Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

As any 10-year-old could tell you, “pitting the biggest household names in superheroism against each other has never made much logical sense,” said A.A. Dowd in AVClub.com. Nonetheless, that’s the premise of the latest attempt to turn DC Comics’ superhero franchise into a box-office blockbuster. Sadly, director Zack Snyder “invests it with all the fun of a protracted custody battle.” Ben Affleck as a brooding Batman and Henry Cavill as a dour, emotionally remote Superman certainly have the looks for their parts, yet come off as “epic bores.” Whereas director Christopher Nolan raised the allegorical stakes for this genre with his Dark Knight series, Snyder mostly dumbs it down, said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. He throws in some ham-handed talk about Good and Evil, but this blatantly commercial film has little to offer but some CGI fight scenes and shots of the heroes shirtless. Still, the visual detail in every frame is sometimes breathtaking, said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. Jesse Eisenberg’s bizarre, jittery Lex Luthor also provides a bit of fun “in a movie otherwise devoted to po-faced, comicsgeeks earnestness.”