Gunn’s ‘Superman’ is silly and sincere, and that’s good. It could be smarter.

[The nihilistic Snyderverse is dead. Whether the ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’ director’s alternate vision can hold together remains to be seen.]

From my review at Decent Films:

The people behind James Gunn’s Superman are definitely familiar with All-Star Superman, Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s celebrated 2005–2008 serial graphic novel. Smart, silly, and sincere, All-Star Superman is far and away my favorite interpretation of Superman and his mythology. David Corenswet’s shambling Clark Kent may remind some of the comic awkwardness that Christopher Reeve brilliantly brought to the mild-mannered reporter, but Reeve’s performance also went into Morrison and Quitely’s take on Clark as an overgrown, out-of-place farm boy who “writes like a poet, but moves like a landslide,” as Lois Lane puts it. And that is what Corenswet is playing. The second half, anyway.

Corenswet (Twisters) is wonderful in the glasses, and he’s good in the cape, too. The whole cast is strong, particularly Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) as a smart, savvy Lois Lane, Nicholas Hoult (Nosferatu) as a raving Lex Luthor, and Nathan Fillion (ABC’s The Rookie) as a hilarious Guy Gardner Green Lantern. Not unlike the comic, the movie isn’t afraid to dig into (relatively) esoteric comics mythology: A significant secondary villain, the nanite-powered Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría), is too minor a comics character to have her own Wikipedia page, while others, like high-tech hero Mister Terrific (Edi Gathegi) and shape-shifting Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan), will be familiar to few outside the world of serious comic fandom.

Insofar as writer-director Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) was hired to make an definitive break from the nihilistic, grimdark Snyderverse DC movies and recover a sense of Superman as a character so decent and generous that it’s okay if he’s corny: mission accomplished. This is the first new big-screen interpretation of Superman since the Christopher Reeve days that feels recognizably like the same character portrayed by pretty much every other screen interpretation of the character I’ve seen, at least since Kirk Alyn in the 1948 serial played the early Superman as a not-so-nice bruiser for justice. George Reeves, Dean Cain, Tom Welling, and the DC Animated Universe Superman voiced by Tim Daly, among others — I can accept them all as the same iconic character, along with Reeve and now Corenswet. As for Brandon Routh in Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, the film was essentially an extension of the Reeve films with Routh as Reeve’s stand-in; I like the film and the performance, but it’s not a new interpretation. That leaves, of course, the glum, aloof character played by Henry Cavill in the Snyder films as the odd man out, and the sooner we put him behind us, the better.