LAST UPDATE May 16, 2026

Review: Superman, 2025: This is, unfortunately, kind of a stupid movie. The special effects are often spectacular, though not always, and there are performances from the cast that are really quite good, but, again, not always. But, in the end the film is doomed by its script. Superhero films are not exactly renowned for adherence to reality, but even with the acceptance of the extraordinary physical powers of Superman, something easy enough to do after many decades of superhero movies (a cycle kicked off by the 1978 Superman with Christopher Reeves), it is the actions of the human cast that bogs down this movie into a Saturday morning cartoon level of storytelling.

For example, villain Lex Luthor finds a video recording of Superman's parents after he burglarizes Supe's secret Fortress of Solitude. The video file indicates Superman has a nefarious plan for conquering earth, or that is, we have to accept Luthor's translation of the unknown Krypton language as conveying this. Luthor soon presents the recording on a television talk show with English translation showing the world the message that Supe's parents from Krypton had instructed him (before their demise when Krypton blew up) to "take many wives" and to "rule the earth without mercy."

The crowd around Superman, as he stands in a park, observing this talk show on a giant television screen, which is hanging off of the side of a fifty-story building and the TV itself is probably the size of a 20 story building, immediately believes everything on said giant TV. As Luthor opines that this is proof that Superman has secret orders to conquer the earth, the crowd begins hurling insults and objects at Superman, meanwhile, they are all, along with Superman, standing near a gigantic Kaiju monster that was just defeated and is laying prone in the park like King Kong after "beauty slew the beast." The problem is that the entire sequence, from the part when Superman first begins fighting the Kaiju to the end when the crowd turns on Superman and assaults him, is steeped in ridiculous behaviors. During the fight, the crowd is shown standing beneath the giant Kaiju and filming and taking pictures with their camera phones instead of running for their lives, in fact they generally act as if impervious to the CGI debris flying through the air and the giant stomping feet and tail of the Kaiju.

The script wants us to take the awesome battle of Superman (and the arriving group of supporting superheroes referred to as "the Justice Gang" who pitch in to help fight the Kaiju) seriously as a real fight to save the city, yet the crowd generally does not, they act as implacable observing NPCs from within a video game. When the crowd incredibly turns against Superman within moments of seeing the Lex Luthor supplied info on the giant TV, they're not actually people, and certainly not the typical cynical and questioning American, they're instead robots who instantly change programming because of a giant TV, but of course they're only "changing" attitude because the script needs them to. Plenty of movie heroes have been framed by bad guys and had people turn against them, but the information would be persuasive within the story and would involve the the calculating working of some mental mechanism of thought. Here in Superman the crowd jerks around to a wholly new attitude instantly against the hero (and amazingly after he just been watched by the lot of them saving the city from getting trampled) and it as if they're zombies.

When Lex breaks into the Fortress of Solitude, his squad of Henchmen and a Henchwoman trash the place and fight down a squad of robots working inside the structure. As debris flies back and forth from explosions and things breaking apart, Lex walks calmly through it all without even a reflexive flinch as objects flit right past his noggin. The script is showing us how cool and powerful Lex is by not reacting, but instead it shows us that the poor actor (Nicholas Hoult) was presumably strutting through a green-screen room with the CGI objects added later. In one little second-long part it looks like an object actually passed through Lex's head.

However it is that they sandwich together CGI and the live human actors, in both the sequences described above there's simply too much unrealism. The otherwise good looking CGI effects don't match to real human behaviors happening simultaneously, and in the end it makes the actual live human actors seem like just more CGI creations.

There are nice sections of dialogue in the film and Sara Sampaio as Eve Teschmacher has a background presence that provides a nice twist in the overall story that was enjoyable. David Corenswet as Superman is fine, enough so that you wonder what it could have been like if the script had been examined by a few outside observers who could have strongly pointed out the inhuman incongruities.

Review: Cat-Women of the Moon, 1953: Marie Windsor is having serious problems keeping her mind on her job as navigator on a rocketship traveling toward the moon. She keeps feeling compelling thoughts demand she land the craft at a certain spot on the far side of the familiar space orb. Once landed, they disembark and Windsor deftly maneuvers the male crew (the ship's two leaders are both in love with her) toward a secret ruined city below the surface. There they discover a race of "cat-women" who run around in black leotard tights and who exercise a kind of mind-control skill that is at its most powerful when projected onto the female brain, that is, Windsor's. Meanwhile, the men are delighted to meet these beautiful denizens of an ancient space-empire, not suspecting the Cat-Woman have a master plan to swipe the rocketship and head to earth on a mission to conquor and repopulate their almost vanished species.

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The line-up of May releases from Warner Archive, quite a few titles with excellent new 4K scans from quality film elements.

Fast Review: The Return of Swamp Thing - 1989: This film doesn't have much ambition other than to play sequel to the original film of 1982 and to try to underline every character and story element with an alternative meaning that is pure camp humor. Louis Jourdan plays a villain that seems somehow bored no matter how much mayhem is happening in his immediate surroundings, and our main star, a young and pretty Heather Locklear, seems to happily grin bigger and bigger as the preposterousness of the story builds. The special effects, writing and side-characters are much better than a straight-to-VHS-tape movie of the 1980s, but somehow The Return of Swamp Thing seems like it was truly made to reside on the shelf of some eternal Blockbuster Video store where it is always ten-minutes before closing on a Friday night and you've already seen all the other "better" titles.

Fast Review: The Divorce of Lady X, 1938: Laurence Olivier is an attorney in London who is a jaded veteran of divorce trials. One evening he is forced by circumstances of weather to stay overnight at a hotel teeming with women who are also stuck there after an event at the hotel's dance hall. Mercilessly disregarding the plea of the hotel management to "double-up" on lodgings since there's not enough room for everyone, Olivier ends up being outsmarted by a clever Merle Oberon who practically steals his bed out from under him, an action that leaves him sleaping uncomfortably in an outer room and also quite smitten.

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Review: The Leech Woman, 1960: Colleen Gray spends part of this film under heavy age makeup, caught in a twisted variation on the “fountain of youth” story. In this case, a venal scientist (her husband!) is determined to make millions from an African tribe’s secret youth-restoring medicine. He pretends his efforts are meant to restore his much older wife’s health and beauty, but we can easily see this is merely a ploy to gain access to her wealth. When success comes, though, there's a price, one that catches the mendacious husband completely by surprise.

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The Marion Davies' film It's A Wise Child, 1931, Warner Archive Blu Ray, release coming May 26, 2026.

HD master from a new 4K scan of best preservation elements!" "...a witty portrait of small-town morality turned upside down – and a reminder of why she ranked among Hollywood’s most engaging stars. Out of general distribution for decades and never shown on television..."

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