
Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow
Reviews for previous films in the series:
The Avengers
Avengers: Age of Ultron

Written Reviews:
Yet while that inherent construction may frustrate those looking for stand-alone cohesiveness, the directors so capably capture, and blend together, their myriad disparate personalities for a thrilling campaign against annihilation that their would-be epic ably justifies the studio’s interconnected storytelling approach—and immediately solidifies Avengers 4 as the multiplex event of 2019.
Entertainment Weekly – Chris Nashawaty
The problem is that with so many characters to shoehorn in and so many realms of the galaxy to put out various fires in, the heroic horde is broken into four or five smaller subgroups that we keep cutting back and forth to. And some, naturally, are more entertaining to sit through than others. And some just seem to vanish for long stretches until you find yourself wondering when the hell are we going back to Wakanda or wherever? It ends up feeling a bit too disjointed – like we’re flipping the channels between four different movies instead of watching one cohesive one
Avengers: Infinity War may be the biggest Marvel Cinematic Universe thus far, it is nowhere near the best. It is esssentially set-up for whatever comes next year. But it works as big-scale entertainment.
Whatever else it does, this Marvel movie shows its brand identity in the adroit management of tone. One moment it’s tragic – the next, it’s cracking wise. It’s absurd and yet persuades you of its overwhelming seriousness. And there are some amazing Saturday-morning-kids-show moments when you really do feel like cheering.
The Hollywood Reporter – Todd McCarthy
This grand, bursting-at-the-seams wrap-up to one crowded realm of the Marvel superhero universe starts out as three parts jokes, two parts dramatic juggling act and one part deterministic action, an equation that’s been completely reversed by the time of the film’s startling climax.
“Infinity War” moves so fast and runs so long (over two and a half hours) it seems intent on exhausting even the most committed of viewers. But even as the movie forces audiences to submit to so many cataclysmic events, the directors manage to direct the cascading mayhem to a unique kind of cliffhanger.
The New York Times – A.O. Scott
Considered on its own, as a single, nearly 2-hour-40-minute movie, “Avengers: Infinity War” makes very little sense, apart from the near convergence of its title and its running time. Early on, someone menacingly (and presciently) says, “You may think this is suffering. No: It’s salvation.” That’s a bit overstated either way. It’s puzzlement and irritation and also, yes, delight.
If you’re a fan of these characters and you’re invested in their fates, there’s plenty of thrills in watching them team up, and zing each other with witty banter. A couple of shots will give you chills. But you better be really invested, because what’s generally missing are the moments where the film can just breathe; where the characters enjoy a shawarma or try to lift Thor’s hammer or simply carry on a conversation longer than 15 seconds about something other than the Infinity Stones. With very few exceptions, Infinity War is all business from the moment it begins to the final end credits.
The best thing about Avengers: Infinity War is, in many ways, the best thing about the Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole: an incredibly charming and almost overqualified ensemble cast. Though a few of the actors in the nearly 20 films of the MCU haven’t worked out so well, many of the performers are key to making the heroes of this fantastical series fresh and exciting. Whenever the sometimes-unwieldy, epic-length Infinity War works, it’s largely thanks to the actors, not the action sequences or the effects or anything else. The cast makes this movie, not the other way around.
And Avengers: Infinity War feels like a really special event. There are at least ten moments in this movie that made me want to just yell out, “yeah!,” at the screen. If you are a human being who likes comic books or comic book movies, it’s almost impossible not to enjoy the spectacle of it all – even though you might leave the theater a little disappointed…
While it’s hard to beat the wonder of that original Avengers film — remember when superhero team-ups were still a novelty? — Infinity War does its best to change the game again. There are unexpected returns, true surprises, real sacrifices and a cliffhanger ending that’s going to freak fans to their superhero-loving core, yet is, quite simply, marvelous.
The long-awaited face-off between the Avengers and Thanos (Josh Brolin), the MCU’s ultimate big bad, is massively entertaining, deftly incorporating dozens of characters across multiple storylines with a kinetic flair. Its devotion to banter and one-liners makes it one of the funniest movies in the studio’s history, but it’s also a film where very bad things happen to good people. After years of movies where even the most mediocre heroes appeared to be invulnerable and indomitable, it’s an arresting jolt — and exactly the film the franchise needed.
That said, Infinity War does find a clever, somber way to keep its successor’s proportions in check. It’s both arresting plot development and efficient solution; like so much in the Avengers series, Infinity War is really a feat of good management above anything else. As Marvel nears the end of this particular saga—or, at least, this particular lineup of actors—it’s a mild, partly begrudging thrill to see them pull it off.
Variety – Owen Gleiberman – [SPOILERS]
“Avengers: Infinity War” can, at times, make it feel like you’re at a birthday party where you got so many presents that you start to grow tired of opening them. But taken on its own piñata-of-fun terms, it’s sharp, fast-moving, and elegantly staged. It also has what any superhero movie worth its salt requires: a sense that there’s something at stake.
*It’s frustrating that it’s so difficult to fully appreciate the fantastic work that went into orchestrating these massive spectacles when we’re constantly being jostled from place to place. Midway through, all these different settings and all these jumps begin to feel exhausting…But also as in comic books, there’s one absolute bombshell of a moment that grabs you by the neck and drives you back into the story. Infinity War boasts the most breathtaking, audacious moment in superhero movie history, one that rocketed through my brain and tore apart everything I thought I knew about the past 10 years of Marvel moviemaking. For the first time in a while, I can’t wait to see what happens next.”
I invoke Kurosawa not out of elitism but to suggest how little Marvel’s films — which are, essentially, war movies — have in the way of a vision. The thousands of fallen bodies have all the weight of computer-game figures. Even Ryan Coogler — whose boxing-ring work in Creed was masterly — could in Black Panther barely rise above competence in showing people being slaughtered wholesale. It’s a matter of philosophy, of ethos, and Marvel’s is to throw more attention on whooshing entities in souped-up suits and stuff blowing up real good than on anything halfway human.
Directors Joe and Anthony Russo move their many playing pieces around with as much grace as possible, and they offer up jolts of pleasure throughout. The violence is ratcheted higher than usual — parents, please note we get both torture and genocide this time around — but the wisecracks still work; on this outing, the audience needs them more than usual, and the experienced cast knows how to throw them around as a way to keep their characters sane in the face of Armageddon.
A.O. Scott, New York Times: “his malevolence is laced with melancholy, and there is a ghastly grandeur to his ambition.”
Todd McCarthy, Hollywood Reporter: “Brolin’s calm, considered reading of the character bestows this conquering beast with an unexpectedly resonant emotional dimension.”
Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert: “I like how the movie builds everything around Brolin’s CGI-assisted but still fully inhabited performance as Thanos—an oddly wistful and lonely figure who is, essentially, a religious fanatic, yet carries himself with the calm certainty of a military man who’s read the ancient Greeks and speaks tenderly to cadets while stepping on their necks.”
Eric Kohn, IndieWire: “Brolin gives the monstrous entity an air of eerie melancholy”
Owen Gleiberman, Variety: “He’s like Hellboy, the Hulk, Darth Vader, and Oliver Stone rolled into one eloquent sociopath.”
Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair: “saturnine and surprisingly compelling”
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: “Thunderously voiced by a dynamite Josh Brolin in a motion-capture performance that radiates ferocity and unexpected feeling”
Justin Chang, LA Times: “Once you get past the impression that he’s swallowed a giant purple boulder, Brolin makes Thanos a suitably authoritative, melancholy villain — someone who really does seem deluded enough to fancy himself a merciful deity rather than a mass murderer for the ages.”
Drew McWeeny, Nerdist: “Josh Brolin’s Thanos emerges as the most fully-written bad guy any of the Marvel heroes have had to face, and I was surprised by how quickly the performance capture creation of Thanos stopped looking like an effect and started feeling like a performance.”
Peter Howell, The Star: “Thanos has complicated motivations that put him on a par with Michael B. Jordan’s Erik Killmonger from Black Panther”
Mark Hughes, Forbes: “Thanos could be the most fully realized villain in a comic book movie. I wasn’t prepared for the extent to which his character would get a strong and complex arc of his own. And the trailers do not do justice to the artistic rendering of his character in the film — anyone who thought he looked like a video game character in the trailers is in for a shock when they see the full movie. Trust me, you aren’t prepared for how well he’s written and portrayed here.”
Scott Mendelson, Forbes: “a fine antagonist, even if he’s not quite as sexy/fun as the last few MCU baddies”
Nick Schrager, The Daily Beast: “If he lacks the scene-stealing charisma of Michael B. Jordan’s recent Black Panther baddie Killmonger, he exudes a heavyhearted menace that’s made more unnerving by his clearly articulated, wholly insane justifications for his mission”
Alonso Duralde, The Wrap: “If there’s one disappointment here, it’s Thanos as a villain, and that’s not in any way Brolin’s fault. […] The character is more fearsome by his actions than in his dialogue, and his intent to wipe out trillions of living creatures gets subsumed by his chill demeanor. It’s like how Earth gets wiped out because of a bureaucratic error in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, only that bit of banal destruction was meant to be a joke. […] It also doesn’t help that Avengers: Infinity War can’t seem to make up its mind about how powerful Thanos is.”
Sam Adams, Slate: “the movie plays fast and loose with how strong they make Thanos at any given moment”
Mike Ryan, Uproxx: “Thanos feels like a tough character to pull off in the sense of, “let’s give him some sympathetic ideas,” but Joe and Anthony Russo sure try their best and get awfully close. If nothing else, Thanos does feel like a real character instead of just a purple bad guy – and even if we are probably never going to walk away thinking, You know, he had some interesting ideas, at least we get a sense of, Okay, his reasoning is bad, but at least we know where he’s coming from now.”
Molly Freeman, ScreenRant: “Infinity War offers a valiant effort to develop his character so as not to fall into the underdeveloped Marvel villain trap. However, with so much else going on and so many other characters sharing the screen, Thanos still fails to be a fully developed and sympathetic antagonist.”
Josh Spiegel, SlashFilm: “Whatever problems this movie has lie separate from almost all of the performances. All except the big one: Josh Brolin as Thanos. Brolin, to be fair, is fine as the literal Big Bad. For the first time, an MCU movie attempts to flesh out this character hell-bent on galactic genocide; unfortunately, Brolin’s firm motion-capture performance can’t hide the feeling that even now, Thanos is a dull, one-dimensional baddie.”
Kaila Hale-Stern, The Mary Sue: “I don’t know about Thanos being the best villain in the MCU’s history, as the Russos kept insisting. I think Killmonger and Loki still get to share that crown. Thanos is certainly more nuanced than many of Marvel’s villains, although he seems to flash back and forth from “sad dad” to “genocidal maniac” enough that you get whiplash. Josh Brolin does what he can, but it’s a damned shame about his CGI chin. Still, they’ve certainly made for a memorable character.”
Bryan Bishop, The Verge: “The prospect of a giant purple computer-generated bad guy has prompted some skepticism, but in context, the character is wonderfully effective. The visual effects undeniably capture the nuances of Brolin’s facial tics and mannerisms, allowing the actor to shine through all the CGI wizardry. It’s a good thing that it works so well, because Thanos is not the cardboard cutout villain that some previous Marvel bad guys have been. His master plan involves destroying half the universe, but in his own mind, his motivations are noble. He thinks he’s the hero of his story, and while nobody is going to agree with his tactics, his backstory does give his overall reasoning a perverse sort of logic. At several key moments in the film, Thanos nearly becomes a sympathetic character — even while he is doing truly horrific, unforgivable things. The biggest surprise of all may be that the most outlandish-looking Marvel villain is also its most complex and layered one, which simply wouldn’t be possible without the film’s synthesis of script, direction, performance, and visual effects.”
Angie Han, Mashable: “Thanos leaves something to be desired. Infinity War hints at surprising depths for its biggest of big bads, but never quite gets around to completing the full picture. At least not in this movie.”
Brian Truitt, USA Today: “…an outstanding antagonist and the best computer-generated baddie to date of any superhero film. Like Michael B. Jordan’s exceptional Killmonger in Black Panther, Thanos offers a level of human depth (thanks to Brolin) that elevates the entire movie”
Tim Grierson, Screen International: “Brolin exudes such calm, cruel malice that his evil is gripping and horrifying.”
Adam Graham, Detroit News: “…a full-blooded presence and a terrific foe to the heroes. It’s a credit to Brolin that through Thanos’ CGI rendering the actor behind him is able to shine through.”
Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic: “Thanos is the most interesting, and most complex, character here.”
Scarlett Johansson
American actress

Scarlett Ingrid Johansson is an American actress and singer. She was among the world’s highest-paid actresses from 2014 to 2016, has made multiple appearances in the Forbes Celebrity 100, and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Born: November 22, 1984 (age 33 years), Manhattan, New York City, New York, United States
Height: 1.6 m
Spouse: Romain Dauriac (m. 2014–2017), Ryan Reynolds (m. 2008–2011)
Children: Rose Dorothy Dauriac
Quotes
I definitely believe in plastic surgery. I don’t want to be an old hag. There’s no fun in that.
One of the best things for a woman to hear is that she is sexy.
I hope they make a video game of me. At least I wouldn’t have any cellulite then.


