Prior to this month I was beginning to worry there was something wrong with me. In a year of new waves, record-breaking hits, and extreme Anne Hathaway saturation, I was overwhelmingly feeling numb at the movies. Sure, there were plenty of things I liked—even liked very much. But overwhelmingly, my enthusiasm was lacking. Oh, how I yearned to be knocked off my feet, to float out of a theater with a glow that led strangers to ask what drug I’d taken. There were a few films at this year’s New York Film Festival—my go-to fall fest—that provided a solid high. But leave it to Nathan Fielder to really send me soaring into the stratosphere. You Can See Everything, the Elizabeth Holmes doc that Fielder co-directed with Lance Oppenheim, is a surprisingly heartbreaking, utterly staggering work of—yes, I’ll say it—genius.
And part of what’s so thrilling about it is that its genius is not one of invention, but rather of perception. Fielder and Oppenheim take Holmes’s invitation to see everything, and they push “can”—the film’s critical word—to its limit, provoking questions about differences in perception, the value and ethics of depiction, and limits in the pursuit of truth. In a year of moviegoing sensations, this is the one that both feels most deeply of this moment—reflecting what technology has done to us, and also pushing back against its tendency to flatten us—and the one that will most stand the test of time.
You Can See Everything (2026)
At one point in You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder asks Elizabeth Holmes why she enlisted him of all people to document her final days before being sent to prison. Holmes struggles to come up with an answer and her partner mentions that Fielder, like Holmes, thinks differently. Whatever the true motivation, the pairing—and add to it co-director Lance Oppenheim—could not be more perfect. Fielder and Oppenheim’s thematic concerns, aesthetic proclivities, and metafictional methods make for the most intriguing, layered, and complex portrait yet of the disgraced Theranos founder—one that deeply probes ideas around truth, manipulation, human psychology, and artistic portrayal. It’s not just the film of the year; it’s the film of the decade.
The Scout (2026)
There have been countless movies about the making of movies, but there’s one part of the process I’d never seen depicted on screen: location scouting. It makes sense. Location scouts are often siloed off from the rest of a crew, and their jobs aren’t glamorous. But in her debut feature, Paula Gonzalez-Nasser uses a day in the life of a scout to brilliant ends—as a window into the homes and lives of various New Yorkers. Gonzalez-Nasser, who previously worked as a scout, has a keen eye for detail, a knack for creating compelling compositions, and a patience that never verges on indulgence. As the titular scout, Mimi Davila aptly and subtly brings interiority to a person who has to spend most of their time appeasing others.
Primetime (2026)
In his first narrative feature, Lance Oppenheim retains many of his documentary trademarks—an interest in eccentric people with wild dreams, a pull toward the dark and strange goings-on in suburban America, and a kaleidoscopic approach to style and structure. Working off a script from Ajon Singh, Oppenheim depicts the turbulent rise of the early-aughts reality show To Catch a Predator and its host, Chris Hansen. The film boasts a solid ensemble, but Robert Pattinson, as Hansen, commands outsized attention with an indelibly over-the-top performance that Oppenheim has likened to somewhere between Hansen, Jerry Maguire, and Dracula.
It Ends (2026)
Being stuck in a car for a long drive that never ends is among my greatest personal nightmares. While the young filmmaker Alex Ullom squeezes some scares out of that premise, his debut feature is more concerned with reflecting feelings that might be present off the road—malaise, uncertainty, existential despair. That the film also manages to be a good hang is testament to a dynamic young cast and a strong sense of pace.
The History of Concrete (2026)
John Wilson’s first full-length documentary retains all the qualities that made How To with John Wilson such a sensational show throughout its three-season run. It is full of unexpected detours, witty juxtaposition, and genuine curiosity. In turning his camera to the subject of concrete, Wilson encourages viewers to rethink one of the most pervasive materials of modern life, while also illustrating the difficulty of convincing prospective financiers that concrete could be a commercial subject.
Chronovisor (2026)
Who says libraries can’t be cinematic? Against all odds, one of the most inventive movies of the year was made on a microbudget, stars a real-life academic, and is about a scholarly quest. Kevin Walker and Jack Auen’s debut feature, Chronovisor, follows a Columbia professor as her research into a time-travel device rumored to have been suppressed by the Vatican yields electrifying, mystical results—and they do so with methods of depicting text on screen that are fresh and enchanting.
Hope (2026)
Hope, from writer-director Na Hong-jin, includes some of the most awe-inspiring action sequences I’ve seen in a movie, and also some of the worst CGI. Whether that latter quality is a feature or a bug is up for debate. Even as he gives the audience what they want, Na provokes the audience, leading to questions about how we watch and how what we watch has impacted our worldviews.
Resident Evil (2026)
In adapting the Resident Evil video game, Zach Cregger creates a first-person experience that is gnarly, thrilling, and frequently very funny. Austin Abrams is the perfect everyman avatar, constantly muttering through his trip to Hell and not quite back.
NAZA (2026)
In their follow-up to the 2024 documentary No Other Land, which showed the destruction of a Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank, Israeli filmmaker-journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor turn their attention to the post–October 7, 2023 actions of the Israeli Defense Forces as they attempt to eradicate Hamas. Through interviews with twenty-four Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers, conducted on Tel Aviv rooftops, with the subjects’ faces hidden in shadow, we get extensive and detailed testimony regarding Israel’s disregard for civilian casualties. It’s a brutal, terrifying account, and one that, beyond providing information, is an insightful portrait of the complex psychology of the perpetrators.
Digger (2026)
I can’t include The Odyssey on this list and not include Digger—a film that is equally audacious and full of excellent craftsmanship, but which, similarly, does not quite work. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s layered treatise on climate destruction and human apathy—spoiler alert incoming—spends too much time in the dazzlingly constructed world of its fictitious play, never quite fulfilling the purpose of its meta twist. Still, love the effort, Tom! Keep on taking risks.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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, Elliot 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.
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.