The Best Movies of 2026… So far

We have just begun the summer blockbuster season, and while we can debate the validity of that designation when we’ve already had several tentpole releases alongside the more traditional smaller movies in the late winter and spring seasons, it’s as good a time as any to look back at what has been released so far. With each of the top 10 movies I’ll give you a little blurb about why I like it so much, and then at the end will be the remaining movies I’ve seen. So now, without further ado except for apologies to Hoppers, Over Your Dead Body, The Sheep Detectives, Pizza Movie, They Will Kill You, The Drama, “Wuthering Heights,” The Devil Wears Prada 2, Crime 101, and The Bride!, here are the top 10 movies of 2026 so far, and then the rest. (I have seen The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Obsession since starting this blog post. The former would maybe end up around the bottom of the top 10 so far, while the latter would be probably 3rd so far.)

10. Hokum (dir. Damian McCarthy)

Adam Scott in Hokum

Hokum is just not quite as scary as I wanted it to be. McCarthy’s previous film, Oddity, was a surprise favorite of 2024 and I was excited to see what he could do with Hollywood talent like Adam Scott. Mr. Are We Having Fun Yet is solid, playing a sad writer (are there any other kinds?) with a sense of pathos and not without some ascerbic digs at the gormless help who work in the remote Irish hotel he visits to finally spread the ashes of his long-dead parents. The digs are fun, and the film’s best emotional moments come from his discovery that these local yokels are real humans just like him. But the surrounding supernatural stuff starts to feel secondary to the investigation into a suspicious disappearance at the hotel which gets solved much easier and earlier than it probably should have to maintain interest. Ultimately, there are fewer twists and scares than there were in Oddity, even if those elements that are present are still well done. I’ll still be eagerly awaiting McCarthy’s next labyrinthine, spooky tale of the folklorish evils we can invoke when we abandon our humanity.

9. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (Dir. it’s in the title)

Damian McCarthy’s countryman perhaps doesn’t deserve the director’s-name-in-the-title treatment (and probably didn’t want it either, but you gotta distinguish between Mummies somehow), yet Cronin delivers pretty well. The movie is too long, as any review will tell you. It does feel big, though, in ways that many horror movies don’t anymore. I was delighted that the story had two interweaving storylines, one in Egypt where a police officer assigned to find an American family’s kidnapped daughter searches for the motive for her imprisonment once she appears in an ancient sarcophagus that remains unscathed in a plane crash, and the other following the now-teenage girl and her family in New Mexico as they try to return to normalcy despite the newly-returned daughter’s locked-in state. In a world where horror has largely become a low-budget genre, it’s nice to have the cash for location filming and more than three characters. And the scares are pretty solid! One particularly gross scene involving clipping toenails has stuck with me in the weeks since I saw it. Cronin’s previous work on Evil Dead Rise informs the supernatural action here, with the titular mummy acting more like a Deadite than the slow, shambling mummies of the past, but at least he’s having fun with it. I did too.

8. Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice (Dir. BenDavid Grabinski)

Eiza González, James Marsden, Vince Vaughn, and Vince Vaughn as Alice, Mike, Nick, and Nick in Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice.

At the end of this top 10, you’ll see the remainder of movies that I’ve seen from this year so far and one thing you might be able to spot is a distinctive clump of straight-to-streaming movies. Most straight-to-streaming movie suck, and while M&N&N&A might not reach the heights of The Irishman or Da 5 Bloods, it is nevertheless a very solid crime thriller with a sci-fi twist. Most importantly, it feels like a real movie with real movie stars being charming and funny and compelling and going to more than one location. James Marsden has been a nice career bump by embracing his mesh of goofiness and movie star looks, and he ably carries this one as a mob hitman who wants out of the game until his former friend and fellow mob guy Vince Vaughn comes to him with a strange request. There’s a love triangle and Keith David as Jimmy Tatro’s dad. Stephen Root and Ben Schwartz are there! Vaughn delivers a pair of great performances that come on either side of a traumatic experience, and it’s so nice to see him trying again. It’s not gonna change the world or anything, but I would like to see the sequel promised by the film’s last moments, and that’s more than I can say for most straight-to-streaming movies.

7. Faces of Death (Dir. Daniel Goldhaber)

Dacre Montgomery in Faces of Death

Bet you didn’t think the team behind How To Blow Up a Pipeline would follow that harrowing thriller up with a reimagining of the cult not-really-a-snuff-film Faces of Death (1978)! And yet, they do a pretty solid job of it! Faces of Death (2026) is a great little serial killer thriller anchored by Barbie Ferreira’s lead performance and Dacre Montgomery’s inspired killer. I haven’t seen either of these actors in their most known tv roles (Euphoria and Stranger Things, respectively), but both are able to tap into the parts of humanity that they represent quite well here. Montgomery, especially, is fantastic as a serial killer obsessed with the original Faces of Death as he builds an audience on notTikTok with his recreations of that film’s kills under the plausible deniability provided by the content moderation Ferreira does as her job. She’s also quite good in the film, though her character does have the unfortunate task of shouldering the film’s Traumatic Backstory #3. It is nice to see a fat protagonist, at least!

6. Nirvana the band the show the movie (Dir. Matt Johnson)

Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol in Nirvana The Band The Show The Movie

The second biggest moviegoing miracle of the year so far is this decidedly Canadian comedy based on an incredibly niche tv show (which started as an even more niche web show). Matt and Jay, played by Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, just want to play a show at the Rivoli as their band, Nirvana The Band. In the process of getting there they experience time travel via Orbitz accident, extreme success and failure, and half the plot of Back to the Future. While some of the traditional comedy beats are a bit overplayed (I don’t know if I ever need to see friends break up and come back together again), they are always surrounded by absolutely zany stunts and the tender friendship these two losers have developed over years and years of schemes and disappointments. There are also remarkable visual effects, tricks, and fun video format changes. What else do you need?

5. Mother Mary (Dir. David Lowery)

Michaela Coel and Anne Hathaway in Mother Mary

David Lowery is one of my favorite working directors. Among the few directors to pull off a great “live action” Disney remake with his Pete’s Dragon, Lowery can often manage a mix of tones and concepts, marrying thematic concerns like environmentalism in his “Green Period” with excellent character work and striking visuals. Well, there’s not a drop of green in this movie, now red and blue are his new best friends. And with them come a new focus on intense character dynamics and artistic creation. Mother Mary explores the relationship between those in front of and behind the curtain, the question of who makes a persona, and the permanence and impermanence of grief, largely in extended monologues or performance-based flashbacks. Hathaway’s pop star has good enough songs that I’ve been listening to them outside the context of the film and they still hit, while Coel’s icy indiference towards her remains among my favorite performances of the year so far. And yet! It is not Coel’s best performance of the year, somehow. More on that later.

4. Send Help (Dir. Sam Raimi)

Rachel McAdams in Send Help

Or is it Send Hepl? Either way, it’s a blast. Sam Raimi returns and once again targets the assholes who immiserate us on a daily basis by stranding one of those great men of business (or at least his asshole son, played by Dylan O’Brien) on an island with an under-appreciated, mousy underling, played delightfully by Rachel McAdams. It is absurd to posit that McAdams is not just undesirable but overtly offputting, but the film does quickly cast that aside as she becomes what Survivor fans call Island Hot. And boy is there a lot of Survivor here, with McAdams sitting down to watch an episode in the only scene set at her home. As one of those aformentioned Survivor fans, this movie has even a little more juice than it already does, as it apes some of the visual storytelling strategies from the long-running reality show, such as the establishing shots involving the rising or setting sun and local wildlife. And Raimi doesn’t pull any punches, either, as the tension between McAdams and O’Brien escalate and things get bloody. It’s a very fun time at the movies.

3. Project Hail Mary (Dir. Phil Lord & Christopher Miller)

The back of Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary

For whatever reason, there haven’t been many space movies in the past few years. Our attention has become earth-bound as we try to deal with the ongoing calamities spurred on by capitalism’s voracious desire for growth and the atomization that it inspires within us as we struggle to survive for ourselves. It becomes difficult to care about your neighbor if you aren’t sure you can survive a minor medical hiccup. Project Hail Mary is a balm, then, in the way that big blockbuster action movies can sometimes be when they attempt to tap into our better natures. Ryan Gosling is the perfect star to bring this tale of cooperation and friendship to the big screen. He’s a guy who can have chemistry with an inanimate object and his ability to play notes of sad-sack make him feel almost like a real person and not a blockbuster character who shoulders hundreds of millions of dollars worth of investment. And look, maybe it’s not Sunshine, which remains my favorite space movie, but if we got a movie this good set in space every other year I’d be pretty damn happy. Would be cool if Sandra Hüller was there to sing a song too.

2. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple (Dir. Nia DaCosta)

Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

If the first 28 Years Later film, directed by series originator Danny Boyle, became my favorite movie of last year based on its surprisingly touching story of a mother and son journey summed up by the pair of latin phrases memento mori/memento amoris, exhortations to remember we must die and love, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple became one of my favorites this year by pushing that to the side to examine how people might struggle to find meaning in a post-apocalypse. One option, embodied by Jack O’Connell’s terrifying Jimmy Crystal, is to become part of a nihilistic death cult that pillages the distant memories of a child’s pre-pocalypse life for scraps of meaning from the likes of the Teletubbies and Jimmy Saville as justification for unrepentant torture visited upon whomever they encounter. The other option, embodied by Ralph Fiennes empathetic former NHS GP, Dr. Kelson, is kindness and understanding, a reaching towards making at least your small part of the world a better place to be. Where the first part of this story seemed to be, in part, about the the self-imposed isolation of Brexit, this movie seems to be struggling to understand how we responded to the Covid pandemic, how some invented demons to explain it and then followed that explanation to its perversely logical conclusion by rejecting treatments and other public health measurements while others toiled to treat those affected by the contagion while developing a greater sense of the humanity of even the sickest amongst us. And, also, additionally, it’s got one of the raddest climaxes I’ve ever seen. Gimme the third one as soon as you can, please.

1. The Christophers (Dir. Steven Soderbergh)

Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen in The Christophers

Sometimes making a great movie is as easy as putting two all-time-great actors in a room together and giving them juicy roles to play. Here, the legendary Ian McKellan plays an art asshole who has become a hermit while Michaela Coel plays an artist hired to smuggle out a few of his unfinished pieces in a forgery plot dreamed up by his no-good children. While the twists and turns in the plot are fun to track as they play out, what’s even more fun is seeing how the film uses those plot machinations to illustrate and complicate the characters at the film’s core. Like Mother Mary, there’s a lot of monologuing here, and boy is it something to see. Writer Ed Solomon (Bill and Ted series, Men in Black) artfully plays with audience expectations and sympathies as their discussions bounce between the topics of who owns a work of art and its meanings, what it means to be an artist, and how art can fill holes in our lives even as it creates new ones. Soderbergh’s ability to adapt to whatever story he’s telling while retaining a near-constant mastery of his filmmaking chops is always exciting to see, and this is one of his best. The ending takes a film that can feel as messy as the apartment where it mostly takes place and completes its transformation into a coherent whole like the finishing touch on a masterpiece. It would not upset me if no movie was better than this by the end of the year.

The Rest…

11. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert (Dir. Baz Luhrmann)

12. The Rip (Dir. Joe Carnahan)

13. undertone (Dir. Ian Tuason)

14. Ready or Not 2: Here I Come (Dir. Matt Bettinelli-Olpin & Tyler Gillett)

15. Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere (Dir. Adrian Choa)

16. Greenland 2: Migration (Dir. Ric Roman Waugh)

17. Apex (Dir. Baltasar Kormákur)

18. War Machine (Dir. Patrick Hughes)

19. The Wrecking Crew (Dir. Ángel Manuel Soto)

20. Mercy (Dir. Timur Bekmambetov)

21. Mortal Kombat II (Dir. Simon McQuoid)

22. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (Dir. Aaron Horvath & Michael Jelenic)

23. Scream 7 (Dir. Kevin Williamson)