With its robust box office returns highlighted as a rejoinder to Hollywood gender bias, and a furious online campaign mounted against its detractors – be they film critics or James Cameron – Wonder Woman (Warner, 12) seemed to grow over the summer from a mere movie into a cause. That’s no bad thing – it’s a better cause than it is a movie. We often speak of blockbusters as critic-proof, but DC Comics’ heavily belated vehicle for its premier female superhero is oddly film-proof, which is to say its execution matters less than the simple fact of its being. If superhero movies are to be the dominant currency of the male-oriented multiplex, this is a film we need; that it’s been so broadly embraced raises hopes that it won’t remain a megabucks outlier.

Is it churlish to wish the film itself were more inspiring, more beautiful, more alive inside? Wonder Woman certainly achieves parity with its male peers on the DC movie shelf, but it shares their predominant aesthetic plasticity, their prioritising of digitastic set pieces over storytelling, their hollowness of character on the sides of good and evil alike. Most disappointing, however, is the cautiously paternalistic attitude taken by the script – dreamed up by four men, and not once might you suspect otherwise – to their heroine, Amazonian warrior turned first world war peace crusader Diana. After proving her mettle on the mythical all-female island of Themyscira, Diana must enter the real world as a peculiar combination of indomitable fighter and winsome naif. All manner of earthly facts are helpfully mansplained to her by Chris Pine’s colourless fighter pilot, while their ensuing romance contributes a strangely retrograde moral: the love of a good man, it seems, is what makes Wonder Woman wondrous. I had hoped for something gutsier from hard-grafting Monster director Patty Jenkins, but her film’s success offers scope for improvement; now the ceiling’s broken, the sky’s the limit.

Few films, understandably, have volunteered this week to go up against the Wonder Woman juggernaut, the tightly knotted Danish drama Land of Mine (Thunderbird, 15) being the best of a brave bunch. Martin Zandvliet’s stoically moving film, tracking a squad of German POWs charged with clearing Denmark’s beaches of landmines after the second world war, is a postwar film in the tensest sense, stretching and manipulating silence to evoke the exhausted, uncertain pause of its era. Bright young actors carry it staunchly, as they do Joe Stephenson’s debut, Chicken (Network, 15), a sincerely felt Norfolk coming-of-ager that paints in some familiar tones of rural miserablism, but gains gentle distinction from Scott Chambers’s lovely performance as a young lad with learning difficulties cast largely adrift into the world.

We’re in the month of Halloween, so if you’re planning your fright-night movie marathon in advance, two handsome Blu-ray reissues are a classy place to start: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Sony, 18), Francis Ford Coppola’s sensually saturated, eternally underrated spin on the vampire standard, and Christine (Powerhouse, 18), John Carpenter’s jumpy, gleefully tacky take on Stephen King’s killer-car throwaway. If you want some subversively modern art-horror in the mix, try out Mexican auteur Amat Escalante’s wily, what-is-that provocation The Untamed (Arrow, 18), in which sandy social realism meets brain-bending sex-squid spectacle: better seen than described.

Finally, Mubi.com has excavated a most welcome gold nugget for any arthouse fans recently entranced in cinemas by Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s woozy dream-lover tale On Body and Soul. Acclaimed on release – it won the Cannes Camera d’Or – but rarely spoken of today, her 1989 debut My Twentieth Century is no less beguiling, and perhaps a little more sweetly approachable. A woolly, fanciful tale of twin girls, separated in the late 19th century, whose paths cross ornately in adulthood – in a careening plot that combines political anarchy with romantic treachery – it has a cockeyed poetry all the more bracing for having been saved from the archives.