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Captain America: Civil War Is Getting Rave Reviews

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Expect spandex to start making a Lazarus-esque comeback on the high street – the reviews for ‘Captain America: Civil War’ are in, and they’re really rather positive.

In fact, as the time of publishing, it’s riding high with a rare 100% 'fresh’ rating on the reviews aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, meaning that there’s yet to be a negative review.

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There are a few five-star notices flying around too, notably from Empire, which has proclaimed that it’s the best Marvel movie to date.

“Matching its blockbuster scale and spectacle with the smarts of a great, grown-up thriller, Captain America: Civil War is Marvel Studios’ finest film yet,” writes Dan Jolin.

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Concurring is, well, pretty much everyone else.

“If there’s a risk of the Marvel 'formula’ becoming stale, there isn’t any evidence of that here. Civil War isn’t just a damn-near-perfect popcorn crowd-pleaser; it doesn’t offer any easy answers for its combatants, or the world going forward,” says Jordan Farley in Total Film.

Justin Chang in Variety calls the film, which pits Chris Evans’ Captain America against Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man, after the US government calls for limits on the jurisdiction of superheroes, 'the most mature and substantive picture to have yet emerged from the Marvel Cinematic Universe’.

In USA Today, Brian Truitt adds: “Tear away the powers, abilities and egos, though, and the third Captain America movie is at its core a deep exploration of friendship and family and what sacrifices should be made to hold onto both.”

The Daily Beast’s Jen Yamato says: “Finally, a big budget superhero sequel that manages to be both effortlessly entertaining and utterly sobering, instead of just one of those things-or, as we’ve endured too frequently in the past, neither of them. (Looking at you, Batman v Superman.)”

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Scott Mendelson in Forbes is thus far the only mildly less celebratory reviewer (but only mildly) concluding: “Captain America: Civil War is a good movie, one worth enjoying on the biggest screen you can find, and one that will entertain the hell out of lots of people even as it goes against the grain in some surprising ways. But the film is periodically an exercise in long-form frustration, one which flirts with The Idiot Plot more often than it should.”

The 'idiot plot’, for the uninitiated, was a somewhat pragmatic term coined by the legendary critic Roger Ebert, described as 'any plot containing problems that would be solved instantly if all of the characters were not idiots’.

But that aside, the Russo brothers, who have directed the movie for Marvel, will likely be pretty pleased with how things are going so far.

The movie is out across the UK on April 29.

Image credits: Disney