Unlock the 26 Mind-Blowing Movies of 2026 That Everyone’s Talking About (But Few Have Seen Yet)
Remember when indie filmmakers from nowhere, like Curry Barker and Kane Parsons, suddenly blasted onto the scene, turning movie discourse upside down with their quirky cult hits? Well, buckle up, because just as those breakout stars were basking in their spotlight, Hollywood’s colossal powerhouses crashed the party. Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and the much-hyped Spider-Man: Brand New Day didn’t just perform; they shattered records, filling theaters in ways unseen since pre-pandemic days. Tom Holland and Zendaya have officially morphed into the pop culture duo you can’t shake off—Zendolland? Tomdaya? You decide. But here’s the kicker: amid all the blockbuster frenzy, what’s truly stealing my heart this summer are the strong comedies and character-driven gems sneaking under the radar, giving us vibrant performances packed with nuance and soul. So, are we witnessing a renaissance in movie magic, or just another fleeting Hollywood phase? Either way, grab your popcorn — movie season is revving up, and it’s anything but predictable.LEARN MORE
12 min readWhen I last updated this list, the movie discourse was fixated on what seemed like the story of the year—a pair of runaway successes from 20-something YouTuber wunderkinds Curry Barker and Kane Parsons. A couple months later, Obsession and Backrooms are each still drawing hordes of moviegoers to theaters. (And fellow Zoomer Alex Ullom’s It Ends will soon vie to join their ranks.)
But more recently, those films have been overshadowed by two giant studio properties that were expected to be big hits—just not this big. The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day are setting records and powering Hollywood’s best box-office numbers since the pandemic. IMAX screenings are selling out at all hours of the night; resale tickets are going for astronomical sums; Tom Holland and Zendaya (Zendolland? Tomdaya?) are suddenly inescapable.
Which is all to say that movies feel more culturally relevant than they have since Barbenheimer summer—if not sometime before then. That’s great! I love excitement around movies! I appreciate the shared capacity to do bits about Zeus’s Law!
As an actual individual moviegoer, though, what’s been even more thrilling has been the surprising number of strong comedies and comedy-adjacent flicks we’ve gotten this summer. Beyond making me laugh, films like Maddie’s Secret, I Want Your Sex, and Late Fame have offered what I’ve found lacking in a lot of the splashiest releases of the year: indelible characters. Giving wildly varied performances, actors like John Early and Kate Berlant (in Maddie’s Secret); Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, and Chase Sui Wonders (in I Want Your Sex); and Willem Dafoe, Greta Lee, and Edmund Donovan (in Late Fame) imbue their characters with ample specificity, texture, and surprise. A lot of these characters have been driven mad by Internet-addled modern culture. But none of them feel like mere cogs in their movies’ machinery. Instead, these films are mostly keen to follow these oddballs wherever they lead.
If memorable performances in service of distinctive characters have felt rare this year, the recently released fall festival lineups indicate that that won’t be the case for long. Venice, TIFF, and New York Film Festival are chock-full of intriguing work from old masters and promising new voices alike. Buckle up. Movie season is coming!
Maddie’s Secret
With its deep cast of alt-comedy superstars, I was prepared for Maddie’s Secret to be funny. I was less prepared for John Early to dish up such a tonally distinct, pitch-perfect Sirk-meets-Showgirls melodrama—at once a send-up of modern test-kitchen foodie culture and an earnest, emotional account of disordered eating.
Late Fame
When I saw Late Fame at last year’s New York Film Festival, it stood out for the way it captured something I’d noticed but hadn’t yet seen in a movie. In this case, it was the way modern New York literary and art culture can feel like absurd cosplay performed by the rich—with nostalgia for past art-making golden ages distracting from actual art-making. The film, written by Samy Burch and directed by Kent Jones, follows Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe), a New York mailman whose old poetry is discovered by a group of young aspiring intellectuals who call themselves the Enthusiasm Society. The high Saxberger gets from the new attention is quickly superseded by what one imagines are the reasons he stopped writing poetry to begin with. Dafoe turns in a tremendous performance as Saxberger, and Greta Lee and Edmund Donovan are equally great in supporting roles.
In theaters
The Odyssey
It feels wrong not to recognize the sheer achievement of Christopher Nolan’s epic. The director and his crew invented new ways to light night exteriors, created spectacular practical effects, traveled to the far reaches of the world, and shot the first commercial feature entirely with IMAX cameras. The results of their efforts are frequently magnificent. And yet, I wished the movie spent more time, or simply went deeper, on the people. It wasn’t until the end of the film that I was truly moved. That said, the highs here are too high to ignore.
In theaters
The Kidnapping of Arabella
The kidnapping in The Kidnapping of Arabella is so whimsical and the movie’s humor so wittily absurd that it caught me off guard when I found myself genuinely affected by the film. But Italian director Carolina Cavalli taps into the adrift anguish of becoming an adult and realizing, as the film’s protagonist says, “It takes so little to keep you from living the right life anymore. And the worst part is you can still imagine it.”
In theaters
I Want Your Sex
Typically, there’s no type of movie that’s more insufferable than a finger-wagging generational treatise made by an elder statesman and directed toward young people. But while Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex is basically that—a plea to have sex and be a little messy—it’s so funny, playful, and balanced that it elides a sense of didacticism. Olivia Wilde gives what may be a career-best performance as Erika Tracy, a controversial modern artist who initiates a turbulent affair with her outrageously horny young underling, Elliot (Cooper Hoffman, also very good). The film doesn’t necessarily approve of Erika’s conduct, but the bulk of its ire is directed at the contemporary art world. And you know what? Fair.
In theaters
Tony
Never underestimate Matt Johnson. I had low expectations for the prolific Canadian director’s seemingly one-for-them Anthony Bourdain biopic after seeing its hokey trailer. But as it turns out, the schmaltz and Bourdain of it all are mainly just a cover to make a solid coming-of-age in a Cape Cod kitchen period piece. Dominic Sessa does his moody young man Holdovers shtick to great effect, and Leo Woodall and Antonio Banderas give lively supporting performances as the devil and angel on young Bourdain’s shoulders.
In theaters
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Much has been made of the ways Jane Schoenbrun’s new film diverges from their previous effort, I Saw the TV Glow. But to me, the two films are flip sides of the same coin—interested in what it means to know yourself, accept yourself, and embrace the things you like. Teenage Sex and Death, the more hopeful and exuberant of the two, centers on hot young queer director Kris’s (Hannah Einbinder) attempt to revive the Camp Miasma franchise. When she pays a visit to the secluded home of original final girl Billy (Gillian Anderson), she gets more than she thought she was looking for—and the film takes great pleasure in muddying reality.
In theaters
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass
David Wain and his favorite fellow The State alums have put their spoofy spin on camp, romcoms, and the Ten Commandments. Which leaves … The Wizard of Oz! The Dorothy of this absurd and absurdly funny new film is Gail (Zoey Deutch), a sweet midwestern bride-to-be who flies to Hollywood to find and bed her celebrity sex pass to even the score and save her marriage. It’s perfectly silly, with a deep cast of excellent performers who are down to clown.
Blue Film
Kane Parsons and Curry Barker have been getting all the wunderkind heat for their breakthrough debut features. But another 20-something, Elliott Tuttle, quietly crafted a far deeper and more mature two-hander for his own debut around the same time. In the film, convicted pederast Hank (a superb Reed Birney) hires a cam-boy who goes by Aaron Eagle (Kieron Moore) to pay him a house visit. But his motives are much stranger than sex, and what results is a tense, surprising dark night of the soul.
Backrooms
Kane Parsons’s Lynchian nightmare of infinite strip-mall liminal space haunted me in a deep way, conjuring feelings of pandemic-era time warp, modern isolation, and the discomforting tedium of life online. It’s a remarkably impressive debut—all the more so from someone so young—with tremendous production design, imaginative world-building, and several unbelievable set pieces.
The Christophers
As budgets for original stories continue to shrink, it’s becoming increasingly common for the bulk of a movie to be two characters in a room talking to each other. And you know what? When the two actors are Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen and the dialogue is as snappy as Ed Solomon’s is in Steven Soderbergh’s latest, that’s more than enough.
Blue Heron
It’s invigorating when a movie reminds you that the medium is full of possibility. And Sophy Romvari’s debut feature does just that. The film begins as a fairly quotidian story of a Hungarian immigrant family living on Vancouver Island in the late 1990s. The main source of tension for the family is what to do about a misbehaving teenage son. In the second half of the film, Romvari takes a bold swing that transforms the film and expands our understanding of everything that came before. It’s a beautiful, assured, and understated work that’s lingered in my mind long after seeing it.
$POSITIONS
The hardest I’ve laughed at a scene from a movie this year came in the criminally under-seen first feature from Brandon Daley. The scene involves a beer bong, urine, and a protagonist who doesn’t know what alcohol tastes like. It’s reminiscent, in the best way, of the dumb-guy comedies of the ’90s and early 2000s. The rest of the movie, which revolves around a man with a crypto addiction that threatens to ruin his life, perfectly synthesizes that energy with the unrelenting anxiety of a Safdie thriller.
Mother Mary
The first time I saw David Lowery’s Gothic chamber piece about a pop star (Anne Hathaway) reuniting with her original fashion designer (Michaela Coel) I fell deeply under the movie’s spell. The movie struck me as a perfect representation of the mysticism of creative collaboration—as well as a campy showcase for Hathaway’s most earnest instincts. On rewatch, some of the magic admittedly wore off, but there’s no denying the power of some of the film’s key scenes.
Exit 8
Video game adaptations have become Hollywood’s latest IP cash grab. But director Genki Kawamura is clearly after something else in bringing Exit 8 to the big screen. The game he’s adapted was hardly a big hit with widely beloved characters. Instead, it’s an opportunity to send viewers on a journey so repetitive and puzzling it becomes fraught with existential terror. Amid a never-ending, fluorescently lit subway tunnel, Kawamura stages a few dazzling set pieces and sprinkles in plenty of details to ponder—all of which produces concrete feelings and plenty of interpretations.
The Python Hunt
For the past dozen years, Floridians and some out-of-staters have flocked to the Everglades in hopes of catching and killing the most Burmese pythons. The Python Hunt Challenge was started as a way of confronting an invasive species wreaking havoc on native wildlife. So you might expect Xander Robin’s documentary about the event to be a Tiger King–esque melodrama full of kooky characters and dangerous animals. There are some of both, for sure. But Robin’s film is more soulful and less exploitative. In tracking various participants, he captures the struggle and meaning that can be found in a futile pursuit. And he also suggests that there are probably other, more direct culprits in the destruction of the Everglades.
Our Land
Lucrecia Martel’s first documentary feature centers around the 2009 murder of Indigenous activist Javier Chocobar. It took nine years for the capitalist raiders who killed Chocobar to be tried in court. And the film shows how the incident was a product of the systematic dispossession of the Chuschagasta people Chocobar represented. Martel’s documentary, which zooms in on the people affected and zooms out to take a wider view of the case, is thorough, revealing, and heartbreaking.
In select theaters
Pillion
It’s hard to believe that Pillion is director Harry Lighton’s first feature. This opposites-attract, BDSM love story set in London’s suburbs was a highlight of last year’s New York Film Festival. (Pillion also won Best Screenplay at Cannes in May.) After Colin (Harry Melling), a parking attendant who sings in a barbershop quartet, meets Ray (Alexander Skarsgård), a mysterious, leather-clad biker, the two begin a relationship that’s always on Ray’s terms and frequently uncomfortable. Lighton handles this sometimes absurd romance earnestly and with great care. The film avoids any temptation to push for a laugh or judge these characters. It’s apparent what both men are getting out of this relationship, as well as why it can’t work in the long term—a lesson that’s rendered with a little sorrow but also a surprising degree of hope.
Natchez
This documentary absolutely haunted me. Natchez is directed by Suzannah Herbert, an expert chronicler of the American South, who turns her focus to a small town in Mississippi with a big antebellum-tourism industry. As the town’s sanitized version of southern history is disseminated by white homeowners, her film captures the tension between their antebellum-property tours and the efforts of the local Black residents to correct the record. As the film unfolds, Herbert slowly but powerfully shatters the fantasy of the nation’s past and exposes the malicious prejudices that remain.
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie is perhaps the all-time high-wire act of indie filmmaking that makes you ask, How’d they do that? The movie is a technical triumph. But more importantly, the extraordinarily playful, idiosyncratic film is simply a really good time at the movies. In Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, comedians Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol revive their fictional counterparts from their late-aughts web series, Nirvanna the Band the Show, and send the two characters on a friendship-testing time-travel adventure. The stakes? Comically small. Matt and Jay need to secure a gig at Rivoli, a bar in Toronto. Still, I cared much more about their finding success than I ever have for a superhero’s battle to save the world.
Dead Lover
I’ve never had such a smelly theatergoing experience as I did at Grace Glowicki’s imaginative, wacky, and deeply heartfelt new B movie, Dead Lover. The film’s distributor provides downright-nasty scratch-and-sniff stink-o-vision cards at select screenings, containing odors labeled everything from “BBQ Stink” to “Ghost Puke.” But even without the card, the film is so tactile that you will practically smell it anyway. Glowicki plays a lonely gravedigger who finds love, loses that love, and then goes to great lengths to revive them from the dead. Dead Lover is also shot in black-and-white, featuring delightfully handmade sets and costumes. It’s not everyone’s speed, but I had a blast.
A Poet
There have been a lot—probably too many—movies about sad, failed artists. And yet, Simón Mesa Soto’s new film manages to feel new and original. It’s partially because of how specific and true his Colombian comedy feels. In A Poet, Oscar Restrepo (a brilliant Ubeimar Rios) is a middling poet and divorced father who can’t move forward with his life. He’s captive to his dream of writing a book, but he’s a heavy drinker with a stunted sense of responsibility. Everything changes when he meets a talented teenager, and he sets out to help her reach her potential. The film is very funny and even more cringey, but there’s a lot to appreciate in A Poet’s empathy for its pathetic protagonist.
The Voice of Hind Rajab
This shattering docudrama from Kaouther Ben Hania utilizes real phone recordings to depict a traumatizing event during the war in Gaza: when the Israel Defense Forces killed a five-year-old Palestinian girl named Hind Rajab. The child was fleeing Gaza City with her family in January 2024 when their vehicle was shelled by an IDF tank. The drama primarily stations itself inside the emergency aid offices of the Palestine Red Crescent Society. As fictionalized workers at the organization receive calls from Rajab, who was trapped in her family’s car, they wade through maddening bureaucracy and regulations to try and rescue her. Ben Hania employs some controversial gimmickry to prove the film’s verisimilitude, but it’s hard to deny the film’s emotional power.
The Love That Remains
Few filmmakers are as attuned to the beauty of the natural world as Hlynur Pálmason. The director’s latest film observes an Icelandic family and the rural world they inhabit over many seasons following an event that changes the group’s dynamic. Anna (Saga Gardarsdottir), a sculptural artist, and Magnus (Sverrir Gudnason), a fisherman, have recently split up. What ensues is rarely eventful, but Pálmason imbues the small moments among the family—Anna and Magnus have three children—with so much specificity, truth, and sporadic surrealism that the film never lags. By the end, The Love That Remains winds up feeling momentous.
Miroirs No. 3
Miroirs No. 3 begins with a car crash in the German countryside. Although a piano player named Laura (Paula Beer) survives, what ensues feels like a dream. Laura is taken in by Betty (Barbara Auer), an older woman who lives near the site of the crash in an idyllic, sun-dappled cottage. Even after Laura has recovered from her accident, she stays, maintaining a mundane sort of fairy-tale existence. You may figure out what’s going on before Laura does as you watch Miroirs No. 3, but you’ll probably want to maintain the fantasy as Laura does. This slow, quiet little film from German director Christian Petzold is mesmerizing. Beyond its routine pleasures, Laura’s and Betty’s stories serve as an intriguing contemplation on the experience of grief.
The Plague
It’s the summer of 2003, and 12-year-old Ben (Everett Blunck) is the newbie at a water-polo camp full of adolescent boys who know each other from the previous summer. First-time feature director Charlie Polinger captures the cinematic beauty—and also the brutality—of the sport. But it’s the moments out of the water when the games really begin. Ben is caught between wanting to be accepted among the popular crowd and not wanting to put down an outcast, whom the other boys have labeled as “the Plague.” It’s a nuanced depiction of childhood bullying. Plus, the chief bully, played by Kayo Martin, delivers one of the greatest child performances I’ve ever seen in a movie.
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