The Batman
Three hours of noir rain, and it earns most of them. Matt Reeves treats Batman as a detective story first, and Robert Pattinson plays Bruce Wayne as a recluse two years into a nightly vengeance habit, eyeliner and all, narrating…
Genre Movies
The Suicide Squad
James Gunn got handed the keys and made exactly the movie only he could make: a hard R bloodbath that is somehow also the most emotionally generous film in the whole DC line. The Suicide Squad soft reboots the 2016…
Zack Snyder’s Justice League
This one exists because fans would not stop asking for it, and the strangest part is that the campaign actually worked: a studio funded a four hour recut of a 2017 flop, Snyder restored his footage, shot a cameo epilogue,…
Wonder Woman 1984
The first Wonder Woman earned goodwill the old way, by being good. The sequel spends all of it. Wonder Woman 1984 opens with a thrilling Amazon games prologue that promises big cheerful adventure, then settles into 151 minutes of plot…
Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
The full title is Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn), and the movie mostly lives up to that subtitle: this is Harley’s breakup picture, a neon splattered romp about a woman setting off on her…
Joker
Whatever you expected from a Joker origin movie, Todd Phillips delivered something closer to a 70s character study than a comic book film. Joaquin Phoenix lost an alarming amount of weight to play Arthur Fleck, a mentally ill party clown…
Aquaman
James Wan looked at the notes for this movie, tossed them in the ocean, and made the most gloriously unhinged blockbuster of its year. Aquaman is a lava lamp of a film: octopus drummers, seahorse cavalry, Willem Dafoe explaining Atlantean…
Shazam!
Shazam! is Big with superpowers, and it knows it. A foster kid named Billy Batson gets chosen by an ancient wizard and can turn into a grown man in a cape by saying a magic word, and the film mines…
Justice League (2017)
Justice League is a Frankenstein production: Zack Snyder left after a family tragedy, Joss Whedon took over, reshot a huge chunk on a rushed schedule, and the studio demanded a two hour runtime. You can see the seams everywhere. Henry…
Wonder Woman
For a stretch in the middle, Wonder Woman is the best film DC produced in its entire connected universe era. Gal Gadot and Chris Pine carry a charming stranger abroad story to the front lines of World War I, the…