Supergirl Lands in the DCU, and Moreno Valley Gets First Crack at It

If you've been waiting for a reason to skip the Sunday errands and duck into somewhere air-conditioned, “Supergirl” opened this weekend and it's already up at Harkins Moreno Valley 16, showtimes stacked all day on the big stadium screens. This is the second stone James Gunn and Peter Safran have thrown into the rebuilt DC Universe, and unlike a lot of superhero sequels that quietly slide into theaters hoping nobody asks too many questions about continuity, this one arrives with a real spotlight on it: does the DCU reboot actually have legs beyond its first film, or was that just a lucky opening act?

The bigger story here isn't really the plot, it's the handoff. Milly Alcock, who a lot of people first noticed as young Rhaenyra in “House of the Dragon,” is stepping into a role that has a messy history on screen, from the 1984 flop to the short-lived CW series. Director Craig Gillespie, who's shown he can handle prickly, unlikeable-on-paper protagonists in things like “I, Tonya,” was a slightly unexpected pick for a cosmic superhero picture, and writer Ana Nogueira came in from television drama rather than blockbuster spectacle. That combination shows on screen in ways that are genuinely interesting: this doesn't feel like a movie built by committee to hit four-quadrant marks, it feels like specific people making specific choices about who Kara Zor-El is when nobody's watching. Add in a supporting cast that includes David Corenswet and Jason Momoa carrying over DCU threads from other corners of this universe, and you've got a film that's clearly meant to be a load-bearing wall in Gunn and Safran's larger plan, not a side project.

As for what actually happens: Kara's dog Krypto gets hurt by someone who shouldn't have been able to touch him, and that sends her out across the galaxy after whoever did it. That's the engine of the movie, stripped down. It's a smaller, more personal hook than “save the planet,” and the film mostly earns that choice rather than using it as an excuse to just restage the same beats every Superman-adjacent movie hits.

Here's where I have to be straight with you. The film's IMDb score sits at 6.1 out of 10, which is a real “fine, not great” number, not a disaster and not a triumph. That tracks with what I noticed watching it: there are stretches where Alcock's performance genuinely carries scenes that the script hasn't fully earned yet, and there are other stretches where the galaxy-hopping structure feels like it's stalling for time between the moments that actually land emotionally. Gillespie gets real mileage out of small, quiet character beats, the stuff between Kara and the people who knew her before she was anybody's hero, and that's the film's strongest material by a wide margin. Where it wobbles is pacing in the middle third, where the hunt for Krypto's attacker turns into a string of set pieces that don't build on each other so much as just happen in sequence.

My honest verdict: this is a solidly good, not great, superhero movie, one worth seeing on a big screen for Alcock's performance and Gillespie's handle on the quiet moments, but don't walk in expecting the instant-classic buzz some of the marketing has been chasing. It's a movie that's better than its slower middle stretch, and worse than its terrific opening act, which nets out to a genuinely worthwhile Saturday matinee rather than a must-see event. If you'd rather wait for it to cycle down to a cheaper ticket, Regency Theatres' Towngate 8 will almost certainly pick it up on second run before long, and that's a perfectly reasonable way to catch it too.

Facts verified as of September 9, 2026.