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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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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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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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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Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (1987)

The Superman series starring Christopher Reeve had just given up by number four, worsening inexorably after its sombre, impressive number one, offering up a high camp number three and then, despite the good omen of Gene Hackman and Margot Kidder returning as Lex Luther and Lois Lane, the series serves up this preposterous number four, a movie in which Superman is pitted against a Lex Luther-created solar-powered drag queen and must find someplace to shove her where the sun doesn't shine.

★★☆☆☆

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Superman III (1983)

The one in which a down-and-out Gus Gorman (Richard Pryor) transforms into Mark Zuckerberg opens with a scene of slapstick mayhem in Metropolis, a prelude to the sprawling mess of loosely held together plots that follow: Superman attends his high school reunion in Smallville; reacquaints with old flame, Lana Lang; is exposed to synthetic kryptonite laced with cigarette tar; drinks irresponsibly; splits into a good and bad version of himself (the bad being a lecherous Superman with bigger hair and more mascara); and battles a supercomputer...and even though Lois Lane departs early and Lex Luther is nowhere to be seen, and despite its unprecedented levels of campiness, in 1982 this third Christopher Reeve Superman movie was everything this then-seven-year-old Superman fan could have hoped for!

★★★★☆

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Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)

Zack Snyder opens this with the trauma of Bruce Wayne's childhood - a backstory no-one needs to see, not now, not again - and from this tired start it is clear he has approached his job of launching DC Comics' Justice League franchise like an overzealous fanboy wanting to include evvveeerything, mashing together Nolan's Dark Knight series with his own 2013 Henry Cavill Superman movie and ending up with a monstrous, laborious, not-fun-at-all Justice League origin story that briefly features a personality-free Wonder Woman and an overly familiar Lex LuHeathLedgZuckerbergJokethor...surely jumping straight into an already assembled Justice League-proper movie would have been more fun than this!?

★★☆☆☆

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Superman (1978)

Grandly staged with big name stars including Marlon Brando and Terence Stamp, and with big special effects, this first big budget superhero movie is an enduring best, unhurriedly telling the origins of the all-American Superman and how he saves the world from a trio of galactic invaders under the command of General Zod.

★★★★★

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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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Superman Returns (2006)

This reboot of the Superman franchise tries too hard to make Superman relevant to modern audiences and achieves the opposite, with modern audiences having to agree with the views Lois Lane expresses in her Pulitzer Prize-winning article, "Why the world doesn't need Superman" -- she is right, he barely survives a real estate controversy and the world clearly doesn't need him.

★★☆☆☆

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