Streaming on:<\/strong> Prime Video <\/span><\/p>\n In his New York office, private investigator Ben Reilly \u2014 wholly inhabited by Nicolas Cage \u2014 receives a client who believes his wife is cheating on him. The supposed cuckold is in the advanced stages of middle-age, and a stout fellow at that. Not a looker. So much so that when he hands Reilly a photo of his very beautiful, much younger partner, the droll gumshoe double-takes. \u201cYou a rich man?\u201d inquires Reilly, indelicately trying to make sense of it. Later, having learnt more about the woman in question, Reilly comments to his secretary, \u201cThe only thing I can say with any certainty is that she isn\u2019t married to that syphilitic walrus.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Spider-Noir<\/em> contains multitudes. Set in 1933, it is film noir with a keen wit and a sharp bite, its lead character (played, we must again stress, by Nicolas Cage) a variation on Spider-Man \u2014 except Reilly is more Humphrey Bogart than Peter Parker, lobbing out sardonic put-downs instead of friendly-neighbourhood wisecracks. It is an absurdly brilliant, brilliantly absurd concoction, on paper a ridiculous idea but in execution, genius. It is uncompromisingly hard-boiled, rattling along with rat-a-tat-tat dialogue, wall-to-wall with private dicks, shady dames and super-villains. And if you\u2019re a fan of Nicolas Cage losing his shit, oh boy.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the Spider-Man Noir from the comics, or the one from the animated Spider-Verse<\/em> films, which Cage voiced; it takes its cue from all that, but then runs \u2014 and runs, and runs \u2014 with it. Here, he is The Spider, possessed of all the arachnid advantages we\u2019ve come to expect, but when we find him in 1933, he\u2019s hung up his woolly mask, scarred by his failure to save the life of his girlfriend five years earlier. Instead, he\u2019s thrown himself into his PI work, although that soon involves run-ins with a motley crew of super-powered undesirables, all borrowed from the comics, and all here connected to the non-powered but very powerful mobster running New York\u2019s underbelly: the snarling, cigar-chomping Silvermane (a particularly Irish Brendan Gleeson, providing genuine menace). Some ugly, brutal gangster violence goes down with this guy. It ain\u2019t for kids.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n It just gets better and better, with a finale that delivers on every level.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n <\/p>\n The show really is none more noir, shot in the most gorgeous black-and-white, although it was simultaneously filmed in colour for philistines who might want that option. In monochrome, this New York is as romantic as it is dangerous. Blinding-white sheets of rain blast onto the streets. Sunlight smashes through Art Deco windows. Frames are painted by cigarette smoke. There is high-contrast lighting and rich shadow-play, accenting the themes: just as duality is a mainstay in noir, so it is here. Ben Reilly\/The Spider provides that in (Sam) spades, and this show never met a mirror it didn\u2019t like.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n What makes it truly noir, though, is the sad heart pumping through it. Reilly is classically nihilistic. Still, his abandonment of costumed heroism doesn\u2019t last too long, and let\u2019s just say that from the start, it\u2019s hard to deny the simple thrill of seeing Nicolas Cage web-sling his way around a skyscraper. The actor is having the time of his life here, munching on the scenery like he hasn\u2019t eaten in weeks: he resists delivering conservative line-readings at the best of times, and this show lets him run amok. One morning, when Reilly is still drunk, and hungover, he says, \u201cI need scrambled eggs, sausages\u2026 and\u2026 a biscuit,\u201d like he\u2019s simultaneously caressing and mocking the English language. A sequence in which he is finding his way with his powers again, contorting his limbs, clicking his bones, is maximum kabuki. Elsewhere, Cage\u2019s facial expression, as Reilly stumbles while trying to improv some Latin, is a facial expression quite possibly never seen before.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/p>\n It\u2019s a miracle that all of this works so well together. And it is full of surprises: one later episode, outstandingly titled \u2018Nightmare On A Gurney\u2019, serves up hallucinatory, Bu\u00f1uelian stuff, going psychologically and biologically deeper than any other Spider-Man outing has. It just gets better and better, with a rug-pulling season finale that delivers on every level, with Nicolas Cage in the middle of it all, fulfilling a lifelong dream he possibly didn\u2019t know he had, with every pore of his body, every restless, fizzy atom of his being.<\/p>\n <\/span><\/div>\n A big swing \u2014 oh, yes \u2014 that pays off from start to finish, this is an irresistible concoction, an utterly insane stew that somehow makes perfect sense. It is total joy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" New York, 1933. Ben Reilly (Nicolas Cage), aka The Spider, has given up the good fight. Soon, though, the fight comes for him… Streaming on: Prime VideoEpisodes viewed: 8 of 8 In his New York office, private investigator Ben Reilly \u2014 wholly inhabited by Nicolas Cage \u2014 receives a client who believes his wife is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9686,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-47"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9685"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9687,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9685\/revisions\/9687"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Episodes viewed:<\/strong> 8 of 8<\/p>\n![\"Spider-Noir\"](\"https:\/\/imdbnews.ir\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/spider-noir.jpg\")
<\/div>\n\n