Zack Snyder’s Justice League is streaming on HBO Max Second chances don’t come around too often. That’s just as true in the movie business as it is anywhere else.* For filmmaker Zack Snyder, his 2017 film Justice League seemed to be firmly in the rearview mirror. Can you blame him? The Marvel Cinematic Universe had producer Kevin Feige coordinating everything. The MCU made money — lots of it. Warner Bros. very quickly realized that a) they owned the rights to the DC comics characters and b) they also loved money. In short order, they rushed to create the competing DC Extended Universe.... Read More

Movies make a promise. Good movies keep them. In one of the early scenes in John Wick, a dipstick gangster and his boys break into the home of a nobody. They beat the nobody, steal his car, and kill his dog. Just another day at the office, right? Not quite. The gangster’s father is a crime lord. He explains to his son that they just made an enemy of the most feared assassin alive. “John wasn’t exactly the boogeyman. He was the one you send to kill the f—ing boogeyman.” That scene sets up an expectation for the audience. It tells us: You just saw an absurdly cute... Read More

The age of the superhero arguably began in 1938,  when Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman. Slightly less than a year later, Bob Kane and Bill Finger devised Batman.  Both characters have passed their 75th anniversaries, and both of them have appeared in pretty much every entertainment medium. They have changed a great deal over the years. We’ve seen iterations of Superman as a paternal authority figure, a socialist crusader, and a Soviet hero. We’ve seen Batman as a revenge-driven psychopath, a bloodthirsty vampire, and a pop art goofball. Like any timeless character,... Read More