Death On The Nile (2022)

Kenneth Brannagh does a much better job with his adaptation of Agatha Christie's Death On The Nile than he did with his Murder On The Orient Express in 2019, but patchy acting (from Annette Bening, especially, and from Russell Brand, too, on the few occasions he is permitted to speak), wonky cartoony cgi environments, some important clues that couldn't be more clanging if they were delivered by a town herald, and some perverse embellishments to Christie's story (that absurd dancing, and that moustache backstory!) keep this from being a great or, given the excellent 1978 adaptation, even a necessary remake.

★★★☆☆

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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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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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