DC has spent two decades treating Superman like a reset button. Every few years, another studio regime decides the answer to a stalled cinematic universe is to relaunch the same Kryptonian, hoping a new cape and a new jawline will fix a foundation that was never stable to begin with. It rarely works. But Supergirl, arriving June 26 as the second film out of James Gunn and Peter Safran's rebuilt DC Studios, breaks that cycle. Not by playing it safe. By trusting a character DC has mostly ignored since 1984, and building an entire movie around her instead of around Superman's shadow.
Milly Alcock is the reason this works. Coming off House of the Dragon, she plays Kara Zor-El with a toughness that never curdles into cynicism, and a wounded quality that director Craig Gillespie lets breathe instead of rushing past. Watching her share the frame with David Corenswet's Superman early on, there's a genuine sense of scale being handed off — cousin to cousin, legacy to legacy — and Alcock doesn't flinch under it. She holds the centre of this film the way very few actors have held the centre of a DC picture this decade.
Ana Nogueira's script gives her somewhere to go. Kara isn't introduced as a symbol. She's introduced as someone who watched her home die and never fully processed it, and that grief sits under nearly every scene, even the loud ones. The film has the confidence to let a superhero movie be about mourning first and spectacle second, which is a harder needle to thread than it sounds, and mostly, it threads it.
Where Supergirl earns its keep is in the texture. This isn't the primary-colour optimism of Gunn's Superman. It's grimier, dustier, shot through with the kind of interplanetary bar-and-junkyard aesthetic that makes Kara's isolation feel lived-in rather than performed. Rob Hardy's cinematography leans into wide, sunbaked frames on the alien worlds, then tightens hard on Alcock's face the second the story turns emotional, and that contrast does real work.
Matthias Schoenaerts plays Krem of the Yellow Hills, and the character is where the movie's ambitions start to fray a little. He's got the look of a proper DC villain, all scarring and menace, but the writing never digs past the surface of him. He functions more as an obstacle than a character, and in a film this committed to interiority everywhere else, that thinness stands out. It's the one place Supergirl settles for the genre's old habits instead of pushing past them.
Still, the picture rarely loses its footing for long. Claudia Sarne's score resists the urge to swell into generic bombast, threading something closer to melancholy through the action beats. And the action itself, when it does show up, hits with real physical weight rather than the weightless CGI blur that's plagued half of this franchise's output.
There's a needle drop mentality running through the whole thing, a punk streak that occasionally feels like the film is working too hard to convince you it's not another polished franchise product. Not every choice lands. But the ones that do land hard, and they land specifically because Alcock sells the exhaustion and the fury underneath the attitude.
Compare this to what Warner Bros. has offered under the Supergirl banner before. The 1984 Helen Slater version is a curiosity at best, undone by its era and a script with no idea what to do with her. This one knows exactly what to do with her. It treats Kara as someone worth building a mythology around, not a spinoff to justify with a cameo.
Is it as tightly constructed as Gunn's Superman was a year earlier. No. That film had a cleaner engine and a more assured hand on tone throughout. But Supergirl doesn't need to be that film. It's doing something riskier, and mostly earning it, which counts for more in a DC library this thin on genuine successes outside the Superman name.
Ten films deep into a genre fighting exhaustion on every front, Supergirl is proof there's still blood in this. Alcock is a star. Gillespie found real feeling inside a summer tentpole. And for the first time in longer than most DC fans want to admit, a movie that isn't Superman feels like the reason to come back for the next one.
