There was a moment early on in Black Panther when I found myself wondering whether superhero stories, and specifically movies, might fill a similar space - in my imagination, psyche, what have you - as the fantasy genre sometimes has for me in the past, and specifically the sense of wonder and other worlds; I think that came partly from the sense of interlocking universes that comes with these 'filmic universes' (on which I have only a shaky grasp even though I've seen a fair number of the individual films across both Marvel and DC) and partly from the set-up of Wakanda itself here. In any case, I thought this movie was great, its engine built equally around action of both the physical (ie fights and explosions) and the political sorts, with good human-sized moments and a very thoughtfully-developed antagonist. (And almost casually filling its ranks with a bunch of excellent female characters incidentally too.)
