Doctor Strange Is a Beautiful 'Headtrip'

Following up its latest Captain America flick can't have been easy, but Marvel Studios has apparently aced the task. With a 90% approval rating from both critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, Doctor Strange is a superhero movie almost universally adored. Here's what critics are saying:

• Sara Stewart had "a heck of a lot more fun than [she's] had at a Marvel movie lately," she writes at the New York Post. "With a mischievous, metaphysical flourish, Doctor Strange administers some much-needed CPR to the flagging superhero genre" and is one of only a few movies that truly delivers on its promise of a 3D spectacle. Benedict Cumberbatch "makes a funny, dashing addition to the Marvel pantheon," and Tilda Swinton is also "excellent."
• The film opens with a "spectacular, slow-motion car accident," but "it's nothing compared to the ocular extravaganza that follows," writes Michael O'Sullivan at the Washington Post. Viewers are in for "a fun and trippy excursion to a place where Marvel rarely seems to go: that is, to the retinal roots of the comics," he writes. Beware of motion sickness, though: the special effects are "quite literally, out of this world."

• "Doctor Strange creates its own world. And it's a badass beauty," writes Peter Travers at Rolling Stone, though he saves most of his praise for Cumberbatch. "What Robert Downey Jr. is to Iron Man ... that's what Benedict Cumberbatch is to Doctor Strange. By that I mean, he's everything." See the flick in 3D IMAX, he adds. "You're in for the hallucinatory headtrip of the year."
• In some ways, Doctor Strange is generic Marvel, yet refreshingly, the special effects "serve beauty and meaning rather than the grimly tedious destruction," Manohla Dargis writes at the New York Times. In fact, the film is "so visually transfixing, so beautiful and nimble that you may even briefly forget the brand," she writes. Plus "the space-and-time warping and mirrored realities … are a blast."

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