Supergirl (2026)
Milly Alcock carries this movie the way her character, Kara Zor-El, carries the weight of a world that no longer exists, and for long stretches, that is enough to keep the movie standing. Supergirl, directed by Craig Gillespie from Ana Nogueira’s screenplay and adapted from Tom King and Bilquis Evely’s Woman of Tomorrow comic, understands something a lot of superhero films seem to have forgotten somewhere between the third franchise reboot and the fifth: the cape matters far less than the person wearing it.
The plot, stripped down, could fit on a napkin with room to spare for a coffee ring. Kara was raised on Argo City, the fragment of Krypton that survived the planet’s destruction, and watched almost everyone she loved die there before her father sent her to Earth alone. Now she finds herself dragged into a mission of vengeance alongside Ruthye (Eve Ridley), a young alien girl hunting the man who killed her family. What unfolds is a road trip with the tone of a western and the pulse of an elegy, for a planet none of us ever got to visit. Jason Momoa’s Lobo turns up periodically to lighten the mood, and, against my own expectations, mostly succeeds. I went in braced for him to be the film’s comic-relief tax. Instead he is closer to a rebate.
Gillespie, who found real feeling inside the chaos of “I, Tonya” and “Dumb Money”, brings that same eye for a person underneath the noise. Alcock plays Kara as someone who keeps moving so the grief cannot quite catch her by the collar, and there is a genuine ache sitting under all the punching. The best moments here are the small ones: a look held a beat too long, a joke that does not quite cover what it is meant to be covering. When the film trusts its actors to simply exist on screen, it soars, pun very much intended.
Where things come unstuck, in my opinion, is the look of the thing. Every planet Kara and Ruthye touch down on seems to have been furnished by the same production designer working from the same single mood board: grey rock, flat light, repeat. A story about the size of the galaxy deserves to look like it has left the one quarry. Matthias Schoenaerts, as the villain Krem, is competent and almost instantly forgettable, which points to a recurring problem with this genre’s antagonists: they get scheduled into the film rather than written into it.
There is something underneath all this about inherited grief and about building an identity out of loss, and the film gestures towards those ideas without quite committing to them. Kara remembers what happened to her; Kal-El, sent to Earth as an infant, does not, and Alcock lets that difference show in ways the script does not always trust her to say out loud.
What stays with you walking out is the sight of a performer finding the emotional core of a character the genre has rarely bothered writing seriously; the fight choreography, serviceable and no more, fades faster. Supergirl is a good film dressed in the costume of a great one, held back by choices that undersell its own ambition. Worth seeing for Alcock alone. Worth seeing twice for Momoa, who looks like he is having more fun than anyone else on the call sheet, and has earned every second of it.