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........

© BBC