Movies

Supergirl, starring Milly Alcock, Eve Ridley and David Corenswet
Trailer: Warner Bros.

Supergirl (2026)
Directed by Craig Gillespie
Rated PG-13
Soared 26 June 2026
#Supergirl

Shocker! Alert the Daily Planet! Supergirl is the best DC movie in years. It’s also one of the better superhero movies overall in quite some time.

Just a Girl

Surprises abound in Supergirl. There’s more of a sci-fi angle to it than expected. There’s a Star Wars vibe in its settings of ramshackle spaceships, dilapidated interplanetary rest stops and lived-in environments. It’s much, much darker than James Gunn’s Superman reboot. It refreshingly steers away from Gunn’s sensibilities in favor of Craig Gillespie’s own brand of humor. There are loads of interstellar spectacle.

Even with all that, though, there was a lingering, nagging question during the movie’s opening minutes: is there still space for the superhero epic in a summer where low-budget horror movies telling original stories have stolen the thunder from high-priced extravaganzas?

It takes a little time for Supergirl to settle into her environment, but those doubts slowly start to evaporate. The lead characters are introduced. The multiple narrative threads are established. Then the best surprise of all emerges.

As the story of Supergirl unfolds, a realization creeps in that gets to the core of the ongoing superhero slump. It’s simple. But it’s something that’s been missing in most of the superhero movies since Endgame. It’s the classic character arc. And Kara Zor-El goes through a great one here.

But there’s more. Actress and first-time feature screenwriter Ana Nogueira loosely bases her story on the DC graphic novel Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, but she also mines territory explored in Fury Road and Furiosa. (Nogueira is currently tapped to write a new Wonder Woman installment. Sounds good.) As part of the story, Kara (aka Supergirl) comes to the aid of a young girl, Ruthye, who witnessed the brutal murder of her parents and brother by a wretched gang of metalheads. Ruthye herself turns into a great character and something of a mirror for Kara to pause, reflect and re-evaluate her own life choices.

Girl from Ipanema

For Kara, some of those choices include a taste for booze. She body surfs (comically, alongside Krypto) through crowds at concerts. She’s all about the intergalactic pub crawl, especially as it serves to help her celebrate her 23rd birthday. She’s right at home in strange bars on strange planets (that, strangely enough, feature disco mirror balls and classic pop songs from that dive planet called Earth). Her cameo at the end of last year’s Superman, which presented her as a drunken party girl, was a bit off-putting. But there’s sympathy to be had in the full reveal of her back story; it’s simply been her way of self-medicating in the wake of her own loss of family (and planet).

There are some really well-done and surprisingly extravagant flashbacks that include extensive use of Suh Ankripton, the Kryptonian language (relax; there are subtitles). It’s a carryover from the Supergirl TV series starring Melissa Benoist and it adds quite a bit to the experience. Those scenes establish Kara’s personal family tragedy, during which the utopian Argo City shields itself from Krypton’s destruction only to see its citizens succumb to Kryptonite radiation poisoning. In other flashbacks, Kara is introduced to Krypto (the rambunctious dog) during her mother’s funeral and Kara tries to settle into the discomforting environment of New York City with its noise, traffic, alarms and sirens.

With all the chaos Kara has to wade through, there’s a simple and yet so effective scene in which she demonstrates how, in fact, in space no one can hear you scream. Great stuff.

Cheek to Cheek

As if the destruction of an entire planet (Krypton) doesn’t provide enough dramatic heft, there’s more in Supergirl. There are a couple story threads that help drive Kara through a sort of reconciliation with her own reality. One involves a really nasty (as in effectively unappealing) villain named Krem (Matthew Schoenaerts, sporting what must’ve been a laboriously applied multitude of facial studs). Krem shoots Krypto with a Kryptonite-laced dart right in front of Kara before taking Ruthye hostage. Ruthye’s journey feeds into the other main narrative thread about sex trafficking. Krem’s gang hunts down and captures girls to serve as breeders for (and this is an unavoidably oddly phrased concept) to perpetuate their “male only” race. Kinda hard to have a male only race without females. So. Yeah.

Getting the antidote required to save Krypto and rescuing the kidnapped girls fuel the action.

It’s surprisingly dark territory to rumble through in a DC movie, but it works. And the intertwining storylines in turn help fuel a couple important themes that should serve to lift-up young girls (despite the PG-13 rating).

David Coronswet returns as Kal-El (better known as Superman), doing his best to help Kara adjust to life on Earth. He encourages her to settle down and skip all her off-world activity (read into this for Earthlings: “online activity”) so she can focus on finding her stride and finding her people. That’s no small feat considering Kara’s the sole female survivor of Krypton (looking past, of course, that whole incident with Ursa and the Phantom Zone).

But it’s in the relationship between Kara and Ruthye Marye Knoll (played so remarkably well by 15-year-old Eve Ridley, whose British accent gives her character and her place in the movie a tinge of a Shakespearean disposition) that Supergirl finds its emotional core. Between the two – and by extension, the addition of the psychotic hunter Lobo (Jason Momoa) – there’s a recurring theme of vengeance. Ruthye wants revenge so badly, but when even a mercenary with a god complex like Lobo (who, legend has it, killed off the entire population of his home planet) advises revenge wouldn’t be satisfying, that’s pretty bold.

Therein lies the real heart of Supergirl.

There’s an extremely simple and borderline quaint message about what should be obvious: stand up for the righteous and the just.

Be good. Find your purpose.

In an appreciated twist, Kara’s advised by her cousin she doesn’t have to be nice but simply must be good. Most significantly, Ruthye is advised by Kara with: “Your life will be your revenge.”

Yes. The best revenge is a life well lived.

The Middle

It’s 2026. Does anybody seriously want to go back and find some sort of comfort in the slop of 1984’s Helen Slater-led Supergirl?

Perhaps the most unexpected twist in all of this is its this new Supergirl that has most effectively gone back to the roots of effective comic book movies. Its messages and themes are virtually unassailable.

And yet many will undoubtedly pull at those roots because of what should be seen as sensible elements. Those elements include a trio of female space pirates wreaking interstellar havoc as plunderers of public space transport. And there is a funny – very brief – discussion about the dynamics between Kara and her cousin. Why is he called Superman but she’s called Supergirl, despite their inconsequential (under these circumstances especially) 10-year age difference?

It’s not an affront. It’s funny. And it reflects the same humor seeking to poke friendly jabs at the source material that’s found in this year’s sorely overlooked Masters of the Universe.

Pulling back from the narrative and thematic elements, Supergirl is also technically well-crafted, with a highly effective use of shifting aspect ratios that highlight the impact of the IMAX format. Central to that is a great cover of Jimmy Eat World’s The Middle set against Ruthye and Kara performing a precarious rescue mission.

Don’t Speak

Gunn’s Superman certainly had its problems, but they had nothing to do with woke culture or immigration. They were more to do with Gunn out-Gunning himself.

It seems as though Supergirl is being primed for an even bigger assault based on some questionable comments made by star Milly Alcock, regardless of her excellent on-screen performance. Putting things in a broader context, it’s possible her statements were misconstrued. Certainly, it’s easy to be offended at first glance, but her points about the challenges of starring in a female-centric superhero movie are legit. Did everybody already forget the nonsense surrounding the underappreciated Wonder Woman 1984? Gal Gadot seemed to be more popular as Wonder Woman in the male-dominated and godawful Justice League movies than in her own standalone features, which were much interesting thanks in part to director Patty Jenkins having an interest in making movies that do more than recreate comic book frames.

Craig Gillespie is a great director with a wide range of movies to his credit, including the terrifically comedic I, Tonya (based on the Tonya Harding scandal), the colorful Cruella (starring Emma Stone) and the disappointing but technically ambitious The Finest Hours (starring Chris Pine). His sensibilities in narrative and humor are a great fit here. But maybe the greater affront is that a woman didn’t direct Supergirl. That’s perhaps a bigger story than much of the nonsense out there trying to stimy this movie’s success.

• Originally published at MovieHabit.com.

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