Batman Returns Returns (Tim Burton, 1992)

Masquerade 

(WARNING: story and plot twists discussed in close and explicit detail)

Saw Tim Burton's Batman Returns on the big screen again after three decades and far as I'm concerned: not just the best onscreen incarnation of the character ever but one of three best examples of its genre, period. Channels a distinct look-- German Expressionism-- with extensive use of miniatures and forced perspective and gigantic sets and minimal digital effects; puts Danny Elfman's creepy-swoony-funny holiday season score to lively use; features a trio (actually a quartet) of stylized performances savoring the sparkling dialogue they've been served (by Daniel Waters)-- as if seated at an extravagant champagne feast of which they've never seen the likes before, and likely never will again.

And the film's so kinky. And subversive. And stuffed to the ears with eat-the-rich sentiment. A lot of frankly explicit jokes, including a scene of Selina (Michelle Peiffer) getting hold of Bruce's (Michael Keaton's) codpiece (prolly helped that Keaton-- clever lad--specifically requested to be able to relieve himself while wearing the costume). You could tell writer and director couldn't care less about the plot, much less the eponymous character (or at least his official job title), much less the source material, and it's a liberating feeling, a pretentious goth art film masquerading as a multimilliondollar superhero movie. Parents were right to be outraged and Warner Brothers was right to be alarmed, and I still wouldn't recommend this to anyone who thinks Pixar and Disney movies are worth watching. This is strictly a one-of-a-kind gloriously bonkers misfire that deserves to be treasured as such. 

Fantastic Four: First Steps (Matt Shakman, 2025)

Take four

You wonder why Marvel's First Family (and first collaboration between writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby) would have so much trouble transitioning to the big screen when predecessors (Captain America) and contemporaries (Iron Man; The Avengers) went on to cause a bigger splash; suspect it all stems from something folks behind those efforts remembered that folks behind this team's previous incarnations forgot: that it isn't the cosmic-ray powers that appeal to readers so much as the motivations they hold for fighting crime, supervillains, various forces of evil and injustice. Not the what, to paraphrase a key lesson taught in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, as the why.

Superman (James Gunn, 2025)

The man with the golden Gunn

A lot riding on James Gunn's latest movie: not just the reboot of DC Films (now called DC Studios, with James Gunn and producing partner Peter Safran as co-CEOs) but also a reboot of not just a DC comic book superhero but arguably the foundational superhero (not the first ever but damned close and arguably the most influential)-- in effect, the salvation of an entire movie genre, which lately has been in a box-office slump generating more bad publicity than Elon Musk on a ketamine binge. 

So did Gunn do it? I'd say you're asking the wrong question. 

Thunderbolts* (Jake Schreier, 2025)

The B-Team*

*(Not the real Avengers)

So about that asterisk in the title-- (skip this one paragraph if you haven't seen the picture!) turns out it's exactly what it signifies, a mark meant to refer to a footnote or omitted matter, in this case the movie's real name The New Avengers, suggesting several things: 1) this is about the level of humor we're getting here on out, more meta and complicated and not that much funnier, and 2) this movie and the characters in it are placeholders for when the real thing arrives. 

Which is both unfair and totally appropriate. Thunderbolts* takes the classic premise of misfits so misbegotten they can't possibly work together and somehow contrive that they not only do so but also win the day: think the original The Avengers (2012), or (off the top of my head) Stripes (1981), or before that and without superpowers (or even military hardware) The Bad News Bears (1976); think all the way back to one of the earliest misfit teams ever assembled for impossible missions, Akira Kurosawa's 1954 Seven Samurai, with Florence Pugh in the Kambei Shimada role of putative leader and David Harbour in the Kikuchiyo role of big-hearted comic relief. 

Joker: Folie a Deux (Todd Philips, 2024)

That's entertainment

Saw Joker: Folie a Deux and-- well I liked the ending. 

Todd Philips can't direct traffic to save his life and the movie still looks like a recycle bin of older better films, among others Umbrellas of Cherbourg, One From the Heart, Pennies from Heaven, and (a Scorsese, can't not have a Scorsese) New York, New York and you can feel the droplets of sweat showering down like a morning thunderstorm from Joaquin Phoenix's brow as he strains to make a profound statement out of yet another $200 million comic book villain movie-- but I did like that ending. 

Deadpool & Wolverine (Shawn Levy, 2024)

Dead on arrival

One thing I loathe almost as much as summer heat is summer movies. "So don't go," I'm told, but at the moment it's 97 F in the shade and the easiest way to beat soaring temperatures is to duck into a movie theater, so...Deadpool & Wolverine. At least the poster looks colorful. 

Superhero movies

Ubermensch

You could start a discussion on superhero movies at any point-- from the first Zorro movie in the '20s to Marvel Studios' 2011 Captain America-- but in my book the genre properly began in 1933, with a superpowered vegetarian.

Blade 2 (Guillermo del Toro, 2002

Hot Blood Sundae

Blade 2 doesn’t so much improve on the first one as it does evolve-- like the creatures at center stage-- beyond. Both movies are based on Marvel’s comic book series, about a half-human, half-vampire hunter who uses a stylish mix of whirling chrome knives and state-of-the-art tech to hunt his bloodsucking brethren.

Madame Web (SJ Clarkson, 2024)

Thread softly

Madame Web is mostly awful but not as bad as y'all say.

Kung Mahawi Man ang Ulap (Should the Skies Clear, Laurice Guillen, 1984)

Family planning

(WARNING: storyline and plot twists discussed in detail)

Laurice Guillen's Kung Mahawi Man ang Ulap (Should the Skies Clear, 1984) is yet another popular komiks series (adapted by Orlando Nadres and Lualhati Bautista from a serial by Gilda Olvidado) about young Catherine Clemente (Hilda Koronel), upset that her mother Minda (Gloria Romero) has fallen for newcomer Pablo Acuesta (Eddie Garcia). Catherine's boyfriend Rustan (Christopher de Leon, almost a required name for middle-class melodramas) scoffs at her fears but Catherine won't be placated; she knows Pablo and his progeny-- Chona (Isabel Rivas), Rita (Amy Austria), Jojo (Michael de Mesa)-- are up to no good.

Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (Edgar Wright 2010)

Game on

Not a big fan of video games. The last game I took even halfway serious was Missile Command back in the '80s-- something somehow addictive about keeping all those relentlessly approaching nuclear missiles from wiping out everything you know and love, something somehow traumatic about the big flashing THE END that flashed your failure That, plus the cool trackball spinning in one hand, sending the crosshairs skittering across the screen--what's not to like?

The Killer (David Fincher, 2023)

David Fincher's The Killer hit Netflix recently and depending on where you're sitting it's either the least provocative thing he's ever done or the most evocative thing he's ever done. 

The Flash (Andy Muschietti, 2023)

Flashback

Warning: plot discussed in explicit detail

Was The Flash a waste of time? I don't know

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

Gagamboy 

In Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, celebrity singer and TV host Jason Taverner passes out in a medical facility, having been treated for an attack from a 'Callisto cuddle sponge,' a dangerous parasite (alien, judging from the name) thrown at him by a former lover. He wakes up in a cheap motel, learns he's not only not famous but his friends don't know him, and he has no identification papers-- dangerous situation in Dick's version of 1988 United States, where if you can't prove who you are to one of many police checkpoints in Los Angeles you can be arrested and sent to a forced labor camp. 

Sin City (Robert Rodriguez, 2005)

Thin City

Robert Rodriguez doing Frank Miller sounds like a match in heaven: Rodriguez's comic-book style should provide the speed and motion and visual depth to enhance Miller's images while Miller should add the twists and wisecracks to spark Rodriguez's sometimes shaky storytelling (Rodriguez as seen in Once Upon a Time in Mexico, often doesn't know how to drive a plot forward; he needs a fairly good writer, which is why I think From Dusk Till Dawn with longtime buddy Quentin Tarantino (clever writer not much of an eye) may be the best work either have ever done (there's Jackie Brown-- but that's an Elmore Leonard film which I hear involves Tarantino)).

Miller's Sin City 'graphic novels' (I remember when they used to be 'comic books') are black-and-white pastiches, the distillation of classic noirs where hardboiled detectives and/or borderline psychotics uphold complicated codes of honor, authority figures are absolutely powerful and absolutely corrupt, women are either whores or innocents endowed with pneumatically enlarged breasts. Perhaps the most notable feature of the novels is Miller's determined manner of turning up the volume on the sex and violence, particularly the violence (the sex mostly happens offscreen and is often remarkably chaste, given the milieu (one character goes on a killing spree after just a single night with a hooker; another goes to jail for years successfully defending the purity of a young girl)). Miller packs as many variations on killing as he can into his pages, using everything from a .45 caliber cannon to razor wire to a samurai sword; he puts a spin on violence through black comedy-- a mordant comment or ironic remark as exclamation point on someone's often bloodspattered passing. The savagery and humor plays against an austerely monochromatic background-- like looking at a blood-drenched world through armor-plated shades.

Ang Sawa sa Lumang Simboryo (The Python in the Old Dome, Gerardo de Leon, 1955)

Phallic symbol

Gerardo de Leon's Ang Sawa sa Lumang Simboryo tells the story of an outsized man: Tulume (Jose Padilla Jr.), former farmer turned bandit when the Spanish Guardia Civil (Civil Guards) kill his wife (this during the years of Spanish rule). Now he's leader of his own gang, with a bounty of thousands on his head.

24/7 (The Sandman, Jamie Childs) Television

Diner time

So now we have it: a fairly big-budgeted adaptation of Neil Gaiman's celebrated fantasy series. Beautifully cast, ingeniously reworked, adequately directed.

Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (Sam Raimi, 2022)

Across the universe

O look a Dr. Strange sequel! (don't remember the first one)

A new Benedict Cumberbatch! (he was better in The Power of the Dog)

A new Marvel superproduction! (as if that was a recommendation)

A new Sam Raimi!

Well--

The Batman (Matt Reeves, 2022)

Batman returns

Dear diary

6:10 PM

Fear is a tool. When light hits the screen it's not just the movie's start, it's a warning. Only who's being warned-- the bad guys on the big screen or us sitting here? Maybe you, reading this? Confused now. 

Sat down to watch Matt Reeves' The Batman. A hundred and seventy-six minutes to go.

Need I remind you? NARRATIVE AND PLOT TWISTS TO BE DISCUSSED IN EXPLICIT DETAIL.

Moving on. 

Batman Begins (Christopher Nolan, 2005)

The dark knight deflates

Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins is a lot like the car featured so prominently in the trailers: muscular, oversized, not particularly imaginative (it's been called "a Humvee on steroids"-- basically Arnold Schwarzenegger on four wheels).

The movie borrows heavily from Frank Miller's Batman: Year One so heavily it's possible to call this an adaptation of Miller. I'd say it's the best to date, Robert Rodriguez's Sin City notwithstanding, which in my book is faint praise: judging from his printwork (the abovementioned plus his best-known The Dark Knight Returns) Miller's is a rather narrowly focused sensibility, bleak romanticism draped with exaggerated noir. If I prefer Nolan's picture over Rodriguez's that's because Nolan isn't as faithful; as an adaptation, Sin City is perfect-- black and white, louder than life, dreary as hell.