?Black Widow? director Cate Shortland is the latest auteur to traverse the Sundance-to-Spandex pipeline

That tussle — between plucky particular person imaginative and prescient and omnipotent home model — is palpable in “Black Widow,” whereby Shortland’s hand is most modern within the movie’s actual world-adjacent scenes: when Natasha and Yelena (Johansson and Pugh) are participating in sisterly sparring matches, for instance, or processing a dysfunctional previous with their mother and father. Humorous, human-scale and observant, these sequences are punctuated with clockwork regularity by the fights, chases, fireballs and physics-defying stunts which can be required of the style, and which can be often dealt with by second-unit administrators. (On “Black Widow,” that was Darrin Prescott, greatest recognized for his work on such nonstop motion photos as “Child Driver” and the “John Wick” motion pictures.)