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This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence.

But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi, does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else. Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism.

On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of monkey-like creatures called Ochi. These little guys may or may not be eating the sheep herds, but William DeFoe sure thinks they are. Makes sense. These guys totally look like the kinds of beasts that would naturally feast on livestock ... Our protagonist, Yuri, finds one of their young in a trap and spends all of ten seconds deciding whether or not to help it out. Daddy DeFoe's not a fan of this idea, but that's fine and good. Yuri's not a huge fan of her dad either. All interested parties find themselves converging over whether or not this little guy gets to go home.

The real star of the show is the golden monkey on Yuri's shoulder. Ochi reportedly had six different puppeteers orchestrating him at any given moment, resulting in an intricate tactile performance. The best thing we can ask for from this film is that storytellers might be curious to replicate this kind physical filmmaking, willing the fantastical into our world without always relying on the interface of computer-generated creatures.

But tragically, the magic of the puppet-work only winds up working against the movie.

The Ochi are presented as wholly natural in this world. Director Isaiah Saxon likened it to an existing primate species that hadn't featured on a BBC special yet. They are not supernatural and have no magical properties that would trigger the kind of superstitious hysteria that fuels this movie. Neither is Daddy some capitalist overlord trying to raze their territory to build like a shopping mall. The plight of the Ochi has no basis in real world discussions about deforestation, nor of adult distrust of childhood innocence or the concept of progress. And so the movie utterly fails to capture the realities of why people ever hated the mysterious or precious things of the world in the first place.

The movie quickly devolves into a lampoonery session for William DeFoe, who gets to the mouthpiece for some kind of amorphous archaism. William DeFoe hates the little critters because that generation can just be so backwards sometimes, don'cha agree? What attempt there is at psychology winds up feeling very shallow and incurious. The movie has this unspoken suggestion that his character is so mired in traditionalism because he just can't conceive of a world where it was okay for his wife to have left him. Yuri's dad has no microtraumas that would benefit from some examination, only a patriarchal delusion handed to him by some invisible hand in the sky.

More disappointing, there's no sign that Yuri herself ever bought into the propaganda she was raised on. And so her rescue of and subsequent adventure with the creature carries no thematic weight. Helena Zengel herself plays a believable weird girl, but her character is not being challenged and is taking no leap of faith. This is How to Train Your Dragon where it never crosses Hiccup's mind that the dragon might kill him if he lets it go. Congratulations, Yuri, for finding it in your heart to not kill fluffy Grogu ...

There are fleeting suggestions of ET that make you wish the movie was better than it actually is. Mostly in the golden lighting, or the wide shots of the mountain scape. I love childhood reverence for the mystical as much as the next film critic, but this film isn't really about the natural love children have for the small things of the world, or the tease of future discovery. It's about grown-ups.

Even if it doesn't want to be.

I feel like it's essential that I establish early on in this review that this marks my first time seeing a Superman movie in theaters.

The Zack Snyder saga was actually in swing while I was in high school and college--back when I was in what most would consider in the target audience for these films--but that kind of passed by me without my attention.

And I'll be clear that I take no specific pride in this. I wasn't really avoiding the films by any means. My buddies all just went to see them without me while I was at a church youth-camp, and I just didn't bother catching up until much, much later. I'm disclosing all this to lay down that I don't really have any nostalgic partiality to the Superman story. Most of my context for the mythology comes from its echoes on larger pop culture.

I know, for example, that Clark Kent was raised in a smalltown farm community with his adopted parents, and it was them who really built him into a pillar of goodness. That is why even when he steps into the thick of the human messiness, such as you would find in a place like a human city, and encounters such paragons of villainy of evil overlord, Lex Luthor, his unwavering goodness elevates him into a templar of decency and altruism against all odds.

James Gunn's new installment certainly uses all that as a starting point, but it introduces one crucial wrinkle into the Superman narrative. The film finds the world uncovering a vital piece of Superman's backstory, leading Clark Kent to question who he really is in a world that is wrestling to define him. As his story approaches several critical junctures, Superman will have to put his ideals to the test and figure out whether the world really has a place for the kind of goodness he knows how to give.

This film's economy runs on both wide-scale global set pieces and intimate character moments, and these progress hand in hand. Without ever feeling anything like an origin story, each bit of this relay race juxtaposes Clark against the people who have formed him.

This being that kind of movie, there are all sorts of high-octane action bits. The movie's visuals prove the scale of the conflict less by furnishing the battlefield with computer-generated explosions and more by adding in a great deal more vibrancy than you'd expect in an earth-bound action pic, giving the film the feel of an adult coloring-book.

But the plot also rests on the outcomes of much smaller players on the board: dogs, street vendors, literal babies, and this is where the story really finds its muscle. This superhero's circle is not insular, the film commits to the superhero thesis of fighting for those who can't fight for themselves in a way few other superhero movies have. By the time judgment day is on for Superman, we know where we stand because we have seen firsthand who he serves.

David Corenswet's instinct seems to be to look for the least decorated reading of any given line. Eschewing unnecessary pretense helps this Clark feel unguarded and without ulterior agenda: we feel like we know who Clark is because he is completely willing to show us.

Rachel Brosnahan's Lois Lane has substantial presence in the narrative--without ever insisting too hard that she's not a damsel in distress, guys!--and Brosnahan effortlessly carries a character who is at once empirical unto sterility and also deeply principled.

Again, I'm not partial to the Superman story. But after he helmed the most important superhero saga put to film, I will admit I am partial to James Gunn and anything he wants to do with the superhero world.

We can perhaps speculate on exactly how large Gunn's fledgling superhero team will grow in the years to come. However that plays out, the narrative will bear out that the modern DC film canon started out just like Clark Kent: an agent of the ordinary, and an advocate for the vulnerable.

In seminal romantic comedies or dramas, the mark of great writing was in artfully burying the lovebirds' insecurities and hangups in artifice. Pretense. The lovebirds didn't know how to honestly approach their own feelings at first. The distortion revealed the personality of both the situation and the relationship. What's more, it was just fun. The film would slowly thaw this facade until Cary Grant and Irene Dunne finally had, what Materialists calls, the ugliest parts of themselves laid bare for one another. Only then were they ready to embrace.

Yet with Materialists, out this weekend, even in moments when the situation calls for vulnerability, the characters are oddly empirical and clinical with describing the things about them that they are ashamed of. These players might as well be performing a passionate reading of a Walmart receipt. Yes, Materialists is very obviously about the transactionality of the dating scene, but the movie finds itself becoming a victim of that very kind of sterility. What we have here is a drama-less love triangle with Dakota Johnson caught between Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans.

The movie is most easily described as a sort of gender-bent Hitch. In this film, "Hitch" is Lucy, a matchmaker in her mid-thirties who finds herself teased by the possibility of finding the same kind of love she facilitates for others--basically the same tension as Hitch.

But Hitch gave itself a highly comedic bend that opened up a lot of doors for the kind of absurdity needed to get these dummies to lower their defenses and admit they loved each other, and this movie doesn't seem interested in drinking from that well. Moreover, Hitch knew exactly what tools it would need to prove its own thesis. The characters and their relationships to courtship and vulnerability revealed the avenues by which a person learns to discover how to love authentically. Meanwhile, there's no synergy between the game pieces Materialists sets for itself.

Lucy and John (Evans) had a relationship some time before the events of the film, but that relationship deteriorated when she figured out she couldn't love him because he was always broke. (We know this because she tells us specifically, repeatedly, "I couldn't love you because you were always broke.") It's only after Lucy puts herself back on the market that John drifts back into her life. (And hey, if Chris Evans has a chance, maybe the rest of us do too ...)

Lucy's character flaw might have been perfectly home in a Clueless analogue, but the film tries to play this totally straight ... and all without probing why a person might actually prefer wealth over companionship. Neither does it do much to expose the materialism of the world at large. There is no kinetic energy to this ritual.

It's not like the wealthy Harry (Pascal) doesn't prove himself a suitable emotional support for Lucy. He's a perfectly articulate, sensitive gentleman, made more endearing by Pascal playing him at just the right volume. And so Lucy's time with him ends up exposing nothing about the cost of making wealth the center of one's romantic ambitions. Neither of the romantic outlets for our protagonist have any muscle to them.

This has the scent of a movie that wants to be subversive, but it doesn't double-check its own math, and by the end of this trip around the merry-go-round, you don't feel like you or the characters have really learned anything. And maybe it thinks it's one of those movies where the bulk of the story can be carried on the interplay between the cast--and it's not a bad cast--but even Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard were allowed a good rainstorm to really bring them together.