Audiences at large film festivals like Cannes have long regarded Hou Hsiao-Hsien, from Taiwan, as one of the very best filmmakers alive. Last year, of the 35 or so films I caught at the Toronto International Film Festival, Three Times was the strongest and most memorable. If there were any justice in the world of movies, Hou would be a household name, the way that Bergman, Fellini and Truffaut were in the 1960s.

When Warner Bros. reacquired the film rights to the Superman franchise in 1992, the studio’s production execs must have thought it would be fairly easy to come up with a movie that could take advantage of the new, darker and nastier comics-derived superhero style established by Tim Burton’s Batman. They couldn’t have imagined what would ensue.