Spider-Man to The Odyssey: 10 of the best films to watch this July

With Tom Holland and Zendaya starring in two of the biggest releases, here are the films to watch at the cinema and screen at home this month.

In the third Minions film – and the seventh Despicable Me film – the yellow humanoids aren't hanging around with supervillains, for a change, they're hanging around with actors and directors in 1920s Hollywood. There's a certain logic to that setting, as the franchise's love of slapstick and non-verbal humour connects it to the world of silent comedy. "All the Minions stuff is heavily inspired by silent-movie stars," the film's director, Pierre Coffin, told Empire. "The whole point of it is that you don't understand them when they speak – but you understand them nonetheless." The twist is that the Minions decide to make their own monster movie – and that means venturing to a remote island to find a real live monster…

Released on 1 to 3 July internationally

Sherlock Holmes's younger sister (Millie Bobby Brown) is off on another fast and furious adventure – this one written by Jack Thorne and directed by Philip Barantini, the screenwriter and the director of Adolescence. Enola isn't an adolescent anymore, though, but a young woman who is due to marry her boyfriend, Lord Tewkesbury (Louis Partridge). The only snag is that Sherlock (Henry Cavill) has been kidnapped, so she has to rescue the great detective with the help of his sidekick Watson (Himesh Patel) and the siblings' mother (Helena Bonham Carter). "Millie's totally different to the Millie that I first met when first thinking about Enola Holmes," said Thorne in the Radio Times. And so [the new script] was trying to capture what it is to be a grown-up Enola Holmes." The films are also Victorian history lessons, added Thorne. "The first film was about land reform and vote reform, the second film was about the birth of the unions, and the third film looks at our colonial history."

Released on 1 July on Netflix

Disney has made plenty of live-action remakes of its classic cartoons, but Moana is different. The original film was released just 10 years ago – and Moana 2 came out two years ago in 2024. Meanwhile, the character voiced by Dwayne Johnson in the cartoons is played by him on-screen in the live-action version, and the various monsters are CGI creations rather than physical puppets. The question is, then: will this Moana film be so similar to the cartoon that it's a waste of time? The director, Thomas Kail, promises otherwise. "I'm from the theatre, where the idea of doing a revival is commonplace," he said in Polygon. "There's something about taking a text and having it evolve… But there's tons of new dialogue, lots of new jokes."

Released on 8 to 10 July internationally

An episode in the third series of Friends popularised the concept of a "celebrity sex pass", the idea being that there are certain famous people that your partner would allow you to sleep with – not that you'd ever have the chance. In this comedy from David Wain (Wet Hot American Summer), a young woman's boyfriend makes use of his pass when he spots his favourite celebrity in Kansas, so Gail (Zoey Deutch) tries to even the score by travelling to Los Angeles and seducing Jon Hamm. Along the way there are cameos from Jennifer Aniston, Henry Winkler, Paul Rudd, Elizabeth Banks, and Hamm's Mad Men co-star, John Slattery, all playing themselves. And there are postmodern references to The Wizard of Oz (which is why its heroine's name is a bit like "Dorothy Gale"). According to Richard Lawson in The Hollywood Reporter, Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is "proudly stupid, a scattershot, oddball comedy that satisfies in visceral, pleasurable ways that a more sophisticated comedy could not".

Released on 10 July in the US

Ross McElwee is an independent film-maker who has built up a cult following by putting himself and his family in his quirky, thoughtful, bittersweet documentaries. His last film, Photographic Memory (2011), examined the friction between McElwee and his grown-up son, Adrian. His new one, Remake, looks back on their relationship in the wake of Adrian's death of a drug overdose in 2016. Like a non-fiction version of Richard Linklater's Boyhood, it sifts through Adrian's life – including when he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and went into rehab. "There is so much pain present in Remake, but there is so much love too – love that seems to radiate through the screen from McElwee's footage of Adrian and his sister Mariah from birth to adulthood," says Hannah Strong in Little White Lies. "Remake is his most nakedly intimate and devastating work, the culmination of a life lived in public for the sake of art."

Released on 10 July in the US

Golshifteh Farahani stars in this inspiring adaptation of writer and academic Azar Nafisi's bestselling 2003 memoir. The drama covers Nafisi's life in Iran in the 1980s and '90s as the post-revolutionary regime tightens its grip. At first, she teaches literature at the University of Tehran, but she is eventually reduced to running a secret weekly book club in her home. Behind closed doors, a small group of women analyse not just Lolita, but The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice, and they discuss how the novels relate to their own ever-more-constricted and dangerous lives. "This is a stirring, if conventionally made story of courage and curiosity in the face of oppression," says Wendy Ide in Screen International. "Farahani is a powerful and charismatic presence. Her Azar is a strong woman whose face speaks volumes even when she chooses to stay silent."

Released on 10 July in the US

Sam Raimi's Evil Dead franchise roared back to life in 2023 with the smash hit Evil Dead Rise. Now there's some more gleefully over-the-top comedy horror in Evil Dead Burn, directed by Sébastian Vaniček. Souheila Yacoub stars as a young woman who goes to dinner with her late husband's family shortly after he is killed in a car accident. It's the definition of an uncomfortable social situation – but it gets worse when the family starts mutating into demonic zombies known as Deadites. Vaniček believe that cinemagoers needn't have seen any previous Evil Dead films to enjoy this one. "My goal was to craft a powerful, singular – almost personal – story that could stand on its own," he said in Variety, "while still resonating deeply within the rich, complex world that Sam has built. I want people to feel physically drained when they leave the theatre, like they've been through an emotional and intense journey."

Released on 8 to 10 July internationally

The director of The Dark Knight, Inception, and the Oscar-winning Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan doesn't make small-scale films. But his latest epic looks set to be his grandest undertaking to date: a near three-hour adaptation of one of the most important works of literature ever written, Homer's Odyssey. Matt Damon plays Odysseus, the king of Ithaca, who is making the long and perilous journey back to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) after the Trojan War. The star-studded cast includes Charlize Theron, Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Tom Holland, Lupita Nyong'o and many more. And the whole thing is shot on 70mm IMAX film – the first feature film to do so. "I think what separates him from other directors is the stories he wants to tell are incredibly ambitious," Matt Damon said on 60 Minutes. "And the way he wants to tell them is incredibly ambitious. In this case he wanted to do it 100% in IMAX, which had never been done."

Released on 15 to 17 July internationally

Nicolas Winding Refn is back with his first film since The Neon Demon in 2016. It's his most extreme and divisive work to date – and considering that his filmography includes Drive, Pusher and Only God Forgives, that's saying something. Sophie Thatcher stars as an actress who moves into a luxury skyscraper in a mist-shrouded future metropolis. She is about to start shooting a science-fiction film, but a supernatural serial killer is on the loose. Meanwhile, in the dark streets below, an American soldier (Charles Melton) is on a noirish quest that pays homage to the fight scenes in Marvel's Daredevil comics. Chase Hutchinson in The Wrap calls this surreal and stylised fairy tale "a captivating cinematic experience… a series of visceral, vibrant and increasingly violent visions that you have to let wash over you".

Released on 24 July in the US and Canada

This is the fourth Spider-Man film with Tom Holland in the red-and-blue costume, but, as the subtitle suggests, it's also a new start: the first film in a proposed trilogy. It has a new director, with Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) taking over from Jon Watts. And Peter Parker is in a new situation: following a spell cast by Doctor Strange in the last film, none of his friends remember that he exists. "It's that time in your mid-20s, when the harsh realities of life can sometimes slap you in the face," Cretton said in Screenrant. "Peter is dealing with some real grown-up problems both personally and professionally, and for the first time, he's learning how to deal with them completely on his own." If that weren't enough, he's got to deal with the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo), the Punisher (Jon Bernthal), and a gang of ninja assassins.

Released on 29 to 31 July internationally

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