10 of the best films to watch this July

From Superman to I Know What You Did Last Summer – these are the films to watch at the cinema and stream at home this month. Best known as the horror auteur who chilled audiences with Hereditary andMidsommar, Ari Aster moves on to state-of-the-nation satirical comedy with his latest film, Eddington. The title is the name of a small desert town in New Mexico where the sheriff, Joaquin Phoenix, is at loggerheads with the business-minded mayor, Pedro Pascal. Their feud has something to do with the sheriff's wife, Emma Stone, but it spirals out of control in 2020 when the town is hit by the Covid-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests. Aster "transforms everyday American insanity into one of the most artistically complete and compulsively watchable doom-scrolls of the year",says Tomris Laffly in Elle. "It's insightful, gloriously bonkers, and often very funny… both the definitive Covid movie and a modern-day Western of sorts, culminating into a superbly directed and gradually darkening finale." Released on 18 July in the US and on 24 July in Australia What is it about US Presidents becoming action heroes at the moment? In April, Viola Davis was a gun-toting, butt-kicking POTUS in G20. Now, Heads of State has John Cena as a President who used to be a Hollywood actor, and Idris Elba as the UK's Prime Minister. When their plane is shot down over hostile territory, they have to battle their way back to civilisation, with some help from a supporting cast that includes Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Jack Quaid and Paddy Considine. Directed by Ilya Naishuller, this action comedy probably won't win many Oscars, but Naishuller's last film, Nobody, had some of the best fight scenes in years, and Cena proved in The Suicide Squad that he knows how to send up his tough-guy image. "This one was pretty much just me getting beat up, and that is my forte," Cenasaid on ExtraTV. "We have a little introduction as to who these people are, and then once it jumps off, you are on the edge of your seat the whole time. Once it goes, it doesn't stop." Released on Prime Video on 2 July internationally Allison Brie and Dave Franco, a real-life married couple, star in this icky horror drama as another couple, Millie and Tim, who may be a little too closely entwined for their own good. They move from Melbourne to the Australian countryside, where Millie is starting a teaching job. After Tim drinks some stagnant water in a mysterious cave, he can't bear to be apart from Millie, but when he touches her, their bodies start to fuse together. Written and directed by Michael Shanks, Together currently has a 100% fresh rating on the Rotten Tomatoes reviews round-up site – but whether it would work as a date movie is open to debate. "This delightfully unhinged spin on the body horror joint… should leave audiences yelping and tittering in equal measure,"says Kate Erbland in IndieWire. "It's hard not to get pulled into the spectacle, stuck to the story, really connected to this crowd-pleasing (and -screaming) little ditty of a midnight treat." Released on 30 July in the US, Canada and the UK, and on 31 July in Australia The debut film from writer-director RT Thorne is a dystopian survival thriller set in Canada. Animals have been wiped out by a pandemic, and food is scarce, so if you are lucky enough to have your own farm, you might be inclined to build a high fence around it, and do whatever it takes to keep gangs of hungry strangers outside. The farmers on this particular property are people of colour – Danielle Deadwyler plays a matriarch with a military background, and her husband is played by a First Nations actor, Michael Greyeyes – which gives 40 Acres another layer of complexity: enslaved people were promised homesteads of "not more than 40 acres" after the American Civil War. The film is full of gory action, but, according toChase Hutchinson in The Wrap, it has some profound issues in mind. "Is there room for community and care when everyone is at each other's throats in what was already a painful existence? The question remains the main point of thematic tension with no easy answers as we follow a family struggling to find a way forward together." Released on 2 July in the US Superman is the first film in the new DC Universe, as revamped by James Gunn (Guardians of the Galaxy, The Suicide Squad). It looks as if it might be more cheerful than Zack Snyder's moody Man of Steel (2013): the trailers don't just feature Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult), but the outlandish likes of the Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, Superman's robot assistants, and Krypto the Superdog. But what can we hope for from Superman himself, as played by David Corenswet? "We can expect a Superman who is about the compassion of the human spirit,"Gunn said in Screen Brief. "Yes, he's an alien from another planet who's super powerful, but he is also deeply, deeply human… This is about a complex character, and I think that’s the thing that audiences are going to be completely surprised by." Released from 8 July internationally A tribe of tiny, brightly coloured, music-loving humanoids who live in a forest village? Over the past decade, the most popular characters who met that description were the Trolls, not the Smurfs: Trolls was a disco-powered smash in 2016, and Smurfs: The Lost Village couldn't match it a year later. Still, maybe the latest Smurfs film, in which animated Smurfs are zapped to a live-action Paris, will put them back on top. The biggest selling point is Rihanna, who voices the Smurfette and contributes new songs (the working title was The Smurfs Musical). But Peyo's original Belgian comic strips were what mattered to the director, Chris Miller (Puss in Boots). "The DNA in Peyo's original drawings guides so many creative choices in the film,"Miller saidat last year's Annecy Animation Festival. "All of the action lines and thought bubbles from the comics are going in the movie, and the comics have inspired the style of animation to be fun and buoyant, with plenty of squash and stretch." Released from 16 July internationally In the original I Know What You Did Last Summer, which came out in 1997, a group of teenagers ran someone over in their car, fled the scene of the crime, and were hunted down by a serial killer known as the Fisherman. The film set off a craze for teen slasher films in the 1990s, alongside Scream (which had the same screenwriter, Kevin Williamson). And now that the Scream franchise is back, maybe it was inevitable that I Know What You Did Last Summer would follow. This legacy sequel has a new set of teens, and another car accident, but it's set in the same universe as the first film, and features Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze Jr as the two survivors of the first killing spree, Julie and Ray. "I came to this originally wanting to dig into: if this thing had happened to you, how would that shape you, and what person do you become after it?" Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, the writer-director, saidin Entertainment Weekly. "So really wanting to look at both Ray and Julie and say, 'Okay, how did this thing shape both of them and where would they be today?'" Released from 16 July internationally Once a decade, it seems, someone tries to launch a big-screen franchise based on Marvel comics' first superhero team, the Fantastic Four. There was a 2005 film, which was successful enough to merit a sequel, and then there was Josh Trank's darkreboot in 2015, which wasn't. And now, in 2025, there is yet another version – but it looks a lot more fantastic than the others. The team is now played by Pedro Pascal, Vanessa Kirby (who shares a surname with the co-creator of the Fantastic Four, legendary artist Jack Kirby), Joseph Quinn and Ebon Moss-Bachrach. The twist is that the film isn't set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but a parallel reality which is a bright and shiny space-aged, 1960s utopia. "This is very much about the spirit of the Space Race,"Matt Shakman, the director, said in Empire magazine. "It's about JFK and optimism. It's imagining these four going into space instead of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. This idea is that they are the most famous people in America, because they're adventurers, explorers, astronauts – not because they're superheroes." Released from 23 July internationally The state of Brazil's democracy is firing up film-makers at the moment: see last year's Oscar-winningI'm Still Here, and the forthcoming Cannes award-winner The Secret Agent. In the documentary field, Petra Costa's personal take on her country's political divisions, The Edge of Democracy, was Oscar-nominated in 2020. And now she returns with Apocalypse in the Tropics, which examines the influence that evangelical Christian leaders have over voters: former president Jair Bolsanaro was embraced by Christians and nicknamed "the Messiah". Costa "explores the history of evangelism to try and grasp how its apocalyptic visions managed to capture the hearts and minds of so many Brazilians",says Jordan Mintzer in The Hollywood Reporter. "By doing so, she sheds light on a phenomenon present not only in Brazil and America, but in countries around the world where 'faith in progress and democracy' is currently being tested like never before." Released Netflix on 14 July internationally Jurassic World Rebirth is a Jurassic World reset. The last film in the dino-series, 2022's Jurassic World Dominion, was a globe-trotting action caper with science-fiction and spy-thriller elements, whereas the new one goes back to basics: it's written by David Koepp, who scripted the first twoSteven Spielberg-directed Jurassic Park films, and it returns to the classic concept of having a small band of intrepid adventurers (Scarlett Johansson, Mahershala Ali, Jonathan Bailey, Rupert Friend) being trapped on a tropical island with some hungry prehistoric animals. The director, Gareth Edwards, demonstrated his skill with CGI behemoths in Godzilla (2014) and his low-budget debut, Monsters (2010), but in this instance he's happy to pay loving homage to Spielberg. Jurassic World Rebirth "really does feel that it's welcoming people to celebrate the original film", Baileysaid in Empire magazine. "It has that wonder and awe, while not being scared to re-inject the thrill and the fear." Released in cinemas internationally from 2 July -- If you liked this story,sign up for The Essential List newsletter– a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week. For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us onFacebook,XandInstagram.