The Best New Movies of 2026 (So Far)
Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Everett Collection (Chris Harris/A24, Neon, Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, Jonathan Olley/Amazon MGM Studios)
Vulture’s critics are tracking the highlights of this year in film, from blockbuster adaptations to low-budget originals and everything in between. Check back each month for the latest additions. Movies are organized chronologically by their U.S. theatrical-premiere date with the most recent at the top.
Photo: Janus Films/Everett Collection
Blue Heron is an autobiographical work pulled directly out of writer-director Sophy Romvari’s childhood, from the period when her parents, both Hungarian immigrants, moved their family of six into a new house on Vancouver Island. But what it really feels like is a séance, a way of using cinema not just to put the past onscreen but to commune with it — to interrogate it for information about her troubled eldest brother, Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), that her younger self was unable to grasp at the time. It’s a tender but devastating work that exists in the netherworld between documentary and fiction, where the innate artificiality of re-creating something that actually happened allows a filmmaker to get to a greater truth. —Alison Willmore
Photo: Brian Roedel/IFC Films/Everett Collection
Daniel Goldhaber and Isa Mazzei’s film isn’t a remake of the infamous 1978 exploitation landmark Faces of Death so much as it’s a clever, nastily-contemporary riff on what the original represents — not just the blurring of what’s real and what’s not but the urge to rubberneck at gore and treat the ability to be unshaken by it as a point of pride. Barbie Ferreira plays a content moderator who starts fixating on whether a series of videos that have been flagged for examination could actually contain real murders, an obsession that puts her on a collision course with a serial killer (Dacre Montgomery) who is just as compulsively online. The result is an uncommonly entertaining horror film centered on a character with personal reasons to want the impossible: for everyone to stop approaching atrocity as spectacle at a time when we’ve turned everything into content. —A.W.
Photo: Neon/Everett Collection
Based on a wisp of an indie game in which the player navigates a series of train-station passages that form a seemingly closed circuit, director Genki Kawamura’s thriller may very well be the greatest video-game adaptation to date — though that bar is awfully low. There’s a genuine elegance to the way that Kawamura incorporates the theme of parental anxiety into his source material’s simple but eerie premise, making the movie feel like it’s building on the essence of the gameplay rather than being trapped by so many Möbius-strip passageways. As a protagonist credited only as the Lost Man, star Kazunari Ninomiya is often left alone onscreen to guide us through the industrial purgatory in which he finds himself while offering us insight into the inner terrain of his character — a man who has been living in an emotional limbo long before he gets stuck in a literal one. —A.W.
Photo: Neon/Everett Collection
One of those compact pictures Steven Soderbergh tosses out every year with the seeming effortlessness of someone making a stack of pancakes, The Christophers is a deceptively simple two-hander starring Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel as artists at different ends of the celebrity spectrum. It’s a sly dramedy that sends the struggling Lori Butler (Coel) into the orbit of Julian Sklar (McKellen), a legend of the ’60s and ’70s living off the fumes of his fame after not having been able to paint for decades. But while The Christophers initially seems like it will be a kind of lo-fi heist film, as Julian and Lori engage in what is essentially a prolonged duel, feinting and jabbing across generations, offering up deceptions and hard-fought moments of vulnerability, it reveals itself to instead be a pair of complex portraits, a diptych of subjects who feel hopelessly wounded by an art world from which they nevertheless want respect. —A.W.
Photo: Greenwich Entertainment/Everett Collection
In his directorial debut, Matthew Shear stars as a bumbling law-school dropout named Sam who’s stuck in an anxiety-ridden stasis after the loss of his paralegal job. But his film, a bittersweet indie about two people whose lives don’t intersect so much as they drift together, is really a showcase for Amanda Peet, in her first big screen role in years as Dianne, an actor whose once-promising career and marriage to David (Alessandro Nivola), a musician with a case of arrested development, seem to have both stalled out. When Sam ends up working as a nanny and caring for the couple’s three daughters, he finds himself falling in love with his employer, who’s both aware of how comfortable her financial situation is and how unhappy and lost she’s been feeling. Peet is vulnerable and brittle and radiant as a woman who’s not sure how to ask for help because she isn’t convinced that she needs it. —A.W.
Photo: 1-2 Special/Everett Collection
Radu Jude has made two of my favorite movies of this millennium, and while Kontinental ’25 isn’t up to the level of either 2021’s Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn or 2023’s Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, it still features plenty of the Romanian filmmaker’s signature touches, from a caustic sense of humor to a keen eye for the impossibility of trying to be a good person while also trying not to get ground to bits in the gears of global capitalism. Eszter Tompa plays Orsolya, a Hungarian woman who works as a bailiff in the Transylvanian city of Cluj and who has to oversee the eviction of a squatter in the basement of a recently sold apartment building that goes horribly wrong. Jude knows how to twist the knife but can also be surprisingly generous about the absurdity of just trying to get by, and Orsolya’s subsequent spinout brings the film to some unexpectedly farcical places. —A.W.
Photo: Music Box Films/Courtesy Everett Collection
“I killed an Arab.” These are the first words uttered by Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), the protagonist of François Ozon’s The Stranger, and already we can sense that this adaptation of Albert Camus’s classic 1942 novel has been given at least one new angle. By foregrounding the moment, Ozon makes it clear he understands the thorny nature of the material he’s adapting. The Stranger is about an almost totally passive and unreflective character, a man whose sole moment of agency appears to be the random act of violence that condemns him to the guillotine. Through subtle shifts in his storytelling, Ozon brings forth another dimension to Meursault’s actions. At the same time, this is a thoroughly faithful adaptation of the novel. Shooting in gorgeous black and white, Ozon’s approach is tactile, sensuous. The camera focuses on the everyday textures and sensations of Meursault’s life to relay the character’s direct experiences, as Camus did with his prose. Most important, the director captures Meursault’s silence. Meursault may be out of place in society’s eyes — a cold, troubling figure seemingly unaware of our most basic rituals — but he also reflects the fundamental silence of the world. —Bilge Ebiri
Photo: 1-2 Special/Everett Collection
What’s beguiling about Christian Petzold’s latest, a small film that nevertheless snags at the heart, are the ways in which it depicts the comforts of the pretense its characters all implicitly agree to. Unhappy Berlin music student Laura (played by Petzold’s current leading lady of choice, Paula Beer), who survives a car accident that claims the life of her boyfriend, acts as if there’s nothing strange about her request to stay with the woman who found her at the crash site. Her new caretaker, Betty (Barbara Auer), meanwhile, behaves as though she doesn’t have incredibly personal reasons to dote over this total stranger. The fairy-tale qualities of the setup disguise some very real pain on the part of characters who, we gradually realize, are engaged in a kind of spontaneous, therapeutic exercise they can’t acknowledge. —A.W.
Photo: Janus Films/Everett Collection
The Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s first narrative feature in seven years is a mesmerizing and Kafkaesque story of a young lawyer seeking justice in 1937 at the height of Stalin’s brutal purges. Although he meets roadblocks all along the way, the protagonist’s determination and patience seem to serve him well. First, he manages to meet with the man he’s seeking to defend: an elderly Bolshevik who was jailed under false pretenses and who shows him his wounds from the torture he has endured in captivity. Then our hero travels to Moscow to speak directly to the country’s chief prosecutor, to plead with him to open an investigation into the prisoner’s treatment. What distinguishes this film is not its overall narrative trajectory (which reads more like a bitter cosmic joke than anything else) but rather how Loznitsa subtly colors in this character’s journey through the halls of power. In the upside-down universe of Stalin’s Russia, this young idealist’s diligence and persistence may well be his greatest failings. He thinks he has agency; he assumes he’s moving up the chain of command; he believes that by going above everyone’s heads, he’s outflanking the criminals who have sullied Soviet justice. In fact, he’s unwittingly enacting a charade, each step on his path more meaningless than the last. —B.E.
Photo: Music Box Films/Everett Collection
Petra Volpe’s film was the Swiss submission to the Oscars this year but didn’t end up getting a nomination. That said, it’s a candidate for a potentially more lucrative award: the title of a film most likely to scratch the itch for The Pitt fans jonesing for more medical-procedural goodness. Set over the course of an evening at a Swiss hospital that’s simultaneously understaffed and much nicer-looking than any American equivalent, Late Shift follows a nurse named Floria Lind (Leonie Benesch) who arrives at work to find the ward nearly full and one of her colleagues out sick. She’s put in an impossible position, constantly being confronted with new fires to put out and unable to give the attention and time she’d like to patients who are desperate and afraid. Even when it feels a little blunt in its characterizations, Late Shift keeps you teetering on the edge as you wait for its heroine to slip up or to break down. —A.W.
Photo: Jonathan Olley/MGM/Everett Collection
It’s a little surprising how well Andy Weir’s books — which can feel as though they’re roughly 70 percent math equations — have transformed into crowd-pleasers, first with The Martian and now with Project Hail Mary, but that’s the power of a good adaptation team. With Project Hail Mary, directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and screenwriter Drew Goddard recognized that the best way to make this story work for the big screen was to essentially make it a Star Wars movie, in which a lovable creature and a charming rogue team up to save the world. That approach is brought to vibrant life through Ryan Gosling and puppeteer James Ortiz, who infuse unlikely astronaut Ryland Grace and brilliant alien Rocky with real optimism, affection, and sincerity as they work to figure out why their respective suns are being consumed by microorganisms and how they can each make it home. The joy of this movie isn’t in the endless wisecracking but in the practical effects and physicality driving Gosling’s and Ortiz’s performances: the wacky way the former throws his body around his spaceship when he wakes up in 2032 with no memory of how he got there, the subtle intonations in the latter’s voice as Rocky works through various applications of the word amaze. Gosling and Ortiz are a complementary pair, and their chemistry adds to Project Hail Mary a socially-minded belief in the power of borderless, open-armed collaboration that Weir might deny exists in his work but that Lord, Miller, and Goddard rightly understand as the point of any sci-fi story worth telling. —Roxana Hadadi
Photo: Dustin Rabin/A24/Everett Collection
Aside from the terrible podcast-recording practices on display, Ian Tuason’s feature debut is a low-budget Canadian horror movie that does a lot with a little. It leans all the way into its claustrophobic scenario, which finds podcaster Evy (Nina Kiri), who has been spending her days alone in her childhood home with her dying mother, slowly splintering apart as the boredom and stress of her situation combine with the eeriness of a set of mysterious audio files that may very well be haunted. The film’s best trick, one that Tuason and cinematographer Graham Beasley make frequent use of, is arranging shots full of negative space so that an inky void swims behind Evy as she sits with noise-canceling headphones on, oblivious to what might be going on around her — an approach that makes the increasingly strange soundscapes she’s taking in all the more unsettling. —A.W.
Photo: MUBI/Everett Collection
The Italian city of Naples, with Mt. Vesuvius forever looming across its bay, has always existed in the shadow of apocalypse. At least that’s the mood director Gianfranco Rosi evokes in his mesmerizing documentary. The apocalypse he presents is not just the legendary one that destroyed the ancient Roman town of the film’s title but an ongoing one that encompasses the calamities of our modern era as well as the rejuvenation that sometimes accompanies destruction. It begins with Pliny the Younger’s contemporaneous description of the devastation of Pompeii and Herculaneum but intercuts the images of ruin with glimpses of the modern metropolis. This is an area of regular seismic activity as well as wildfires. It has also been plundered for centuries by grave robbers and smugglers. Rosi’s high-contrast images carve shadows across his subjects’ faces and bodies, rendering them not dissimilar to the timeless statues and friezes among which they roam. The film’s observational qualities serve a broader quest for profundity and beauty. This is not a fly-on-the-wall documentary; it’s a Caravaggio-on-the-wall documentary. —B.E.
Photo: Dean Rogers/Amazon MGM Studios/Everett Collection
Everyone says they want movies for adults; here you go. Crime 101 is a perfectly entertaining, competently made heist picture of the kind that this industry used to churn out with some regularity and now can’t be bothered to create outside of Fast & Furious branding. No one in Crime 101 is tasked by a secret government agency with saving the world, and there aren’t even that many wild chases through the streets of Los Angeles. What Bart Layton’s film has instead is deep internal characterwork from a note-perfect ensemble led by Chris Hemsworth, Halle Berry, and Mark Ruffalo, each of whom represents a different thread of Crime 101’s interwoven story: a jewel thief (Hemsworth) growing tired of his loner tendencies, an insurance broker (Berry) who has been passed over for a promotion one too many times, and a detective (Ruffalo) convinced that the recent spate of jewel thefts all over Los Angeles are the work of one guy. Over 140 well-paced minutes, Crime 101 drops us into each of the trio’s lives, draws them together, and shows us how they’re threatened by a horny-for-violence young thief played by Barry Keoghan. It all leads up to a satisfying, western-influenced climax whose genre beats are elevated by the cast’s performances, particularly Ruffalo’s head-tilted riff on Columbo’s “Just one more thing” questioning. —R.H.
Photo: Neon/Everett Collection
You don’t need to be familiar with Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s web series turned TV show Nirvanna the Band the Show to enjoy its big-screen continuation. I’d even argue that the movie is better as a stand-alone discovery that introduces you to Johnson and McCarrol’s fictionalized versions of themselves while also blowing up their show’s basic premise via a Back to the Future–style plot. The whole delightful caper, which finds Johnson and McCarrol struggling to get back from the year 2008 after unintentionally time-traveling with the help of a discontinued Canadian soft drink, is powered by the pair’s DIY ingenuity, willingness to potentially get arrested, and, most important, a back catalogue of footage they’ve been shooting for over a decade and a half. It’s an absurd Toronto adventure that has the slightest touch of Boyhood-esque poignancy. —A.W.
Photo: Warner Bros./Everett Collection
Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights has the tunnel-vision horniness and girlish aesthetic sensibility of a high-school freshman who has been assigned to read Brontë in class while tearing through a pile of explicit bodice rippers under the covers at home. Asking if it’s faithful to the classic 1847 version is like asking if a tween crush on a boy-band member is true love — it’s beside the point and doesn’t do justice to the uniquely hectic feelings of its own feverish experience. Jacob Elordi broods and flashes a gold tooth, Margot Robbie flounces around in a red vinyl skirt, snails lustily slime their way across windowpanes, and everything works out perfectly terribly for all these magnificently awful characters. —A.W.
Photo: Chris Harris/A24/Everett Collection
Harry Lighton’s salty-sweet directorial debut is, chain collars and ass-eating aside, surprisingly mild at its core. It’s more of a journey of self-discovery than a sexual one — like fellow BDSM-inflected A24 release Babygirl, a story of someone slowly learning to articulate what it is they want. While Harry Melling’s guileless Colin, who’s constantly in awe to find himself involved with the strapping blond biker dom who approaches him at the pub one day, provides the film with its melancholy heart, Alexander Skarsgård provides the humor as his love interest, Ray. Half the joke is his appearance — this absurdly hot man who looks like a Tom of Finland sketch that has sprung to life and decided to live in suburban London — but as punch lines go, it’s a good one. —A.W.
Photo: Brook Rushton/Walt Disney Studios/Everett Collection
Rachel McAdams is such a scream in this Sam Raimi throwback that she almost makes you forget her character would make a lot more sense played by, say, an Office-era Phyllis Smith. Still, the comedic thriller about a resentful office drone stranded on a Pacific Island with her smug new nepo-baby boss (Dylan O’Brien) works because McAdams is unerringly funny and incredibly game. Whether she’s hurtling herself into a scene in which she gets drenched in blood and mucus while hunting a boar or convincing you that her character is absolutely capable of crafting a restaurant-worthy sashimi platter out of items she has foraged along the shore, she’s the perfect partner for Raimi’s combo of gross-out and grimly amusing. —A.W.
Photo: Cineverse Entertainment/Everett Collection
Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s droll directorial debut begins as a comedy about ghosts possessing appliances at an electronics factory and ends as a meditation on becoming a collaborator working against the interests of your own kind. At its center is Nat (Davika Hoorne), the late wife of the factory owner’s son, who isn’t ready to let death stop her from being with her husband and starting the family they always talked about. The film’s bright color palette and deadpan tone — the scene of Nat seducing her spouse in her new form as a vacuum cleaner is surreally hilarious — belie how pointed it eventually becomes. Nat, as desperate in the afterlife as she was in life to prove herself worthy, starts helping eradicate other ghosts in return for security for herself, becoming as much a figure of complicity as tragedy. —A.W.
Photo: Sony Pictures/Everett Collection
Although it is, in many ways, a more conventional film than last year’s 28 Years Later, Nia DaCosta’s follow-up to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s deranged zombie sequel is also a more psychologically acute effort. Much of it follows a bizarre gang of blond-wigged, tracksuited, acrobatic zombie killers, all answering to the name of Jimmy and led by a psychopath calling himself Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell). Their exploits are intercut with the efforts of the nutty hermit Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) as he tries to find ways to commune with the undead and maybe even reverse the “rage virus” that has destroyed humanity. Kelson spends a lot of his time dosing and chilling with the enormous and brutal “alpha” zombie Samson. All these little paths into the characters’ inner lives start to cohere into a vision of human cruelty. DaCosta works in these ideas subtly even though The Bone Temple itself is not what one might call subtle. In fact, it’s downright loony tunes: Its scenes of crazed flamboyance fit into the film’s overall sense of a civilization stuck in time, of people mentally frozen at the moment of collapse. The only way to transcend and survive a dying world, it suggests, is to cut loose and find ways to be yourself. —B.E.
Photo: Watermelon Pictures
Cherien Dabis’s film is a moral fable in the guise of an epic family drama. Stretching across 145 minutes, the picture opens with a spirited Palestinian teen, Noor (Muhammad Abed Elrahman), as he’s shot during a West Bank street protest sometime in 1988. Then the film flashes back to 1948, and we find ourselves in the life of a well-to-do Palestinian family in Jaffa. As the movie proceeds, we see the fate of this family in 1978, and 1988, and beyond. There’s a closed-off style to the drama that reflects the cloistered nature of the characters. As war and displacement consume them, their isolation grows. And there’s power in the sheer spectacle of time: Charismatic young men become old and embittered; once-vivacious children grow up to be fathers themselves, who are then harassed and tormented by Israeli soldiers. These historical episodes demonstrate the never-ending cycles of humiliation Palestinians have had to suffer. The first half of the movie, with its grim journey through the decades, turns out to be a prologue to the story of the teenage Noor’s fate. Even then, the film has more surprising moves left in it. All That’s Left of You isn’t really looking for empathy. In its own uneven but artful way, it shows us the alienation that survival sometimes requires. By the end, I was destroyed. —B.E.
Photo: Row K Entertainment
Gus Van Sant’s latest sticks generally to the facts in its portrayal of Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård), an aspiring businessman who one day in February 1977 walked into the offices of Meridian Mortgage and kidnapped his broker, Dick Hall (Dacre Montgomery), wrapping a wire attached to a shotgun around the man’s neck. Tony claimed the mortgage company screwed him over after he took out loans to develop a once-neglected piece of real estate where he intended to build a shopping center. In other words, this gun-wielding kidnapper was a man who believed in the profit motive and the idea that hard work and ingenuity would ultimately pay off. Tony has fully bought into the dream, and Skarsgård plays him with excitable, boyish humor, almost as if the whole thing were a game. He’s just a child, momentarily rebelling against the world that made him. Something similar occurs with Dick, who is an executive in a business run by his father (Al Pacino) and is pretty powerless himself. Dick is also a child of a system that doesn’t love him back, only in this case it’s his literal family. Both he and Tony have been sacrificed to the almighty dollar. There’s a powerful civilizational metaphor in this film’s central image of two broken capitalists locked in a murderous standoff. —B.E.
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