About That "Dexter: Resurrection"

Spoilers for "Dexter" and "Dexter: New Blood" ahead.

The original "Dexter" series aired on Showtime back when I had no access to premium cable television.  I only watched the first few seasons, which I liked, but nothing after the fourth season - the one with the Trinity Killer.  However, I definitely got wind of the franchise's ups and downs over the years - the botched ending of the series with Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall) becoming an Alaskan lumberjack, the 2021 sequel miniseries, "Dexter: New Blood" that tried to give him a more dignified exit, and finally last year's "Dexter: Original Sin" prequel show.  I didn't watch any of these, but I was finally persuaded by good reviews to give the latest entry in the "Dexter" saga, "Dexter: Resurrection," a fair shot.  And I'm thrilled that I did.

I had absolutely no trouble getting up to speed with what Dexter Morgan has been up to for the past ten years, which comes down to trying his best to stop being a serial killer.  In "Resurrection," however, he's back to bad habits.  Dexter goes to New York City to help his now adult son Harrison (Jack Alcott), who has gotten himself mixed up in a murder.   Inevitably, Dexter becomes an active killer again, despite becoming friends with his new landlord Blessing (Ntare Gumo Mbaho Mwine), and despite the warnings of Dexter's deceased father Harry (James Remar), who hangs around as a personification of his conscience.  Unfortunately, Dexter's ex-pal Angel (David Zayas), is also in town intent on proving that Dexter is a murderer once and for all.  He's helping the detective in charge of investigating Harrison, Claudette Wallace (Kadia Saraf).  Dexter also inadvertently stumbles into a peculiar group run by the billionaire Leon Prater (Peter Dinklange) and his formidable henchwoman Charley (Uma Thurman). 

"Dexter: Resurrection" feels like a series reset to get the main character back to his original status quo, but to the credit of returning showrunner Clyde Phillips, it does a good job of showing how Dexter naturally arrives at this point, and emphasizes that he has changed over the years.  This ten-episode first season spends a lot of time helping Dexter process all the drama and upheaval he's been through, and getting his priorities straightened out.  He wants to be a good Dad.  He wants to be more human and connect to other people.  At the same time, the show treats the audience to a ton of new kills, new serial killer rivals, callbacks, fanservice, and guest stars galore.  This is easily the most star-studded "Dexter" project to date, with Peter Dinklange absolutely stealing the show every time he's onscreen.  I am sorely tempted to write a spoiler post for this season, just so I can gush over some of the other performances, but I'll leave you to discover those for yourselves.

One very good choice was cutting down the complications in Dexter's life so Harrison is his main concern.  They have an interesting relationship to watch, and Jack Alcott has no trouble shouldering the plot for long stretches, thankfully.  I also like the move to a New York setting, which puts Dexter out of his element, but creates all kinds of new opportunities for culture clashes and new character dynamics.  Dexter's past is always on his mind, and sometimes in his face in the form of Angel, but being in New York gives him a chance to shed some old baggage and sort out what he actually wants moving forward.  Dexter's snarky internal monologues were always a fun part of the show, and here they're snarkier and more entertaining than ever.    

And really, that's what caught me the most off guard about "Dexter: Resurrection."  It is so much more fun than I remember the original "Dexter" being.  The macabre, winking opening sequence may be gone, but that same toothsome verve keeps rearing its head throughout this season, which features all kinds of wild twists, loads of black humor, and cheerfully implausible things happening in every episode.  Sure, you could nitpick the plot holes, or you could suspend disbelief and just enjoy watching Dexter outsmart his adversaries with improbable smarts and foresight, narrowly getting away again and again.  And unlike a lot of other sequel series and legasequel series, the formula still works great here.  I hope to see more of Dexter Morgan and friends soon.

  

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About That "F1" Movie

I will preface the following remarks with the disclaimer that I know almost nothing about auto racing, race cars, or what distinguishes Formula One from any other type of racing.  I know that it's not a casual sport, with most of the cars and teams being sponsored by major auto manufacturers with deep pockets.  And fortunately, this is pretty much all you need to know going into "F1," aka "F1 the Movie."

Joseph Kosinski has proven that the success of "Top Gun: Maverick" wasn't a fluke, and he's done it by making a film that establishes a pretty clear pattern of how Kosinski makes a hit.  You make a movie in a nearly extinct action sub-genre, put an aging movie star at its center, have the story be about passing the torch and one last shot at glory, and pretty the whole thing up with cutting edge movie effects to amp up the spectacle.  It's not just a matter of putting Brad Pitt into an F1 racing movie, but boiling all the tropes of racing movies down to their most basic forms and presenting them in a shiny new package.  The version of F1 we see depicted onscreen is very idealized - women and minorities are conspicuously represented - as the U.S. Air Force was in "Top Gun: Maverick," with any political or cultural barriers to entry only vaguely alluded to.  And since the movie couldn't have been made without the participation of the FIA, the governing body of F1, that's no surprise.

I'm also certain that the racing itself doesn't remotely resemble what actually happens on a real Formula One race track.  Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a maverick racer-for-hire who is constantly using dangerous tricks and stratagems to gain an advantage.  He's recruited by an old racing teammate, Ruben Cervantes (Javier Bardem), as a last ditch effort to save the floundering newbie APXGP team, which Ruben bankrolls.  The team's other primary driver is the talented, but green Joshua Pearce (Damson Idris).  They also have the risk-averse Kaspar Smolinski (Kim Bodnia) as team principal, and F1's first female technical director, Kate McKenna (Kerry Condon), in charge of the cars.  Sonny joins the team and promptly clashes with all of them, but also provokes them to do better.  We watch as they figure out how to work together over the course of an eventful season, chasing victory despite many defeats and setbacks.  There are injuries, disqualifications, ghosts of the past, and plenty of interpersonal frictions.  There's also a secret saboteur in the mix, naturally.  

The pieces of the movie are all very artificial and very familiar, but this isn't a bad thing.  All the old tropes work to the film's benefit, and "F1" turned out to be exactly what I wanted in a summer movie blockbuster.  The performances, the filmmaking, and the execution of all the predictable twists and turns are fantastic.  "F1" is absolutely the kind of movie that you want to see on the biggest screen possible to really immerse yourself in the experience of watching all those beautifully staged race sequences where the cars are barrelling down the track at unfathomable speeds.  There's a first person POV sequence in the last race that is downright breathtaking to behold, and DP Claudio Miranda should be up for every cinematography award in a few months.  The script is bare bones and the characters even moreso, but you buy that Sonny Hayes is getting away with all of this because it's Brad Pitt, looking as handsome and  charming as ever.  And Javier Bardem is a pro at making the implausible behind-the-scenes troubles seem plausible, because he's terribly convincing every time he announces that something else has gone wrong.

"F1" is a sports movie, but it's also a process movie.  What I appreciated the most was getting an up-close and detailed look at the cars and the racing, even if much of it was romanticized and cleaned up for the silver screen.  Half of what sells the racing is spending so much time with dedicated professionals behind the scenes who are obsessed with improving their race times by mere tenths of a second.  It's sitting in on strategy meetings, board meetings, and press conferences.  It's watching APXGP lose race after race, but learning a little bit more each time.  Kosinski embraces being a maximalist storyteller, and ensures that the sizable budget is well spent.  Unlike a lot of other movies this summer, you can see every dollar onscreen.  "F1" is also a long movie, but it earns its running time, and in the end the filmmakers earn the happy ending that could only happen in the movies.  

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Rank 'Em: "Mission: Impossible"

I'll start off with the caveat that I don't count myself as a "Mission: Impossible" fan.  I've seen most of the later movies only once apiece, and there are several I just flat out dislike.  However, when the series was good, it was good, and some of these entries definitely deserve a few kudos.  So here, from best to least, are my rankings of the "Mission: Impossible" movies:

1. Ghost Protocol (2011) - It's all set pieces.  And it's all set pieces orchestrated by Brad Bird, who is so great at balancing action and character and humor.  There's a playfulness to this installment that works so well for me, and helps to set the franchise apart from all the other spy franchises of the time.  And while Tom Cruise is indisputably the star, the team is great - Benji is promoted, Jeremy Renner's William Brandt makes a fun newbie, Paula Patton is a delight, and everybody gets their moment.  

2. Mission: Impossible (1996) - The franchise kickoff is very much a '90s Brian DePalma thriller, and barely feels of a piece with the rest of the series.  It's much more grounded, much more twisty, and doesn't care if the audience can keep up with it.  Still, it delivered the big set pieces as well as anybody.  This is also the "Mission: Impossible" movie where Tom Cruise's ego is the least on display, even though this is the first movie he produced.  I wish we'd gotten a few more entries like this one.  

3. Mission: Impossible III (2006) - After a nice long hiatus, this was a pleasant surprise.  J.J. Abrams isn't great in the director's chair, and the script has some groaners, but what distinguishes this movie is that it has one of the franchise's truly great villains: Owen Davian, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Also, Ethan Hunt' relationship with Julia is the only romantic relationship in the series that ever really worked for me, even if it still feels like Cruise is trying too hard to seem like a human being.  

4. Rogue Nation (2015) - The first of the Christopher McQuarrie directed films that set the formula for the rest of the series.  It feels like it was originally planned as a grand finale or a potential handoff point to another leading man, which might be why it comes across as so celebratory and satisfying.  Rebecca Ferguson makes her first appearance as Ilsa Faust, and the opera sequence is a franchise highlight.  This is also the last "Mission: Impossible" film where I felt the humor worked for me.

5. Fallout (2018) - Here's where I'm going to get in trouble.  I have absolutely no beef with the action sequences or the spycraft or the performances in "Fallout."  This is the one with Henry Cavill and his mustache as the main villain, and he is impeccable.  However, this is also the one where the attempts to sell Tom Cruise as a romantic lead were so grating that it completely took me out of the movie.  Some view this as the pinnacle of the franchise, but it's when I started looking for an escape hatch.  

6. Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) - That title is just hilarious in retrospect.  I enjoy Hayley Attwell as the new love interest, but the movie is a bore whenever it's not in the middle of one of the action sequences.  Fortunately, the ones in this movie are pretty good, and especially the train crash.  However, I take exception to the AI doomsday plot, which is just badly written science-fiction that doesn't feel like part of this universe.  Audiences weren't pleased either, going by the box office.

7. Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) - The motorcycle duel!  The gratuitous slow motion with doves!  Thandiwe Newton looking all winsome!  Bellerophon and Chimera!  It's the John Woo entry into the "Mission: Impossible" series, and it is goofy and ridiculous, and it presages a lot of the franchise's worst habits.  There's Cruise already showboating shamelessly in the opening sequence.  There's the gratuitous use of mask reveals.  I have a soft spot for this one, but I won't pretend it's any good.

 

8. The Final Reckoning (2025) -  I didn't like it.  I think it's good that we're done for now.  

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Getting "Inside the Actors Studio"

This is a late tribute to a television program that fell off of my radar some time ago.  "Inside the Actors Studio" was once the flagship program of the Bravo network, back when they were trying to be a more classy arts channel, before the "Real Housewives" era.  It quietly aired for 24 years and amassed 277 episodes.  I knew that the host, James Lipton had passed away in 2020, and I assumed that "Inside the Actors Studio" had ended as well.  However, I didn't know about the show's move to the Ovation Network in 2019, or the final season that featured interviews by a revolving collection of different hosts.  As far as I'm concerned, the show ended in 2018 after 22 seasons, with Lipton's final interview with Ted Danson.  

I watched a ton of "Inside the Actors Studio" in my college years.  It was one of a very few long form interview shows that survived on the air into the 2010s.  The other major one was "Charlie Rose," which ended in 2017.  "Inside the Actors Studio" was more fun, of course, because it featured well-known actors and other celebrities.  Its format was dictated by its origins as a seminar for the Actors Studio Drama School, of which Lipton was Dean Emeritus.  He sat with each interviewee on a stage and went through their whole career, from soup to nuts, intent on provoking thoughtful discussion, and treating acting (or directing or stand-up comedy) as serious artistic work.  Every episode ended with questions from the real students of the Actors Studio seated in the audience, and the famous Bernard Pivot questionnaire.  The show's detractors found it all stuffy and self-serious, but I loved that the interviews were put in an academic context, lending them an air of gravitas and importance that we didn't see anywhere else on television.

Of course, it was very easy to make fun of the show, and to make fun of James Lipton, who took it in stride and gamely played himself in many parodies and guest appearances on other programs over the years.  He became a beloved celebrity, who I was happy to see every time he popped up on "The Simpsons" or "Conan O'Brien."  His professorial persona was so theatrical and larger-than-life, it might have seemed ridiculous if it weren't backed up by those meticulously researched, thoughtfully conducted interviews with everyone from Roseanne to Steven Spielberg.  The comedian interviews were often my favorites, because it was a chance to see silly people like Robin Williams and Mike Meyers take a pause and give some serious, honest answers about their craft, if they were so inclined.  Mike Meyers did, and Robin Williams elected to perform a comedy set for ninety minutes, riling up the audience to the point where it took Lipton more than ten minutes to ask his first question.  Bravo replayed that episode a lot.  

I stopped watching "Inside the Actor's Studio" roughly around the time I stopped paying for cable television.  It was never appointment television for me, but rather a show I watched when the interviewee was someone that I recognized, or it happened to be on when I was channel surfing.  I feel like the show peaked around 2003, when it started doing the group interviews for the casts of television shows, and some stars like Tom Hanks and Val Kilmer started coming back around for second interviews.  The best interviews were with the performers and creatives who had a substantial body of work behind them, and some of the later shows were with interviewees who were only there because they were popular at the time.  Jennifer Lawrence famously turned down a chance for an interview in 2013, around the time the second "Hunger Games" film was released.      

In 2025 the show has largely fallen out of the cultural consciousness.  This was inevitable considering the age of the program, but it's likely also because it's one of those series that is not streaming anywhere officially and is thus difficult to access.  Amongst the data hoarders, it's one of the most commonly sought-after programs, and pirated versions of various interviews are constantly popping up on Youtube and other video platforms.  I'd love to be able to see some of the early episodes myself - a lot of those director interviews with the likes of Norman Jewison and Stanely Donen sure would have come in handy - but the full archive only seems to be available to students of the Actors Studio.   

And finally, yes, no, attention, stress, laughter, leaf blowers, unfuckingbelievable, screenwriter, apiarist, and "Welcome."  

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Watch Out for "Weapons"

Zach Cregger's new horror film "Weapons" is a very satisfying film to watch, even if you're not a horror film.  Telling a single story from multiple perspectives is a tricky proposition, but if it's done well, it's so much fun to watch all the pieces fall into place, and all the reveals and payoffs play out.  It also helps that "Weapons" has one of the best hooks for a horror movie that I've come across in a long time.  In the Pennsylvania town of Maybrook, we are told, seventeen children from the same third grade class mysteriously vanished in the middle of the night, all at the same time.  They simply got out of bed, ran out of their homes into the darkness, and disappeared.

The action picks up a month later, when the school reopens.  Starting with the missing children's teacher, Justine Gandy (Julia Garner), we follow the POVs of six different characters who are either investigating what happened, or inadvertently stumble across pieces of the truth about the disappearances.  Justine is drawing a lot of ire from angry and frightened parents, including Archer (Josh Brolin), one of the fathers.  She's also concerned about a child from her class who didn't disappear, Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), who appears withdrawn and isolated.  Other major characters include Justine's policeman ex-boyfriend Paul (Alden Ehrenreich), the school principal Marcus (Benedict Wong), Alex's eccentric Aunt Gladys (Amy Madigan), and a local drug addict and petty thief, James (Austin Abrams).  

"Weapons" had a fantastic teaser trailer that showcased the film's inciting incident, where the missing children are running through the darkened streets at 2:17 AM.  This is one of those rare cases where the movie is as good as the trailer, much better than I expected.  Zach Cregger does a great job of orchestrating his nightmare imagery, jump scares, and thrilling reveals to build on each other, leaving some parts of the story on cliffhangers that don't get resolved until later.  It's similar to how his first film "Barbarian" was put together, but "Weapons" is better written with a much more compelling group of characters.  It helps that the budget and the caliber of the acting talent have both gotten a boost.  However, the storytelling is the main event.  I love how multiple characters come to the same conclusions via different routes.  I love the use of jump cuts to get laughs.  I love that the real protagonist of the film isn't revealed until the last third of the film, and that the villains are as funny as they are terrifying.  And boy are there some potent terrors in this one!

Much of the chatter that I've seen around "Weapons" so far has come from people trying to read hidden meanings into the film ("the real villain is alcoholism!"), and I think that's a result of the worldbuilding being as good as it is.  Without ever drawing too much attention to it, you can see the way that characters are separated by class and social strata, with hints of more complicated histories everywhere.  By using all these different POVs, you get to spend time in each of these characters' private worlds, and see how they think and react.  In the first part of the movie with Justine, notably, all the other POV characters appear, but some are on the edges of the frame, or not quite in her field of vision.  And as the movie goes on, it becomes clear how very important things can be overlooked by those who are only focused on what they want or care about.         

All the performances are good, but I want to single out Cary Christopher and Amy Madigan, who shoulder a significant amount of the film, and do a great job of it.  I'll refrain from being mean to a similar film from last year that "Weapons" reminds me of, but Amy Madigan's performance is exactly how the creepy/funny line should be handled in a film like this.  Aunt Gladys has surely secured her place in the horror movie pantheon.

Finally, despite the participation of so many kids, this is not a horror film for kids.  Many of the deaths are pretty upsetting, which I appreciate is warned for right up front.  However, there are no naked hijinks like there were in "Barbarian," and the ending is - well let's just say it's a little out of left field for a horror film, but in a good way.  I heartily recommend "Weapons" for all your scary movie needs.  It's easily the one I've enjoyed the most this summer.  

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Watching Trailers on Youtube

I went back and forth on whether I wanted to write this post, but I've already sunk way too much time into the research and data gathering to turn back now.  

So, I'm still under the likely misguided impression that if I interact with Youtube enough, I can make its algorithm work for me.  I can get it to understand what I want to watch and improve the quality and relevance of the recommendations and search results that it sends me.  How is this going?  Well, here's a brief example that I found telling.

One constant goal I've had with Youtube for years now is trying to get it to recommend new trailers for movies and TV shows.  I think that this is a fairly simple request, and Youtube has been under a lot of scrutiny lately to improve trailer search results because of the whole fake trailer kerfuffle from earlier in the year.  "Trailers" is definitely a content category on the site, and a "Trailer" button regularly appears on my Youtube front page next to "Podcasts," "Film Criticisms," and "Variety Shows."  I also run searches for trailers often enough that Youtube should have enough information to know what I'm looking for.

So, what happens when I open up Youtube on a random day and navigate to the "Trailers" category?

The first four displayed videos are trailers for upcoming films and shows.  Then there's a clip of "Promising Young Woman," a Red Letter Media review of a recent superhero film, a clip of "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy," two "Honest Trailer" spoofs, and a film essay on "Alien v. Predator," before the next trailer for an upcoming film.  Then come three more trailers, three commentary/reaction videos about trailers, and then three more trailers before the page refuses to load further results.  That's eleven actual trailers and nine videos that can broadly be called film/TV promotion, but not trailers.  There are also ads interspersed after every five or six displayed results.

I also searched "Trailers" to see what would come up.    The first twenty or so results are trailers for upcoming movies and TV shows, but often grouped into particular categories.  After the first six results (and three sponsored ads) I get three results that were "Popular in my area," then three "popular today" and even a "Previously Watched" category.  However, I'm not counting the multiple attempts to steer me towards the "Shorts" section of the site that is essentially Youtube doing TikTok.  The further down into the results I get, the more older trailers and non-trailers start coming up, including a "South Park" clip, reactions, "Honest Trailers," "Pitch Meeting," "SNL" parodies, and a random news alert.  I was appreciative that about half of the sponsored advertisements were actually trailers themselves, but these results still struck me as pretty dire.   

I expect better from Youtube, and I know they can do better, because there's another, less visible recommendation algorithm on the site.  If you click into any video on the site, a sidebar of similar videos will populate.  If you open a movie trailer, the accompanying sidebar videos have their own category buttons, including "Trailer."  What happens when you click on this "Trailer" button?  The first recommended video was for a new movie review from one of the Youtube channels I'm subscribed to.  Following that, I counted thirty-seven movie and TV trailers and one "Honest Trailers" video before the recommendations stopped loading.  And there wasn't an ad in sight.  Why weren't these the results on my front page?  

Well, the answer is sort of obvious, isn't it?  Once you start watching any video, Youtube wants you to keep watching videos, and will give you the more relevant recommendations at that point to keep you engaged.  The front page and searches want to push sponsored ads and channels that have longer content than the ones that publish official trailers, which rarely run more than three minutes a pop.  

The long and the short of it is that Youtube isn't very helpful to me for keeping up with recent trailers because it insists on focusing on the most popular hits, and then prioritizes showing me content that is popular in related categories.  It doesn't show me anything new until it hits a certain popularity threshold.  Trailers for independent and arthouse films often don't get enough views to hit that popularity threshold, so they require more specific searches.  You can sort search results by "new" to just get a listing of everything uploaded with certain keywords, but even here older results won't show up if they don't hit a certain view count.  

The one thing that I will commend Youtube for is that I no longer see any fake trailers or "trailer concepts," when they used to be all over my search results.  However, that just means that Youtube is perfectly capable of improving their results sitewide.  They just don't want to.      

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A "Superman" For Today

I had my concerns about James Gunn being put in charge of  "Superman."  I've found his superhero movies very hit-or-miss, a little too crass and a little too cynical for me.  After a decade of Zack Snyder and Henry Cavill's grimly god-like Superman, I was definitely ready for a change, but was Gunn the man to do it?  Yes, it turns out.  Maybe this isn't the best "Superman," but it's exactly the right "Superman" for 2025.

We begin not with Issue #1, but somewhere around Issue #200.  Clark Kent/Superman (David Corenswet) is already in a relationship with Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), and is the sworn enemy of industrialist Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), who is devoting considerable resources to destroying him.  In the opening scene we watch Superman in a heated battle with an armored warrior who Luthor controls, and later his superpowered henchmen, giant monsters, and other foes on his payroll.  This is a universe where "metahumans" are plentiful and very active, so Superman also regularly encounters the corporately sponsored Justice Gang, made up of Guy Gardner/Green Lantern (Nathan Fillion), Kendra Saunders/Hawkgirl (Isabela Merced), and Michael Holt/Mr. Terrific (Edi Gathegi).  Superman doesn't know much about his origins, but he has his Fortress of Solitude, with a couple of robot helpers, and also a loveably destructive superdog named Krypto.

Superman has never faced the kinds of challenges that he faces in this movie.  The new Lex Luthor is not only greedy, but obsessive in his hatred of Superman, and using all kinds of crazy technology to attack him on multiple fronts.  This includes an intense online hate campaign using a deluge of misinformation.  The public isn't sure what to think of him.  Metahumans are common, but Superman is an alien from another world, and there are deep suspicions about his motives.  However, the important things stay the same.  The one thing that hasn't been modernized at all is Superman himself.  He's still the same aw-shucks small town reporter from Kansas, raised by loving human foster parents (Pruitt Taylor Vince and Neva Howell), who staunchly believes in helping humanity and doing the right thing.  He's naive about geopolitics, not sure about his place in the world, and has a lot to learn about public relations, but he wants to be a good person wholeheartedly.  David Corenswet gives him the right physicality and heroic gravitas, but also a fair amount of relatable frustration and existential doubt.  This Superman can believably beat up an army of robots and still feel like an underdog.  

And the casting is great all around.  Brosnahan is a fantastic Lois, who is smarter, savvier, and more pragmatic than Superman, but there's never a doubt they're perfect for each other.  Nicholas Hoult is channeling petty tech-bro on a power trip, and it's so satisfying to see him get what's coming to him.  Comic relief characters Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo) and Eve Tesmacher (Sara Sampaio) get their own ridiculous subplot, and prove to be a lot of fun.  The Justice Gang is made up of the typical James Gunn-style abrasive oddballs, who would be a better fit in the "Peacemaker" corner of this universe, but they're mostly just around to provide a contrast to Superman, and not in the movie too much.  I really love that Ma and Pa Kent are played by non-celebrity actors, and come across as just ordinary, average people.  

The cast is what keeps the overstuffed plot and the in-media-res narrative from being too overwhelming.  Gunn and company decided to throw us in the deep end more or less, introducing us to all kinds of super-powered characters, pocket universes, secret conspiracies, crazy creatures, and other common comic book devices.  There's a cameo cavalcade, naturally.  You couldn't have made a "Superman" like this ten years ago, but after so many years of superhero movie saturation, audiences can be expected to keep up, more or less.  And even if they do get lost, "Superman" offers plenty of action and spectacle that needs no explanation and should satisfy even the nitpickiest fan.  Plus, there's a cute dog, and who doesn't love a cute dog?

My biggest complaint, ironically, is the same one that I had with "Man of Steel," which is that "Superman" isn't kid friendly enough.  I like that this version involves more interactions with kids, and uses a few kid performances to great effect, but there are some intense sequences and a few instances of questionable content that make this hard to recommend to anyone under the age of twelve or so.  (No parent wants to explain what a harem is to a second grader.)  And that's such a shame.  

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