A Great Villain Helps Avengers 3

Your favorite Marvel superheroes from Black Panther to Spiderman rally against a villain hoping to destroy half the universe in Avengers: Infinity War, the lengthy (2 hours, 40 minutes) third installment in the series slated to wrap up next year. Setting the stage for an epic conclusion, the film directed by brothers Joe and Anthony Russo is pretty well received with a 85% rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. What they're saying:

• "Welcome to the ultimate superhero extravaganza," Mara Reinstein writes at US Weekly, calling Avengers: Infinity War "a massively ambitious, thrilling, satisfying, rock 'em sock 'em epic crowd-pleaser to the highest degree." She found the most joy in scenes in which superheroes get acquainted. They're "chock full of clever one-liners," she says.
• Richard Roeper ranks the film "somewhere in the bottom half of the Top 10" of Marvel's 19 superhero pictures, despite it being "the biggest and most ambitious Marvel movie yet." That doesn't mean it's not worth seeing. "There's plenty of action, humor and heart," he writes at the Chicago Sun-Times, noting the film "kicks into a particularly exhilarating gear when the action shifts to Wakanda."

• Stephanie Zacharek thinks the film tries to do too much. It's "more of a fulfillment center" than a movie. As a result, "there's no pacing … It's all sensation and no pulse," she writes at Time. "The movie's climax scratches at something close to melancholic grandeur," she continues. "But it's way too little too late."
• Todd McCarthy disagrees. "The climax is startling in its gravity" and an after-credits teaser "amplifies the ending by serving up even more questions," he writes at the Hollywood Reporter. He was also impressed with Josh Brolin's performance in this "densely packed superhero orgy." He gives villain Thanos "an unexpectedly resonant emotional dimension, making him much more than a thick stick figure of a supervillain."

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