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

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