Three Films Make A Post: In a city forever in darkness an ancient horror awakens.

Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham (2023): For large parts of its running time, this adaptation of the Mike Mignola, Richard Pace and Troy Nixey Elseworlds mini-series as directed by Christopher Berkeley and Sam Liu sticks rather closely to the original. In its first acts, its mostly makes some not terribly creatively handled gestures towards inclusivity it would have been weird not to include in 2023, and allows Oliver Queen a bit more heroism than the original had. For the finale, though, the script by Jase Ricci makes increasingly strange choices that muddle what was a pretty straightforward plot and climax in ways that seem weird, and pointless. I’d understand – if not like – changes to make things slicker or more contemporary, but farting around with a solid structure to replace them with a rickety construct of rotten wood makes little sense to me.

Otherwise, Doom certainly is one of the better DC animated features; it even shows some moments of visual creativity instead of the more factory like approach DC’S animation arm seems to prefer these days.

Operation Fortune: Ruse de guerre (2023): Whereas this misbegotten attempt at some sort of comedic Mission Impossible thing by Guy Ritchie is at times astonishingly bad: jokes never hit – and are generally underwritten - action set pieces are bland and lifeless, scenes that shouldn’t be in the film at all go on forever. Even at his worst – and I’d say that’s at least half of his output – Ritchie usually knows how to pace quick, usually at least semi-witty dialogue and seems to be a director who appreciates the qualities of a good cast, but you won’t even find any of that here. This is just a lifeless, glossy yet cheap-looking waste of a great cast.

Acidman (2022): For my taste, Alex Lehmann’s film never quite rises to the set-up of “woman’s (Dianna Agron) attempts to reconnect with her long-time estranged father (Thomas Haden Church) and fix her own hang-ups in the process is repeatedly interrupted by his obsession with UFOs and his Alzheimer’s”. The film’s neither sad nor weird enough to really pull the set-up off quite as effectively as one would wish it to, and much of it turns out to be a pretty middle of the road “woman meets dad” indie that doesn’t seem to dare to become as strange or emotional as it could and should. It’s a nice enough movie, mind you – it only wastes its potential to be more than that.