‘Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie’

Starts streaming: July 10

An animated comedy about a rotund, flatulent superhero in a red cape and tighty-whities sounds extremely unpromising, at least for grown-ups, but “Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie” turns out to be a clever, fast-paced and genuinely funny surprise. With a screenplay by Nicholas Stoller, who directed “Neighbors” and “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” and voice cast loaded with talent like Kevin Hart, Jordan Peele, Ed Helms, Thomas Middleditch and Kristen Schaal, the film gets plenty of lowbrow laughs from the premise of two wiseacres who hypnotize their principal into believing he’s a superhero. Nick Kroll is particularly inspired as Professor Poopypants, a German scientist and master criminal cursed with a name that doesn’t earn him much respect.

‘Cities of Last Things’

Starts streaming: July 11

Winner of last year’s Platform competition section at the Toronto Film Festival, this Malaysian curio from the director Ho Wi Ding unfolds in reverse chronological order through three segments, each drawn from a different genre. “Cities of Last Things” works backward from the suicide of Zhang Dong Ling. A different actor plays Zhang in three individual segments: The first a dystopian science fiction set in 2035, the second a noir that flashes back to his days as a police officer and the third a drama that goes all the way back to his childhood, when he got involved in organized crime. Taken together, the trio accounts for what led this character to such a terrible end and how much of his destiny is owed to the hands of fate.

‘Point Blank’

Starts streaming: July 12

Not to be confused with the superb Lee Marvin thriller from the late 1960s, “Point Blank” operates in the same genre, but Americanizes a 2010 French hit about a man who pairs up with a lowlife criminal to rescue his wife. Anthony Mackie stars as an E.R. nurse who frees an injured murder suspect (Frank Grillo) from police custody and enlists his help in bringing down the dirty cops who have kidnapped his pregnant wife. The French film emphasized the sheer ordinariness of its hero, but Mackie is a more conventionally ripped action star, and most of the tension comes from his mismatched-buddy dynamic with Grillo.

‘American History X’

Starts streaming: July 15

The cultural life of “American History X” has been appropriately fraught, starting with a battle over the final cut between the director Tony Kaye; his star, Edward Norton; and its distributor, New Line Cinema. When it found an audience later on home video, it was hard to know whether to celebrate its hard-hitting treatment of white supremacy in America or fret about how its message may or may not be received by the movement it is ostensibly decrying. Either way, “American History X” is a combustible and ever-relevant drama, starring Norton as a neo-Nazi leader who serves three years for manslaughter and comes out of prison a changed man, eager to steer his younger brother (Edward Furlong) down a more tolerant path.

‘The Great Hack’

Starts streaming: July 24

Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim’s documentary explores the terrifying implications of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which raised issues of privacy at Facebook. In early 2018, it was reported that the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica was harvesting personal data from millions of Facebook users as a service to politicians like Ted Cruz and Donald J. Trump. “The Great Hack” digs into individual stories from figures on different sides of the data breach, arriving at unsettling conclusions about how social media sites like Facebook are weaponized to spread disinformation and spark discord in politics. Noujaim’s involvement is particularly enticing: Her credits include “Startup.com” and “The Square,” two insightful docs about transformative moments in internet culture.