July’s viewing slate is full of epics of many sorts, from Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, the director’s sprawling and star-studded take on Homer’s poem, to the Netflix series adaptation of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, a saga about a family in the pioneer era making a new life for themselves.

But there are heroic stories of other sorts too—a documentary about the legendary poet Mary Oliver; Apple TV’s Lucky, in which Anya Taylor-Joy runs from both the FBI and a ruthless crime boss; an adaptation of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, about teaching literature under an oppressive regime. And there’s also two series about the epic powers of love and friendship: Peacock’s The Five Star Weekend, about a group of women coming together to support a friend grieving, and Netflix’s Heartstopper Forever, the finale of Alice Oseman’s wildly popular graphic novel series about the budding romance between two queer teenagers. Who says love isn’t epic?

Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (Kino Lorber, in theaters. Premieres on PBS in August)

I think I’d always known Mary Oliver’s poems were out there waiting for me, but I didn’t expect to be won over to her work by a Stephen Colbert cold open. Sasha Waters’s vibrant and clear-minded documentary begins with Colbert attempting to read Oliver’s “The Summer Day” before pausing at risk of choking up. Here and throughout the film, Waters captures the effect of Oliver’s poems with readings of the work and personal anecdotes (at the beginning of every summer, Colbert gives “The Summer Day” to his children, which ends with the lines, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”). In case I’m making the film sound saccharine, it’s not. It’s a pleasure to watch, but it’s also sobering, as Waters weaves in sensuous and sometimes unsettling nature footage with clips of art films.

Speaking of saccharine, it’s a critique that’s often leveled at Oliver and addressed here. Donika Kelly remembers a fellow poet saying, “If you’ve read one Mary Oliver poem, you’ve read them all.” Former U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón explains that “sometimes, when a poet gains the people, they lose the poets.” The subtle meaning behind Limón’s emphasis on “sometimes” gradually comes to light as the film explores Oliver’s meteoric success as a queer woman who didn’t explicitly write about sexuality and never wanted to be pigeonholed as a woman poet or a nature poet. Others describe being won over, like the filmmaker John Waters, a longtime friend and neighbor of Oliver and her partner Molly Malone Cook in Provincetown, Mass., who readily admits to avoiding nature because he knows it’s out to kill him; or the writer Nick Flynn, who struggled with her poems’ seeming erasure of the darkness that inspired them until he recognized the value of the work’s “attention” to its subjects, a word that figures importantly in “The Summer Day.”

Oliver is known for writing about nature, yes, but as the film makes clear, she was never depicting nature from a distance, nor was she out to paint pretty pictures. Rather, she managed to locate our place in nature and its place in us. I feel like I’ve been living under a rock for never engaging with her work before. In the film, a friend of Oliver’s says she believed rocks were alive. Now I can start wondering what they’ve been saying to me. –David Varno, reviews editor

Little House on the Prairie (Netflix, full season available now)

It’s easy to wonder why, in 2026, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie—which in recent years has been rightfully reexamined for its racist stereotypes about Native and Black Americans, would be adapted for television. But showrunner Rebecca Sonnenshine found the alchemy between her own childhood love of the books and wanting to expand past Ingalls Wilder’s antiquated viewpoint. The resultant series is a loving adaptation about a family who, despite their own trials and tribulations, embraces being a part of a community—which includes those on the sidelines. As Sonnenshine told PW, the shared DNA between Little House on the Prairie and the 2006 football series Friday Night Lights is a lot about that concept. The Wilder family can’t build their future home without help: Laura’s curiosity about their Osage neighbors helps to save them all from a deadly fever, and Caroline’s changing attitudes about their Native and Black neighbors show that the right person at the helm—one willing to change the narrative—can be truly transformative. —Kerensa Cadenas, news director

The Five Star Weekend (Peacock, full season available now)

Elin Hilderbrand’s 2023 novel, The Five-Star Weekend, examined women’s friendships, a strained mother-daughter duo, and many flavors of indiscretion. Now an eight-episode miniseries on Peacock, it’s the second of Hilderbrand’s books to be adapted for the screen, following Netflix’s six-episode The Perfect Couple. It passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors, yet men—a lost husband, an old flame, an office creep, a young townie—provide their share of the drama.

Like a jarring Hallmark movie, The Five Star Weekend opens with holiday music. Food influencer Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner) is cooking in her impeccable kitchen when she receives the news that her husband, who’d just left to catch a plane, has died in a car crash. Six months later, Hollis invites four friends—one each from childhood, college, young parenthood, and the present day—to join her for a cathartic weekend on Nantucket. Together, they’re the five stars of the title, to be photographed having fun by Hollis’s grieving daughter Caroline (Harlow Jane). Their brunch-and-spa itinerary, animated in calligraphic intertitles, is a veneer for something messier.

Say what you will about Nantucket (Hollis’s former college roommate Dru-Ann (Regina King) calls it “just a white person clam island,” signaling her own Blackness and class), but Hilderbrand has staked her claim, and episodes place the characters in real shops, bars, and restaurants from the books. If the television version lacks the novel’s aspirational brand-naming and lavish sensory descriptions, it frontloads the characters’ combativeness. Dru-Ann is a Gen X talent agent, frustrated with a Gen Z athlete and client; Hollis’s tough childhood bestie Tatum (Chloë Sevigny) chain smokes and side-eyes the invitees; try-hard pal Brooke (D’Arcy Carden) exudes embarrassing loneliness; and Gigi (Gemma Chan) maintains a public poise despite her secrets—a plum role, vexed by typecasting, for the lone Asian American in the book and on the show.

Meta moments abound. Hilderbrand’s fans refer to themselves as Hilderbabes, and Hollis’s online followers joke about being Hollibabes, emphasizing the parallels. Timed to the episodes, Peacock will release The Five Star Weekend Official Podcast, in which executive producer Hilderbrand chats with the show’s cast and crew while pairing signature cocktails with the action. The five-star test kitchen is serving a multilevel-media recipe, all summer long. —Nathalie op de Beeck, West Coast and Library Correspondent

Reading Lolita in Tehran (In theaters beginning July 10th, expanding nationwide)

“There is no such thing as a thought crime,” asserts Azar Nafisi (played by Golshifteh Farahani), the real-life literary rebel at the center of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Adapting the author’s 2003 memoir of the same name, the film details the time-jumping anecdotes from her book in an overtly linear fashion. We follow the professor of English literature as she returns to Iran at the beginning of the revolution in 1978, through the Islamic Republic’s rise to power, and eventually departs for the United States in 1997. Despite dissidents enduring state-sanctioned imprisonment, torture, and murder—illustrated through the backstories of several women in the writer’s orbit—Nafisi never ceases to fight back: she refuses to wear the newly-mandated hijab (resulting in her firing from Tehran University), fosters a friendship with a well-read male colleague despite taboos, and, most crucially, begins to host a women’s reading group in which “banned” Western texts are discussed—including, of course, Nabokov’s 1955 novel.

While Nafisi’s story is riveting and enraging, there’s also a political facet to the film’s production that merits interrogation. The film is an Israeli coproduction, directed by Eran Riklis, who born and based in Israel; that a movie about the exploitation of women in the Arab world would be coproduced by a state that itself has mounted countless invasions in the region invites uneasiness, to say the least. Nafisi is right when she says that thought crimes cannot be prosecuted—we should be able to think, write, and read with complete autonomy—but we also live in a world where crimes against humanity are currently unfolding without consequence. Reading Lolita in Tehran may be a testament to Nafisi’s tenacity, but it is just as much a reminder of all of the women currently enduring persecution without a voice, an outlet, or hope for a peaceful future. —Natalia Keogan, web producer

Lucky (Apple TV, first two episodes premiere on July 15 with weekly episodes)

Marissa Stapley's 2021 novel Lucky gained acclaim when Reese Witherspoon picked it for her book club and her production company, Hello Sunshine, snapped up the television rights. Five years later, the book has been adapted for Apple TV by Jonathan Tropper, a respected novelist, primarily of romantic comedies, who is also a TV showrunner, most recently helming the Jon Hamm vehicle Your Friends and Neighbors. Tropper’s co-showrunner is Cassie Pappas, whose other project is Silo, the TV adaptation of Hugh Howey's Wool series of dystopian novels.

Lucky, in its TV rendering, is inspired by, but not a direct translation of, the novel. Lucky (Anya Taylor-Joy) has just pulled off her last heist with her husband, pilfering $10 million from a powerful gangster (Annette Bening). But before they can flee from Vegas to Dominica on a cargo plane, they opt to party, play some craps, quaff some Dom—and, surprise, Lucky awakes to discover her luck has run out: both her husband and the money have vanished. With the FBI descending on the hotel and the gangster's henchmen lying in wait, Lucky is forced to flee. She then sets her sights on tracking down her disappeared beloved and recovering the cash, all the while avoiding capture by Billie Rand (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), an FBI agent with a grudge, and a coterie of menacing men intent on causing her harm. Lucky's imprisoned father and con-mentor (Timothy Olyphant) dispels sage advice through a series of collect calls made from prison pay phones.

Fortunately, Lucky is a practiced con woman, one who navigates the world by manipulating people into thinking she’s someone she isn’t (frequently, this is as an abused woman, which is more a criticism of the world than of Lucky). This is a story in which there's plenty of ambiguity between various codependent relationships—lovers, parents and children, a stalker and their prey. The plot careens along, hinging on a few fortuitous coincidences (the show is called Lucky) to maintain dramatic tension. Despite not having much of the book in the show, this Lucky is an original in its own right: the seven episodes are nicely paced, the trio of female leads feels fresh, and the opening credits feature a new song by Fiona Apple, "Horns of a Bull," powerfully rendered. —Ed Nawotka, senior news and international Editor

The Odyssey (Universal, in theaters now)

Homer’s epic poem of the original homecoming has been adapted for screen before, but usually only in part (2024’s The Return) or through parody (2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?). But Christopher Nolan, coming off multiple Oscar wins for Oppenheimer, has finally assembled the massive scale of cinematic resources and artistic experience necessary to faithfully adapt The Odyssey as a film worthy of the poem’s legacy. As Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his crew return home from the Trojan War, almost all of the poem’s iconic incidents and characters are included, from the cyclops Polyphemus (Bill Irwin) to the singing Sirens.

But what really makes The Odyssey worthwhile is the way Nolan reframes the entire narrative without making it feel anachronistic. In Homer’s poem, the Greek gods are a constant presence, with the sea god Poseidon often blamed as the main obstacle in Odysseus’s path. But Nolan only uses one god, Athena (Zendaya), and locates another reason that Odysseus spent so many years away from home, one that resonates with both Homer’s text and historical theories of Bronze Age collapse. It’ll get you thinking about mythology in a whole new way. —Christian Holub, Fanatic editor

Heartstopper Forever (on Netflix now)

The final installment of Alice Oseman’s Heartstopper series provides closure with its film length finale. As Nick (Kit Connor) prepares for university and Charlie (Joe Locke) approaches his final year of school, their teenage romance is put to the test. The story flows through seasons of change and growth while Charlie forges his path in school and Nick struggles to find himself, exploring the strain this places on them both. The film continues to follow the threads the series wove together, exploring themes of mental illness with sincerity, chronicling a modern love story, and crafting feel-good queer visibility. Connor delivers a stellar performance as Nick spirals into his anxieties, following his character arc in a compelling through line, and Locke continues to beautifully embody Charlie, inviting the audience to feel his emotional journey firsthand. Heartstopper Forever does not pull its punches. The ensemble cast provides a colorful landscape as they all struggle with the uncertainty of their futures while navigating a final year together. Despite plenty of conflict, there are beautiful moments of soul every step of the way that allows this cozy romance to soar. Fans of the show will be satisfied with this heartwarming goodbye to a beloved saga. —TreVaughn Malik Roach-Carter, digital editorial coordinator