This is Douglas's first film since his much publicised illness, and I for one hope completely normal service is fully resumed. From Wall Street to Falling Down to Wonder Boys, he has shown himself to be one of our greatest screen actors: intelligent and humorous, he inspires in one that sense of being in safe hands which comes with only the best of performers. If he lacks the legendary status of his father, it is only because our era is not conducive to legend-making, for he is certainly a better actor, and indeed has been a star for longer. In Behind the Candelabra, he manages to make an otherwise stock deathbed scene into something awful and startling. Liberace probably wouldn't have chosen Douglas to play him, but he would have been wrong.

From Man of Rhinestone to Man of Steel: Superman is back, bigger, bolder and at nearly two-and-a-half hours, frankly more boring than ever. The elephantine Christopher Reeve film from 1978 boasted the longest credit sequence in the history of cinema. This new version must break some kind of record for noise levels and the number of office blocks destroyed. It's a pity that amid all the grandiosity some humour wasn't allowed to slip in somewhere. The pomposity with which comic strip heroes are now routinely treated is a sign not of our growing sophistication but our increasing infantilisation; it's down to all those teenage boys again, and the money to be got from piling on the flattery.

As with the recent Batman makeover, Man of Steel is po-facedly referred to as an "origins" movie, i.e. we should expect one every two years from now until, well, infinity. The initial sequences set on the dying planet of Krypton are in fact the best, like one of those apocalyptic paintings by John Martin you can see in the Tate. It drew me in, for a time. But even here the awe is kept in check by the knowledge that this was all done inside a computer. How much more of this synthetic wonder can people take before finally turning their backs? Rather than firing the imagination, the pyrotechnics just deaden it. You can see it on the faces of people as they leave the cinema — expressionless and dead-eyed. And they're the ones who enjoyed it.

The British actor Henry Cavill, whom we last saw in tights as the Duke of Suffolk in that history-porno series The Tudors, is our hero this time and he is without doubt a real specimen. Outrageously handsome and with a machine-tooled body, he makes poor old Reeve look like a flab-ball. Rather than plumping for Superman, Cavill should have held out for Bond. As it is, he swoops, he soars, he says very little. Perhaps in future instalments his character will be allowed to "grow". But here, he is swamped by the relentless visuals around him — the explosions, the falling masonry and a finale of super-hero confrontations which seems to go on for a full hour. The lights eventually went up, but I'm afraid my mind had long since gone up, up and away.