Cruel & Unusual Films (USA): 5

Based on the DC Comics superhero team of the same name, Justice League (2017) is an American film. It opens with footage taken by two kids using their camera phone, capturing Clark Kent/Superman after one of his heroic missions. In an interview, one of the kids asks Superman about his favorite thing on Earth, but before he can answer, the footage abruptly ends. Fast forward several months later in Gotham City where a robbery has just taken place. Perched on a gargoyle, Bruce Wayne/Batman confronts the perpetrator and engages him in a fight. Using fear as his ally, Batman dangles the man over the edge of a building and lures out a strange winged creature. After ...

Based on the DC Comics character of the same name, Wonder Woman (2017) is a superhero film. As Diana Prince enters the Louvre in Paris, France, she receives a delivery from Wayne Enterprises containing an old photograph of herself and four men during World War I. The briefcase also includes a message from Bruce Wayne requesting to hear the story behind the picture. In her childhood years on the island of Themyscira, hidden away from the world, Diana grew up among the powerful Amazons – an all-female warrior clan. While observing General Antiope training her fellow warriors on the field, Diana yearns to join them but is forbidden by her mother, Queen Hippolyta. ...

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) is an American superhero film featuring the iconic DC Comics characters, Batman and Superman. In a flashback to his childhood, Bruce Wayne flees from his parents’ funeral and tumbles into a cave. As he falls, bats lift him back to the surface in a swirling vortex. In the present day, eighteen months after his epic battle with General Zod in Metropolis, Superman has become a controversial figure. Meanwhile, Bruce has been operating as the masked vigilante known as Batman in Gotham City for two decades. Being present for the destructive clash between Superman and Zod only strengthens Bruce’s belief that Superman ...

The American epic film, 300: Rise of an Empire (2014), directed by Noam Murro and written by Zack Snyder and Kurt Johnstad, retells the story of the Battle of Marathon. During this battle, King Darius of Persia is killed by Themistocles of Athens. Witnessing his father’s death, Darius’s son Xerxes is advised to avoid war with the Greeks. However, Artemisia, Darius’s naval commander, convinces Xerxes to become a god and sends him on a journey through the desert. After bathing in a mystical liquid in a cave, ...

Sucker Punch (2011), an American psychological fantasy action film, is the directorial debut of Zack Snyder and was co-written by him and Steve Shibuya. The story follows a young woman named Babydoll who accidentally shoots her sister while trying to defend herself from their abusive stepfather. After discovering that their mother left everything to her daughters in her will, the stepfather has Babydoll institutionalized under false pretenses and bribes orderly Blue Jones to have her undergo a lobotomy. In a state of delusion, Babydoll imagines the asylum as a brothel ...