Supergirl (2026)

Regular readers of this column (if any) may have sensed that I stopped bothering with superhero movies several years ago. Since the first Super- Bat- and Spider-man flicks hit the screens decades ago, the genre has become, with painfully few exceptions, derivative, senselessly violent, intellectually insulting and simply boring. 

But I had to wonder how the DCU would approach this one, and I had heard good things about its star, Milly Alcock, so I caught a screening.   

It’s true that her hungover hero brings the charisma with her unconventional portrayal of Supe’s smart-aleck cousin, who, in contrast to Clark’s prim nerdiness, is a borderline unlikable partier, a nihilistic drunk and a bar brawler uninterested in cornball heroics. Mighty locomotive, my ass.

Other pluses include Eve Ridley as a teen in need of rescue from sex traffickers, and an uncredited Jason Momoa as a kind of space biker dude. Jason revels (and excels) in this kind of nonsense. Matthias Schoenaerts does not disappoint as the main villain, whose face looks like he got in a nail-gun fight and lost. 

But unfortunately, this space western adheres closely to the superhero playbook, and every time it veers off into necessary exposition (it is after all a sort of origin story) the momentum stops cold. And there are a lot of spare parts from better space operas floating around, like the endless alien variants in Star Wars and Star Trek. But all this serves to make Alcock’s unforced performance more enjoyable. 

So, is this going to bring me back to the superhero genre? Hardly. But I was mildly entertained and didn’t consider it a total waste of my afternoon. Faint praise, I know, but coming from me, that’s a rave. (107 min)