Anupama Chopra reviews Spider-Man: Brand New Day, director Destin Daniel Cretton's entry into the franchise, which trades globe-trotting spectacle for a New York-bound story about the singular ache of adulting. Set four years after No Way Home — in which Doctor Strange made the world forget Peter Parker at Peter's own request — the film finds Tom Holland's Spider-Man handling what Florence Pugh's Black Widow calls small potatoes, from local robberies to an unstoppable armoured truck, while trying to find his way back to MJ and restore some equilibrium between his two selves. Anupama notes that after 37 MCU films this rootedness is the film's strength, even if Cretton and writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers strain to keep the storytelling personal, pleasurable and soaring all at once. Anupama finds the first hour has plodding stretches, with stakes that never feel urgent enough despite Jon Bernthal's Punisher and Mark Ruffalo's Hulk flitting in and out, though the pacing picks up in the second hour as motivations are revealed and the plot twists — including a gorgeously choreographed sequence pitting Spidey against the red-clad ninjas of The Hand. She singles out Zendaya, whose thoughtfulness and authenticity anchor the film, along with Holland, whose visible ageing into the role a decade after Captain America: Civil War adds heft to his angst, and Sadie Sink, who brings a tragic ferociousness to her part. Across two hours and twenty-five minutes the energy dips and flows, and too much of it feels like set-up for future tentpoles, but there are passages of poetry and enough heart to lift it above the superhero industrial complex — consistently watchable if not riveting, and that is the THR Bottomline. Spider-Man: Brand New Day is playing in theatres near you. #SpiderManBrandNewDay #SpiderManBrandNewDayReview #THRIndia