‘Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’ Review

metroweekly.com:

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (★★★☆☆).Diehard fans of Spidey comics, games, cartoons, and movies will have a field day trying to spot every iteration of Spider being, gathered from various storylines and product lines, some dating back decades, who pop up here.

But there are far too many for our hero, Miles Morales, the bright Brooklyn teen introduced as the new Spider-Man in the 2018 animated Oscar-winner Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, to fully grasp.Miles (Shameik Moore) is still stuck on Gwen Stacy (Hailee Steinfeld), a fabulous Spider-Woman from another dimension, who teamed with him and a loosely assembled squad of Spider-friends in the first film to defeat Kingpin and Doctor Octopus, and destroy the villains’ black hole-spawning collider.A masterpiece of style and storytelling, Into the Spider-Verse ended with the sound of Gwen’s voice ringing out from her dimension to contact Miles relaxing in his room.

Across the Spider-Verse — directed by Joachim Dos Santos, Justin K. Thompson, and Soul co-creator Kemp Powers — picks up there, following a clever spoken-word intro by Gwen, beautifully delivered by Steinfeld, and quickly clarifies that Gwen has found a way to travel across dimensions on her own.The universe she inhabits on Earth-65 is visualized in a gorgeously paint-streaked animation style that contrasts softly with the digital, double-image edges of every surface on Earth-1610, home to Miles and his concerned parents, Rio (Luna Lauren Vélez) and “PDNY” lieutenant Jeff (Brian Tyree Henry).They might also be concerned about which focus group led to Jeff’s surname change, since Lt.