Destin Daniel Cretton makes superhero stories worth watching when he lets their characters have ordinary worries. We rate his patience with actors, though his interest in people does not always survive the larger action sequences.
Fi1m perspective
Peter Parker lives in a small flat, works, patrols and talks to almost nobody in Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026). Cretton gives that routine enough attention to make the isolation matter, rather than treating it as a pause before the next fight. Erik Sommers and Chris McKenna’s script helps by taking Peter’s circumstances seriously. For an hour, we thought this was the strongest of Tom Holland’s films in the role. Cretton is worth following for that willingness to spend time with someone who has nobody to talk to.
That concern was there in his breakthrough, Short Term 12 (2013), about a young woman caring for children nobody else wanted. It followed his feature debut, I Am Not a Hipster (2012), and drew on his work in a group home. The studio dramas The Glass Castle (2017) and Just Mercy (2019) came before the move into Marvel with Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021). Brie Larson became a recurring collaborator, with rehearsal an important part of his work with actors. In The Glass Castle, however, the shift between naturalism and melodrama makes the tone uncertain.
Shang-Chi showed that he could stage a fight we could follow, and the early stairwell and fire-escape brawls in Brand New Day are clean and fast. We lost interest when the people became pixels: those earlier fights had made it easy to follow who was where. The arrival of guest stars makes the film longer without making it more involving. Cretton can handle action, but the smaller confrontations here give us little reason to wish for larger ones.
Wonder Man (2026) is the stronger recommendation, although its achievement is shared with fellow directors Stella Meghie, Tiffany Johnson and James Ponsoldt. They keep the emphasis on character and give Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Ben Kingsley room to develop their warm, funny rapport. The showbusiness satire could be sharper, but the series lets its superheroes have interests beyond preventing catastrophe. That smaller scale suits what we value in Cretton’s work, without requiring every future film to be small. Start there if another evening spent preventing catastrophe sounds rather like work.
Biography
Destin Daniel Cretton is an American film director, screenwriter and producer. Born in Haiku, Hawaii, he studied at Point Loma Nazarene University and San Diego State University. After working for two years at a group home for at-risk teenagers, he began making short films and directed his feature debut I Am Not a Hipster in 2012.
Cretton is known for directing Short Term 12 (2013), The Glass Castle (2017), Just Mercy (2019) and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021). He directed episodes of the series American Born Chinese (2023) and co-created and directed episodes of Wonder Man (2026). He also directed Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026).
