Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021)

The follow-up to Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, this movie is director Zack Snyder’s cut of the 2017’s Justice League. While he was the original director of that film, Snyder handed over the reins to Joss Whedon after the death of his daughter. Mixed reviews led to HBO commissioning a recut, and the return to Snyder’s darker, grittier version.

The death of Superman triggers the reactivation of the Mother Boxes, millennia-old world-destroying devices. This sparks the interest of Darkseid and his Parademon army who know the Mother Boxes are the key to their conquest of the world. To fight them, Batman and Wonder Woman attempt to assemble a team of metahumans, including Cyborg, Aquaman and The Flash.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League was hailed as one of the 10 best films of 2021 by Variety’s Owen Gleiberman, who praised it as “a superhero movie with a difference. It’s a piece of ominous glittering Wagnerian comic-book pop, its superhero backstories unfolding with an imaginative fury, its battles spilling forth with a dark grandeur worthy of Tolkien (not the Lord of the Rings films, but the dream battles Tolkien wrote on the page), all rendered with an incendiary conviction that sweeps you up and won’t let go.“