David Fear
Contact David Fear on X View all posts by David Fear July 1, 2026
Left to right: 'My Father's Shadow,' 'Project Hail Mary,' 'Magellan,' 'Obsession.' Mubi; Amazon MGM Studios; Black Cap Pictures; Focus Features Welcome to the halfway point of 2026 — a year that’s already given us a good deal of high marks and low points, unexpected gems and genuine disappointments, bloated blockbusters and scrappy Gen-Z–auteur horror flicks, hot-and-heavy literary adaptations and revisionist-history biopics and whatever the hell you’d call Melania.
It’s been a weird six months at the movies, to be sure. Screenwriter extraordinaire William Goldman once famously quipped that when it comes to Hollywood predicting what will connect and what will flop, “nobody knows anything.” That seems to be the overall mantra for 2026. Cinematic universes that once felt they could mint money indefinitely now stumbled. Attempts to exploit nostalgia and brand-name I.P. were D.O.A. before they’d even begun. Remember when that highly hormonal take on Wuthering Heights, Charli XCX’s meta-fiction The Moment, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s musical-gangster mash-up The Bride, and the controversy-bating anti-romance The Drama were breathlessly anticipated to the point of hyperventilation? Most folks would be now be surprised to recall that they did indeed come out this year. Focus Features obviously figured they had a chance to make a splash with the indie-horror movie Obsession since they ponied up $20 million for it at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. They probably didn’t think, however, that they’d end up with what’s currently the eighth highest grossing movie of the year, ahead of a Star Wars spinoff, a DC superhero epic, and the latest Scream sequel.
And yet! It wasn’t tough to pick 10 movies that made the first half of 2026 worth our while. Some were holdovers from 2025 that finally got a proper theatrical release after festival and for-your-consideration runs. Some were left-field indies, modest documentaries, and genre exercises that sneakily got under our skin. One starred the long-dead king of rock & roll and another featured an alien made of rocks. Most of these didn’t dominate the discourse. All of them blew our minds and earned their place here.
(Honorable mentions: Backrooms, I Love Boosters, The Invite, The Love That Remains, Mother Mary, Nuestra Tierra, Pillion, The President’s Cake, Rose of Nevada, A Useful Ghost.)
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‘Blue Heron’
There are memory movies (think Roma, The Fabelmans), and then there’s Canadian writer-director Sophy Romvari’s feature debut, which rewinds to a fateful summer for an eight-year-old named Sasha (Eylul Guven). It’s the mid-1990s, and her family is trying to settle into their new home in Vancouver Island; the fact that her mentally unstable teenage brother (Edik Beddoes) is becoming more violent and volatile isn’t making the adjustment easy. Around the halfway point, the story shifts to a filmmaker (Amy Zimmer) who bears more than a passing similarity to Romvari — and who happens to be making a movie about the way her self-destructive sibling slowly tore the family apart. The metafictional conceits never dampens what’s clearly a personal story for its creator in more ways than one. And no sooner has Romvari mapped out this hall of mirrors than she delivers one hell of an emotional wallop by literalizing the idea of comforting your inner child. See this ASAP.
