Alexander Larman

Marvel is releasing its latest extravaganza, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, this weekend. Although early reviews have been largely negative and suggest the film is overwrought, it will inevitably make a huge amount of money and begin Marvel’s so-called "Phase 5" in high-profile fashion. Which is why it’s crucial for the publicity machine that its star Evangeline Lilly’s views on the anti-vaxxing debate do not overshadow the film’s more straightforward themes of good, evil and quantumania. Unfortunately, real-world issues are more complex than Marvel might like them to be. Lilly has enjoyed a successful career in films such as The Hobbit and in shows including Lost, and her appearances in the Ant-Man pictures were, until the advent of Covid, entirely uncontroversial.

The author and lyricist Polly Samson did not mince her words earlier this month when she attacked the musician Roger Waters on Twitter. She described him as “anti-Semitic to your rotten core. Also a Putin apologist and a lying, thieving, hypocritical, tax-avoiding, lip-synching, misogynistic, sick-with-envy, megalomaniac.” She ended with “Enough of your nonsense.” Not only did her husband, Pink Floyd singer and guitarist David Gilmour, retweet her attack on his former bandmate, he added, “Every word demonstrably true.” Waters’s response was to tweet, with appropriate pomposity, “Roger Waters is aware of the incendiary and wildly inaccurate comments made about him on Twitter by Polly Samson which he rejects utterly.

Before the beginning of February, American viewers may have been forgiven for not knowing who Philomena Cunk was. The actress who plays her, Diane Morgan, was familiar enough thanks to her appearances in Ricky Gervais’ After Life and brief cameos in the Charlie Brooker-scripted Death to 2020 and Death to 2021. The one, the only, Philomena Cunk, however, remained a British phenomenon, much like Marmite and poor dentistry. Yet Netflix, recognizing the universal brilliance of the Cunk character, stepped in to co-produce her new series, Cunk on Earth, with the BBC. It aired to an appreciative Britain last September — now the United States has the great privilege of seeing Cunk unleashed. For the uninitiated, the set-up is simple but endlessly effective.

Like most of the world, I saw M. Night Shyamalan’s very fine ghost story The Sixth Sense when it came out in 1999. It’s a blessing that it was released in pre-social media days, because its central twist would have been spoiled in minutes. Yet even without the shock value occasioned by its splashy central revelation, the film is still a haunting (no pun intended) piece of work, a Kubrickian exercise in restraint where the horrors are genuinely terrifying on the few occasions that the movie moves out of its comfort zone of chilly reflection. The then-twenty-nine-year-old director clearly had a glittering career ahead of him. I looked forward to his next film eagerly. Two and a half decades on, I would happily cross the country to avoid seeing another film by Shyamalan.

When someone compiles the history of 21st-century Hollywood, the section devoted to Armie Hammer will be one of the most bizarre. “Handsome leading man, came to prominence playing twins in The Social Network, a film about a forgotten invention known as Facebook. Most of the films he was subsequently cast in flopped, despite often being quite good. Amidst allegations of sexual assault and worse, it was then revealed that he had a cannibalism fetish, and that was the end of his acting career.” Yet canceled Hollywood figures often refuse to stay canceled these days.

Say what you like about the Marvel Cinematic Universe (or the MCU, for short) — and I do, frequently — but you can’t deny that it has a grim efficiency. The MCU impressively herds tens of millions of unsuspecting moviegoers into theaters to watch the latest incomprehensible special effects behemoth, with a wildly overqualified and suitably embarrassed cast. As I write this, the latest installment to threaten audiences is Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Now I don’t know what Quantumania is, and I will be perfectly happy to never find out. But as the previous film, Ant-Man and the Wasp (the titles lack a certain finesse), made more than $600 million at the box office, I accept I might be in the minority.