Effective. Review on Doctor Strange

Scott Derrickson’s adaptation of this exotic entry in the Marvel canon lives up to its title, in mostly good ways. Stephen Strange(Benedict Cumberbatch) is a deft, brilliant, and ambitious New York neurosurgeon who loses the use of his hands in a car accident. When medical science gives up on him, he seeks occult help, travelling to a compound in Nepal that’s run by the Ancient One(Tilda Swinton) and her associates, Mordo(Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Wong(Benedict Wong). There, Strange is trained in metaphysical martial arts, which he deploys in battle against Kaecilius(Mads Mikkelsen), a renegade mystic who attacks the world’s three centers of supernatural power—New York, London, and Hong Kong. Derrickson realizes visions of paranormal cataclysm with vertiginous glee; sidewalks, buildings, whole cities rise up, turn sideways, and churningly intertwine with an Escher-like intricacy. Strange’s propulsion into transcendental realms plays like a comic-book caricature of Terrence Malick’s cosmological imagery, and the movie’s high-stakes games with time reversal and out-of-body combat have a lighthearted but grandly wondrous exhilaration that offers sufficient distraction from the cardboard plot. With Rachel McAdams, as a surgeon who repairs Strange’s heart, literally and metaphorically.