10 of the best films to watch this June

From Materialists to 28 Years Later – these are the films to watch at the cinema and stream at home this month.

Celine Song’s bittersweet debut, Past Lives, was nominated for two Oscars in 2024. For her follow-up, Song has moved from a delicate semi-autobiographical drama to a glamorous romantic comedy with an A-list cast. Dakota Johnson plays a New York matchmaker who is blunt about her clients’ value as potential partners: what matters, she says, is exactly how rich, tall and good-looking people are. But in her own love life, should she choose her poor ex (Chris Evans) over a wealthy new suitor (Pedro Pascal)? Materialists may be more conventional than Past Lives, but Song told Time that she wanted to make a film about the pursuit of love. “When people say it’s not important, I ask, ‘Not as important as what?’ When you watch a movie, we don’t all know what it’s like to save the world. But we know what it’s like to fall in love. It’s the biggest drama in our lives. It’s vital, and we need to talk about it more.”

Released on 13 June in the US, Canada, India, Poland and Turkey

The Life of Chuck begins at the end – specifically, at the end of the world. Two ex-spouses, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Karen Gillan, reunite to watch the Earth crumble and the stars blink out of existence – but why are there suddenly posters everywhere celebrating the mild-mannered Charles “Chuck” Krantz (Tom Hiddleston)? Flashbacks to Chuck’s younger days unravel the cosmic mystery, but the best way to watch this inspirational Stephen King adaptation is not to know anything else about it in advance. “It’s surprising and upsetting, funny and profound,” says Kristy Puchko in Mashable. “I laughed hard, cried ’til my eyes ached, and once gasped so loud that I heard it echo across a theatre struck silent by a moment both shocking and tender. The Life of Chuck is glorious.”

Released on 6 June in the US and 11 June in France

M3GAN was a hit in 2022 – although that may have had less to do with the film itself than with the way clips of its robotic anti-heroine took off on TikTok. Either way, a sequel seemed inevitable – and here it is, the return of the artificially-intelligent doll (Amie Donald, with the voice of Jenna Davis) which was designed by Gemma (Allison Williams). The director of both films, Gerard Johnstone, has followed the Terminator 2: Judgment Day path of pitting a former villain against another, even nastier robot. A murderous “autonomous android” has been built using Gemma’s technology, and the only way to stop it is to upgrade M3GAN and let the two machines fight it out. “A sequel’s got to be different enough from the first movie that people don’t feel cheated,” producer Jason Blum explained to Den of Geek, “but not too different from the first movie that people feel cheated, and that’s the line we’re trying to straddle with M3GAN 2, and I think we do that.”

Released on 27 June internationally

Cinema’s most famous meeting between a boy and an alien was in Steven Spielberg’s ET The Extra Terrestrial – and the boy was named Elliott. Could that be why Pixar’s cartoon about a boy meeting aliens is called Elio? Given how meticulously everything is planned in Pixar films, you’d have to assume that the similar names are no coincidence, and that the studio is hoping to bring some Spielberg-style sincerity to their tale of a shy 11-year-old being mistaken for Earth’s supreme leader by an interstellar council. If Elio does have the emotion of ET The Extra Terrestrial, it could move audience as much as Inside Out 2, which was the highest grossing film of 2024. “I do feel like Inside Out 2 really hit because we were able to talk about anxiety in a way that really resonated with audiences,” Pixar’s chief creative officer, Pete Docter, said in The Wrap. “And I think the core of this film… has to do with the feelings we all sensed a lot of times, that we’re in this big world full of people, but we’re alone. But we don’t have to be.”

Released on 18, 19 and 20 June internationally

It’s actually only 23 years since 28 Days Later came out, but who’s counting? What matters is that the UK’s favourite horror franchise is back at last. And, unlike the first sequel, 28 Weeks Later, this one has been masterminded by the creators of the original film, director Danny Boyle and screenwriter Alex Garland. Their big idea is that the virus which turns people into uncontrollable homicidal maniacs (they’re not officially undead, so don’t call them zombies) is now confined to Great Britain, and while most of the country is overrun by “the Infected”, there is a small island where survivors played by Ralph Fiennes, Jodie Comer, Jack O’Connell and Aaron Taylor-Johnson are safe – for now, anyway. If 28 Years Later is half as nerve-jangling as its Kipling-soundtracked, folk-horror trailer, it should be the best instalment in the franchise so far. And it won’t be the last. Rather than concluding the “Later” trilogy, this film is the first part of another trilogy – and part two has already been shot. “This is very narratively ambitious,” Garland said in Empire magazine. “Danny and I understood that. We tried to condense it, but its natural form felt like a trilogy.”

Released on 18, 19 and 20 June internationally

The John Wick series seemed to come to a definitive conclusion at the end of 2023’s John Wick: Chapter 4, but fear not, Keanu Reeves’ moody assassin is back – in a couple of scenes, anyway. The main character in this spin-off, though, is Eve Macarro, played by Ana de Armas, who showed off her action credentials in the last James Bond film, No Time to Die. Eve is a vengeful ballet dancer who is immersed in the franchise’s byzantine mythology, and who meets some of the regulars, including Ian McShane and Reeves himself. But the director, Len Wiseman, believes that Ballerina has its own identity. “One of the things that was very important early on was that I was not setting out to do a female John Wick,” he said in IGN. “This is an entirely different character – not somebody that’s replicating what John Wick does. Eve is looking to become an assassin. John Wick is essentially trying to get out of the world.”

Released between 4 and 7 June internationally

Marlee Matlin was the first deaf actor to win an Oscar when she took home the best actress trophy for Children of a Lesser God in 1987. And, in fact, no other deaf actors won Oscars until 2022, when Troy Kotsur was named best supporting actor for playing the husband of Matlin’s character in Coda. Now an acclaimed, empathetic documentary tells Matlin’s story, which includes addiction, sexual abuse, political activism, and life as the only deaf person in her family. The film’s director, Shoshannah Stern, is also deaf, and so their intimate interviews are conducted in American Sign Language. Leslie Felperin says in The Hollywood Reporter that this “engaging, exuberant portrait of the relentlessly likeable Matlin [is] immensely watchable, not least thanks to Matlin’s still incandescent natural charisma”.

Released on 20 June in the US

One of Adam Sandler’s earliest films, Happy Gilmore is a knockabout sports comedy about a short-tempered hockey player who realises that he can hit golf balls farther than anyone else around. It helped to establish Sandler as a big-screen star, but it’s still amazing that now, almost 30 years later, the film has a devoted following, and Sandler’s “Happy Gilmore swing” is imitated by amateur and professional golfers alike. Sandler’s co-writer, Tim Herlihy, told the New York Times in 2021 that he could hardly believe the film’s longevity. “To have that sort of staying power that people are even talking about it 25 years later? At the time, we were just trying to stay alive and have a movie career… we never thought these movies would end up in the Library of Congress.” Not only that, but Happy Gilmore now has a sequel, which features Ben Stiller and Travis Kelce alongside Happy’s old enemy (Christopher McDonald) and love interest (Julie Bowen). If they make two more sequels after this one, they can call the last one Happy Gilmore Fore.

Released on 25 June on Netflix internationally

The team behind Top Gun: Maverick – including director Joseph Kosinski, screenwriter Ehren Kruger, producer Jerry Bruckheimer, cinematographer Claudio Miranda and composer Hans Zimmer – reunite for another big-budget drama about a veteran speed demon teaching the younger generation how it’s done. There’s no sign of Tom Cruise, though. Instead, F1 stars Brad Pitt as a Formula One driver who retired after a disastrous crash, but is persuaded by a former team-mate (Javier Bardem) to mentor a promising rookie (Damson Idris). The film was shot at actual Grand Prix events, and features actual Formula One racers, but it’s Pitt’s driving that’s the impressive part. “When you see Brad driving, that’s not acting,” said Kosinski in Collider. “He’s really concentrating on keeping that car on the track out of the wall during all those scenes… It required months – literally months – of training.”

Released on 25, 26 and 27 June internationally

Eva Victor’s debut film earnt rave reviews when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. As well as writing and directing, Victor stars in Sorry, Baby as Agnes, a lecturer who teaches at the same New England college where she once studied. When her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) comes to stay, it’s clear that Lydie’s life has moved on since they were students, whereas Agnes is stuck – perhaps because of a sexual assault that is explored in flashback. Kate Erbland in IndieWire calls Sorry: “a darkly funny and enormously tender film that is about what happens after the worst occurs, but with plenty of room to weave the light next to the dark… Something bad happened to Agnes. But life goes on. Big, wonderful, funny, horrible, strange, sad, great life. How lucky we are that Victor is here to chronicle just that.”

Released on 27 June in the US