Tag: DC Comics
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The long-forgotten comic book villain Black Adam makes for a quickly-forgotten movie
Jaume Collet-Serra’s dreadful Black Adam is damning evidence that Hollywood has forgotten why kids like superheroes in the first place.
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Batman: Year One copies the comics but doesn’t capture what made the them classics
The film buffs at Criterion Cast recently took a break from their usual discussion of the likes of Ozu, Godard, and Cox for in their year-end podcast review of the 2012 year in movies. Rather surprisingly to me, they talked up Batman: Year One and Dredd as two underrated 2012 releases. I had been happily […]
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Batman wants to be taken seriously in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight
I really wanted to like The Dark Knight. Director Christopher Nolan (also cowriter with brother Jonathan) and star Christian Bale have long proved themselves thoughtful, serious filmmakers, but if they have one common flaw it might be a terminal deficiency of levity. The Dark Knight inarguably has all the hallmarks of quality, intelligence, and craft, […]
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A god walks among us in Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns
It’s probably my own fault for buying into the hype, but Superman Returns left me cold. There’s not a lot of drama implicit in the story of an omnipotent alien from another planet, and I just can’t buy the “god walks among us” metaphors. Spider-Man is a real, troubled human being burdened with great responsibility; […]
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Fascism by Common Consent in James McTeigue’s V for Vendetta
For all the negative buzz regarding V for Vendetta writer Alan Moore’s total disavowal of James McTeigue’s adaptation, I was surprised to find that the film kept far closer to the book than I expected. Closer, in fact, than the two other travesties of Moore’s comics, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and From Hell. Perhaps not […]