Where so much of the superhero genre of films feels loaded with bathos in how films will undercut their own stakes and concepts with irreverent humour poking at the essential silliness and vapidity of their own construction, “Shazam!” feels more like the superhero films nearly two decades its junior; the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films. Those…

A gloomy tragedy that foregrounds the hamartia of its protagonists then sets about methodically pulling down its characters into the appropriate misery and madness. Initially only the leading wife explicitly rejects death, the husband a scientifically-minded doctor that finds the concept perfectly peaceable, but as their move to a wishfully calmer backwoods town doesn’t result…