X-Men Finally Bounces Back

Critics are largely impressed with the latest installment in the X-Men series: X-Men: First Class is certainly an improvement over the last few. A sampling of reviews:

• “After a close call with franchise death, the X-Men film series has bounced back to life with its fifth installment, rescued with a straight injection of pop,” writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. The film “indulges in period nostalgia as it gazes into the future, using the backdrop of the cold war to explore how the past informs the present (while also blowing stuff up).”

• Peter Travers, writing in Rolling Stone, calls X-Men: First Class “a fireworks display of action, smarts, and fun, plus a touch of class from actors who can really act.” This "primal blast of a prequel" reminds us why we used to love the X-Men franchise.
• For Elizabeth Weitzman, the film is “big, bright, savvy, and so expansive you'll undoubtedly leave feeling you got your money's worth,” she notes in the New York Daily News.
• But not everyone’s charmed: In the Los Angeles Times, Betsy Sharkey calls the new X-Men “a frustrating mire of multiple plots, overreaching special effects, leaden ancillary players, and world-ending military standoffs that have all the tension of a water balloon fight.”

(More X-Men stories.)