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    Marvel Studios Unveils ‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’

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    The studio announced news of the film’s release on Saturday at the pop-culture convention Comic-Con International in San Diego.Marvel Studios has unveiled a trailer for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” — the long-awaited sequel to its hit film “Black Panther” — which it said would open in cinemas in the United States on Nov. 11.The teaser, screened on Saturday at the pop-culture convention Comic-Con International in San Diego, features several cast members from the first film, as well as a tribute to Chadwick Boseman, who played one of the protagonists, King T’Challa. Boseman, whose image appears on a mural in the teaser, died from colon cancer at age 43 in 2020.The film follows Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), Shuri (Letitia Wright), M’Baku (Winston Duke), General Okoye (Danai Gurira) and the elite women warrior group Dora Milaje (including Ayo, played by Florence Kasumba) as they “fight to protect their nation from intervening world powers in the wake of King T’Challa’s death,” the studio said on Saturday in a news release.“As the Wakandans strive to embrace their next chapter, the heroes must band together with the help of War Dog Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) and Everett Ross (Martin Freeman) and forge a new path for the kingdom of Wakanda,” the studio added.The trailer — a visually dazzling glimpse of the future world of Wakanda — is set to a cover of the Bob Marley song “No Woman, No Cry.” Ludwig Goransson, the film’s composer, described it as “an aural first glimpse of Wakanda Forever.”The “sound world” for the film, he said in the statement, was created during trips to Mexico and Nigeria, where he and others worked with traditional musicians to learn about the “cultural, social and historical contexts of their music.”Then, they built a catalog of instrumental and vocal recordings together with those artists, and “began to build a musical vocabulary for the characters, story lines and cultures of Talocan and Wakanda,” Goransson said, adding that the idea was to create “an immersive and enveloping sound world for the film.”The film’s release was announced by the president of Marvel Studios, Kevin Feige, who also noted the upcoming release of several other films and shows, including “She-Hulk: Attorney at Law,” starring Tatiana Maslany; “Secret Invasion,” featuring Samuel L. Jackson and Ben Mendelsohn; and “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.”Speaking at the Comic-Con event on Saturday, Nyong’o said that it felt “monumental” to return to Wakanda. “The universe of Wakanda is expanding,” she said. “You guys have a lot to look forward to.”Gurira, who plays Okoye, the general of Wakanda’s elite female bodyguards and the head of armed forces and intelligence, said that when she was growing up in Zimbabwe she always looked up to the way America “made superheros onstage and on the big screen.”To the crowd, she added: “You’re taking in that culture, and you’re celebrating it. That, to me, is everything.” More

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      ‘Nine Days’ Review: Belief in the Beforelife

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      In this drama featuring Winston Duke and Zazie Beetz, unborn souls are given a chance at life on Earth.“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov. We have been imagining and describing one of those ostensible eternities — the afterlife — for millenniums. “Nine Days,” the ambitious and often impressive debut feature from the writer-director Edson Oda, surprises by positing a prelife world, and a vetting process determining which souls are awarded a term on earth.In a small house in the middle of a desert, a stocky, quiet man named Will (Winston Duke) watches a bank of tube TVs, recording their feeds on VHS cassettes. These POVs show the lives of the people he’s “passed.”Just as he’s meeting, one by one, a new group of individuals to assess, one of his people in the world ends their life, which shakes Will to the core. He gets obsessed over why. Will this affect his ability to look at his new charges with fairness?“Nine Days” is more about questions than answers. It’s not an overtly political film, in any sense. Will’s screens don’t seem to depict any human beings who aren’t at least in the vicinity of the middle class. When Will is pitching his candidates on his process, he tells them of “the amazing opportunity of life,” and that if they pass they will be “born in a fruitful environment.” But later Will blurts out some thoughts to his friend and neighbor Kyo (Benedict Wong) suggesting Will believes himself something of a con man.The candidates are, arguably, stock characters with some sensitively added value. Alexander (Tony Hale) just wants to have beers and hang out. When he learns that Will himself once lived on earth — the film’s realm encompasses souls both “passed” and those never born — he can’t figure out why Will is reluctant. We know that Emma (Zazie Beetz) is going to be a special kind of free spirit by the insouciance she displays when showing up late for her first appointment.Oda is a very assured and sometimes inspired filmmaker, and he handles his actors beautifully. Duke and Beetz in particular deliver performances for the ages. And the movie’s inquiries, about ethics, morality, consciousness and the ability to hang on in this brief crack of light we’re sharing at the moment, are pertinent. But the narrative conceits of “Nine Days,” while exquisitely constructed, are intricate to the point of laborious. At times the movie almost sinks under their weight.Nine DaysRated R for language and themes. Running time 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More