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.

1. Minions & Monsters

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

4. Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass

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........

© BBC