Spider-Man: Brand New Day Swings as High as Its Hero: Review

The best advertising Spider-Man: Brand New Day got this summer came from an article about a different movie. In a June 2026 GQ interview, Tom Holland explained that his experience making Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey led him to insist that everyone working on the film needed to know “why we are making this movie beyond the fact that it’s Spider-Man 4 and they make loads of money.” It’s an approach that served as a promise, explaining why Brand New Day is a remarkably coherent, often joyful film, dedicated to giving the character some growth and grace. Directed by Destin Daniel Cretton and penned by returning Spider-Man writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, the title of Holland’s fourth stand-alone Spidey movie implies a stand-alone adventure. However, it primarily functions as a direct sequel to No Way Home. The 2021 movie, which famously brought together multiple universes, ended with a reality-changing spell that saved those universes from collapsing but erased the existence of Peter Parker from everyone’s memory. (It felt worth recapping that bit, gentle reader, in case your own memory needed jogging.) The spell means that people remember being saved by Spider-Man, but those...