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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The Flash (2023)

Even The Parent Trap in 1961 does a better job of duplicating its star (Hayley Mills, playing twins) than this peculiar 2023 DC exercise that randomly turns the second-versions of lead actor Ezra Miller into a weird slack-jawed cartoon - sometimes completely unnecessarily, like at times when there is only one Ezra Miller on screen! - and these NQR Polar Express doppelgangers distract from an already uninvolving Back To The Future time travel multiverse superhero origin story, one about a super-super-fast, red-lycraed Flash.

★★★☆☆

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Black Adam (2022)

The acting's a bit wonky in this one, not just from the kid (but from the kid in particular) and it features a bunch of cheap-working superheroes collectively called the Justice Society that most audience members won't know or care about (the group includes a particularly unhelpful 'swirling wind' girl and her sidekick, a lumbering dope who grows to giant size but can't think of anything to do with this skill to help out), but check it out: the tone adopted is interesting, Dwayne Johnson's title antihero behaves in a most unsuperherolike fashion, mercilessly killing bad guys in a cgi fury, and it is also interesting to think about how this fits with other episodes of the so far mostly lugubrious DC Universe series of movies.

★★★☆☆

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The Batman (2022)

When the topic of The Batman came up, a teenager I tutor summed it up perfectly as a movie about a "miserable Batman with miserable friends fighting a miserable villain in a miserable city", and he wasn't wrong, because this brooding restyling of the franchise positions Robert Pattison's Batman as a sullen emo and has him, Zoe Kravitz's slinky Selena, the mobsters and Gotham street crims, the justice system, and in fact the entire city of Gotham sunk in a psychotic depression while The Riddler, a Heath Ledger-Joker-echo, murders public figures and taunts authorities with tightly scripted David Berkowitz-style codes - all of which oppressive heaviness is fine - it's Batman, afterall - until the final act reveals the supposed root of the city's decay and it feels, in comparison, almost trivial.

★★★☆☆

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Zack Snyder's Justice League (2021)

It didn't help that an hour in our internet cut out and my viewing partner accidentally drummed up the original 2017 cut, not this 2021 refashioning by Zack Snyder, leaving us perplexed by scenes we'd already seen playing out of sequence, but even once we got back on track this unnecessarily long re-release stretches a bad two-hour movie to an interminable four-hour slog: a first hour and a half of false starts, a muddled middle split pointlessly between Batman's Justice League recruitment drive and Steppenwolf's "mother box" raids (the raids are doing the recruiting, making Batman's story redundant), and a finale that comes only after too many musical lamentations (each time Wonder Woman appears), too many dopey Flash close-ups, far too many little-boy shrugs from Superman, and way too much of that cyborg character so stiff and miserable we never once connect — four hours later, it isn't Justice League so much as Justice beLeaguered.

★★☆☆☆

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WW84 (2020)

Towards the end of this sprawling, goofy superhero almost-cartoon, one surely modelled on Superman II and III, Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman has trouble pushing her way through a maelstrom of wind and swirling A4 papers — I don't know why — and her plight mirrors that of her audience who have at that point struggled for nearly three hours with this sequel's maelstrom of unclear ideas, left asking questions like, "Whose wishes have been granted and whose wishes have been renounced?", "When a wish is renounced, what shifts in reality take place?", "Why wasn't Steve Trevor simply magicked to 1984 in his own body instead of this movie's convoluted Oh God! You Devil! bodyswapping nonsense?", "Was that schmuck (this movie's Oh God! You Devil! original rockstar) ever missed by anyone?", "What is a broadcasting machine and how is it that a boy on a freeway can communicate with his father via it?", "Why can't today's sfx technology make superfast running look good?" and, the question that most preoccupied me during WW84's exceedingly long runtime: "Do superhero movie studios deliberately ride this wave of excellent originals followed by overcooked, cheap sequels, seeing what they can cheaply get away with once audiences have bought-in?"

★★★☆☆

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Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn (2020)

There are no characters and no acting here, just famous people in make-up in this terribly unengaging anti-superhero movie from the DC stable, a movie so pedestrian, so uninteresting it can't even think of anything fun to do when staging a fistfight staged in a carnival funhouse, and while it is nice to see women in the front seat of a superhero vehicle, this twisted, damaged group of caricatures unite only in the final scenes and only under threat of death, leaving the supposed girlpower message as flat and joyless as everything else.

★☆☆☆☆ 

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Shazam! (2018)

A wizard grants a kid a confusing mix of superpowers, and while the kid and the audience are still trying to figure out how all these powers work, this DC superhero movie, a cross between Spider-man and Deadpool, ends, finishing with an extended sequence like a Disney/Power Rangers-esque "effects spectacular" that celebrates family and panders to very young viewers but leaves the hero poorly defined and a bit irrelevant. 

★★☆☆☆

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Joker (2019)

A Rupert Pupkin's neurological condition, which causes him to laugh uncontrollably and inappropriately, continues through a compounding series of abject miseries.

★☆☆☆☆

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Aquaman (2018)

When Aquaman says late in the movie he's doing what he's doing for all the people he loves, he must mean his dad and a bald bikie who asks for his picture in a bar - oh, and perhaps an arguing news team - because they're the only people we see him grunt and stare impassively at in his "surface" life, while under the water the most remarkable thing going on, much more interesting than the Lord of the Borings political fantasy going on between kings and Ocean Master and m'ladies on seahorseback, is everyone's underwater hair, by far the most animated thing in this terribly acted and very uneven superhero movie, a bit Brendan Fraser's The Mummy, a bit LoTR, a bit kitsch Flash Gordon scifi but always, most consistently, um, wet.

★★☆☆☆

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Batman (1989)

The batsuit is so rigid poor Michael Keaton can only turn his head by moving his whole upper body - it looks like Batman slept badly - and the movie, er, literally follows suit in that it too is awkward and unmoving: Tim Burton's Gotham is a poorly populated theatre set, the hero is oddly mannered and neurotic, and the story is lifeless with neither the camp fun of the Adam West tv series (except for Jack Nicholson's Joker's half-hearted band leader marches x 2) nor the weight and menace of the much later Christopher Nolan movies.

★★☆☆☆

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Justice League (2017)

The Infinity War of the DCEU brings together Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman and someone called Cyborg to fight a bad guy called Thanos, I mean Bane, I mean Steppenwolf who is seeking the Infinity Stones, I mean the Motherstones, I mean the mother boxes that will allow him to destroy the world, and while it is not as heavyhanded as previous instalments, Justice League continues the mistakes of many previous DCEU instalments like bad editing that results in inexplicable scenes (green slime and an 'electroaxe' with no user instructions, for example), it bites off more than it can chew (couldn't Superman have just woken up on the right side of the bed?), and it features banter between its heroes that just isn't as fast and fun as that of the heroes' Marvel counterparts.

★★★☆☆

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Wonder Woman (2017)

After her personality-free debut in the lamentable Batman vs Superman, Wonder Woman comes into her own in this blockbuster and even though hers is the same fish-out-of-water story as Thor's, full of the same WWI derring-do as 'Captain America', DCs 'Wonder Woman' still manages to be a refreshing change from all the movies about her male colleagues and a break from the smart-arses of the Marvel universe, featuring a mature, sensible female hero set to become a panacea for all that is wrong with the male world.

★★★★☆

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The Dark Knight Rises (2012)

No Batman movie has ever taken itself quite so seriously as this third episode of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, a long and deadly earnest superhero opera that grows increasingly loud and monotonous as it goes on and on with a booming soundtrack that for almost three hours sounds like it is heralding the rise of the valkyries - your patience will be tested and you'll want to give it all away when suddenly towards the end a final act revitalises things.

★★★★☆

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Man of Steel (2013)

This frenetic but enjoyable instalment of the Superman franchise has Superman looking more like Wolverine than ever before - muscly, hairy, and fearless - and features dizzying but thrilling action sequences only slightly marred by the sight early on of Russell Crowe riding a Jar Jar Binks-style dragonfly around Krypton.

★★★☆☆

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