Checking in on Supergirl and other sisterly stories
Superman is compelled to protect Earth and do good. Supergirl would like to stay out of it and get her buzz on.
Supergirl(PG-13, in theaters) builds on Milly Alcock’s cameo at the end of last year’s Superman (streaming on Prime Video and HBO Max and available for purchase or rent). After partying on planets whose red sun doesn’t prevent her from getting a little tipsy the way Earth’s yellow sun does, Alcock’s Kara Zor-El came back to her cousin Superman/Clark/Kal-El’s (David Corenswet) Fortress of Solitude to pick up her energetic good boy dog Krypto.
While Clark lives in Metropolis, fighting bad guys and, as Kara says, seeing the best in everyone, Kara just sort of dirtbags around in her RV-esque spaceship, partying on dirtbag-y planets and keeping company primarily with Krypto. She is not looking to save the day — but she can’t quite just live with bullying either. When 13-ish-year-old Ruthye (Eve Ridley) shows up at the bar where Kara is slumming it, Kara seems compelled to fight the patron who tries to steal Ruthye’s sword. Impressed with Kara’s fighting skills even in her low-power red-sun state, Ruthye tries to get Kara to join her on her quest to find and kill Krem (Matthias Schoenaerts), the girl-trafficking villain who killed Ruthye’s family. Kara is all “no thanks, kid” but then Krem and his ruffians steal Kara’s ship, in the process poisoning Krypto. A healer tells Kara that she has three days to get the antidote from Krem or Krypto will die. She still isn’t interested in helping a little girl do revenge but now Kara has no choice but to search for Krem, and Ruthye tags along.
Somewhere along the way, they run into and then keep running into Lobo (Jason Momoa), a bounty hunter with some super strength and costuming that suggests off-brand KISS.
Jason Momoa here is a bit like the cinematic equivalent of what happens when you get a bottle of hot honey — it’s such a fun flavor pick-me-up that you just start randomly putting it on things. It’s not unpleasant, per se, but it doesn’t always feel necessary. Jason Momoa knows how to be in this kind of movie and has good enough chemistry with Alcock but, like, I’m not sure why we’re drizzling him on everything.
Kara’s relationship with Ruthye is nice — big sister-y at times with Kara genuinely interested in keeping young Ruthye from sliding into the same grief and loneliness pit that she has been living in since she left behind the people of Krypton. The flashbacks explain how Kara has a working memory of Krypton culture and her father Zor-El (David Krumholtz), brother of Superman’s dad Jor-El, and yet is younger than Superman. It’s all basically fine, as exposition goes. More than we get from the brief glimpse at Krypton via the Superman parents’ video message in Superman, not quite the dazzling world building that you might want for someone so tied to that part of her life.
I think this movie wants — while still being in the 2025 Superman universe, with cartoony bad guys and Superman’s grounded earnestness — to be about the same sense of hope but from shadows. Kara hasn’t had Clark’s Kansas upbringing, she doesn’t have a found family. She feels alone and adrift in a universe that is mostly crappy, full of pirates and ruined worlds and individuals picking on the weak. Caring, for her, is a road to more grief. But, as her mother told her, she may be tough and not always nice but she is inherently good. So how do you be good in a crappy world? It’s not the shock of “this is different” that I think gave Superman its sparkle but Supergirl is full of interesting ideas, with more smart or funny or thoughtful moments than weak ones. I liked it more than I didn’t and — especially with its under-two-hour run time — had fun without too much checking my watch.
Another movie with a female duo at its otherwise tonally wildly different center is Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (R, streaming on Hulu and available for purchase). Picking up pretty much exactly where 2019’s Ready or Not ended, this gooshy dark-comedy horror starts with bride Grace (Samara Weaving) smoking on the steps of her in-laws’ in-flames mansion, having survived/killed her way out of a Satan-mandated game of hide and seek on her wedding night. She is taken to the hospital, where she wakes up to find herself handcuffed to a gurney — a lot of people died, after all — and trying to explain the situation she’s in to her estranged sister Faith (Kathryn Newton), who is still her emergency contact. Before Grace can do much recuperating or explaining, someone shows up to try to kill her and she learns what we already know, which is that the previous night’s game has leveled up. The death of her in-laws has left a hole in Mr. Le Bail’s, aka the Devil, High Council. As Satan’s lawyer (Elijah Wood) explains, now the remaining High Council families will hunt Grace until sunrise with the family that dispatches her getting to sit at the head of the High Council and basically rule the world. The local family hosting the hunt is the Danforth family, represented by twins Titus (Shawn Hatosy) and Ursula (Sarah Michelle Gellar, who wonderfully understands the assignment). Thus a new group of rich wieners attempt to kill Grace and, because she’s there, Faith, while Grace, outfitted once again in her blood-soaked wedding dress, attempts to fight them off. Fight them off and not get too much goo on herself when the council members explode for having broken a rule, which seems to happen a lot.
This movie, like its predecessor (which is also on Hulu, if you’re looking for a double feature), is giddy and goofy and a real good time. The addition of a sister, and thus a team member, for Grace adds a nice element. The sisters have spikey chemistry but Grace still feels responsible for Faith even if Faith is still nursing her hurt at Grace’s long ago disappearance. Weaving and Newton are also both just well suited for these kinds of characters. They are being chased and threatened and they are scared but they’re not victims.
The sister relationship is the most interesting part of Voicemails for Isabelle, a June-release Netflix rom-com movie. Jill (Zoey Deutch) is trying to figure out who she is and what to do with the rest of her life since the death of her sister Isabelle (Ciara Bravo) from cystic fibrosis. Because of Isabelle’s long history of being in hospitals and, as Jill describes it, stuck at home, their sisterhood was particularly central to their lives. Even when Jill moved out to San Francisco from their hometown of Austin to pursue her career dreams of being a baker, Jill and Isabelle constantly checked in with each other, something Jill continues even after Isabelle has died, listening to Izzy’s old voicemails and leaving new messages at Izzy’s phone number. What Jill doesn’t know is that Wes (Nick Robinson), a real estate broker or something in Austin, has inherited Izzy’s number and is getting Jill’s messages. He’s charmed by Jill and starts to follow aspects of her life like it’s his new soap opera. He hears about her difficulties with her pretentious “yes chef” boss Chef Bastien (Nick Offerman, having great fun) and her attempts at dating. And when he gets a chance, he heads to San Francisco to meet her.
The boy-meets-girl of this movie is very Amazon Essentials Rom Com. It hits all the beats but nothing about the Jill-Wes relationship is particularly exciting or memorable. Jill’s relationship with her sister on the other hand is a nice look at close sisterly bonds (a relationship somewhat mirrored in relationships Wes has with found-family-type people he calls cousins) and how the loss of someone so close is not only the cause of great grief but can change how the remaining person thinks about her whole self. Jill finding her way back to her life, and deciding if the chef-y nonsense of Bastian’s kitchen is as important to her as it once would have been, is watchable, made more-so by Deutch, who is pretty good at adding a little something extra to light lifts like this.
The sisters at the core of Netflix’s recently released Little House on the Prairie series also have a compelling relationship, though one that seems to be more built on struggling with their forced proximity than embracing it. (The eight-episode first season of the show, released in early July, has already won a second season.) Laura Ingalls (Alice Halsey) and her older sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes) have been dragged to the Kansas prairie by their father, Charles (Luke Bracey), in search of new opportunities and open land. That the land is open to settlement is news to the Osage, still hoping to prevent the settlers (and the federal government that would enforce those settlers’ claims) from taking their land. The tension between the newcomers and the land’s inhabitants is one of the interesting points of friction in this new adaptation of the classic novels. Unlike the saintly parents of the 1970s TV show, Charles and his wife Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald) here start the show at a mom-and-dad-are-fighting simmer. Caroline seems to be all in on Charles’ plan for the family — or at least 70 percent in — but this big move to the new place with no extended family or community amenities (no church, no school, no post office for the first episode) is terrifying to her, as are the wolves that roam the area, the assorted drifter types and, at first, her Osage neighbors, whose claim on the land Caroline doesn’t know about. We see the Osage side of the tensions from neighbors White Sun (Alyssa Wapanatâhk) and William Mitchell (Meegwun Fairbrother), whose daughter Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts) becomes fast besties with Laura.
Around the edges, the show also touches on the Civil War and its effects on the men who fought in it and, ever so lightly, on issues of race. We also get more of the frustrations of the female characters about the special restrictions and hardships of places like this for women. Caroline has to put up with a snotty neighbor, Jemma James (Mary Holland, a first-rank “hey it’s that guy” who needs to be in more things), if she wants any female friendship at all. Or at least, she does until she makes better friends with the significantly cooler Emily Henderson (Barrett Doss), the Black owner of the town’s general store, and Lacey Aubert (Rebecca Amzallag), the pants-wearing French lady whose relationship with Mr. Edwards (Warren Christie) is always discussed with raised eyebrows.
I like how show tells the story of Laura and her family with a sympathetic eye to them, particularly to the curious, open-hearted, school-averse Laura, while still being realistic about the injustice-filled situation they’ve rather naively wedged themselves into.
In tone, the show reminded me of the bits I’ve seen of Anne with an E, the Anne of Green Gables adaption from the late 2010s whose three seasons are still available on Netflix. (Little House inspired me to watch or possibly rewatch a few episodes.) There, like here, we get the familiar story but more rooted in the history of the time and reality of the characters. Amybeth McNulty’s Anne is a plucky story-teller with a big imagination but she’s also suffering from the effects of abuse she suffered as the ill-used, unpaid servant to several large families. That show, like the new Little House, isn’t quite a gritty update, it’s more a reconsideration that has you thinking about what the familiar story beats (tweenage orphan or family on the prairie) would actually mean and feel like. The Little House adaptation does have a bit more heft (both in its story and in the strength of its performances) and it seems to be working with a bigger budget, with that money well spent when it comes to setting and overall production.
If you’re looking for more sister-ish relationships on TV, check out the recently canceled Ponies(on Peacock) while it’s still accessible. Even though news came out in June that it would not get a second season, the one-season, eight-episode show, which came out back in January, tells a good, relatively complete story and is worth watching. Mother of Dragons Emilia Clarke plays Bea and Haley Lu Richardson is Twila, both women living with their husbands at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the late 1970s. They both learn that their CIA husbands have died on assignment and are offered the choice to work in Moscow as embassy secretaries while secretly working for the CIA in hopes of learning more about their husbands’ deaths. Bea has the advantage of being a somewhat native Russian speaker, having learned the language from her Jewish grandmother (Harriet Walter) who lived in the USSR before and during World War II. Twila is a wonderfully plucky, seemingly bumbling American whose mix of street smarts and smart smarts (and curly hair) gives her a somewhat Natasha Lyonne-in-Poker Face vibe. (Poker Face is also a delightful watch, also on Peacock and also, sadly, canceled. But even if the second season doesn’t quite reach the heights of the first season, I also recommend watching all 22 episodes while you can.)
I’m a sucker for some high-quality late 1970s production design and costuming, and this definitely has that as well as some Cold War trade craft and fun character beats, particularly in the growing friendship between Twila and Bea as they work together and separately on increasingly dangerous assignments.
Featured photo: Supergirl.
