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.

To make it as a fashion model is one thing; to endure in such an intensely competitive field, as Christie Brinkley has done, is quite another. It means having to live in constant fear that your job might be snatched by someone younger, or thinner, or whatever the zeitgeist might be hunting for at any given moment. If Brinkley’s new memoir, “Uptown Girl,” has one lesson to impart to its readers, it’s that no one, not even the beauty icon, rides through life for free.

Brinkley, who grew up in Canoga Park and Malibu, was discovered in 1973 by photographer Errol Sawyer at 19 while waiting for a payphone on a Paris street corner. Things went whoosh! and she signed with legendary agent John Casablancas, then decamped to New York, where she worked for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and virtually every other fashion magazine on the newsstand. In 1974, Brinkley booked her first job for Sports Illustrated, a collaboration that endures today. (Last year Brinkley appeared, along with Tyra Banks, Martha Stewart and other celebrities, on an SI cover celebrating 60 years of the swimsuit issue.)

Life was grand for Brinkley. She recalls one lunch in the early 1970s with agent Nina Blanchard at the old Brown Derby in Hollywood, when she booked her first three major TV commercials before coffee was served, just by sitting there. Francesco Scavullo, Patrick Demarchelier and Helmut Newton trained their lenses on her and the rest was history. She bought her first apartment in a prewar building on the Upper West Side soon after.

Brinkley bemoans the present colonization of the fashion space by digital media. “There was a kind of dance between photographer and model,” says Brinkley via Zoom from a hotel suite in midtown Manhattan. “You felt as if it was a joint creation, but that’s been lost. Digital photos can be retouched any which way, so what happens on a shoot becomes an afterthought. And there is also the fact of holding a magazine in your hands without being interrupted by pop-up ads.”

In January 1983, while on location in St. Barts for a photo shoot, she met Billy Joel at a motel dive bar. Both were reeling from their previous relationships; Joel had recently divorced his first wife, Elizabeth Weber. Joel played “The Girl From Ipanema” on the bar piano while Brinkley sang along. Brinkley knew nothing about Joel, let alone that he was a global pop megastar.

Two months later, she knew all too well, as Joel wooed Brinkley in grand rock-star fashion. There were thousands of roses, presidential suites in impossibly picturesque hotels, a white horse as a Christmas gift. On her 30th birthday, Joel chartered a Gulfstream III jet to sweep Brinkley from Long Island to his concert in South Bend, Ind., where a grotesquely large cake was rolled onto the stage and 16,000 fans sang “Happy Birthday” to her. The couple got married on March 23, 1985, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty.

What happened next was like a Nora Ephron script rewritten by John Cassavetes. In the summer of 1986, the couple and their then-4-year-old daughter, Alexa Ray, were staying in a rented cottage in Montauk while Gate Lodge, Joel’s estate on Long Island’s North Shore, was being renovated. One rainy night, Brinkley woke up in the early morning hours to discover her husband had vanished. Shortly before dawn, he returned home, stumbling out of a cab, drunk and ornery. It was the first in a series of scary scenes for Brinkley, whose feelings for Joel vacillated between veneration, unconditional love and abject fear.

“I loved him and I wanted to make it work,” she says. “Drinking is a disease. And I knew that there had to be some way to help him, and not always get to that point where this person who you love is suddenly a stranger to you.” Given the very public nature of their marriage, Brinkley found herself unable to cultivate support for fear that the tabloids would find out about Joel’s addiction. “I was 100% dedicated to Billy, but I never told anyone about our issues, not even my friends,” she says. “It was very difficult in that way, but we had a child together and I was trying to protect the family.”

Then Joel’s issues began to shade into psychosis. Brinkley in her book describes one ugly scene when Joel, deep in his cups, ate a heap of spaghetti directly from a large pan on the stove, then vehemently kicked everyone out of the house for eating his pasta. “I hesitated to put that scene in the book,” she says. “But at the same time, it demonstrates what I was up against.”

Christie Brinkley has maintained a vigorous career as a model and entrepreneur.

(HarperCollins)

Despite the roiling storms she was navigating in her private life, Brinkley’s public persona was expanding beyond fashion’s gilt frame into the American mainstream. By the early 1980s, she had become synonymous with the massively popular Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, appearing on the cover three years in a row. Then there was the 1983 music video for Joel’s hit “Uptown Girl,” in which Brinkley, wearing a strapless black and white dress, is the unattainable object of desire for the pop star, who plays against type as a working-class car mechanic.

“Suddenly, I had a theme song,” she says. “That was definitely a gift that Billy gave to me.”

Brinkley hacked it for 11 years with Joel, until one final crescendo of boozy madness and a string of well-publicized affairs prompted her to file divorce papers in 1994. As it turned out, this was a mere prelude for a far more traumatic incident in her life. That same year, a helicopter crash on a mountain in Telluride, Colo., nearly killed Brinkley and her five traveling companions. She married crash survivor Richard Taubman, a real estate developer, in the aftermath. The couple had a son and divorced in 1995.

Despite the vicissitudes of her life, Brinkley has maintained a vigorous career as a model and entrepreneur, enduring far longer than her contemporaries, readjusting her approach to the marketplace, finding the niche that eludes everyone else. “In the years after the copter crash, I have maintained an extraordinary sense of gratitude on steroids,” she says. “We’re all so lucky to make it through each day, especially now.”

In other words, nobody rides for free.

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.