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Your Ultimate Guide to This Summer’s Best Movies

Don’t miss any of the action with our critics’ picks of what’s coming and where to catch them


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(Left to right) Tom Hanks in "Asteroid City," Tom Cruise in "Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One" and Harrison Ford in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny."
Courtesy of Pop. 87 Productions/Focus Features; Christian Black/Paramount Pictures; Disney

Everyone ready for the movies to come back big-time after COVID cleared the cineplexes for years? Good, because screens big and small are lighting up with an exciting mix of comedies, dramas and blockbusters this summer. Make your movie nights worth it with our critics’ picks of the best of what’s coming up.

COMING IN MAY

About My Father (in theaters May 26)

An immigrant with old-world ways (Robert De Niro, 79) meets his son’s soon-to-be mother-in-law, a rich U.S. senator (Kim Cattrall, 66). “She’s a control freak,” Cattrall told Screen Rant, “so when she meets the Robert De Niro character and his son it’s not what she expects or wants for her daughter. But in the end it’s exactly what she should have.”

Check it out: About My Father

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COMING IN JUNE

Shooting Stars (on Peacock June 2)

In a series adaptation of LeBron James’ early-life memoir, the coach (Creed’s Wood Harris, 53) of young LeBron (Marquis “Mookie” Cook) tries to break up his basketball crew, so they defect to a white Catholic school whose disgraced coach (Scream VI’s Dermot Mulroney, 59) hopes to make them national champs.

Check it out: Shooting Stars

Flamin’ Hot (on Hulu and Disney+ June 9)

In Eva Longoria’s film inspired by real events, Frito-Lay janitor Richard Montañez (Jesse Garcia) invents a new kind of Cheetos that tastes like his Mexican immigrant dad’s fiery home cooking. (There’s some dispute about who actually invented the spicy treat, but hey, it’s a movie!)

Check it out: Flamin’ Hot

Mary J. Blige’s Real Love and Strength of a Woman (on Lifetime June 10 and 17)

A woman’s star-crossed college romance resurfaces in a later decade in this pair of linked films inspired by Blige’s hit song and album. 

Check it out: Real Love and Strength of a Woman

The Flash (in theaters June 16)

Fleet-footed Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) races back in time to prevent his mother’s murder. Understandable, but this sparks a new multiverse in which annihilation-minded General Zod (Michael Shannon) runs rampant. (True, Zod died in 2013’s Man of Steel, but this is a multiverse, dude.) So the Flash must recruit Batman to save the world — and we get not one but two Batmans: Michael Keaton, 71, and Ben Affleck, 50.

Check it out: The Flash

Asteroid City (in theaters June 16)

Something out of this world happens in the American desert at a 1955 Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention in Wes Anderson’s latest cinematic confection. It’s got more stars than there are in heaven, including Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks (66), Jeffrey Wright (57), Tilda Swinton (62), Edward Norton (53), Steve Carell (60), Matt Dillon (59), Willem Dafoe (67) and Bryan Cranston (67). It will no doubt be elegantly cartoonish, because all his movies start out as “animatics,” storyboard cartoons for each scene that he acts out for the actors. “Wes makes an animatic and voices all the characters in the animatic, what he calls the cartoon,” Cranston told Collider.

Check it out: Asteroid City

The Perfect Find (on Netflix June 23)

Middle-aged fashion designer Jenna Jones (Gabrielle Union, 50), who loses her job and her fiancé, picks herself up with a new job in fashion journalism — competing with young fashionistas and working for her old boss/frenemy Darcy Vale (Gina Torres, 54), who thinks her kids need some of Jenna’s old-school wisdom. Jenna gets cozy at a party with a charming young videographer she learns is her new coworker — and the boss’ son.

Check it out: The Perfect Find

No Hard Feelings (in theaters June 23)

Desperately broke, a young Uber driver whose car was repossessed (Jennifer Lawrence) answers the Craigslist ad of a rich guy (Matthew Broderick, 61) who offers her a Buick Regal to date his painfully shy son before he heads off to college.

Check it out: No Hard Feelings

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (in theaters June 30)

After a prologue set in 1944 featuring a digitally de-aged Harrison Ford, 80, Indiana Jones comes out of retirement in 1969 to crack the whip at an ostensibly former Nazi (Mads Mikkelsen, 57) who’s attempting to use NASA’s moon program for his own purposes. (The screenwriters were riffing on the fact that NASA’s rocket program was first led by V-2 rocket scientist turned American rocket scientist Wernher von Braun.)

Check it out: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

COMING IN JULY

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(Left to right) Pierce Brosnan, Adam DeVine, Ellen Barkin and Nina Dobrev in "The Out-Laws."
Scott Yamano/Netflix

The Out-Laws (on Netflix July 7)

You think the parents in Meet the Parents were hard to deal with? Try Pierce Brosnan, 70, and Ellen Barkin, 69, as an infamous crime duo called the Ghost Bandits. When their soon-to-be son-in-law, an uptight bank manager (Adam Devine), gets his bank robbed the week they arrive for his wedding, he suspects the in-laws are, you guessed it, the outlaws in question.

Check it out: The Out-Laws

Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One (in theaters July 12)

Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise, 61) drives a Fiat down Rome’s Spanish Steps while handcuffed, wrecks a 70-ton train, rides a motorcycle off a Norwegian cliff and hopes his parachute opens. Top that, Bond!

Check it out: Mission Impossible — Dead Reckoning, Part One

Barbie (in theaters July 21)

Think pink! Helen Mirren, 77, narrates the madly colorful tale of that doll Barbie (Margo Robbie), racing her convertible from Barbie Land to the real world. Will Ferrell, 55, plays Mattel’s weird and insensitive CEO.

Check it out: Barbie

They Cloned Tyrone (on Netflix July 21)

Jamie Foxx, 55, had a No. 1 Netflix hit with his 2022 vampire film Day Shift, so hopes are high for this sci-fi spoof. He plays a man investigating President Richard Nixon’s plot to clone his friend (John Boyega).

Check it out: They Cloned Tyrone

Oppenheimer (in theaters July 28)

In the latest epic by The Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan, 52, a high-strung former child prodigy (Cillian Murphy) becomes the father of the atomic bomb — even though his wife and mistress are communists, and the general who’s his boss (Matt Damon, 52) says, “You’re a dilettante, you’re a womanizer, unstable, theatrical, neurotic!”

Check it out: Oppenheimer

Haunted Mansion (in theaters July 28)

Jamie Lee Curtis, 64, plays Madame Leota, summoning ghosts in New Orleans with help from a smug professor (Danny DeVito, 78), a psychic (Tiffany Haddish) and an exorcist priest (Owen Wilson, 54). Jared Leto, 51, plays the Hatbox Ghost. “It’s scary like a Disney ride, and funny,” Curtis told Entertainment Weekly.

Check it out: Haunted Mansion

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The Miracle Club (in theaters in July)

In hardscrabble Ballygar, Ireland, in 1967, two ladies (Maggie Smith, 88, and Kathy Bates, 75) win a miraculous trip to the sacred French town of Lourdes. But when they meet Chrissie (Laura Linney, 59), who’s been exiled in America, old wounds are opened and bitter secrets exposed. Hearts can’t be healed until they’re first broken.

Check it out: The Miracle Club

COMING IN AUGUST

Gran Turismo (in theaters Aug. 11)

True story: Young Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe) is so obsessed with the excellent video game Gran Turismo, his parents (Djimon Hounsou, 59, and Geri Halliwell, 50) are worried. But he wins a gamer contest — and becomes a professional driver of real race cars!

Check it out: Gran Turismo

The Last Voyage of the Demeter (in theaters Aug. 11)

The captain of the Demeter (Liam Cunningham, 61, Game of Thrones) is sailing from Carpathia (Romania) to London, but unfortunately, the scariest-looking Dracula you ever saw (Javier Botet) is aboard, hiding in a coffin. If you try hiding under a bed behind closed doors, don’t think you’re safe. Plus, if he bites you, the sunlight will set you on fire.

Check it out: The Last Voyage of the Demeter

Heart of Stone (on Netflix Aug. 11)

In the first of a planned action-heroine franchise, Gal Gadot plays an MI6 agent contending with a mysterious global peacekeeping organization, the Charter, a crisis that requires her to be heroic and glamorous in Italy, Iceland, Morocco, England and Portugal, and more emotionally grounded than most male action heroes.

Check it out: Heart of Stone

Strays (in theaters Aug. 18)

In the sweetest of revenge movies, Will Ferrell, 55, voices a terrier as kindly as Will Ferrell usually is. But a more hard-nosed terrier (Jamie Foxx, 55) opens his eyes to the fact that his owner (Will Forte, 52) is a rotten person who abused and abandoned him. So with the help of a high-IQ Australian shepherd (Isla Fisher) and an anxious emotional-support great Dane (Randall Park), he plots to bite the owner where it hurts.

Check it out: Strays

White Bird (in theaters Aug. 25)

In a sequel to the smash 2017 indie hit Wonder, about a kid bullied for his genetic facial deformity, Helen Mirren, 77, plays the grandma of the bullying kid, who teaches him a lesson via a flashback to her youth as a bullied Jew in Nazi-occupied France. Since the director is Marc Forster (Finding Neverland, Quantum of Solace), it could be another feel-good hit.

Check it out: White Bird

Golda (in theaters Aug. 25)

Is Helen Mirren ubiquitous this year, or what? She plays Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in a historical thriller about the 19-day Yom Kippur War in 1973, when Israel’s existence was at stake. Liev Schreiber, 55, plays wily Henry Kissinger.

Check it out: Golda

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