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. 

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025)

You would think setting The Fantastic Four: First Steps on a kitsch Austin Powers alternate Earth (after the 90s cartoon series (but with monochromatic blue replacing the lurid Austin Powers palette)) would help make this Marvel superhero movie a nostalgic joy, but rather than zing, it feels inert, ponderous, empty even, despite the cartoonish action, but helping fill the time is Julia Garner in another steely performance as a surfboarding metal bad guy, and while Pedro Pascale never fully inhabits his character, he is easy to look at as Reed Richards, the mild-mannered brainiac head of a superhero family.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Thunderbolts (2025)

I think Florence Pugh is great as Yelena Belova, the main character in a thrown-together-by-chance superhero ensemble called "Thunderbolts", a sort of rough-around-the-edges Avengers group ('the Bvengers') whose first movie outing cleverly takes on movie audiences' superhero fatigue by trumping it - the characters here are worldweary, eye-rolling rejects, and that includes the always terrific Julia Louis-Dreyfus as the cumbersomely named Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, an unflappable corrupt agent navigating career turmoil of her own callous creation.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Deadpool & Wolverine (2024)

My finger hovered over the OFF button right the way through the first half hour of this umpteenth Deadpool movie, one with long-dead Wolverine brought back to life and injected into the story for what proves very little reason, but then something Ryan Reynolds says made me laugh despite my wariness of wanton pop-song-accompanied violence and all of a sudden the credits were rolling, I'd laughed out loud multiple times and enjoyed what felt most like an extended comedy skit rather than a superhero movie full of nerdy superhero details to geek out on (it is that, but it is possible to ignore it)..

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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. 

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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. 

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Blue Beetle (2023)

It took me four or five sittings to get through this looong DC superhero movie that tells, with a glossy magazine look, the origin story of a superhero called Blue Beetle, a human teenager enhanced with a glowing blue parasitic alien technology that effectively disappears the movie's biggest asset, the young and good-looking Xolo Maridueña into a Power Ranger suit.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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.

★★★★★

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Doctor Strange And The Multiverse Of Madness (2022)

Given the empty hero-versus-villain plots and interchangeable cgi-action sequences of all these movies, Marvel seems to believe simply striking upon different skins and tones, for example giving Thor IV an 80s-rock theme or setting Venom in a noirish San Francisco or making it horror-lite or nanosized or snart-arsed is the best way to perpetuate its exponentially-growing raft of superhero movies and in the hands of director Sam Raimi, this sequel to Doctor Strange is certainly a unique look horror-lite Marvel entry with a very Carrie-like witch, oodles of risen-dead bad guys and evil souls reincarnate and so is perhaps for a slightly older than usual Marvel viewer....say ten.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Wakanda Forever, this 2022 sequel to Black Panther, certainly goes forever, told with the sweep of a grand war saga after Homer, which is a feat given almost the whole of its nearly three-hour runtime revolves around a single battle, and even though this conflict — between a deep-sea kingdom and Wakanda — seems easily-avoidable and founded on a misunderstanding, and even though two-and-a-half hours of not terribly interesting political exposition is spent trying to explain how and why it is avoidable to a Homeric catalogue of overwrought characters, the epic CGI fight goes ahead in the end.

★★☆☆☆

Cinecal: One Sentence Reviews

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.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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.

★★★☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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. 

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Morbius (2022)

 

This vampire superhero hardly endears himself to viewers when, early on, he slaughters a roomful of people, but somehow we are still asked to sympathise with him and gun for him as he enters into a battle with a similar bat-bite-influenced villain in what is, dreary-start-to-dreary-finish, a lethargic entry into the Marvel universe with the only thing less charismatic than the lead character being Jared Leto, the lead actor himself, whose appeal as a Hollywood superstar completely eludes me.

★☆☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

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.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Brightburn (2019)

Brightburn flips the Superman origin story, making the baby delivered by spacepod to a couple on a remote farm the villain, not the superhero, but in the end, after the movie resorts to gore - glass shards to one character's magnified cornea and a steering wheel to another character's head - to distinguish itself and pad the runtime, all that can be said is yes, this spacepod boy is a real villain, not a superhero - and that is the extent of it.

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS

Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings (2021)

The baffling appearance of Ben Kingsley - he turns up about halfway through playing a Shakespearean actor who believes real monkeys were cast in the Planet of the Apes - marks where this, until then by-the-numbers Marvel superhero movie, unravels, descending from that point into a Disney mess aimed at pre-teens involving a massive flying threadworm, ludicrous bow-and-arrow mastery, flip-flopping bad-no-good-no-bad-no-good guys, a headless turwomken (a turkey, wombat, chicken cross) and other cgi Star Wars-style creatures trying to make interesting a lengthy middle stretch of exposition, vague ten-ring powers, and a hero whose martial arts prowess goes viral (but whose friends don't seem to know) and whose early childhood years of training as a ruthless assassin are breezily referenced (but which have no obvious effect upon the present) - all up, a mess of too many hasty, childish ideas in a movie which, like Black Panther, ends without it having been firmly established why the superhero origin story is the lead character's movie and not the movie of one of the other more interesting, more impressive characters (but certainly not that embarrassing Ben Kingsley one).

★★☆☆☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS