Superman Returns (PG-13, 2006)

After a five-year absence, Superman returns to Earth. Lois Lane (Kate Bosworth) now lives with her fiancé, Richard White (James Marsden) and her young son. Paroled from prison, Lex Luthor (Kevin Spacey) starts an electromagnetic pulse that cripples a NASA plane, and Superman shows up just in time to save the frightened passengers (mostly reporters, including Lois). Before Superman travels to the Fortress of Solitude to commune with Jor-El (an archived Marlon Brando), Lex gets there, thrilled and renewed when he finds Jor-El for himself: "I'm his son," gasps Lex, as Jor-El starts dispensing wisdom: "The son becomes the father, the father, the son." To make space for his new self-concept, Lex decides to build his own continent, literally. Accompanied by his moll Kitty (Parker Posey), Lex combines crystals and kryptonite to grow a land mass to serve as his empire's base and to kill Superman. It's a brilliant scheme, nation-building a its most extreme, unnamed and insidious.

Superman's return in Bryan Singer's film raises the question of why "we" need him. In a post-9/11 world, superheroes might seem idealistic and quaint concepts, even, as Lois has written in a Pulitzer Prize-winning article, "irrelevant." Singer pays loving homage to Richard Donner's 1978 Superman: The Movie. But this saddened, more experienced Superman has seen the aftermath of world destruction, and so comes with a perspective not quite so boldly idealistic or pompously ideological. Yes, he still means to save this world, but the triumph is less complete now, the costs more visible.