Month: July 2025

Popcorn Perspectives with Danny Minton

Week of July 7, 2025

Superman
Rated PG-13 for language, action and violence
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 85%
In Theaters
The original (or at least I’m calling it original) Superman, starring Christopher Reeve, was my first super hero movie as a child, and to this day, one of my favorite films. Since that 1978 classic, there have been tons of sequels and reboots, but none of them have really captured what we love about Superman. In this new reimagining of arguably the most famous super hero of all, writer/director James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy) has brought us a truly unique vision of Kal-El’s story with this thrilling new adventure. The film very wisely chooses not to go into another origin story, and instead begins as Superman (David Corenswet) is in the middle of a fight he is badly losing. We find out that for centuries, metahumans have been visiting our planet, and that Superman is one of these metahumans who has been on our planet for 30 years, making himself known to the world, and trying to do some good. But he’s also stirring up political trouble by stopping a war that would have changed the geopolitical scales while also killing lots of innocent civilians. So back to him losing a fight. As he is lying near his fortress of solitude in Antarctica, so badly beaten that he can’t even stand, we meet Krypto, his new dog who quickly becomes one of the most important (and lovable) characters in our movie. Krypto helps Superman get to safety and healing, and then the movie gets right back into the action. It’s a whacky beginning that immediately sets the tone for what we are about to experience. The story moves forward with Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) attempting to get inside Superman’s head regarding the ramifications of his actions, while Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) makes every attempt to kill him, so that he can move on to his more diabolical plans. Since James Gunn became a household name (for many) with Guardians of the Galaxy, we have been given some very outlandish, yet incredible and unforgettable storytelling for movies that would normally be missing these elements he regularly infuses into his craft. Just as with his work on his Marvel projects (and 2021’s Suicide Squad which was probably his DC working interview), he has created here a beautifully quirky picture, full of wonderful surprises and fantastically weird spectacles, all with a strong dose of humor. This all sounds like distraction from story, but it’s not. The characters, and overall universe, prove to be larger than life, giving Superman an uber-creative backdrop to hang his cape on. While there are some irritations, like people who don’t move when the world is crashing down on them (this has always been a problem), you merely go along with Gunn’s vision, gladly taking in what he is dishing out. I expected to be wowed by Gunn’s imagination creatively, but I did not expect how overtly political the film would be in regards to foreign wars, how we treat immigrants and animosity towards crazy, dangerous billionaires. There will be some angry dissenters, but my prediction will be that these are largely universal beliefs that will satisfy most audiences. Politics aside, this Superman is different than anything you have seen before, and I can’t wait to see where Gunn takes the DC universe as he sets out to chart a new course. A

Popcorn Perspectives with Danny Minton

Week of June 30, 2025

Jurassic World Rebirth
Rated PG-13 for a drug reference, action, some suggestive references, bloody images, intense sequences of violence, and language
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 52%
In Theaters
Rogue One director Gareth Edwards brings us this new reboot for the Jurassic Park world which features Scarlett Johansson who plays a mercenary who is hired by a pharmaceutical company to assemble a team of experts who can travel to a secret island to capture DNA from still existent and very much alive dinosaurs left there. Once on the island, they discover that this was where scientists secretly did crossbreeding experiments, creating new types of dinosaurs never found in nature. This film has one heck of a pedigree with Edwards at the helm, a script by David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Spider-Man), a score by Alexandre Desplat (The Shape of Water, The Grand Budapest Hotel) and a strong enough cast including Johansson and Oscar-winner Mehershala Ali (Moonlight, Green Book). Much of it has real potential, especially the concept of a Jurassic World with monsters instead of just dinosaurs. The creations they come up with here are creative and capable of being quite frightening. But while most of the elements work, this movie proves that one broken element in a production can bring the whole thing down, and in this case it’s the script. Koepp is typically a very good writer, whose mostly action-packed adventures are thrilling and intelligent. But here, his script is just lousy, filled with stupid, clichéd dialog and predictable, stereotypical turns. It’s almost as if he didn’t write it himself (as I give him much too much credit to be this bad) but rather relied on AI to create such a sloppy screenplay. And when your eyes are too busy rolling into the back of your head to focus on the positives of the film, it really takes you out of what could have been a decent enough summer tentpole. The film makes a point of presenting that no one cares about dinosaurs anymore, and therefore the love of them is going extinct enough to really make them go away. With such a beloved franchise like this treating the material so trite, this rebirth is very likely to not go anywhere, and may hurt our chances of good adventures in the future. C+

Ironheart
Rotten Tomatoes Score: 86%
Streaming on Disney+
Introduced in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) is a poor but brilliant young MIT student who is given the boot from school, and thus steals her homemade Iron-man suit project to continue her work at home. Since she doesn’t have funding, she finds a local criminal (Anthony Ramos) to team up with until she discovers that he is a dangerous super villain that needs to be taken down. Much of what Disney has been doing with Marvel lately has been completely underwhelming. Fortunately, this 6-episode adventure makes for a nice diversion within the Marvel universe that is worth a watch for fans. I’m not certain if this character has much of a future within the MCU, but at least the series is entertaining and not so intricately tied into an over-arching storyline that is distracting and confusing. B