4 stars

One of the reasons I liked this latest in Tom Holland's version of the Spider-Man franchise is, I think, because I deliberately hadn't read too much about it, and hadn't had some of its bigger thrills spoiled for me.

For that reason, I'm going to be more obtuse than usual as I unpack this 27th film in the Marvel cinematic universe.

If you want absolutely no spoilers, perhaps read the rest of this review with your eyes deliberately blurred, like you're waiting for one of those secret 3D pictures to come into view.

But like a contestant on RuPaul's Drag Race, pulling of wig after wig and dress after dress, revealing an ever more thrilling series of hot looks, this film is a constant delight for fans of Spider-Man, fans of those endless Marvel films, or just fans of pop culture.

The surprises and reveals come thick and fast, and in a cinema as full as the one I saw this in, it must be an excruciating viewing experience for someone who as never seen one of these films, with the rest of the audience constantly gasping or cheering or saying 'Hey! That's so-and-so.'

Yes, I just said cheering. When was the last time you've been in a cinema when the audience cheered? In my screenings the entire audience cheered three times. This wasn't an advance screening crowd drunk on free champagne, this was a suburban audience at 5pm on a Thursday.

This is the third stand-alone film for the young British actor Tom Holland's take on Spider-Man. As a child actor, he was super opposite Naomi Watts in The Impossible, and he has been brilliant in these films and the handful of other Marvel films his Spider-Man has appeared in.

The story picks up immediately after the last film, Spider-Man: Far From Home, in which Spidey defeats Jake Gyllenhaal's Mysterio, a supposed super-powered hero, who was in reality just a tech genius with a wonderful sense of showmanship and a murderous intent.

While Mysterio is defeated, he leaves one last bomb to detonate at that film's end, and here we pick up our story - Mysterio announces to the world media Spider-Man's secret identity, that of American high school student Peter Parker.

Suddenly Peter (Holland) cannot go anywhere without a barrage of media coverage. Peter and girlfriend MJ (Zendaya), best friend Ned (Jacob Batalon), Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) and Stark Industries heavyweight Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau) are pulled in for questioning by some Homeland Security equivalent. For all of his heroism and his world-saving, Spider-Man is, after all, a vigilante.

In their final year at high school, Peter and his friends dream of continuing their learning journey together at MIT in Boston, but the three get rejection letters from the school due to Peter's notoriety. Seeing his friends' dreams crushed, he goes to an old friend for help.

The friend is magician Dr Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch), whom Peter asks to to perform a spell that will make the world forget that he is Spider-Man, hoping to bring some order back into his life, but Peter interrupts the magician mid-spell and so many things go wrong as a consequence, opening up a multiverse timeline as Marvel fans will already be familiar with from the recent Loki television series.

This is an epically big film. Big cast, big sequences, big budget, but director Jon Watts still manages to make this an intimate, character-driven work. He pulls this off in a number of ways that include focusing on performance and dialogue while enormous action is happening in the background, and by pulling his characters into intimate spaces. Watts cut his teeth as a director working for the satirical American newspaper The Onion, and he again and constantly underscores the drama with so much humour, as he did while directing the two previous Spider-Man outings.

The performances are all top-notch. He works with a number of extremely big-name actors, and the one already spoiled by appearing in the film trailer is Alfred Molina reprising his Doc Octopus role. Molina, as with a handful of other performers, is digitally de-aged, and we still enjoy strong and moving work, silliness of the character and gimmickry of the computer effects aside.

Having been a cinema worker myself for many years, I have to ponder how much the ushers must hate these Marvel films, with the fans all staying entirely throughout he credits to soak up the two now-mandatory post-credit sequences. That's 10 minutes in which they could have cleaned up everyones' spilled popcorn and have the cinema ready for the next session.

But for all of the recent think-pieces in newspapers around the world about the death of cinema in the post-COVID world, I have to say that it was practically impossible to find a seat for this film on opening day with more than 100 collective sessions to choose from in my home city.