Every once in a while, when I’m zombie-flipping TV stations, I’ll come across a channel playing Iron Man. Sometimes not far from my cameo about 45 minutes in. I can’t help but watch. Vanity, thy name is Bowles.

I also can’t help but watch because it’s the moment comic book films proved their might to Hollywood — and thus marked the point of their inexorable decline, corruption, and glorious farewell to moviemaking as we knew it for more than a century. Perhaps for history.

I just submitted my ballot for nominations this year for best film, actor, actress, supporting chimp, yaddy. And I struggled to find five Best Picture candidates.

The MPAA will have to select TEN from an arid, fractured cinematic landscape catastrophized by a writers/actors strike and left bone-dry from a pandemic that may turn movies into the Broadway of the Like & Subscribe generation: A pleasant, expensive distraction for those wealthy enough to spend that much money and three hours’ attention to a single storyline.

Iron Man, which turned 15 this year, wasn’t long, not that expensive ((less than $150 million), and very much a risky bet for Paramount Pictures, which produced the Robert Downey Jr. movie. I certainly didn’t think much of it when the studio asked if I wanted a cameo in the film, directed by Jon Favreau, a guy I’d interviewed before.

My response: Sure, but can I interview the cast — including Downey, fresh off a drug scandal, and Jeff Bridges, fresh off being the greatest actor of his generation — for the paper? I guess I’ll be a newspaperman longer than newspapers.

Paramount and Marvel agreed, and we set a date. In addition to the celebrity interviews as a piece, I offered my managing editor a first-person piece on being an extra in a Hollywood comic-book movie.

My editor said the genre was a risky bet, and declined the first-person story. Asshole barely ran a piece on the stars.

But fuck him. Here’s the story I would have written:

Not only was I going to get Downey and Bridges for the story, but Stan Lee, the Marvel Comics legend, would be on hand for his trademark cameo. As fate would have it, our scenes were back-to-back.

I dispensed with the interviews and began my scene — as a guy doing an interview.

The scene was at Disney Hall, which bristled with activity. A red carpet rolled, cameras were positioned and dozens of extras playing a press gaggled murmured and primped. Several asked what a reporter does on a red carpet; I said struggle.

But not tonight. “I guess we better rehearse,” Bridges said to me. It was a career highlight in a job that’s had a few.

We rehearsed the bit: Bridges, Playing Obadiah Stain, discussing the altruism of Stark Industries, with me nodding doped monkey.

What struck me about filmmaking was the time required. We must have spent an hour and a million dollars filming a scene that lasted 15 seconds. It remains a craftsman’s trade, but making movies cannot continue at that pace and cost if it hopes to see 2030.

And even if it does, can comic book movies remain a mainstay? I accompanied the movie to Comic-Con the summer it was to be released. I have never seen a more energized crowd, including for Springsteen or The Stones.

Hollywood needs a hero about now.

So Happy Birthday, Tony Stark. I think I know your candle wish.

We know two things about Napoleon: He was short, and he was angry.

His actual shortness is like Hitler’s micro penis: It may be historically dubious, but it makes for salacious motivational narratives. In truth, the guy was 5-6, though his wars are estimated to have cost the lives of between 3-6 million soldiers.

Too bad little of this is on display in Napoleon, Ridley Scott’s tepid historical biopic that makes Oppenheimer look like Citizen Kane, which it ain’t.

Given the writers’ and actors’ strikes, it feels like the two movies were released back-to-back, though months separated their opening dates. Still, they both represent what classical Hollywood is all about: ginormous props, sweeping scores, casts of hundreds. Comparison is inevitable — and that’s bad news for Scott’s film.

Even with Oppenheimer’s half-billion take at the box office, Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus would have been hard to beat. Stars glommed over each other to snare even a single scene in the A-bomb story. The only A-lister in Napoleon is Joaquin Phoenix.

But the joke, as it turns out, is on audiences expecting anything akin to Phoenix’s Oscar-winning turn as Batman’s favorite nemesis. Where Phoenix was Taxi Driver emotive in Joker, he plays Napoleon like a constipated poker player holding a pair of jacks.

Even Napoleon’s famed military strategizing is glossed in scenes where he off-handedly proposes battle plans that bring victory — but no personification of a man who altered the landscape of Western military power.

Instead, we get what Scott must think defines Napoleon: his ill-fated marriage to Josephine (Vanessa Kirby). The love story continues even after the collapse of their marriage, and provides the movie with its few moments of humor and romance.

But this is strictly Oscar bait, and the big one may have been caught in the summer.

Napoleon the man is fascinating. Napoleon the movie is not.

Making a film is such a collaborative process we hesitate to say any individual, even the lead, carries a movie, but that’s exactly what Benicio Del Toro does as a world-weary detective in the seedy and lurid cop-noir “Reptile”: He carries this sometimes convoluted and derivative thriller into three-star territory with an absolutely mesmerizing and authentic performance that conjures up memories of past anti-hero greats such as Bogart and Mitchum, Robert Ryan and Sterling Hayden. It’s authentic, grounded, stunning work.

Even when the material is the stuff of B-movie guilty pleasure.

Director Grant Singer (who co-wrote the script with Del Toro and Benjamin Brewer) makes the move from helming music videos for stars such as Ariana Grande, Skrillex, Lorde and Sam Smith to a feature-length debut that could have benefitted from tighter editing (the running time is 2 hours and 14 minutes). But he has a keen eye for this lurid material, bathing the visuals in ominous and unsettling autumnal tones while making smart choices, e.g., having two of the most violent moments in the film occur offscreen, making them perhaps more impactful and jarring than if they had transpired on camera..

“Reptile” opens with in affluent suburb of Scarborough, Maine, with the mood-setting sounds of an Edie Sands cover of Chip Taylor’s melancholy one-night-stand classic “Angel in the Morning” on the soundtrack, as a young real estate agent named Summer (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz) and her boyfriend Will (Justin Timberlake), the heir to a local real estate empire, prep a spacious suburban home for a showing. Not long after, Will discovers Summer’s body in the master bedroom of that same house, stabbed more than 30 times, the knife plunged into her body with such vicious force that it remains jammed in her pelvis.

Enter police detective Tom Nichols (Del Toro), who will lead the investigation into this sensational murder with the help of his eager but green partner Dan (Ato Essandoh). The shifty and smarmy Will is an obvious suspect — he acknowledges his relationship with Summer had its ups and downs — but we’ve got a couple of other contenders as well. There’s Summer’s estranged husband Sam (Karl Glusman), a hollow-eyed creep who makes art incorporating human hair (we see security cam video of this guy surreptitiously snipping someone’s locks on a bus), as well as the disturbed and volatile Eli (Michael Carmen Pitt), who has carried a vendetta against Will’s family ever since they bought up Eli’s family’s farm when the family was financially vulnerable, which led to Eli’s father committing suicide. (Frances Fisher is exquisitely icy as Will’s controlling mother, who runs the real estate empire with ruthless efficiency and treats her jelly-spined, 40-ish son as if he’s 12.)

Poor Summer is nearly forgotten in the morgue as “Reptile” dwells on Tom’s life with his longtime and beloved wife, Judy (a terrific Alicia Silverstone), who has stuck by her husband through some trying times in Philadelphia, when Tom was nearly taken down along with his corrupt partner. (It’s unclear whether Tom DESERVED to go down.) The dynamic between Tom and Judy is warm and passionate, with just the lightest undercurrent of tension fueled by Tom’s jealousy. (He doesn’t trust that hunky contractor who’s renovating the kitchen.)

We also take in the “Copland” type vibe among Tom’s colleagues, including the police chief (Mike Pniewski), a real straight shooter; the captain (Eric Bogosian), a highly respected leader who is also Judy’s uncle, and the veteran cop Wally (Dominick Lombardozzi), who recently started a private security firm and is one of those loud-mouthed, “life of the party” tough guys who is always on the brink of taking the razzing a bit too far. Tom and Judy spend a lot of time with the group and their partners, but we get the feeling Tom still feels like an outsider.

“Reptile” is the kind of movie where the phone is always buzzing in the middle of the night or there’s someone pounding on the door late into the evening, and every time you’re driving on a winding road, the headlights behind you get uncomfortably close. Danger lurks, jump scares abound, and you don’t know who can be trusted. There’s a moment late in the game when Tom wonders if this is Philadelphia all over again, and he says to Judy, “There’s only one thing I love almost as much as I love you, and that’s being a cop, [but] you know what? This thing does not love me.” It’s a killer line, delivered by a world-class actor at the top of his game.