Superman (2025)
Superman is a near-perfect film. Christopher Reeve knocked my socks off in a theater when I was 10 years old. It's the first Superman movie that made me feel like that giddy kid impressed by what I thought were the best special effects ever. But it was the acting, the score, the action, and more. This is all of that and then some, offering something new and modernized while delivering a filming style that felt wholly unique.
Superman (2025) signalled to me that James Gunn has hit the pinnacle of his career. Creatively and professionally, this is Gunn at his peak, pulling off in one movie what Zack Snyder tried (and mostly failed) to do across three. (And no, Joss Whedon’s Justice League abomination doesn’t count.)
Gunn knows how to write and direct a summer tentpole comic book movie. His quirks and signature style are stamped all over Superman, but he strikes the right balance: honoring what came before while planting the flag for this new DCU. By the time the credits roll, we've got a Justice League, teased spin-offs, and a sense that DC finally knows what it’s doing.
You can see the journey here, from his early Troma days, Slither, Super, the Guardians trilogy, and his recent homerun reboot of The Suicide Squad. Superman is his most mature and confident film yet.
As for the cast, it’s as if someone fed every previous actor who’s played Clark Kent, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, and Lex Luthor into an AI human printer (like the one in Mickey 17) and hit “amalgamate and print.” And it worked. Each actor holds their own, with Nicholas Hoult as the standout, delivering a Lex Luthor that feels like a razor-sharp riff on a certain real-world narcissistic billionaire with emperor fantasies. Lex, you've got nothing on our current Villain-In-Chief, but you do win the prize of having 5X more IQ than our own villain.
The action is unreal. Gunn employs a 365 degree POV cam that looked glorious in my theater. I saw this on one of those new immersive theaters—IMAX screen in front, floor-to-ceiling visuals on both side walls. It felt like I was inside a hologram, which is the only format that might convince me to see the next Avatar (ugh).
In true Gunn fashion, Superman faces off against meta-humans, the U.S. government, Luthor’s souped-up body armor goons, and, of course, a few “only James Gunn could dream this up” kaiju. It’s big, weird, and glorious.
But the MVP? Krypto the Superdog. You know you're getting a scrappy CGI furball that’s as clever as he is cute in a Gunn movie, but goddamn, Krypto steals every scene he’s in. He's surprisingly integral in many key fight scenes. And the CGI was so seamless, I barely noticed it.
Decades from now, I think a new generation of Letterboxd cinephiles will look back at Superman as the moment Gunn not only stuck the landing but rebooted an entire cinematic universe. But he did more than that. His vision, tone, and leadership made him King in one day and gave us comic book movie lovers hope that we've got another 5-10 years of terrific shit coming our way.
