Superman (2025)

I grew up on Christopher Reeve's Superman, loved the caped hero the most out of the Saturday morning's Justice League ensemble, used to throw myself off the verandah, arms forward, in an effort to fly, and still get excited every time there is a reboot, sequel, update, or new actor cast in the role, but something feels really off about this James Gunn movie, which awkwardly blends cartoony, goofy kiddie stuff (repetitive — really repetitive — Superdog cuteness, for example) with deeply disturbing real-world issues (genocide, beheadings, mass death, and war), and what makes it worse is that the whole movie is populated with only deeply unlikeable characters — Lois and Clark, as presented here, unfortunately included. 

★★☆☆☆

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Shazam! Fury of the Gods (2023)

When mythological monsters run amok in Philadelphia and among them are angry unicorns only placated by handfuls of Skittles, things in this DC-related superhero movie start to teeter at my "switch off" point, especially given up to that point I'd already tired of a superhero movie that wants to champion a true mythological hero while also making him an annoying teen only as strong as each of his six team members, not to mention all those uncomfortable scenes showing teenaged boys holding hands and being romanced with 6000-year-old women. 

★★★☆☆

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Madame Web (2024)

This much maligned Marvel superhero flick isn't so bad if you are not fussed by its relatively small (for superhero movies) budget or by its lack of male muscle and brawn (instead we have female teamwork and clairvoyance), and you need to be able to look past some weird dubbed voice acting that is never explained, but Dakota Johnson, a presence as light as a feather (like her mum in Working Girl, you feel she might blow away in a wind) is captivating as Cassandra Webb, a paramedic experiencing strange things in the lead up to her discovering by movie's end that she is a spider-enhanced superhero. 

★★★☆☆

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Spider-Man:Across The Spider-Verse (2023)

First and foremost, this feature-length Spider-Man cartoon, which follows on from 2018's "Into The Spider-Verse", is art - captivating, enthralling mixed-media art that you can't take your eyes off - and then, on top of that, it is a thrilling sci-fi adventure, touching family drama, rousing coming-of-age story, love story and a superhero blockbuster against which all other superhero movies pale.

★★★★★

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Ant-man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023)

The uprising that takes place in this third Ant-Man movie against new villain Kang, an uprising that starts with the Ant-Man family suddenly being sucked into Kang's subatomic-sized Quantum universe, spans the family's meeting the tiny world's inhabitants and choosing to side with them in a long-running conflict, and an uprising that ends with the family's takedown of Kang in a dizzying film-final cgi battle, all seems to happen in a narrative time of about twenty minutes, which isn't to say the movie is exciting - it is written so that everything happens in the time it takes to shrug your shoulders and is in fact the least interesting of the three movies of the series.

★★☆☆☆

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Klaus (2019)

It hijacks the Christmas tradition and completely fabricates a Christmas origin story, but Klaus is worth watching for the beautiful hand-drawn animation alone, and for Jason Schwartzman's hilarious voice performance of the main character Jesper - a lazy son cast out by his father to a remote snowy outpost - who finds reward in hard work and in getting good out of people, albeit duplicitously.

★★★★☆

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Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

Taika Waititi's Thor episode dresses up the same old same old 'superhero battles a supervillain' plot in an 80s rock opera skin and fills it with big-name cameos, Taika Waititi's trademark kooky humour, and schoolkid-pleasing nonsense, but it is like this particular Marvel franchise is a hammer of God and try as he might Taika Waititi simply isn't able to lift it.

★★☆☆☆

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Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)

Some of these superhero cartoons feel especially lightweight, like an eight-page comic that is opened, flipped through, closed and discarded in almost one motion, like this sequel to the original Venom featuring a villain who is vividly brought to life by an oddly-wigged Woody Harrelson but only for a few moments — a moment involving chickens, one about a dinner date, and a sfx-laden car-ride moment — before he is dispatched in a climactic sfx spectacle, chomped by Tom Hardy's symbiot (investigative journalist Eddie Brock and his cartoony, toothy alien parasite, Venom, who leaps out from between Brock's shoulderblades) and then the credits roll, before we learn anything interesting — or anything at all —about Brock, about Venom (he eats chickens), about that villain, or about Brock's three "in-the-know" allies: a shopkeeper, a former lover, and the former lover's new man. 

★★☆☆☆

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Spider-man: No Way Home (2021)

I wasn't always rivetted, as evidenced by the fact I was able to make to-do lists in my head as the dizzying cgi-action sequences went on and on, but there's no denying the cleverness of this Spider-man movie (the sixth Marvel film to feature Tom Holland as the webslinger but the first to characterise him as a mature agent of salvation, not a juvenile wannabe meter-out of violent justice), one that makes all the previous iterations of Spider-man, the ones with Andrew Garfield or Toby Maguire or even, say, Shinji Tôdô an extension of this movie, neatly rendering moot any and all past inconsistencies in plot or character or circumstance that may have niggled at viewers of umpteen versions, making everything connected and sensible and, get ready for it, ripe for multiple concurrent Spider-man releases.

★★★★☆

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Dark Phoenix (2019)

All we want from these X-men movies are some scenes in which the mutants pool their resources and unleash their powers in imaginative combination and this 2019 episode, one of the "Muppet babies" ones of late, delivers lots of that - we especially liked the  train carriage scene - and we also get some more of poor Jean Grey's backstory, though after some new details about how she came into Professior Xavier's care as a child, her story becomes the same old same old one about her reckoning with her awesome powers - it seems the only new thing that can be done with this character is adding different adjectives to her name.

★★★☆☆

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Beowulf (2007)

With the exception of Ray Winstone in the title role who is transformed into the legendary, muscly Geatish warrior Beowulf, this computer-animated version of the Old English epic poem is populated by incredibly realistic animated versions of actors like Anthony Hopkins as King Hrothgar and Angelina Jolie as the mother of the marauding troll-like monster Grendell whom Beowulf is asked to slay, but far from eliciting wonder, the movie mostly leaves you feeling that director Robert Zemeckis' purpose for using such ultra realistic animation and not using the actors themselves was simply to be able to stage a series of peculiar nude fight scenes.

★★☆☆☆

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Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016)

Stephen King cites it as a source of inspiration and it has spawned innumerous cosmic horror boardgames, computer games, novels, tv shows and movies so it was only a matter of time before Lovecraftian horror, its psychotormented protagonists and its alien ghouls, was made the stuff of animated movies for preteens - right? - except with leaden voice acting, lifeless animation and dreary plotting that turns the Cthulhu mythos into an afternoon of decidedly unfun snowplay, this first of the Howard Lovecraft movies sucks more life out of the horror franchise than it injects new life into it.

★☆☆☆☆

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Paddington 2 (2017)

This time the Peruvian marmalade-loving bear gets himself in a tangle trying to make enough money to buy his aunt a book for her birthday, even ending up in prison charged with Hugh Grant's memorable villain's theft of said book, but because Paddington looks for the good in everyone, by the end of the movie he has enchanted the whole of Windsor Gardens, Notting Hill, a veritable Who's Who of the British screen playing among others Knuckles the prison cook and Dr Jafri and prison guards and inmates and newspaper stallholders and shut-ins - and of course the Brown family - who rally behind Paddington and help him with spectacularly animated, frequently hilarious, slightly overlong but ultimately extremely touching adventures.

★★★★☆

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Wreck-It Ralph (2012)

There's a positive message in this Disney animation about the young and ostracised  breaking free from the expectations of others and determining for themselves their role in life but this message is buried in such tiresome, convoluted, made-up arcade game mythology, only the most undemanding of young viewers will find any enjoyment sitting through the story of Wreck-It Ralph, an arcade game bad guy who seeks a hero's medal and so ventures outside of his own game and into other game worlds.

★☆☆☆☆

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Inside Out (2015)

It goes on a little bit with repetitive scenes of 'memory islands' collapsing, but Pixar's Inside Out, an animated movie-length Herman's Head about the inner workings of a depressed child's head, is surprisingly touching and a breath of fresh air for anyone who has grown weary of the positive psychology industry: the message of this film is the importance of acknowledging and sharing, and not simply blocking out or smiling through, Sadness.

★★★★☆

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Heavy Metal (1981)

This instantly repulsive but ultimately captivating animation, clearly the work of an all-male team of animators having a hoot, features copious amounts of sex and violence in an oddball collection of stories about a strange glowing ball that terrorises a young woman.

★★★★☆

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Paddington (2014)

The accident-prone marmalade-loving bear from darkest Peru is rendered in 3D in this big budget, entertaining and frequently very funny film adaptation of the beloved English children's books by Michael Bond.  

★★★★☆

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The Wind Rises (風立ちぬ) (2013)

This animation from Japan's Miyazaki Hayao, the last before his retirement in 2013, is undeniably beautiful - many scenes elicit an auto sensory meridian response with the animation capturing the quiet and tactility of grass rustling or slippered feet padding around or wind blowing - but there is also something mechanical about it and not just because it's a story of historical figure Jiro Horikoshi, an engineer who eventually designs the planes used by Japan in World War II.

★★★☆☆

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Hop (2011)

Cashing in on Easter but wholly unEastery, this religion-free kids movie features, would you believe, a magic candy factory on Rapa Nui (!) where a Russell Brand-voiced animated rabbit shirks his annual Easter responsibilities and instead goes to Hollywood to be discovered as a drummer on a talent show hosted by David Hasselhoff, receiving help along the way from a goofy human played by James Marsden.

★☆☆☆☆

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Zootopia (2016)

Real-world issues like racial stereotyping, our conscious and unconscious biases, and politics are cleverly packed into this entertaining Disney cartoon mystery about Judy the rabbit who wants to become a police officer, not a carrot farmer — a movie with such an important message you feel it should be mandatory viewing for all children.

★★★★☆

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