If you’ve had your fill of comic book movies that’s between you and your Zod, but SUPERMAN (2025) is a particularly good one. It’s literally and figuratively colorful, it’s perfectly cast, it’s joyously funny and silly, but it deeply and sincerely loves its characters, especially its cornball hero and his do-gooder point-of-view. Also it heavily features cinema’s first great super hero pet. Being the rare one of these with a writer/director (James Gunn, SLITHER), not to mention the advantage of being the official kick off to a new do-over DC Comics (Detective Comics Comics) cinematic universe, it has a very specific setting, tone and visual style. In that sense it reminds me of what I liked about comic book movies in the ‘90s, but otherwise it feels very modern.
I personally believe that there’s more than one way to make a good movie, so I will not be disavowing Zack Snyder’s MAN OF STEEL, but I like that this one takes the exact opposite approach. Snyder’s version emphasized the awe – it was about a god-like being coming to a quasi-realistic earth, and how humanity reacts. We witnessed him as mortals, looking up trying to catch a shaky glimpse of him in the sky. Gunn gives us a world where “meta-humans” have been around for centuries, and Superman has been public for three years, so people are used to it. Right off the bat Gunn and director of photography Henry Braham (ROAD HOUSE remake) put the camera steady on Superman’s face when he flies, like we’re right there with him. He’s one of us. (read the rest of this shit…)
THE HARDER THEY FALL (no relation to THE HARDER THEY COME) is one of the better movies I’ve seen this year, and definitely one of the better made-for-Netflix ones. It’s a western with an all-Black, all-star cast, and the opening title card says, “While the events in this story are fictional… These. People. Existed.”
