​James Gunn’s Superman casts its Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) as a former punk enthusiast, a fitting interest for a burgeoning journalist speaking truth to power.  There’s nothing punk about the character of Superman (David Corenswet), a farm-raised hayseed whose  goofy alter-ego Clark Kent doesn’t take much acting.  Contra Kill Bill, Clark Kent and Superman are the same person, except Kent doesn’t shoot lasers out of his eyes and punch kaijus in the jaw.  In response to Lois’ jibes about his corniness and earnestness, Kent retorts that maybe that’s the new punk if her irony and complexity is the norm.  In the wake of Zack Snyder’s grimdark imagining of the character, Gunn brings a new sensibility to DC and Warner Bros, redefining punk in opposition to Snyder and Gunn’s old employer at Marvel, who also have an allergy to earnestness.  Some real-world resonances and old-fashioned spectacle complete the picture and get Gunn’s tenure as studio head at DC off to a stirring start.

After so, so many superhero movies, Gunn’s Superman has to be credited with assuming the audience has heard of the character.  Beginning well after Superman’s emergence, the film starts with Lois and Kent in passionate love, with her full knowledge of who Kent is, and with multiple other superheroes operating in the world.  Superman’s parents back on Krypton appear on a video screen only and the planet itself isn’t shown.  Just like no one needs to see Bruce Wayne’s parents killed again, Gunn pushes the story into the space where he wants it, which is in the middle of Superman actively thwarting one of Lex Luthor’s (Nicholas Hoult) schemes.  Immediately before the film begins, Superman has stopped an invasion of one advanced country into another defenseless one, and in the aftermath, he’s suffered his first defeat at the hands of the invader’s own super-powered fighter.  Combined with public questioning of his acting like a one-man global policeman, Superman has begun to doubt his purpose and his methods.  More meddling by Luthor and his minions uncovers Superman’s true purpose on earth, turning most everyone against him and Luthor is then empowered to take federally-backed action against a savior who has been recategorized as a menace.
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Superman has been in production for a long time, so any comparisons to the real world are accidental, or perhaps evergreen.  Tech titans who can’t tolerate being away from the center of attention have been around since Gunn was making Troma films.  Every time Peter Thiel talks about the antichrist, one can imagine Hoult taking notes for the sequel.  The chillingly casual way that Hoult’s Luthor breezes past any safeguards in any system, be they legal or extradimensional, is a grim embodiment of moving fast and breaking things.  Obviously no physical match for Superman, Luthor fights through a surrogate who responds to the numbers called out by Luthor, each number defined as an attack or reversal.  Hoult is excellent as a man in control who wants to lose control, spending time and effort and money on getting to the point where he can bludgeon an alien to death, spitting out commands with greater and greater amounts of spittle-flecked intensity.

As there’s always been grandiose industrialists, so too has there always been exploitation of weaker nations, and the obvious comparison in 2025 is unavoidable.  Where would Superman be if zealots were blocking aid trucks on their way to feed starving children?  Would he intervene as a quadcopter took aim at a teen about to cross a line invisible and secreted from him?  Ta-Nehasi Coates said of the Israel-Palestine conflict that he’d been told his whole life that it was complicated, and then he went there and observed that it was actually quite simple.  That’s what this version of Superman’s all about, that there is a time to cut through complexity and obfuscation and arrive at the point of being able to stop a thing from happening, that not doing can be the same as doing.  This is a populist movie in its heart, and not only because of the prominence of Superman’s dog Krypto. 

Gunn uses broad strokes to paint his film, but the small grace notes from the well-considered cast are just as resonant.  Corenswet and Brosnahan have great physical chemistry in a genre that’s been dead below the waist.  In that vein, Gunn’s version of Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) looks like the aw-shucks character that has always been portrayed, but this Jimmy fucks, and in a hilarious way that’s integral to the plot.  Pruitt Taylor Vince as Pa Kent is as far as possible from the most recent version, played by Kevin Costner.  That this man, fat and pasty and cross-eyed, could raise a son of infinite power and infinite gentleness is the most powerful facet of the film.  His big scene with Superman isn’t wise or verbose, but what makes it unique is how he carries himself as a man painfully full of love for his adopted son, a warmth unironically as powerful as the yellow sun that gives Superman his powers.  It’s corny, but Vance’s big body does the work.

Just as the Christopher Reeve version kicked the genre off, Gunn’s Superman pushes the genre forward by both returning to basics and waving away what has outlasted its purpose.  Imaginative and colorful visuals instead of gray goop (barring some third-act messiness), dialogue that doesn’t need to be punctuated by a quip, antagonists that are both fun to watch and chilling in their villainy.  Who knows if the blip of recent years, where superhero fatigue set in and these movies could once again fail, is going to persist, forcing studios to give wide audiences something new?  With Gunn leading one corner of the world, that fatigue might be premature.  B+

​The world of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, then Weeks, and now Years, is so uniquely oppressive and unpleasant that the thought of coming back to the franchise after so much time did not fill this viewer with anticipation.  Few zombie movies would be fun places to live in, but the animalistic, rabid infected of Boyle’s and writer Alex Garland’s imagining provoke the most skin-crawling sensations in the genre.  Their effectiveness spurs a kill-them-all response that every critic who’s ever written thoughtfully about zombie movies would define as the exact thing someone like George Romero is trying to evoke, where the ultimate purpose is to get the viewer to consider how quickly they would shoot their neighbors in the face.  With Boyle’s infected, the only correct answer is immediately.

In 28 Years Later, that critique is completely inapplicable, as the intervening time period since the first outbreak has turned the whole of the British Isles into a state of nature populated by snarling and naked infected desperate to either vomit blood onto their victims and thus turn them, or rip them to pieces.  The film, written by Alex Garland, doesn’t linger long on a prologue dated back to the beginning of the outbreak, but the raw mechanics of it are too horrible to consider.  Despite this reintroduction to the indiscriminate cruelty of the world, Boyle does attempt to provoke some amount of feeling for the infected as arrows pierce their skulls, incorporating a snapshot-like effect at the moment of death.  However, they are so grotesque that it cannot work as anything other than an intellectual exercise.  The most dedicated pacifist would not be convinced to spare a ravenous infected.  Boyle’s and Garland’s attempts to give the infected a semblance of civilization, where packs are led by virus-enhanced alphas with pendulous hogs and a recognizable family unit screams when one of their members is killed, are equally faillures.  28 Years Later is the start of a new trilogy and, if this is the goal, the great challenge will be to make me feel anything from an infected.
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The film is on moderately more interesting ground with the firer of the aforementioned arrows.  The tide-protected geography of the island of Lindisfarne provides a haven for the few surviving humans, and that’s where the viewer finds pre-teen lead Spike (Alfie Williams).  His mother Isla (Jodie Comer) is delirious with an indeterminate illness, but dad Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a peak post-apocalyptic specimen, eager to take Spike to the mainland for a coming-of-age hunt.  The Kipling poem Boots has accompanied the trailers, read by a tinny radio voice that builds in intensity as the poem continues its evocation of the mind-destroying military mixture of drudgery punctuated by sharp terror.  It’s played here too over the walk to the mainland, implying that the island community is some kind of authoritarian dystopia, or that Jamie is the soldier narrating the poem, or that Spike might one day turn into him.  Boyle also intercuts archival scenes of British armies, like this is all that’s left of a once globe-spanning empire. 

However, none of those ideas, intriguing as they are, come off.  The island is actually a fine place to live, all things considered, there is value in searching the mainland for supplies, and each dead infected is one less vector of disease.  Unlike in 28 Days Later, there’s no parallel drawn between the physical devolution of the infected and the moral devolution of the surviving humans.  This journey is only Spike’s first of the film, as the subsequent celebrations reveal the sham that his parents’ marriage has become, and Spike responds by scooping up his mother and taking her to the mainland, where Jamie has earlier pointed out a smoke plume where an insane doctor is known to live.  This pivots the film away from any kind of societal commentary and towards an intimate family drama, though both parts share the high-tension infected chases that the series is known for.  One keeps waiting for the two halves to connect and they never do, providing the viewer with a tonal mismatch amidst strong acting from Comer, Taylor-Johnson, the doctor played by Ralph Fiennes, and newcomer Williams. 

28 Years Later only comes alive in its final scene, a teaser for the next film and a glimpse of the kind of eccentricity that might have developed after two dozen-plus years of isolation.  Despite its horror/sci-fi premise, the film is oddly staid until a gang of acrobatic infected-killers in very specific uniforms show up and give the franchise a more action-oriented bent.  The thread has run out on the more biting War on Terror allegories from before, and the best thing about 28 Years Later may be as a bridge to the next thing.  When he’s directing, Garland has fully turned towards the nail-biting chaos of muscular action filmmaking.  As Boyle steps away for the sequel, this franchise may also be ready for something new.  C

Before The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s greatest sequence of filmmaking comes at the end of his debut, The Childhood of a Leader.  By the end, the rebellious kid has grown into the titular leader, a fascist facsimile greeted by a wild crowd on his way to who knows what atrocity.  The spinning, disorienting camera is part of the crowd, pushing and jostling to get a look.  It’s a shocking way to end an imperfect film, and Corbet carries that same style into the beginning of The Brutalist.  This time, the camera is part of a crowd in the hold of a ship headed to Ellis Island, and where it landed in an ominous place for Childhood of a Leader, here it lands on the Statue of Liberty after emerging from the literal dark of the hold and the metaphorical dark of WWII Europe.  Laszlo Toth (Adrien Brody) is overjoyed to be here, and the film is too based on the way that Daniel Blumberg’s score is building, but that camera style implies something else.  The Brutalist brings titanic cinematic might to bear from its first scene, self-consciously filmed in VistaVision to evoke the grand epic road shows of the Hollywood studio system heyday.  It reeks of importance and achievement, and it delivers on what it promises through Corbet’s will and ambition and his collaboration with an immensely talented cast and crew.  ​