For Fans of Sam Liu

Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox is Liu's most complete film. It opens with real violence and earns it, sustains genuine tragedy across its runtime, and closes on something genuinely moving. The Dark Knight Returns is the more faithful adaptation and the bigger critical statement, but it requires you to already care about Miller's Batman. The Flashpoint Paradox works cold.

Justice League Dark: Apokolips War does something the live-action DC films have never managed: it burns everything down and means it. Characters die. The survivors look broken. The ending refuses redemption. For a property whose default mode is reset-and-continue, this is genuinely rare filmmaking, and Liu directed every frame of it with conviction.

Made four years before the Ayer film, Batman: Assault on Arkham does everything the live-action version failed to do: it gives its villain team actual personality, keeps the threat credible, and uses Batman as a looming secondary presence rather than the lead. It is a clean, confident 75-minute thriller wearing the skin of a licensed tie-in, and it deserves far more credit than it gets.

Invincible is the closest thing to a live-action Sam Liu film that exists. It takes the same approach: start with the premise, treat the violence honestly, refuse to protect its characters from consequence. Robert Kirkman's source comics share the same DNA as the DC material Liu adapted, and the Amazon series captures that ferocity while adding long-form television's room to breathe.