Den of Geek Gives Brand New Day Four Stars. Its Real Verdict Is About Tom Holland.

By release week, the Brand New Day review conversation already has a rhythm to it: Rotten Tomatoes sitting in the low 90s, review counts climbing past seventy, most outlets converging on some version of “best reviewed since No Way Home.” Den of Geek's review breaks from that shape a little. David Crow's four-star write-up isn't really grading the ensemble. It's grading Tom Holland.

Crow writes that Holland has “never been better portrayed on screen” and is “in better command of the character than ever before.” That's the most unqualified praise for Holland specifically that any review on our tracker has offered — ahead of TIME calling him “a smart, sensitive actor”, and well ahead of the Guardian's read that Zendaya outshines him.

This is a look at what Crow's review actually argues for that claim, what he still holds against the film wrapped around it, and where a four-star, Holland-first review sits next to the two we've already covered in detail.

What “Liberated” Actually Means In Crow's Review

Crow's framing starts with a contrast. Holland's earlier MCU outings had, in his words, “athleticism” and a “zippy joie de vivre” — real qualities, but ones that came packaged with franchise mechanics that kept his range on a leash. In Brand New Day, Crow writes that Holland “is finally liberated to play the joy, as well as the agony and sorrow” — not a different performer, an expanded one.

Part of that expansion, per the review, comes from how much of the film Holland spends under the mask. Going “long stretches wearing the mask and relying only on his body language,” Crow argues, pushes Holland toward something closer to silent-film performance — what he calls a “Tramp-like sense of physical comedy,” a direct nod to Chaplin.

Holland is finally liberated to play the joy, as well as the agony and sorrow.

That Chaplin comparison isn't just Crow reaching for a reference. It turns out to be where the choice actually came from.

The Premise Crow Is Grading Against

Brand New Day picks up five years after Doctor Strange's spell erased Peter Parker from the world's memory. Peter promised MJ and Ned he'd find his way back to them once the dust settled. Instead, per Crow's account of the plot, he chose isolation — pouring everything into being Spider-Man and nothing into being Peter. The story starts moving when MJ and Ned return to the city, forcing him to face the loneliness he built for himself, and the feelings for MJ he never actually dealt with.

Cretton's Direction: “The Best Looking Spidey Since Raimi”

Director Destin Daniel Cretton gets some of the review's strongest praise. Crow calls this “the best looking Spidey has been since the days of Raimi,” crediting a “quieter, more measured gaze” that still leaves room for standard MCU levity — a harder balance to strike than it sounds, and one Crow says the film mostly pulls off.

The Chaplin influence, it turns out, isn't just Crow's own comparison — he reports that Cretton cited Chaplin as reference material during production, which is presumably where the mask-on physical comedy direction actually originates, rather than being something Holland improvised alone.

Zendaya, Bernthal, and an Inverted Amnesia Trick

Crow calls Peter and MJ “the heart of Spidey mythos,” and argues that Holland and Zendaya's real-life marriage deepens the on-screen read of it. The film's structural trick is inverting the usual amnesia story: instead of the hero being the one who's forgotten, everyone else has the memory gap this time. That reversal, per Crow, produces “longing and awkward pauses between the two” that “burn with meaning” rather than reading as a rehash of the No Way Home ending.

Jon Bernthal's Punisher gets singled out too — “a genuinely wonderful addition,” per Crow, bringing warmth and complexity to Frank Castle as Spidey's “workplace friend.” Crow frames the pairing as “a blending of the Marvel Universe tapestries” that reflects old-school comic-book logic about how tightly wound New York's street-level heroes have always been — the same instinct our own read on Castle and Banner as competing mentor figures has been tracking.

Sadie Sink's Villain: Good, But One Franchise Too Many?

Sadie Sink is “quite good in the role,” Crow writes, though he flags that her character — whose identity the site has already covered in full — plays like “a backdoor pilot for another Marvel saga entirely.” It's a specific complaint about how her arc is being used inside this film, not about the performance itself, and Crow ties it directly to his bigger complaint about focus.

Where the Four Stars Come With Fine Print

Crow's core criticism is tonal inconsistency and narrative bloat. The film is, in his words, “heavily preoccupied in large swaths” with servicing the wider MCU rather than staying with Peter's own story. Three complaints do most of the work in that argument:

• Mark Ruffalo's Hulk cameo, which Crow says is “needlessly and superfluously stuffed into the yarn almost purely for the trailer sizzle”
• Peter's own anxiety-driven subplots, which “feel lost amid competing storylines” rather than getting room to land
• The Chris McKenna / Erik Sommers screenplay, which Crow says turns “busy” in a way that dilutes the intimate character moments that are otherwise the film's real strength

The film at times feels cluttered with its meta-franchise obligations.

How This Stacks Up Against TIME and The Guardian

Set next to the site's other two review breakdowns, Crow's take is the outlier specifically on Holland. TIME's Stephanie Zacharek calls him “a smart, sensitive actor” — real praise, but not a ranking against his own past work — and lands on almost exactly the same pacing and plot-density complaints Crow does, without a star rating to hang them on. The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw goes further in the other direction, arguing Zendaya “outshines” Holland outright. Crow is the only one of the three to call this Holland's best performance in the role, flatly, rather than a strong turn inside a crowded film.

On the numbers, four stars is a comfortably positive review rather than an outlying rave — our tracker on the wider critical response has the film sitting around 90-91% on Rotten Tomatoes from more than seventy counted reviews. Den of Geek's score sits inside that majority; what makes the review notable isn't the rating, it's how specifically it argues for Holland within it.

So Is This Actually Tom Holland's Best Spider-Man Performance?

On Crow's own terms: yes, and he doesn't hedge it. The physical-comedy work under the mask, the wider emotional range, the command he says Holland now has over the character — all of it is presented as clearing the bar the first three films set, not just matching it. What Crow doesn't do is pretend the film deploys that performance perfectly. His own review spends real space on exactly where the franchise gets in Holland's way.

The human element shared between Holland and Bernthal, or Holland and Zendaya, or Holland and Batalon, is where Brand New Day's greatest strength lies.

Holland has spent much of the press tour framing this run as a victory lap, and a review built almost entirely around his own performance being the best of his career is close to the exact validation that framing was reaching for — even if Crow's own scorecard says the film carrying him there isn't quite as disciplined as he is.