The return of Marvel, Final Destination and Mission: Impossible franchises are among this month’s unmissable films to watch and stream.

Cobra Kai began life as a YouTube series which picked up from where the 40-year-old Karate Kid franchise left off. In short, it didn’t sound like essential viewing. But the series went on to be an Emmy-nominated, critically acclaimed, six-season hit, and it put the star of the 1984 film, Ralph Macchio, back in the limelight. Now Macchio is starring in a Karate Kid sequel, Karate Kid Legends, featuring Ben Wang as the new Kid on the block, a Chinese teenager who learns to fight bullies in New York. Confusingly, Legends follows the continuity of the original Karate Kid films, as well as the Cobra Kai series, but it also brings in Jackie Chan’s Mr Han, who was in the 2010 Karate Kid remake. Still, Macchio promises that all the elements in this shared universe will be in balance – and as Mr Miyagi once explained, “Balance is key”. “Once we were able to line that up, for the Cobra Kai story to lead into the new film – even though they’re separate ecosystems – it all made sense for me,” Macchio said in Variety. “Then, working with Jackie was just super exciting. I started this on the big screen. How cool is it to get it back to the big screen?”

Released on 28, 29 and 30 May in cinemas internationally

Danny and Michael Philippou are the Australian twins who made Talk to Me, a terrifically creepy indie horror film which was an international hit in 2023. It was such a success, in fact, that you might have expected the Philippous to move straight onto a sequel, or even to a Hollywood blockbuster. Instead, the brothers stayed in their hometown of Adelaide and made another low-budget horror film with an original story: Bring Her Back stars Sally Hawkins as a foster mother, Laura, who is trying to contact the dead. Thematically, this supernatural chiller is closely related to Talk to Me, although it’s been given extra depth by a death in the Philippou family. “We were doing pre-production meetings, then we started shooting, and there was no time to properly sort through those emotions,” Danny Philippou said in Den of Geek. “They sort of poured themselves out in the script and in conversations with Sally, so that bled into the character of Laura and scenes that were meant to be scary suddenly turned sad. I think there’s a rawness in it that wasn’t in Talk to Me.”

Released on 29 and 30 May in cinemas internationally

The co-director of Deaf President Now!, Nyle DiMarco, says that his documentary tells “the story of the greatest civil rights movement most people have never heard of”. Its setting is Gallaudet University in Washington DC, the world’s first university for deaf and hard of hearing students. Gallaudet was established in 1864, but for more than a century, none of its presidents was deaf. In 1988, when the board of trustees appointed yet another hearing president over two deaf candidates, the students wouldn’t stand for it. Eight days of protests followed – and four of the protesters are interviewed in the film. Co-directed by Davis Guggenheim, who made the Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth and Still: A Michael J Fox Movie, Deaf President Now! is “a firebrand historical documentary that is as crowd-pleasing and informative as it is innovative and inclusive”, says Marya E Gates at RobertEbert.com.

Released on 16 May on Apple+ internationally

There were five Final Destination films from 2000 to 2011, all with the same structure. First, there would be a spectacular catastrophe; then this sequence would be revealed to be someone’s premonition; then the person who had the premonition would save a handful of people from the catastrophe when it actually happened; but then those people would be claimed by Death, one by one, usually via complicated accidents. Now the gleefully grisly franchise is back from the dead, so prepare to squeal and squirm at yet more ingeniously nasty killings. But Final Destination: Bloodlines has moved on from the previous films in one respect. According to the trailer, it turns out that all of the victims in the previous five films were descended from people who were saved from one particular catastrophe, decades ago. That means that the film isn’t just about a group of strangers, but a family that is trying to break an inherited curse. “Suddenly, the five films are not just one fun, gory rollercoaster ride after another, but a series with a lot of interweaving emotional weight,” says Shawn Van Horn in Collider. “Those stronger relationships are going to make the characters more three-dimensional, and we’ll likely be rooting for their survival rather than relishing in the bloodshed.” Well… maybe.

Released on 14, 15 and 16 May in cinemas internationally

In 2018, Paul Feig’s A Simple Favour finished with Blake Lively’s glamorous killer being jailed for 20 years, and with Anna Kendrick’s widowed mother finding fame as a crime-solving vlogger, so a sequel didn’t seem likely. But the film prided itself on its outrageous plot twists, so maybe it’s appropriate that, seven years on, Lively’s character is not just free from prison, but is about to marry a wealthy Italian on the island of Capri – and she is determined that her old frenemy should be her maid of honour. A Simple Favour was a devilish comedy noir that treated viewers to deceit, betrayal, murder, and the sight of Lively sipping martinis while wearing absurdly stylish outfits. Another Simple Favour is even more lavish in its fashions, and even more head-spinning in its plotting. Kristy Puchko in Mashable calls it a “shapeshifting creature, transforming in tone moment to moment to revel in biting humour, relish in mob drama [and] plunge into the delicious depths of mad women in the psycho-biddy subgenre”. Fans of the first film will “cherish this divinely twisted thriller”. 

Released on 1 May on Prime Video internationally

Tim Robinson, a Saturday Night Live alumnus with his own sketch show, Netflix’s I Think You Should Leave, has his first big-screen leading role in Friendship. And, true to form, it will make you cringe as much as laugh. Robinson plays Craig, a suburban office worker who is too awkward to have any real friends. Then he meets his neighbour, Brian (Paul Rudd), a weatherman who plays in a punk band in his spare time, which makes him fabulously cool by Craig’s standards. Craig is thrilled to hang out with his Brian and his buddies, but after he ruins one social occasion too many, Brian “breaks up” with him, and he spirals out of control. Written and directed by Andrew DeYoung, this bromantic black comedy is “feverishly and hilariously demented”, says Nick Schager in the Daily Beast. “Partnered with the always ridiculous Rudd, Robinson reconfirms his standing as the reigning master of discomfort. Together, they make Friendship the funniest movie of the year.”

Released on 9 May in the US

Admittedly, the last of Disney’s live-action remakes, Snow White, was (a) dogged by controversy, and (b) not very good, but Lilo & Stitch looks a lot more promising. The film retells the story a genetically engineered, blue-furred alien called Experiment 626, or Stitch. He is so destructive that he is condemned to be exiled to an asteroid, but he escapes from the interstellar authorities and crash-lands on Earth, where he is befriended by a Hawaiian girl, Lilo. The original 2002 film, then, was one of the few Disney cartoons to have a modern-day US setting, and one of the few to mix contemporary human beings with fantastical creatures – so, for once, a remake that has both live-action and CGI characters makes total sense. Another good sign is that the film is directed by Dean Fleischer Camp, who made the Oscar-nominated charmer Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. And a third key factor is that, in the trailers, Maia Kealoha, who plays Lilo, seems to have the most adorable chemistry with an alien since Drew Barrymore was in ET The Extra Terrestrial.

Released on 21, 22 and 23 May in cinemas internationally

Nicolas Cage doesn’t appear in many subtle dramas these days, so you may not be surprised to hear that The Surfer is “a gloriously demented B-movie thriller”, as Xan Brooks puts it in The Observer, or that Cage cranks “the acting dial from befuddled to vexed to outraged to volcanic”. He plays an unnamed businessman who has returned to Australia after years in California, and who wants to buy the beachfront house where he grew up. But when he tries to surf in a nearby bay, he is harassed by a gang of locals led by a shamanic thug (Julian McMahon). Cage’s character won’t be put off, though, and camps out in the car park above the beach, sacrificing his possessions and his sanity in the process. “Crisply scripted by Thomas Martin and directed by Lorcan Finnegan with a pleasing, no-frills intensity,” says Brooks, “The Surfer [is] a low-budget, hard-hitting comic bruiser of a picture: a midlife-crisis movie dressed up as a 1970s exploitation flick [with a] wild, roiling, hallucinogenic vibe.”

Released on 2 May in the US and Canada, 9 May in the UK and Ireland, and 15 May in Australia

Jane Austen may be turning 250 in December, but film and TV directors are as smitten by her novels as ever. Emma Corrin and Jack Lowden are starring in a new Netflix adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and before that there is a French romantic comedy drama, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life, written and directed by Laura Piani. Camille Rutherford stars as Agathe, who works in a bookshop in Paris, but dreams of becoming an author. With the encouragement of her friend Felix (Pablo Pauly), she accepts the offer of a writing residency in England set up by the Austen estate. Will she finish her novel at last? Will she come to see Felix as more than a friend? Or will she fall for one of the residency’s organisers (Charlie Anson), a handsome toff who happens to be the great-great-great-great-nephew of Austen herself? “The film is a delightful ode to Jane Austen’s novels, serving up a unique blend of humour and introspection that reflects both European sensibilities and the particular quirks of Austen’s world,” says Louisa Moore in Screen Zealots.

Released on 16 May in Spain, 23 May in the US, and 30 May in the UK

The original Mission: Impossible TV series ran for just seven years, but the film series has been running for 29 – and its star, Tom Cruise, does plenty of running himself. Could the franchise be coming to a conclusion at last? The subtitle of the eighth instalment, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning, suggests that Ethan Hunt won’t be choosing to accept any more missions after this one, so this could be the last time we’ll see Cruise, Ving Rhames, Simon Pegg and Hayley Atwell crashing cars and jumping off buildings. On the other hand, Cruise is refusing to confirm whether or not Hunt will live to fight another day. “You gotta see the movie,” he told Empire magazine. “It’s a hard thing for me to discuss at the moment, because it really is something that you have to experience.” The film’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, is also being cagey, but he does acknowledge that the word “Final” is in there for a reason. “It is, I hope, the satisfying conclusion to a 30-year story arc,” he says. “I’m pretty confident that people are going to feel that the title was appropriate.”

Released on 21, 22 and 23 May in cinemas internationally

It seems as if writers and directors can’t stop celebrating/ satirising the luxurious lifestyles – and enviable kitchens – of the super-rich, whether in such television series as The White Lotus, The Perfect Couple and Your Friends and Neighbors, or in such films as Glass Onion, Triangle of Sadness and Blink Twice. The sharpest of all of these depictions is Succession, Jesse Armstrong’s multiple Emmy-winning series about a Murdoch-alike media dynasty. And now, two years after Succession concluded its run, Armstrong returns to the territory he has made his own. Mountainhead is a comedy drama shot in Park City, Utah, starring Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef as billionaire tech bros on holiday in a ski resort during a global crisis. The film wasn’t even shot until March this year, so Armstrong and his team must be editing it at lightning speed. Could that mean that Mountainhead will be the most topical fictional commentary on the 1% so far?

Released on 31 May on HBO and Max, and 1 June on Sky and NOW

“After years of misfires, disappointments, and a growing sense of superhero fatigue, the MCU looks poised for a comeback with the highly anticipated arrival of Thunderbolts,” says Linda Marric in HeyUGuys, “a gritty but mostly fun new adventure that just might put Marvel back on top.” The idea behind this rough-edged spy caper is that Marvel’s least powerful, least glamorous, and least fulfilled superheroes have been carrying out covert missions for a shady businesswoman (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). When she decides that they’re expendable, these grumpy loners are forced to form a ragtag team consisting of Florence Pugh’s Yelena, David Harbour’s Red Guardian, Sebastian Stan’s Winter Soldier, Wyatt Russell’s US Agent, and Hannah John-Kamen’s Ghost. “It is a film that makes us truly care about its characters and their well-being,” says Marric. “It’s gritty, chaotic and sometimes uneven, but also thrilling and unexpectedly heartfelt. Best of all, it proves Marvel can still surprise us when it stops trying to please everyone and leans into the weirdness.” 

Out now in cinemas internationally