Blockbuster season heats up in July with Black Widow, Space Jam, and M. Night Shyamalan

The influence is palpable in the trailer for Gunpowder Milkshake—until halfway through, when all of a sudden the air is thick with . This Netflix shoot ’em up models itself after some of the most successful exercises in hyper-stylized violence from the past decade, but with a twist: The gun-toting assassins are all female. Karen Gillan stars as a hitwoman whose mission to protect an 8-year-old girl forces her to reunite with her mother, also a dangerous killer; Lena Headey co-stars as said matriarch, alongside Angela Bassett, Michelle Yeoh, and Carla Gugino as a trio of gun-toting “librarians.”

The Bugs Bunny/Michael Jordan commercial expansion was once considered enough of a commercial disappointment (it did well, but like so many Warner Bros. features before and after, failed to kick off a WB-branded animation renaissance) that various sequel possibilities stalled. 25 years later, this nostalgia-bait reboot returns the Looney Tunes to their classic ’90s roots: befriending professional athletes, playing basketball, and saying things like “It’s on!” and “Well, that happened.” At least LeBron James looks more comfortable on camera than Jordan did; the Tune Squad, meanwhile, mainly looks “expensive,” as Daffy Duck mentions in the trailer— for at least part of the movie, they’ll be rendered with pointlessly realistic 3-D animation. may come out of this looking better than ever.

, about a group of strangers fighting their way through an elaborately booby-trapped building, was more watchable than your average January horror movie. (Remember Cube? It was like that, but with mediocre CGI.) The film’s relative fun—along with solid box-office and the release-date changes caused by the pandemic—may account for the prime summer real estate afforded its sequel. This one takes the approach, in that it sends a bunch of people who survived the titular death trap (including the stars of the first movie, Taylor Russell and Logan Miller) through a bigger, more treacherous series of puzzles.

For a certain breed of moviegoer, all that needs to be said about Pig is that it’s a movie where Nicolas Cage goes on a rampage to track down his missing truffle pig. If you need a little more incentive, however, there’s the oddball detail that the film is partially set in the rarified world of haute cuisine, an unusual locale for a revenge thriller. Then there’s the fact that it’s being distributed by Neon, whose recent Oscars streak suggests that this is something a little classier than your average DTV throwaway. But, again: Nic Cage hunts down the people who kidnapped his pig. That’s going to be enough for many.

Anthony Bourdain has been memorialized many times over since his tragic death three years ago. Now it’s Academy Award winner Morgan Neville’s turn to pay tribute to the beloved celebrity chef and globetrotting author, with this biographical documentary that chronicles Bourdain’s rise to public prominence, as well as his battle against the private demons that followed him on his travels around the world. The film, which premiered to raves at Tribeca last month. tackles his life and work through archival footage and talking-head interviews with those who knew him best, as well as the prolific writer’s own words.

2020 is over, but we’re still dealing with one aspect of that unfortunate year: movies conceived and then shot during the pandemic. The latest to see the light of day is this self-described “feel-good apocalyptic comedy” about the last day before a comet destroys the planet. Zoe Lister-Jones, who also wrote and directed, crosses the empty streets of Los Angeles en route to one final party, the personification of her younger self (Cailee Spaeny) in tow. Lamorne Morris, Nick Kroll, Olivia Wilde, Fred Armisen, Helen Hunt, Charlie Day, and Bradley Whitford are a few of the famous friends making tossed-off celebrity cameos while Lister-Jones learns to love herself on the eve of Earth’s destruction. Reactions from Sundance, including our , were less than rapturous.

In a season where multiple high-profile releases are still absconding for the safer pastures of streaming, it’s a little bit surprising that Paramount’s Snake Eyes, a prequel to the G.I. Joe movie series most people assumed was defunct—if they remembered it at all—is getting rushed into theaters. What could be so special about an origin story for the masked ninja once played by Ray Park? The trailer does look sleeker and less overblown than either or , with Henry Golding flexing some sword-fighting, motorcycle-riding muscles as the badass who hasn’t yet taken his vow of silence (or received the injuries that keep him silent in the cartoon.)

M. Night Shyamalan trades superheroes for the supernatural, even as he looks to an actual comic book for inspiration. The writer-director’s follow-up to is an adaptation of the graphic novel Sandcastle, about a family whose secluded beach vacation goes horribly awry when they all start rapidly aging. The cast includes Gael García Bernal, Alex Wolff, Thomasin McKenzie, Embeth Davidtz, Ken Leung, and ’s Vicky Krieps. Mothers and fathers, at the very least, will probably get a few chills from the premise, which puts a Twilight Zone spin on that old parental saw about how they grow up so fast.

Not even a global pandemic could stop Robert De Niro mugging his way through , but it could stop him from mugging his way through a more adult-oriented comedy—albeit temporarily. Though the casting of De Niro, Morgan Freeman, and Tommy Lee Jones makes it look like a standard-issue 2010s geezer comedy (serving as a simultaneous reunion for both and ), this is actually a period farce about an unscrupulous movie producer (De Niro) plotting to Producers his way out of debt to a gangster (Freeman) by insuring an aging Western star (Jones) and engineering his on-set death, which proves more difficult than it sounds. Zach Braff is the token youngster; maybe he wanted to witness yet another reunion, this one between De Niro and his screenwriter George Gallo, who writes and directs here.

Actress-turned-director Augustine Frizzell takes a right turn from her debut, the stoner comedy Never Goin’ Back, with this Netflix love story based on a novel by JoJo Moyes. The name of the game here is time-jumping, border-hopping romance, with Felicity Huffman in the starring role as a journalist whose discovery of a cache of secret love letters inspires her to hunt down their writers and continue the story of their illicit affair. Shailene Woodley and Callum Turner co-star as the star-crossed midcentury lovers, alongside Nabhaan Rizwan as the archivist who helps Jones in her quest.

Given his history, Mark Wahlberg isn’t the first actor you’d expect to headline a movie about a guy marching for tolerance. That’s the premise of this ripped-from-the-headlines drama, directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green (), penned by the Oscar-winning screenwriters of , and starring Wahlberg as a father walking from Oregon to New York, extolling an anti-bullying message on behalf of his gay teenage son (Reid Miller). From last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, that Joe Bell had its “heart in the right place, but its head is foggy and possibly concussed.”

Quentin Dupieux, the French musician-turned-filmmaker, is as prolific as he is unconventional. Just four months after his last absurdist whatsit hit the American market, the director is back with a zany-looking buddy comedy about a pair of knuckleheads (Grégoire Ludig and David Marsais) who find a fly the size of a dog in the trunk of their car and try to figure out how they can make money from it. Adèle Exarchopoulos, bellowing loudly, costars. The, ahem, buzz from last autumn’s festival circuit was largely positive.

The success of the first seemed to consume Disney for years, as the studio became hellbent on replicating it with four (though usually quite profitable) sequels. Now that the series is in some kind of limbo, Disney’s live-action division can get back to their original mission: making ill-advised movies out of other old Disneyland attractions. Admittedly, Jungle Cruise seems like their best shot since the first Pirates, simply by virtue of starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, and seemingly zero . The trailer looks a bit lumbering, but maybe all that heavy synergy will be mitigated by the presence of ace B-movie director .

Dev Patel is Sir Gawain, a.k.a. King Arthur’s nephew, in this by-all-appearances striking take on the 14th-century legend. Excitement for the film has arguably only grown in the year and change since it was set to premiere at SXSW; both the original teaser and the emphasize the supernatural, horror-leaning imagery offered by writer-director David Lowery (, ). A24 is banking on The Green Knight being worth the wait. If nothing else, it does look like a spectacle built for the big screen, not a casual stream—and the rare Arthurian adaptation that pairs its mythic source material with some true mythological grandeur.

When an American college student (Abigail Breslin) studying aboard in Marseilles is accused of murdering her girlfriend, her father (Matt Damon, trying out a thick Oklahoma accent) moves to France to fight the case. Judging from the trailer, which emphasizes the danger and urgency of the situation, Stillwater is a change of pace for director Thomas McCarthy—though, of course, it also counts as a return to adult drama after his last movie, the Disney+ original . That it’s premiering at this month’s Cannes Film Festival ahead of its U.S. run is a pretty good sign.

In a rustic cabin situated on the edge of oblivion, a quiet functionary played by Winston Duke interviews candidates for existence itself—literal unborn souls, all vying for a chance to go to Earth and live a life. Though the premise retroactively suggests a live-action, adult-oriented , this first feature from writer-director Edson Oda owes a clearer debt to Kore-eda Hirokazu’s similarly stripped-down , though it’s not nearly as conceptually sound. A strong cast—including Zazie Beetz, Tony Hale, Benedict Wong, and Bill Skarsgård—helped Nine Days rack up some glowing reviews at last year’s Sundance.

He’s not as young as he used to be, but Jean-Claude Van Damme can still do the splits like no one else. Flexibility is just one of the skills the Muscles from Brussels shows off in his new Netflix action-comedy, which takes the approach of pairing him with a younger actor, Samir Decazza, cast as the estranged son of Van Damme’s grizzled former French secret service agent. Our hero swoops in to save his progeny from false accusations of weapons and drug trafficking, leading to an adventure we suspect will be a bit of a bonding experience for the duo as well. Just, you know, with car chases and bone-crunching fight sequences.

When former U.S. Air National Guard analyst Matt DeHart was convicted on child pornography charges in 2016, he and his family insisted the accusations were false, claiming that they were retaliation for DeHart’s involvement in the hacker group Anonymous. Director Sonia Kennebeck delves into the veracity of DeHart’s story in this documentary that premiered at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. The guiding hand of nonfiction legend Errol Morris, who executive produced, can be detected in a shifting approach to the contradictory evidence unearthed in Kennebeck’s investigation.