Review: 'Supergirl' serves up DC Comics' cynical side, and gives Milly Alcock a chance to shine as Superman's jaded cousin

If you like your superheroes surly, then director Craig Gillespie’s “Supergirl” is right up your alley — though you may wish, as I did, for more for the young woman of steel to do in the second movie of James Gunn’s DC cinematic era.

What you may know about Supergirl — either from her 1959 comic book debut, the 1984 film with Helen Slater, Melissa Benoist’s portrayal on TV (2015 to 2021) or Sasha Calle’s too-brief appearance in “The Flash” (2023) — is that she’s Kara Zor-El, Superman’s cousin and the second survivor of the destruction of the planet Krypton. Unlike Superman, aka Kal-El, aka Clark Kent, Kara did some living before arriving on Earth. 

In this movie, those experiences — seen in flashbacks, with David Krumholtz (“Oppenheimer”) and Emily Beecham (“Little Women”) as her parents — have made Kara (Milly Alcock) more jaded about the universe. Clark, Kara says at one point, “sees the good in everyone, and I see the truth.”

Kara spends a lot of time off-world, usually looking for planets with red suns like Krypton — because on those planets, she can get drunk and not have superpowers. She rides around in a junker spacecraft that looks like an RV on the inside, with her sole companion her dog, Krypto, who stole Gunn’s “Superman” out from under David Corenswet in his blue tights.

Rookie screenwriter Ana Nogueira’s story starts with a brutal scavenger race, the Brigands, who terrorize a family in the middle of nowhere. The Brigands leave behind a teen girl, Ruthye (Eve Ridley), who vows to kill the group’s leader, Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), for revenge. 

Ruthye’s father managed to destroy the Brigands’ ship before he was killed, so the group finds a new one to steal: Kara’s. When she puts up a fight, Krem hits Krypto with a poison dart — and a healer tells Kara, through Ruthye, that she has three days to find Krem to get the antidote. 

Kara searches for the Brigands, and Ruthye tags along, though the two disagree strongly on what will happen when they find Krem. Ruthye intends to kill him, while Kara needs him alive to get the antidote to save Krypto.

What follows are a series of fight scenes, some of them in dive bars that make the Mos Eisley cantina look like a Best Western. In one bar, Kara and Ruthye encounter Lobo (Jason Momoa), a bored immortal who works as a bounty hunter. Lobo is a DC Comics fan favorite, I’m told, and Momoa brings the same comical menace to the role that he did to “Fast X” and “A Minecraft Movie.”

Gillespie’s action sequences are serviceable, if overly reliant on CGI and whiplash-inducing camera moves, in a narrative that borrows a little too much from Gunn’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies. 

The best part of “Supergirl” is Kara herself, and the way Alcock finds the sweet spot between the goody-goody hero and the sulky, despondent survivor. Hopefully Gunn & Co. will bring her back in a movie that makes full use of her bad attitude.

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‘Supergirl’

★★★

Opens Friday, June 26, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, action, language, and smoking. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: 'Couture' tells of four women in the fashion world, but the stories don't form a satisfying whole

French filmmaker Alice Winocour cannot be accused of not filling her drama “Couture” with plenty of smart ideas about the fashion world and the women on whom everything in it depends. Corralling all of those ideas into a consistently engaging film narrative isn’t so easy, though.

Winocour sets her film in Paris fashion week, with the stories of four different women:

• Maxine Walker (Angelina Jolie), an American indie filmmaker hired by a fashion house to direct the short film that will open the label’s big show. Her work is interrupted by a worrying call from her doctor, and news that she has breast cancer.

• Ada (Anyier Anei), a model just arrived in Paris, whose unique look has prompted the fashion house to hire her to lead off the runway show — and star as a vampire in Maxine’s short film. She’s trying to figure out this strange business, while supporting her family back in a camp for South Sudan refugees.

• Angèle (Ella Rumpf), the makeup artist hired for the label’s show and Maxine’s film — and who also has dreams of turning her backstage experiences into a screenplay. (It’s no coincidence that Winocour makes Rumpf’s Angèle the narrator.)

• And Christine (Garance Marillier), a seamstress trusted with putting together the label’s signature dress, the one Ada will wear down the runway. 

Winocour connects these four women’s stories in some intriguing and visually arresting ways. My favorite came when Christine pins thin red ribbons around a mannequin as a guide, and later a doctor (Vincent Lindon) draws similar red lines with a marker on Maxine’s chest ahead of her MRI. But for every arresting image like that, there’s something trite and predictable — like Angèle’s narration, or Maxine’s romantic fling with her cinematographer (Louis Garrel). 

The attention to detail is also striking. Winocour convinced Chanel to let her film in their atelier (with the double-C logo carefully removed), bringing a sharp authenticity to the movie, particularly in Marillier’s scenes in the workroom.

I would have loved to have seen any of the four stories — especially Ada’s, and also Christine’s — lifted from this movie and explored in a separate film. With this four-in-one approach, “Couture” gives us an interesting tasting menu rather than a satisfying meal.

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‘Couture’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 26, in theaters; Rated R for language, some sexuality, nudity and brief bloody violence. Running time: 103 minutes; in English and in French with subtitles. 

Review: 'Lucky Strike' tries to deliver World War II action on a budget, with a wooden Scott Eastwood in a solo survival march

The World War II drama “Lucky Strike” has neither the budget to create the epic sweep of a “Saving Private Ryan” or the acting talent to make its attempt at a one-against-all combat thriller worth the time.

The story is in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium in December 1944, just as the German army is launching its last-ditch effort to stop the approaching Allied forces — a massive and deadly six-week push that became known as The Battle of the Bulge. Director Rod Davis Lurie (“The Contender,” “The Last Castle”), co-writing with Mark Frydman, concentrates on a U.S. Army unit of engineers, six men tasked with planting explosives to block a road that the German Panzer divisions need to advance.

Leading the unit is Capt. John Castle (played by Scott Eastwood), an efficient and personable commander. We don’t see much of his charm, though, because his men are gunned down as they’re finishing the placement of their explosives. Castle succeeds in setting off the explosives, but then faces another dilemma: Getting back to base, wounded and alone.

He gets on the unit’s portable radio, but the men on the other end cannot help, because they’re pinned down by enemy fire, as well. The voice on the radio tells Castle to start walking to a rendezvous site 27 kilometers away — and to guard his radio battery, which he’s told will be his lifeline.

What follows in Lurie and Frydman’s telling are a series of encounters, with a Belgian farm family, various SS soldiers, what’s left of a Black U.S. Army unit that was ambushed early in the story, and an American (Taylor John Smith) who’s separated from his unit. 

Filmed in Bulgaria, the movie is short of recognizable cast members — besides Eastwood, the only major players are Colin Hanks as a colonel who gives Castle’s unit their orders, and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor (“King Richard”), who appears in the movie’s framing device and whose role in the story is only revealed at the end.

Lurie rests everything on the strong back and jutting chin of Eastwood — and while the actor has a face that resembles that of his famous father, Clint Eastwood, he doesn’t have the same charisma or gravitas. Between his wooden performance and the production’s limited resources in making wartime carnage look convincing, “Lucky Strike” becomes a damp squib of a movie, never delivering the nail-biting action it promises.

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‘Lucky Strike’

★★

Opens Friday, June 26, in theaters. Rated R for violence, some grisly images, and language. Running time: 103 minutes.

Review: 'Toy Story 5' brings the playthings back for another fun adventure, and delivers a gentle message about limiting screen time

It’s time to play with your favorite toys again, as Pixar bring out “Toy Story 5,” the latest chapter of the animation studio’s longest and most durable franchise — a witty and warm-hearted adventure that makes a strong case for the importance of physical play in an increasingly digital world.

Little Bonnie (voiced by Scarlett Spears) still likes to play with her toys — Jessie the cowgirl (voiced by Joan Cusack), Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Tim Allen) and the rest — but she’s starting to notice that other kids don’t want to play with her. They’re all spending their time looking at screens, so Bonnie asks her parents to let her have one, too.

Her parents, eager to help Bonnie fit in, get her a Lilypad, an electronic gadget that provides both games and social contact with the girls from her dance class. Bonnie’s toys, now led by Jessie, see Lilypad (voiced by Greta Lee) as a threat to their existence — and Lily, programmed to believe that what she’s offering is in the child’s best interests, isn’t going to give up her new dominance easily.

Jessie enlists some help, their old friend Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) — who, if you remember from “Toy Story 4,” has teamed up with Bo Peep (voiced by Annie Potts) to help abandoned and discarded toys in the wild. 

Before Woody arrives, though, Jessie and her horse, Bullseye, get separated from the rest — and end up at the house where Jessie’s first owner lived. (We even see the tree with the tire swing where Jessie was abandoned, first seen in a flashback scene from “Toy Story 2” with that tear-inducing Sarah McLachlan song.) 

The family living in the house today includes a little girl, Blaze (voiced by Mykal-Michelle Harris), and Jessie sees that Blaze could be the real friend Bonnie really needs. Jessie finds that she must make new friends with Blaze’s discarded tech devices — including a toilet-training gizmo, Mr. Smarty Pants (voiced by Conan O’Brien) — to reach Bonnie through Lilypad.

Director and co-screenwriter Andrew Stanton — who directed “Finding Nemo” and “WALL-E,” and has wiring credits on all five “Toy Story” movies — creates a sprightly story that likely will appeal to viewers of all ages. Stanton and co-director/co-writer McKenna Harris also deliver a firm argument for the importance of limiting children’s screen time and encouraging physical play and its imagination-stretching benefits, which has been a welcome constant ever since Buzz arrived in Andy’s room more than 30 years ago.  

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‘Toy Story 5’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 19, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG for some thematic elements and rude humor. Running time: 102 minutes.

Review: 'The Furious' is an inventive Hong Kong martial-arts movie with fast and bloody action from start to finish

Pick practically anything off the shelf at a Home Depot, and the folks behind “The Furious” will turn it into a weapon — creating the most endlessly inventive and freakishly violent martial-arts movie this side of “The Raid” movies.

In an unnamed southeast Asian country, Wang Wei (Xie Miao) works quietly to provide for himself and his daughter, Rainy (Yang Enyou), who communicates with her mute father using sign language. When a child trafficking ring plucks Rainy off the streets, Wang tries to fight back — and, with fast moves and righteous anger, he nearly succeeds. 

When the bad guys get away with Rainy, Wang goes to the police, who say they can’t help. A woman sergeant, Yadong (Manatsanun Phanlerdwongsakul), tries to take on the case, but her commander overrules her. Later, to no one’s surprise, we find out the commander is in the pocket of the wealthy cabal in charge of the child trafficking.

Wang spots one of Rainy’s kidnappers, which leads him to a high-security nightclub, where he starts bashing heads into tables, glass partitions and other heads. One of the people he encounters there, Navin (Joe Taslim), turns out to be on the same side — he’s a journalist who’s been investigating the missing children, along with his reporter wife, Matia (JeeJa Yanin), who we see get kidnapped before the opening credits. 

Wang and Navin team up, and become a two-man wrecking crew — using knives, hammers, ice blocks, lead pipes and whatever else is handy to take out the bad guys. Is the bloody violence too vicious? Maybe, until you’re reminded that those on the receiving end are trafficking young children, so they get what’s coming to them.

Director Kenji Tanigaki stages one physically impressive fight sequence after another, all the way up to a two-on-two final boss battle that gets complicated by a fifth fighter (Brian Le) returning to the action — and seemingly alternating his loyalties with each hit, encapsulating the entertainingly blood-soaked chaos of the entire film.

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‘The Furious’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violence and language. Running time: 113 minutes; in English, and in Chinese and Thai with subtitles.

Review: 'Stop! That! Train!' adds a campy spin to the 'Airplane!' disaster-spoof genre, with 'RuPaul's Drag Race' alums and a lot of cameos

The wild and wacky “Stop! That! Train!” is a broad, goofy parody of ‘70s disaster movies that puts a lot of faith in the comedy stylings of several alums of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” including RuPaul Charles themself.

The action takes place aboard the Glamazonian Express, a high-priced high-speed train where every rail attendant worth their tray tables wants to work. Tess (played by Ginger Minj) and Deedee (played by Jujubee) work, instead, at a low-rent rival company, Stank Rail. But when that rail line shuts down unexpectedly, Tess and Deedee hustle their way into an open job at Glamazonan — despite objections from the first-class crew, led by the haughty Amber (Brock Hayhoe). 

At U.S. Rail headquarters, though, one of the dispatchers, Donna Dusk (Rachel Bloom), sees trouble ahead — a massive weather event, with the technical name Stormaganza. Unfortunately, her bosses, all men, don’t believe Donna’s warnings and mock her for thinking she’s smart. Donna persists, though, and contacts the Glamazonian Express’ conductor, Davenport (Chris Parnell), to warn of the storm the train is about to encounter.

Also on board the Express are a kid with a wayward scorpion, a famous actress (played by famous actress Sarah Michelle Gellar) who thinks people recognize her, a sex-starved passenger (Missi Pyle), and Davenport’s dumb-but-gorgeous assistant conductor, Cal (Brian Jordan Alvarez) — for whom Deedee pines.

News of the impending danger reaches the Oval Office, where President Judy Gagwell — that’s RuPaul — is worried the disaster will be a catastrophe for her approval ratings, knocking them down to “Lea Michelle, 2020.”

Director Adam Shankman (“Hairspray”) and writers Christina Friel and Connor Wright eagerly jump into all the LGBTQ-coded humor 90 minutes of screen time will allow. A low percentage of the jokes land, but there are so many of them that a few still hit the target. And when all else fails, the filmmakers resort to a string of cameos to generate some chuckles of recognition.

“Stop! That! Train!” follows as its model the Rosetta Stone of parody films, “Airplane!” The cast of drag stars made me think of the unsung hero of “Airplane!,” Stephen Stucker, who played Johnny, the one over-the-top comic performer in a room full of actors who were performing seriously. (Example: When Lloyd Bridges’ airport director Steve McCroskey shows Johnny a map and asks, “What do you make of this?”, Stucker’s Johnny replies, “Oh, I can make a hat, or a brooch, or pterodactyl wings!”)

“Stop! That! Train!” plays like it cast a room full of Stephen Stuckers. (The original, alas, died in 1986 at age 38, from AIDS.) And that approach to the comedy the problem — “Airplane!” worked so well because the stars behaved as if everything they said was deadly serious, and the cast here leans too far into the camp. The exception is Bloom as the harried train dispatcher, who in going deadpan gets the movie’s best laughs.

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‘Stop! That! Train!’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for sexual material, language, some drug material and brief nudity. Running time: 90 minutes.

Review: 'Disclosure Day' allows Steven Spielberg to raise a big question — what if we're not alone? — in an entertaining, thrilling package

Though not a direct sequel to his 1977 masterpiece “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” director Steven Spielberg’s “Disclosure Day” shows the veteran director still has deep thoughts about humanity’s place in the universe — and maintains the skills to transfer those thoughts into a rousing, thought-provoking entertainment.

Spielberg throws us into the action from the beginning, with shadowy agents threatening a man, Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), in the stands at a pro wrestling match. Daniel has a backpack with memory chips the agents want. The agents, working for a shadowy defense contractor named Wardex and their boss, Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), have Daniel’s girlfriend, Jane Blankenship (Eve Hewson), zip-tied in a van outside the arena.

Because of what’s in the backpack, Daniel is able to get Eve back, keep the backpack and escape the clutches of Scanlon’s operatives. The couple find a place to lay low — a monastery where Jane was once a novitiate — and then are taken to a safe house by people working with Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who’s got plans of his own.

Early on, Jane learns what’s in Daniel’s backpack. Daniel and Hugo, we’re told, worked at Wardex, where they discovered the big secret that’s revealed by those memory chips — video evidence, going back 79 years, of extraterrestrials landing on Earth. It’s a secret Hugo is convinced the world needs to hear, and one Scanlon will go to great lengths to keep quiet.

While this is going on, Spielberg and screenwriter David Koepp (who wrote Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park”), working off Spielberg’s story idea, introduce us to Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a weather presenter at the NBC affiliate in Kansas City. She’s getting ready for work, chatting with her boyfriend, Jackson (Wyatt Russell), when a cardinal flies in the window. From here, Margaret begins acting oddly, speaking languages she claims not to understand and knowing intimate secrets of anyone she meets, from the cop pulling her over to her newsroom colleagues.

Then she rushes onto the set to deliver the weather forecast, and suddenly starts speaking in some strange clicking language. The video of this moment goes viral and Daniel sees it — and, unlike anyone else we’ve met so far, understands what she’s saying.

That may feel like a lot of synopsis, but actually it only covers the first 30 minutes or so, and it’s all covered in the movie’s trailer and ad campaign. I won’t go further into spoiler territory, except to say Spielberg and Koepp have created a road movie with a structure similar to “Close Encounters,” with people traveling across America trying to solve a mystery, pursued by quasi-governmental operatives trying to stop them.

Spielberg and Koepp are working here with some big ideas, like setting this story against a backdrop of global panic of an imminent nuclear war. Because Spielberg is who he is, with more than a half-century of delivering the cinematic goods, he can bring the scale and technical chops needed to tell such a big story. There are few directors working today who can command such resources — Christopher Nolan, and maybe Martin Scorsese on a good month — and know how to use them.

That said, not everything in “Disclosure Day” is perfect. The first half hour is a bit bumpy, as Spielberg and Koepp set everything into place. Blunt has the hardest road at first, saddled with some creaky character development to establish Margaret’s flighty personality, to contrast the serious things that happen later. Thankfully, Blunt is a gifted actor, and she eventually rights the ship with a performance that gracefully captures Margaret’s tenderness and resilience.

It’s significant to note that Spielberg was six months old when the first stories came out of Roswell, New Mexico, about debris supposedly from an alien spacecraft — so the question of whether we’re alone in the universe has hovered, like a UFO, over him and us ever since. In “Disclosure Day,” Spielberg doesn’t just tell us he thinks we’re not alone, but he makes viewers consider how that knowledge, whenever it finally comes out, will affect the 8 billion of us.

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‘Disclosure Day’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, June 12, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for action/violence, some bloody images and strong language. Running time: 145 minutes.

Review: 'Masters of the Universe' revives the '80s toy commercial, er, TV show into an action franchise with no brains

I acknowledge that I am not the recommended audience for “Masters of the Universe,” for two important reasons: 1) I was too old to be a fan of the oversized toy commercial of an animated series that ran from 1983 to 1985; and 2) I have a functioning brain in my head.

Apparently the folks at Mattel thought they could turn their intellectual property into the same type of crowd-pleasing movie that they did with “Barbie.” They did this without considering that the “Masters of the Universe” toy franchise didn’t spark children’s imaginations the way Barbie dolls did — because the cruddy TV show did all the work there. 

The series was centered on Prince Adam of Eternia, who would wield a magic sword that — with the incantation of the words “By the power of Grayskull! I HAVE THE POWER!” — would turn him into the hyper-muscular He-Man. Our hero had friends and allies, including the armored Man-at-Arms, the brave Teela and a talking green tiger named Cringer, aka Battle Cat. The villain, Skeleton, was a talking skull with a ripped body. 

The names were dumb on purpose, so children wouldn’t get confused when buying the corresponding toys. In this new movie version, that becomes a running joke, as the names were given out by young Adam when he was 10 years old.

The movie shows Prince Adam as Adam Glenn (played by Nicholas Galitzine), a hapless cubicle dweller in Oklahoma City who has vague memories and childhood drawings of his youth as a prince on Eternia. To set this up, we see a younger Adam witnessing Skeletor’s takeover of the kingdom, defeating Duncan, aka Man-at-Arms (Idris Elba), who’s trying to protect Adam’s parents, the king (James Purefoy) and queen (Charlotte Riley). Only fast thinking by The Sorceress (Morena Baccarin) gets Adam and the magic sword to safety on Earth.

It takes an attack from a monster, The Beast, to allow Adam to connect back to Eternia — when his former childhood friend, Teela (played all grown up by Camila Mendes) arrives on Earth to rescue him and return him to his home world. That world is dark and depressing, thanks to Skeletor and his chief aide, the witchy Evil-Lyn (played by Alison Brie). 

Will Adam discover his power? Will he rescue Eternia from Skeletor’s grip? Will Teela and Man-at-Arms, her inebriated father, reconcile their differences? If you can’t guess the answers to those questions, then first grade must have been rough.

The casting of Jared Leto as Skeletor is worth a moment to reflect, mostly on how horribly the Oscar-winning actor’s career has gone the last few years. The last few years, Leto’s movies have included “Tron: Ares,” “Haunted Mansion,” “Morbius” and “House of Gucci” — stinkers all. At least with “Masters of the Universe,” Leto could have denied involvement, as Skeletor’s bony mask never comes off. You have to admire Leto’s commitment to the bit, even if the performance is as much a mess as the rest of the film.

Galitzine, who was fun in “The Sheep Detectives” and the Anne Hathaway romance “The Idea of You,” is fine as the goofy and gallant Prince Adam. But the only performer who doesn’t act like they’re above this nonsense is Brie, who actually understands the assignment of playing a campy villain.

The real mystery here is who director Travis Knight (“BumbleBee”) thought he was making “Masters of the Universe” for. The tone veers from strained attempts to joke about the franchise’s dumb-as-dirt characters or earnest scenes of the hero learning his purpose. And because the movie tries to have it both ways, trying to be either self-satire or inspirational fantasy adventure, it fails to connect either way.

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‘Masters of the Universe’

★1/2

Opens Friday, June 5, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence/action, some suggestive material, and language. Running time: 140 minutes.