--- title: 'A Hero with a Hangover' type: 'film-review' film: 'Supergirl (2026)' director: 'Craig Gillespie' author: 'CinePixo' rating: '6.5/10' stars: '3.25/5' published: '2026-08-11' updated: '2026-08-11' canonical: 'https://cinepixo.com/reviews/supergirl-a-hero-with-a-hangover' film_url: 'https://cinepixo.com/movies/supergirl-2026' publisher: 'CinePixo' genres: - 'Action' spoilers: 'mild' --- # A Hero with a Hangover **CinePixo** on *Supergirl* (2026) — **6.5/10** (3.25 of 5 stars) > Milly Alcock gives Kara a bruised, unruly pulse that the surrounding space western only intermittently deserves. *Milly Alcock gives Kara Zor-El anger, grief, and comic recklessness, but Supergirl keeps sanding its strange space-western edges into familiar franchise machinery.* **Spoiler warning:** this review contains mild spoilers. --- The first useful thing *Supergirl* does is refuse to make Kara Zor-El a sunnier copy of her cousin. Milly Alcock’s Kara drinks across planets, avoids intimacy, and treats heroism as an obligation she would rather postpone. The posture is comic, but the grief beneath it is not. She remembers Krypton not as an inherited story but as a home she watched disappear. That difference gives Craig Gillespie’s film a promising center. This Supergirl can save people and still resent the universe that keeps asking her to care. The problem is that the movie around her is less willing to remain difficult. ## A promising mess at the center Alcock plays intoxication and anger without turning either into a costume. Her Kara is funny because she is impatient, not because the screenplay pauses for a joke. Even when the effects become busy, Alcock keeps a physical sense of someone who has enormous power and no stable place to put it. Krypto helps reveal the softness she tries to conceal, while the young Ruthye gives the story a revenge plot and an ethical argument. Their journey through a rough cosmic frontier allows the film to borrow the shape of a western: damaged travelers, a pursued villain, temporary alliances, and landscapes where law has little meaning. The arrangement should feel stranger than it does. Too often the film translates its unusual comic-book source into the recognizable beats of a franchise adventure. Kara may be unruly, but the structure surrounding her remains obedient. ![Craig Gillespie](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/people/2026/08/6dd20cde-8d0f-4140-9085-a0adb8aad5dd.webp) *Director Craig Gillespie. Image hosted by CinePixo.* ## Grief treated as production design The destruction of Krypton gives Kara a different psychological relationship to loss than Superman. He grew up with absence; she carries memory. *Supergirl* understands this distinction intellectually and sometimes visually, but it does not always allow grief to alter the movie’s rhythm. Pain becomes one more piece of backstory to be activated between action sequences. Alcock works against that simplification. A glance or sudden retreat can suggest the history the dialogue has already explained too cleanly. Gillespie has previously shown a taste for protagonists whose damage creates abrasive style. Here, the demands of the larger DC project appear to pull in the opposite direction. The movie wants Kara to be a barfly, a survivor, a protector, and an accessible new franchise lead. It rarely lets those identities remain in conflict for long. ![Matthias Schoenaerts](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/people/2026/07/21a998f0-fc25-4a9c-bd18-d988d57d98b4.webp) *Matthias Schoenaerts. Image hosted by CinePixo.* ## A western that keeps becoming a superhero movie The revenge story gives the film forward motion, and Matthias Schoenaerts supplies a villain whose menace is most effective when it remains personal. Yet the action often expands beyond the emotional scale that made the pursuit compelling. Flight should give the camera unusual freedom, but several battles become visually indistinct. Bodies and environments lose weight, and the choreography follows motion instead of clarifying intention. The result is movement without the visceral geography that would make danger immediate. The space-western imagery occasionally recovers that geography. A lonely settlement, a shared drink, or a tense approach can make the universe feel inhabited rather than rendered. Those passages suggest a more confident film—one willing to let Kara move through other people’s stories instead of constantly preparing the next display of power. ![Jason Momoa](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/people/2026/07/b962dbdf-c8ee-4ec3-b479-bfd7f1027c83.webp) *Jason Momoa. Image hosted by CinePixo.* ## The performance worth carrying forward The movie’s unevenness does not erase what Alcock establishes. Her Kara can be reckless without becoming empty, wounded without becoming solemn, and powerful without losing the awkwardness of someone still deciding what kind of adult she wants to be. That is a durable foundation for future appearances. It may even explain why the film remains watchable when its plotting becomes mechanical. Alcock is not waiting for the franchise to tell her who Supergirl is. She supplies a complete, contradictory person and lets the machinery struggle to keep up. The film’s final movements work hard to reconcile revenge with heroism, but the moral resolution feels cleaner than the character who has carried us there. Kara is most interesting when goodness is an action she chooses against her mood, not a destiny the story confirms. *Supergirl* is neither the disaster suggested by its disappointing commercial run nor the distinctive cosmic western promised by its strongest ideas. It is a compromised vehicle with an uncompromised lead performance. Alcock makes Kara feel like a hero who has woken with a hangover and still answered the call. The next film should trust that contradiction enough to stop tidying it away. --- ## The film Released 2026 · Directed by Craig Gillespie · 108 min · Rated PG-13 · Action · United States IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8814476/ Published by CinePixo — https://cinepixo.com/reviews/supergirl-a-hero-with-a-hangover Review © CinePixo. Film metadata supplied by TMDB.