With his dark eyebrows deeply furrowed and gleaming white teeth firmly clamped shut, Henry Cavill winces when asked if Superman is treated like a terrorist in “Man of Steel.” His reaction is somewhat understandable. The charming British actor should feel very protective of the character — one of the biggest icons in pop culture.

It seems as if Zack Snyder's “Man of Steel” is the millionth Superman movie to come out. The plot predictably begins with the destruction of Krypton and ends with Clark Kent (played by Henry Cavill) saving the world, with Lois Lane (Amy Adams) simultaneously falling madly in love with him. However, the familiarity of it all doesn't make the film banal.

Humanity's home planet hardly merits the name-check in “After Earth,” M. Night Shyamalan's sci-fi survival tale whose shipwreck action could (with the exception of a scene where our hero scrawls a crude map over Lascaux-like cave paintings) take place on any old life-supporting globe in the cosmos.

Unwieldy, overlong and overly reliant on melodramatic coincidences, “The Place Beyond the Pines” is still better than it has any right to be, thanks to its cast.

Ever wonder what it would feel like to suddenly wake up in another universe? You could find out, perhaps, by joining the next space mission to another galaxy, or, slightly easier, you could go to your local multiplex and watch “Fast & Furious 6” without having seen the first five movies.

“Star Trek Into Darkness” is like fan-boy fiction on a US$185 million budget. It's reverential, it's faithful, it's steeped in “Trek” mythology. It's also an excessively derivative what-if rehash of themes and interactions that came before, most of the characters lesser copies and even caricatures of the originals. The scenario's been hijacked and rejiggered from better “Trek” plots of decades ago, the best verbal exchanges lifted nearly verbatim from past adventures.

Does happily-ever-after marriage have a good ring to it? Apparently it does with Nat (Rose Byrne) and Josh (Rafe Spall) in “I Give It a Year;” so much so that they rush into a marriage fueled by their honeymoon bliss of a relationship. Quickly, problems, which they were blind to before, start to bubble up, and they slowly start to realize how fundamentally incompatible they are.

Plot-twisting puzzlers are a bubble market in the movies these days, with an arms race of “Inception”-like reality reversals that flip like a coin until dizzy audiences lose all interest in how it lands.

The “Iron Man 1” was rusty, and the second was just a rustier one with friends, but “Iron Man 3” is a Hollywood blockbuster superhero movie that ticks all the right boxes. It has the story, the special effects, the self-depreciating humor, all the explosions and action you could ask for, Gwyneth Paltrow and, of course, the arrogantly charismatic Robert Downey Jr.

Renown Hong Kong Director Johnnie To Kei-Fung (杜琪峰) presents to us the 50th film in his movie-making career. “Drug War” (毒戰), which follows the story of a police investigator in his life-threatening battle against the drug lords across China and Hong Kong, has already grossed over NT$600 million in the first two weeks since its release in China.