It can be easy to overcomplicate the troubles that have plagued film adaptations of DC Comics for the past decade. Zack Snyder’s Ayn Rand grimdark nonsense was never going to have a ton of mainstream appeal, but efforts to course-correct the franchise hit plenty of avoidable snags. Time and time again, these movies just weren’t very good.

James Gunn and Peter Safran were brought on not just to execute a soft reboot, but to make good movies. Last year’s Superman was a promising start for the new administration. Just a year later, the abominable Supergirl takes us right back to where we started.

A loose adaptation of Tom King’s Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, the film takes us away from Earth, as Kara Zor-El (Milly Alcock) tries to find her place in the universe after the destruction of her homeworld. Depressed and lonely, she spends her days drinking on planets in orbit around a red sun, which suppresses her powers, and her liver. Her libations are interrupted by a young girl Ruthye (Eve Ridley), whose family was murdered by Krem of the Yellow Hills (Matthias Schoenaerts). What started as a typical Western revenge story takes on additional emotional stakes as Krem shoots Krypto, Kara’s pupper and breakout star of Superman, with a poison dart, sending Kara scrambling to find the antidote within seventy-two hours.

Alcock is very comfortable in the lead role. The Supergirl character has been a challenge for DC Comics for decades. The CBS/CW Supergirl leaned into that all-American image that her cousin is known for. Director Craig Gillespie definitely doesn’t want Kara to be emulating a Boy Scout, but this version of the character doesn’t really have a ton of personality either. She’s an alcoholic. That’s pretty much her whole characterization.

We get some flashbacks of Krypton falling apart and the subsequent fall of Argo City that might appeal to hardcore fans, but the pieces don’t really come together in a way that doesn’t feel like a generic coming-of-age story bending over backwards to create stakes. This dynamic is on display most with how often the film needs to tell us what kind of sun each system has. Part of the problem with depicting the Superfam on screen is how ridiculously powerful they all are.

To create drama, people have to be able to challenge the hero. The film could achieve that either by having a really strong villain or a lot of Kryptonite. Krem is kind of a joke, a cookie-cutter comic book villain with no personality. Gillespie has zero ability to manage Kara’s power level, making the whole exercise into a pathetic plot device. She’s powered up when she needs to be, and screwed when the mechanics of narrative demand it.

For whatever reason, this film felt the need to include Lobo (Jason Momoa, who previously led the DCEU as Aquaman) in an extended cameo. The special effects are really bad. Part of what made Tom King’s original story work so well was that it felt like its own thing, with beautiful artwork from Bilqus Evely. This film looks like every other D-list superhero romp sitting at the bottom of the bargain bin.

Gillespie never really overcomes the original sin at the heart of this mess, an entire movie built around a single woman’s problem with drinking. It’s often said that alcohol is not a substitute for a personality. James Gunn might have kept that in mind with this woefully pathetic narrative.

We can certainly have sympathy for Kara’s plight, being one of the last survivors of the Kryptonian race. But beyond the generic hero’s call to “do good,” there’s just nothing really here to leave any kind of impression. The film desperately wants to lean into Kara as an anti-hero, but the film spends no time exploring her as a person.

That might not matter as much if this film had anything going for it. The action sequences are terrible. In some ways, it’s nice to have a superhero narrative where the world isn’t ending, but this third act is a joke. Even at a brisk 108 minutes, the whole thing feels way too long.

Much has been said over the past few years regarding how superhero films don’t really feel essential anymore. Genre fatigue is an easy excuse that doesn’t really apply here. Gunn built a lot of goodwill by delivering a strong Superman movie last year. For whatever reason, the new DCU chose to squander all of that with an absolute nothing of a feature. Supergirl is boring, ugly, and sloppy. Worst of all, I don’t think anyone can explain why it exists.

The past few years have taught a lot of Americans about the levers of capitalism that have exploited the working class since the dawn of time. The idea of hard work being all you need for success is practically the stuff of fairy tales. People have caught on to the reality that billionaires rarely achieve such status by playing by the rules.

Boots Riley’s absurdist crime comedy I Love Boosters takes aim at the business practices of the fashion industry. Corvette (Keke Palmer), Sade (Naomi Ackie), and Mariah (Taylour Paige) are three “boosters,” people who shoplift high-end clothing to resell at a discount on the black market. Living out of a closed-down fast-food chicken restaurant, their favorite target is the Metro Designers chain, owned by Christie Smith (Demi Moore), an idol of Corvette’s.

Christie, an outspoken personality on social media, exploits her workers both domestically and abroad. Metro Designers specializes in monochrome collections, which store employees are expected to purchase for themselves each season when the stores completely rebrand to a new color. Working conditions at her Chinese sweatshop are inhumane. One of the workers, Jianhu (Poppy Liu) started raiding Metro Designers’ shops after her aunt died and her mother got cancer from the sandblasting at Christie’s shops.

Riley’s work reaches new levels of surrealism when the Boosters team up with Jianhu, who is armed with a portable transportation device that’s also capable of deconstruction and situational acceleration, riffing on Marx’s theory of dialectical materialism. The transporter devices are quite amusing, if not a little stifling amidst everything else going on. When it’s not busy diving into heavy Marxism, the narrative makes space for more surface-level critiques in the form of Dr. Jack (Don Cheadle), who runs a classic pyramid scheme called Friends being Friendly.

There is a lot going on in I Love Boosters. Riley’s attention to style is perpetually on display, particularly the set design. Christie’s office, built on an incline, helps set the tone for the film’s lack of subtlety. The score, performed by Tune-Yards, operates on the same wavelength as Riley’s frantic sense of pacing.

The three leading women have a natural sense of chemistry. We don’t learn a ton about any of them as people. Corvette gets the most character development, especially opposite a mysterious man with a pinky ring (LaKeith Stanfield) but Riley is pretty content to let things play out as a fairly standard revenge piece.  Moore and Cheadle showed up to play, while Will Poulter shines in a bit role as one of the store managers. Paige is the real comedic standout, constantly eliciting laughs through Mariah’s antics.

Riley’s worldbuilding is the key to the film’s success. Everything feels lived-in, fostering an inclusive atmosphere for the narrative’s ample humor. The dramatic tension rarely lets up, an exhausting 113-minute runtime that could probably have shaved ten minutes off.

The film wears its anti-capitalist message on its sleeve, but the substance of the story doesn’t go much deeper. There’s too much going on for Riley to really thoroughly explore any of his themes. Cheadle’s storyline doesn’t really receive enough attention to justify its place in the narrative.

Capitalism itself largely relies on people being too overwhelmed to process all of life’s own whiplash. Riley takes a lot of big swings with I Love Boosters. They don’t all land perfectly, but the space he created is so much fun to spend time in. The arts as a whole would be a lot healthier if more artists were given space to work their own magic like Riley.

Society has a weird way of selectively clutching its pearls regarding morality. We’ve celebrated bad people for years, villains we love to hate. But social issues, like gun violence and abortion, exist in this space, where people second-guess the suitability of the subject matter for artistic purposes.

The Drama is a film that basks in the taboo nature of its material. Charlie (Robert Pattinson) is a British museum curator living in Boston. He notices Emma (Zendaya) reading a book. Rather than engage her in a normal conversation, Charlie lies about having read the book.

The narrative takes a time jump to right before Charlie and Emma’s wedding. At a wine tasting that seemed a little too close to the wedding, the two get drunk with their best man and maid of honor, each sharing the worst thing they’d ever done. The relatively harmless crude game took a turn when Emma revealed that as a child, she’d planned and almost carried out a school shooting.

Director Kristopher Borgli is clearly having the time of his life exploring the messy nature of love, set against the backdrop of the most heinous hypothetical many could think up. Plenty are familiar with the concept of “love makes you do crazy things,” but that whole dynamic takes on a different meaning when love is making you forgive crazy things. The narrative essentially exists in a level deeper than that, as the entire case against Emma amounts to a thought crime, something she came close enough to achieving that she became deaf in one ear from rifle practice, but not actually something she went through.

Charlie, on the other hand, has more tangible deficiencies. He’s a liar. His friends who are judgmental of Emma have also done bad things in their lives. The Drama works best as a narrative when it allows itself to explore the inherent messiness in watching not great people judge someone who is probably a psychopath.

Zendaya brings such a quiet intensity to Emma that really sells the whole experience. Her performance highlights Emma’s vulnerabilities that draw you in, even if you don’t trust her in the slightest. Charlie’s infatuation with her, and his reluctance to cut her from his life, make perfect sense.

In Zendaya, Borgli found an actress capable of eliciting all the nuance from Emma needed to make everything work. His screenplay and narrative choices betray a lack of confidence. Early on, Emma reveals that Charlie was her first real crush, having met him at the age of 28, a sequence clearly meant to convey a personality disorder.

Frequently throughout the film, we see a younger Emma (Jordyn Curet), sometimes alongside Charlie. We see some of Emma’s motivations, lonlieness and a desire to belong, not dissimilar from alt-right fare centered on the manosphere. At times, it feels like Borgli is simply throwing stuff out into the ether as possible explanations for Emma’s character rather than exploring her through the mechanics of the material itself.

Emma’s revelation consumes the whole film, a layered thought experiment that isn’t explored with nearly the same depth with which it was created. There’s a lot of fun to be had in watching Charlie wrestle with his emotions. Pattinson is perfect for the way, infectiously charming while wielding the kind of ego necessary to entertain the thought of staying with Emma.

We see Charlie’s personality deficiencies mostly through the prism of his relationship to Emma. We don’t learn much about Charlie himself. Borgli shows a bit of Charlie and Emma’s work lives to get a glimpse of who they are outside of their relationship, but the scenes border a bit on filler. These characters are fun to watch, but they’re not really convincing people.

Borgli also has nothing interesting to say about school shootings, somehow completely removing politics from potentially the most politically charged topic in the country. At one point, Charlie wonders how many other Americans think about mass shootings, considering how many we have each week. This observation would be more compelling if it went anywhere.

Zendaya and Pattinson have enough chemistry to buoy the experience, but The Drama lacks depth. This is a really interesting subject, explored solely at the surface level. As a filmmaker, Borgli has a lot of impressive technical skills and a firm grasp on the pacing of his work. The 105-minute runtime flies by.

School shootings are a part of American life. There is no reason we shouldn’t be able to tackle this subject in our art, even if some people find that notion gauche. Art is not supposed to be comfortable.

But the best art also has a perspective. The Drama has a really engaging hook. It has brilliant lead performances by two actors at the top of their games. If only it had something more interesting to say.