June gave us five movies, the most we've seen in a single month this year, and after a couple of thin stretches that was a relief, even if the top and bottom of the list sorted themselves out pretty quickly. Here's how they rank, worst to best. Number one takes the automatic bid into the end-of-year tournament.
5. Masters of the Universe
No surprise at the bottom. I'm not sure why we keep trying to mine Gen X nostalgia when the box office keeps proving it doesn't work, and the result here is the usual lackluster product, a movie that seems faintly embarrassed by its own premise. There are entertaining moments, and I went back and forth on bumping it up a slot, but it's mostly just boring, and it hides behind constant winking jokes instead of committing to the earnest, full-throated spectacle these things actually need to land. A relic of a bygone era in the worst sense.
4. Disclosure Day
This one is low for a specific reason: it's forgettable. Literally, it took me going through the list of movies I saw in June from the AMC app to recall I saw this one. I lost whole stretches of it, and I left the theater thinking "that was enjoyable enough" and not much else. Going back through my notes, the problem is the ending. Not deflating in the deliberate, hopeless way Infinity War or The Empire Strikes Back are deflating, but deflating in that the wind just leaves the sails right as it should be building to a climax. The antagonist, a man established as willing to kill everyone, simply lets it all happen, and the whole thing wheezes to a stop. The prism device doesn't help, functioning as a MacGuffin that does whatever the plot needs at any given moment. The performances are strong and it hangs together as a coherent film, but coherent and forgettable is a tough combination to rank.
3. Toy Story 5
Better than Toy Story 4, and I enjoyed it, but it can't crack the top two because its core story doesn't land. The heart of the movie, Lilypad trying to do what she thinks is best for Bonnie at the expense of the other toys, keeps getting muddied by a confused tech angle. All these gadgets get lumped together as sinister "tech" when in an earlier film they'd simply have been toys, and the clearest example is the Conan O'Brien-voiced talking potty, which would have been a plain toy a couple of movies ago and now inexplicably needs to send messages over the internet. Don't think about it too hard. There's a genuinely good, grounded film here about Jessie learning what it means to be there for a kid through a fleeting window of childhood, and there's nuance available in the tech argument too, especially once you fold other objects into it. But the movie won't commit to that nuance, defaults to "all tech bad," and lands in a weird spot as a result.
2. Supergirl
Let me explain this one, because I liked it, probably more than most people did, and Milly Alcock is fantastic in it. Two things hold it back. First, it's adapting Woman of Tomorrow and it doesn't have the vibrancy of that comic, which is a fundamental misfire given what the movie is trying to be. Second, this is supposed to be a story about Kara learning to care, learning to become the protector Zor-El sends her to Earth to be as Argo City dies around them, and nothing she actually encounters would plausibly change her. Everything she runs into is the worst of the worst, traffickers and predators, and at no point does she meet something pure and worth saving that cuts against her cynicism. Saving Ruthye from killing Krem of the Yellow Hills doesn't salvage this character's soul, and Supergirl being the one to kill Krem doesn't either. Lobo's in the movie too and serves no real purpose, present mostly because Jason Momoa is perfectly cast and they wanted to use him before he aged out. The bones of a great movie are here. It's just missing the thing that would make it truly great, and the headphones-as-blocking-out-the-noise motif they raise and then abandon is the clearest symptom of that. The one nitpick: I'm not convinced the Kryptonian-language dialogue works, not because performance in a language you don't understand can't be great (Chalamet's Chakobsa speech in Dune proves it can), but because this particular delivery doesn't sell it.
1. Power Ballad
Full disclosure, I'm a John Carney fanboy. Sing Street has a special place in this network's history. It was one of the first advance screenings we ever did back in 2016. I also enjoyed Flora and Son more than most people. This is a real step forward from that. Paul Rudd plays Rick, a wedding singer who gave up his Madison Square Garden dreams for his family and knows, fundamentally, that he made the right call, even as he's eaten up with bitterness that the man who stole his song is living the life he wanted. Rudd plays that tension beautifully. Nick Jonas is the boy-band star, Danny, and there's an obvious authenticity to his performance, as someone who actually lived the experience of coming out of a group and trying to become his own person.
It's not flawless. It tries to please too many masters of story, and a little more time developing Danny into his own character would have paid off. It also spends too long toying with the mystery of whether there's real proof the song was ripped off, and the extended hangout sequence between Danny and Rick runs longer than it needs to. This is the kind of movie Carney could win a Best Original Song Oscar for, though Taylor Swift dropping her Toy Story 5 track the same week probably kills that conversation and nudges her one step closer to an EGOT. Even so, this is the most complete, cohesive film June had to offer, and it takes the automatic bid.
So the running board through the halfway mark: H is for Hawk (January), Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die (February), Project Hail Mary (March), The Christophers (April), The Mandalorian and Grogu (May), and now Power Ballad (June). Six months, six automatic bids, and the wildcard fights still to come.
Please note, in the podcast episode we inadvertently say The Devil Wears Prada 2 won the automatic bid from May in error.
