Kate Bosworth

Watch Superman Returns (2006) and count how often Lois Lane is carried. Kate Bosworth plays the best reporter in Metropolis as brittle and wounded, a woman who has moved on and does not care to be reminded, and that is the right note for a story in which the man she left floats outside her house at night and listens through the walls. But Bryan Singer's film has no use for a Lois who does anything. She is lifted, flown, rescued and set down. There is little warmth between her and Brandon Routh, and when they share the frame it is him we watch, which is not where a love triangle should leave its Lois.

That is an odd fate for an actor who came in through a door most do not use. She got her first part, in Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer (1998), at an open casting call that wanted a girl who could ride, and she could. Her breakthrough, Blue Crush (2002), was a surfing drama that asked her to be visibly, physically ready, and that readiness is still the thing most often noticed about her. Since then she has alternated: studio pictures such as Superman Returns and 21 (2008); smaller films such as Wonderland (2003), Beyond the Sea (2004) and Still Alice (2014), where she is part of an ensemble built around a central performance; and a later run of horror and thrillers, Straw Dogs (2011), Before I Wake (2016), The Domestics (2018). No single persona has settled on her. We think that is a loss, because what she does well is not hard to see.

The complaint most often made of her Lois was youth: too young, not enough weight next to the Loises people remembered. We do not think youth was the trouble. The brittleness was right. The script handed her a woman to be pitied and protected rather than one who asks questions, and no actor of any age talks her way out of that. Her most frequent collaborator has been the director Michael Polish, five films together, which says something about where she has chosen to spend her working life.

Our honest reaction to her in Superman Returns was regret rather than irritation. The wounded note she found is a good one, and we would have liked to see what she did with it in a film that let her put her own feet on the ground. On being cast as Lois she said, “I’m just glad my 'breakout' wasn’t a gigantic film.” The gigantic film came anyway and spent 154 minutes carrying her about. Give us the one where she paddles out.