a light on!). Still, it challenges blockbuster fans in unexpected ways, presenting them with richer acting than we’ve seen in these films in some time and, perhaps most shockingly, a final act that’s emotionally grounded instead of just “CGI things go boom.” It ends on a note that feels like a preview for another movie (or movies), a common problem in the MCU, but this time it’s almost as interesting a final touch narratively as it is driven by marketing. Could the MCU get its groove back with a group of outcasts who defy what it means to be a hero? Maybe it was always the only way they could.

The first act of “Thunderbolts*” is undeniably its weakest. Getting this group together under the thumb of the mediocre villain Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) lacks depth, feeling like little more than blockbuster wheel-spinning. So many of these films feel like contractual obligations more than passion projects; that box-checking casts a cloud on this already under-lit film. Just look at its first few scenes of yawn-inducing congressional investigations and reunions with characters we barely remember.

That’s when we’re reconnected with Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh), emotionally numbed by the death of her sister, Black Widow, in “Avengers: Endgame.” Yelena works for Valentina as a sort of black-ops Avenger, but she’s ready to move on after her latest job destroying evidence for the CIA. Of course, covert government operations are like the mob: you don’t just retire. So when Yelena is sent on another clean-up mission, she’s startled to find fellow Valentina employees at the same location, a facility about to go up in flames. Valentina, who is under Congressional investigation, is seeking to destroy evidence, and Yelena knows too much to keep around.

She’s not alone. At the remote facility, she runs into John Walker aka U.S. Agent (Wyatt Russell), Ava Starr aka Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen), and the quickly exterminated Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). In classic MCU fashion, it’s one of those scenes in which it feels like you need to have done some homework to really keep up with it in that these three characters were initially defined in “Ant-Man and the Wasp,” “Black Widow,” and the TV show “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.” It again feels like you need notes as these movies and shows have gotten too abundant to track.

Yelena, Ghost, and Walker are startled to find someone else at the facility, an ordinary guy named Bob (Lewis Pullman), who ends up being anything but ordinary. Before long, Yelena’s father Red Guardian (David Harbour) and Bucky Barnes aka The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) have joined the crew of burned assets, who unite to take down Valentina, only to learn that their biggest threat may be one of their own.

“Thunderbolts*” leans into the self-serious tone of much of Marvel lately by embedding it in the film’s subject matter and visual language. Even the opening Marvel logo is drained of color, something that’s largely followed by the palette of the film that follows. Red Guardian’s outfit looks closer to brown in a film that’s been so desaturated that when a guy in a yellow chicken outfit shows up late, it’s almost a jump-scare. At times, the drab filmmaking feels thematically resonant. But there are more visually creative ways to do it than the ones employed by the incredible cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo (“The Green Knight”), who falls victim to the paint-by-numbers approach to these films (and the only paint colors he has are brown and browner). It doesn’t help that Schreier’s action choreography doesn’t shine, leaving us with too little to hold onto as this film takes off.

Yet it somehow finds a way to reach its destination. By the time the crew is together, following a standout car chase sequence in which Bucky joins the gang, the pieces start falling into place. Of course, it helps a great deal to have multiple Oscar nominees in the cast. The best MCU films are often elevated by actual performances from actors who don’t just meet fan expectations of comic book characters brought to three-dimensional life but exceed them (think Robert Downey Jr. and Chadwick Boseman), and that’s what Pugh does here, using Yelena’s depression as a throughline to find her character’s rhythm instead of just as a crutch. Pullman is also excellent, finding complex notes in a role that could have just been CGI-enhanced gobbledygook. Harbour is having a blast in what is basically the comic relief role, and Russell finds shades of a wannabe leader who knows he hasn’t exactly been on the hero’s journey. Ghost is so woefully underwritten that John-Kamen can’t make much of an impact and Stan looks like he’s grown weary of playing this character, but the ensemble largely works.

And the truth is, sometimes that’s enough. Some of the best movies in the history of the MCU have thrived off bouncing interesting characters and performances off each other in projects like “The Avengers” and “Guardians of the Galaxy.” I don’t expect “Thunderbolts*” to have the same culture-shaping legacy as those projects. Still, I could easily see it bringing fans back to this universe who felt burned after misfires like “The Marvels,” “Brave New World,” and the truly dismal “Quantumania.” As “Phase Five” of the MCU comes to a close with this film—“The Fantastic Four: First Steps” begins the sixth in July—no one would argue that these movies have the cultural impact they did a decade ago. But “Thunderbolts*” reminded this former comic book reader and fan of much of the early films in the MCU and what these blockbusters could do before they got too reliant on multiverses: Remind you of the humanity in the heroism. Maybe these second-rate Avengers really are the heroes that 2025 needs.

At this point, the prospect of watching a film about an aging boxer whose life has hit the skids sounds as appealing as getting into the ring with Oleksandr Usyk. It’s the sort of well-trod cinematic territory that feels overly familiar, and the title, Salvable, does not exactly inspire hope. Fortunately, co-directors Bjorn Franklin and Johnny Marchetta’s debut feature proves better than its synopsis suggests. While the film doesn’t chart any particularly new territory, it benefits greatly from Franklin’s subtle screenplay and performances infusing it with emotional power that sneaks up on you.

The sort of gritty, realistic drama that frequently emerged from England in the early ‘60s, the story set in Wales revolves around Sal (Toby Kebbell, the film’s real star, despite Shia LaBeouf’s prominence in the marketing), whose successful boxing days are well behind him. Although he still trains at night under the watchful tutelage of his old trainer Welly (James Cosmo), his days are spent working at a nursing home, where his gently compassionate treatment of its elderly residents speaks volumes about his character.

Living in a trailer parked in a field and reduced to having sex in his car with his girlfriend, the divorced Sal has a difficult relationship with his teenage daughter Molly (Kila Lord Cassidy), who’s still angry over his previous neglect. His bitter ex-wife (Elaine Cassidy) won’t let him see Molly outside of specified times, and his legal efforts to get joint custody are rejected. Things go from bad to worse when he loses his job at the nursing home after having to leave suddenly to deal with a school emergency involving Molly.

Films with this sort of subject matter often feature a character who’s a bad influence. In this case, it’s Sal’s old friend Vince (LaBeouf), with whom he has a checkered past. Vince, whose propensity for troublemaking is instantly signaled by his bleach blond dye-job, has just been released from prison. He resumes his former gig of organizing underground fights in which Sal, in desperate need of money, agrees to participate. But it doesn’t go well when Sal forfeits a bout rather than seriously injure his clearly inferior opponent.

“I’d have killed him!” he tells the frustrated Vince.

Sal attempts to resume boxing and reunite with Welly for “one last dance,” as the veteran trainer calls it. But he blows off the scheduled bout to join Vince in an ill-advised criminal venture that has fateful consequences.

The plot, as you can see, feels standard-issue. But it plays much better than that, thanks to incisive writing that elevates the proceedings beyond predictability. Sal’s relationship with his daughter proves more complex than it initially appears, especially in the quiet aftermath of a beautifully written scene in which he implores her school principal, an old friend, not to punish her for a transgression. And Vince emerges as more than a standard villain, demonstrating a genuine love for Sal that ultimately results in him making a tremendous sacrifice. LaBeouf, whose tabloid exploits have come to overshadow his talents, delivers a quietly commanding performance.

But it’s Kebbell — his extensive screen credits include Control, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and Kong: Skull Island — who gives Salvable heart and soul. Never succumbing to the sort of histrionics to which a lesser actor might have resorted, he makes us care deeply about his troubled character, a man who keeps getting in his own way. His fine performance, and the atmospheric lensing of the Welsh locations, make the movie more than salvable.  

As far as niche sub-genres are concerned, the “Summer When Everything Changed” film has certainly proved itself a reliable little lane for up-and-coming filmmakers to traverse, affording them the space to discover their own styles just as their subjects begin to discover themselves. Sometimes, the significant change depicted comes from a moment of subtly depicted life-altering trauma; sometimes it’s a moment of sexual awakening; oftentimes it’s both, but the power always comes from that synergy between art and artist—that feeling that the film exists as an inescapable piece of the filmmaker’s own past brought to the screen.

Perhaps this is where a film like Bonjour Tristesse deviates somewhat from expectations, for while the bones of this story could very well have spoken personally to debuting director (and writer) Durga Chew-Bose enough to send her towards this material in the first place, the material itself has been around since long before her own adolescent crossroads. An adaptation of a 1954 novel by Françoise Sagan—itself already adapted four years thereafter by none other than Otto Preminger—Chew-Bose’s film already has a steep hill to climb beyond the scope of her own memories (as is so often, though not always, the case with these films), and so the challenge becomes less one of recapturing subjectivity and more a challenge of creating it from scratch.

The subject of this well-worn tale of ennui is Cécile (McInerny), a teenage girl spending her summer in the south of France with her widowed father Raymond (Bang) and his French girlfriend Elsa (Nailila Harzoune). Cécile’s days are filled—as is the case with most films of this ilk—with meandering trips to the beach and cozy games of solitaire on the couch with a glass of wine, all in between courting her first love affair with a local boy, Cyril (Aliocha Schneider). It’s not until an old friend of the family, Anne (Sevigny), arrives to share in this vacation that the malaise of summertime gives way to more concentrated bouts of interpersonal horn-locking.

The first thing one may notice about Bonjour Tristesse, as is typically the case with films of this quietly crushing sabbatical nature—think Call Me By Your Name, Aftersun, Falcon Lake—is a concentrated emphasis on atmosphere. These films understand that to communicate what is so inarticulable to the child’s mind means communicating it, oftentimes, without words at all, instead letting the blistering heat of the sun or the invasive hum of cicadas fill the dead air that so often accompanies stolen glances. Chew-Bose is definitely privy to this notion, as her film makes a concerted effort to shoot the seaside of the day and the lofty trees of the night with equal emphasis to the words shared in their space.

It’s a concept that Drew-Bose understands, but not one that she executes all that effectively. This is mainly because Bonjour Tristesse, for all its emphasis on what can be communicated without words, seems entirely determined to undermine that notion at every turn with an endless stream of stilted, overworked dialogue exchanges. Nearly every line in the film feels written as though it was thought-up with the expressed intention of becoming an out-of-context pull-quote for teenagers unwilling to sit through a film this sparse to begin with—“Be wrong sometimes… it’s less lonely,” or “I love this time of day; there is so much possibility before lunch”—which may be an effective tool to make some characters appear more vapid or constructed than others, but doesn’t really serve a film of this tone when everybody speaks that way.

This may very well be a byproduct of the film’s literary origins—not only is Bonjour Tristesse based on a book, but Chew-Bose’s own prior artistic experience comes from writing a book compiled of essays—in which sensory experiences and complicated, contradictory thoughts must, by necessity, be expressed in words. If anything, though, this further emphasizes the challenge that comes with adaptation, and the laudable efforts of those who manage to adapt to the work to the silver screen and make that sensory experience more… well, sensory. Even the presence of Sevigny (in an ironic twist, an actress who made her bones on independent films becomes the most recognizable name in this one) does little to elevate the film, controlled as she may be in her grasp of the film’s stilted aura. Chew-Bose may very well have found something viscerally relatable in Sagan’s source material to warrant yet another adaptation, but rarely has the feeling of a warm summer day felt so foreign and frigid.

In the end, Bonjour Tristesse never quite lives up to its interest in harnessing the malaise of a quiet and confused summer, mostly due to its over-reliance on fatigued dialogue and thin characterization.

Score: 47/100

*still courtesy of Elevation Pictures*

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