Madame Web (PG13)

116 minutes, opens on Feb 15
2 stars

The story: New York City paramedic Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) discovers she has life-changing abilities beyond administering first aid in this Marvel Comics stand-alone origin story.

Madame Web is not to be confused with The Marvels (2023), another recent Marvel Comics female ensemble adventure.

Neither is the Sony Pictures production connected to the two Venom adaptations (2018 and 2021) or Morbius (2022) from the studio’s Spider-Verse.

All the same, it is just the latest franchise formula product that will almost certainly contribute to cinemagoers’ deepening superhero fatigue.

The title heroine introduced in the 1980 issue The Amazing Spider-Man #210 is a blind, paralysed, elderly clairvoyant: Imagine the box-office prospects for that.

She has here been de-aged into an attractive, independent 30something, unrecognisable to Madame Web herself.

And while Johnson is an appealing actress, director S.J. Clarkson’s debut feature is bland with cut-rate visual effects action once Cassandra begins to experience telepathy after a near-death accident.

“Your mind has infinite potential,” a shaman tells her in a typically clunky line.

Her visions weave together alternate dimensions within the Spider-Man world, as well as the sister-power destinies of three lonely teens, each with supernatural potential of their own: bratty Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor), saucy Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced) and timid Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney).

The story is set in 2003. Cassandra will mentor the girls into becoming future iterations of Spider-Woman. But, for now, the sheroes have nothing more interesting to do than collectively fight off a boring villain (Tahir Rahim as Spider-Man foe Ezekiel Sims) in pursuit, who crawls on ceilings wearing a spidey suit but, rather stupidly, no mask.

Hot take: A sequel is not eagerly anticipated.

Orion And The Dark (PG)

101 minutes, available on Netflix
4 stars

The story: Orion (voiced by Jacob Tremblay) is an 11-year-old American schoolboy terrified of the dark, who appears one night in the form of a gentle black-cloaked giant (Paul Walter Hauser) and whisks him away on a nocturnal adventure around the world to show him there is nothing to fear but fear itself.

DreamWorks Animation’s Orion And The Dark is scripted by Charlie Kaufman, the visionary surrealist who entered the portal of movie star John Malkovich’s mind in Being John Malkovich (1999) and conceived Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004).

So, one wonders, could Orion – who is scared of dogs, bullies, rejection, heights, the ocean, cancerous cellphone waves and just about everything – be the screenwriter revisiting his own childhood psyche with all his signature neuroses?

Sounds bleak. But such is the inner world of an anxious child, and Kaufman has reinterpreted British author Emma Yarlett’s 2014 picture book as a witty and imaginative bedtime story a-swirl in existential dread.

Feature debut director Sean Charmatz blends the hand-drawn abstract concepts with computer graphics.

There is much of Pixar’s Monsters Inc (2001) and Inside Out (2015) in Dark and his Night Entities co-workers Insomnia (Nat Faxon), Unexplained Noises (Golda Rosheuvel), Quiet (Aparna Nancherla), Sweet Dreams (Angela Bassett) and Sleep (Natasia Demetriou).

The half-dozen goofy personae befriend Orion and they help him overcome his insecurities and confront life’s uncertainties.

Kaufman’s idiosyncrasies turn what might have been a simple life lesson into metafiction and cross-generational time travel, complete with narration by German cinema maverick Werner Herzog.

Hot take: Kaufman puts his unique spin on a whimsical kid’s fantasy that is as strange as it promises to be.