It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman … again?! That’s right, the Man of Steel has been rebooted again, only this time, he’s part of a new universe, the DCU, and he actually resembles his comic book counterpart and inspiration. Thank James Gunn for that. The director embraces the character’s gee-whiz naivete and crafts a rousing, if still formulaic, comic book movie that doesn’t reinvent the wheel so much as it blasts some of the cobwebs off.
This time around, Superman (David Corenswet) has to battle something more fearsome than kryptonite — bad public opinion. The masses don’t trust Superman after they learn he was sent to Earth to conquer it and impregnate as many women as possible to propagate his alien race. They only know about this thanks to Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), who wants to destroy Superman in any way he can.
That includes creating a new metahuman named Ultraman, who is just as powerful and indestructible as Supes. But that bad guy doesn’t have what Superman has — the love of Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and Krypto, the super-powered dog with an intimidating bite. Can Superman defeat the forces of evil, save Metropolis and have time to feed Krypto before his weekly date with Lois? You’ll have to stream the movie to find out.
Zombie movies are a dime a dozen nowadays, but one of the very best remains 2022’s 28 Days Later, director Danny Boyle’s kinetic take on the walking dead genre. 23 years later, he’s back with 28 Years Later, a sequel set in the post-apocalyptic world he established two decades ago.
Great Britain is still plagued by “the Infected,” and now quarantined from the rest of the world. Scavenger Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) does his best to survive, teaching his son, Spike (Alfie Williams), essential survival skills while tending to his ill wife, Isla (Jodie Comer). But the family’s relatively peaceful life is disturbed by the arrival of the Alpha (Chi Lewis-Parry), an evolved zombie who is quicker, smarter and deadlier than those that came before him. Can Jamie protect his family from this new threat? Or will they all succumb to this new strain of the Infected?
28 Years Later is effective as a horror flick — there are scares and gore galore — but it’s also a surprisingly moving portrait of a family doing its best to survive. I won’t spoil the ending except that it’s both devastating and leads directly into the sequel, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, which is scheduled to release in 2026. Based on the quality of this movie, that follow-up can’t come soon enough.
“Swipe left” is now part of the English lexicon, and that’s thanks to Bumble. The online dating app allows its users to take a more active role in the dating process and helped create the foundation for modern romance — or at least some questionable hookups — that similar apps Tinder and Grindr helped build.
Now Hulu is telling the origin story of how Bumble was created with Swiped, a new movie that chronicles founder Whitney Wolfe Herd’s (Lily James) journey from disgraced Tinder exec to one of the most influential women in Silicon Valley. Like Super Pumped with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and WeCrashed with Anne Hathaway, Swiped takes an in-depth look at the sometimes wild and always fascinating world of tech start-ups from the founder’s point of view. As Herd, James is magnetic as a woman eager to find her place in a male-dominated industry that does its best to crush its female members.
Pixar is such a strong brand that even its failures are better than most animated movies out there. Take Elio, for example — the 2025 coming-of-age story about a lonely boy who befriends an alien was a box office bomb that most critics shrugged off, yet it’s still worth watching now that it’s streaming on Disney+.
When orphan Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is sent to summer camp, his initial dread of spending the season with strangers and bullies disappears when he’s kidnapped by aliens. Aboard their mothership, Elio befriends Glordon (Remy Edgerly), a worm-like creature who shares his sense of isolation and longing to travel among the stars. Together, these two unexpected besties help each other realize their dreams while learning to appreciate what they have at their respective homes.
War is hell, and if you don’t believe that, watch Warfare. Directed by Alex Garland, this intense 2025 movie chronicles a day in the life of a US Navy SEALs team as they seek cover at a local Iraqi house after the Battle of Ramadi in 2006. There’s no time to rest, though, as Iraqi soldiers pummel the house with bullets and grenades. With no support and dwindling supplies, these American soldiers face impossible odds to survive another day.
With a cast consisting of up-and-comers like Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton and Kit Connor, Warfare is an unusually star-studded war film that has no lead character to root for. Instead, these soldiers are all more or less the same — scared, determined and willing to do just about anything to survive. You never know who is going to live or die, which is exactly the point. In war, there are no stars or main characters, and whoever manages to survive is left to pick up the pieces.
What if you crossed Lost in Translation with Knives Out? You’d get something like I Don’t Understand You, a black comedy where cultural misunderstandings lead to murder. Don (Andrew Rannells) and Cole (Nick Kroll) travel to Italy to celebrate their 10th anniversary. Things take a dark turn when they accidentally kill the elderly owner of the restaurant they’re eating at one night. Desperate, they cover up their crime, but misunderstandings and language barriers cause more mayhem and, yes, deaths.
There’s very little logic in I Don’t Understand You, but what it lacks in believability it more than makes up for in laughs. As the accidentally murderous couple, Rannells and Kroll are comic portraits of upper-middle-class panic. They’re horrified by what they’ve done, but they are even more scared of being deprived of all the materialistic things they’re used to back at home. The movie’s ambitions are only to make you laugh at all the ridiculous deaths Dom and Cole cause and by that metric, it succeeds.
Everyone wants to go to Paris, France, and that includes aspiring artist Dawn (Miranda Cosgrove). She can’t afford art school on her own, so she participates in a popular dating show, The Honeypot, which promises an all-expenses-paid trip to Paris. Dawn is selected to be a part of the show, but is dismayed to find out it’s filming in Paris, Texas. Ew! But before Dawn books her flight home, she sees the show’s handsome, eligible bachelor, Trey (Pierson Fodé) and decides maybe the town isn’t so bad after all.
Netflix’s original rom-coms have a can’t-miss formula by now: a charismatic female lead with a Disney or Nickelodeon background, a hunky male costar (who no one has ever heard of) and a silly premise. When it works, it’s enjoyable, and The Wrong Paris is a successful product of Netflix’s never-ending rom-com factory. That’s due mostly to Cosgrove, who injects enough spunk in her generic character to give the movie some life. She’s great at portraying a woman whose Parisian dreams have to be slightly readjusted to match her Cracker Barrel reality.