Hot on the heels of another great year of movies, it’s time to flip the calendar. Which around these parts also means it’s time to look to the future and see what cinema has to offer us this year. With that in mind, here are my 50, or at least 50-ish most anticipated movies coming our way in 2026.
It doesn’t feel entirely accurate to call writer/director Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead a zombie movie, which is how it’s been marketed. At the same time, however, it’s difficult to talk about without mentioning the Z-word. There are undead to be found, though not the swarming, apocalyptic, flesh-hungry variety, nor are they the film’s focus. They exist in this narrative as the impetus, as part of the inciting event to get the ball rolling; they’re presence is unsettling, yes, but not often as dangerous as anticipated.
It’s that time of year again, where I struggle to put together a best-of list. For once, I’ll save everyone the spiel about how I don’t like ranking movies or pitting one film against another. (If you’re interested in that, you can read more about it here.)
Before he wraps up his single-take action franchise next year (the third installment, One Last Shot, is reportedly already in the can), James Nunn is back to grace us with the Kate Beckinsale-fronted DTV offering, Wildcat. And tactical action fans have a great deal to be thankful for.
Ultimately, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about Die My Love, the new film from Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin, You Were Never Really Here). There’s a great deal to appreciate, admire, and even love. It’s certainly stuck with me since I first watched it and I can’t quite shake the idea of. At times it invites the viewer in, at times it keeps us at arm’s length, intentionally oblique to the point where it invites near endless interpretations.
In 2019’s Harpoon, writer/director Rob Grant made a tense, violent, often hilarious horror movie that I called “a gory, savage black comedy potboiler” about three friends trapped on a boat and coming unraveled. For his next trick, he tackles something equally harrowing and metaphorically equivalent to being lost adrift at sea: adolescence. This Too Shall Pass is a funny, bittersweet, messy story of a time that’s, well, funny, bittersweet, and messy, even if the delivery system is at times a nostalgia overload.
When 15-year-old orphan runaway Jeanne (Clara Pacini) breaks into a theater to sleep for the night, she discovers the building is being used to film an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, which just so happens to be her favorite fairy tale. As she insinuates herself into production, she falls under the thrall of Cristina (Marion Cotillard), the film’s demanding, enigmatic diva, and the two develop a mutual, deepening obsession. So goes The Ice Tower, the new film from Evolution and Earwig director, Lucile Hadzihalilovic.
