With the proviso that the best films of 2026 will turn out to be ones we don’t know anything about, here are some big up-and-coming contenders:
Disclosure Day: Steven Spielberg films are already an event and now he is returning to a theme – UFOs – which he has already treated with two established masterpieces: Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. Since then we’ve had Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival and so the master is going to have to raise his game.
Emily Blunt, Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth and Colman Domingo star and the recent trailer which dropped promises a broad scope with John Williams scoring his 30th Spielberg film. David Koepp – writer of Jurassic Park and War of the Worlds – is the scribe, working from an idea by Spielberg.
Dune Part 3: Frank Herbert’s Dune Messiah is essentially a reaction to the popularity of the first book. His point was that power corrupts and so there was always going to be something inherently paradoxical about an Arthurian power fantasy of a boy leading a rebellion to overcome the empire and then become the Emperor himself. And to be fair to Denis Villeneuve, this discomfort with what was happening is already seeded in Zendaya’s Chani distancing herself from Timothee Chalamet’s messianic Paul in Dune Part 2. The film – due out in exactly a year – will close the Paul trilogy and be Villeneuve’s final film in the franchise.
Sirat: Spanish director Oliver Laxe’s new film exploded across the festival circuit last year and is going to be the film to see this February. Following a father (Sergi López) and son who are roaming the Moroccan outdoor rave scene in search of a lost family member, the voyage becomes a truly immersive experience of music and heat and dust. From Apocalypse Now to Werner Herzog, the film takes its influences where it finds them while also managing to be something utterly unique. Don’t read another word about it. Just watch it on the biggest screen you can as soon as you can.
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The trouble with Brigitte Bardot
The Bride! After the horrotica of Nosferatu and the grand opera of Del Toro’s Frankenstein, Maggie Gyllenhaal remakes James Whale’s classic sequel The Bride of Frankenstein – now reduced to The Bride! – with Jessie Buckley in the lead role and Christian Bale as her Monster. Gyllenhaal’s debut The Lost Daughter was a gem in which Buckley also starred, and so this reimagining, set in 1930s Chicago, has a lot going for it.
The Adventure of Cliff Booth: David Fincher directs a Quentin Tarantino screenplay, you say? I’m tempted to respond: The 1990s called, they want their enfant terribles back. But Tarantino, Fincher and Brad Pitt are a power combo not to be blinked at.
It is not clear if this is to be a Netflix series or movie but in either case, Paul Dano is unlikely to feature.
The Odyssey: Christopher Nolan is paradoxically both a hugely rated film-maker and a bizarrely underrated director. It’s like his very size means that we’re always too close to get a proper grip or measure of him. And he doesn’t make things easier by choosing the biggest topics available: the universe with Interstellar, the development of the nuclear bomb in Oppenheimer and now the foundational work of western literature, The Odyssey.
Matt Damon might at first appear an odd choice (his last period outing The Last Duel gave us an epically bad haircut), but Odysseus was the original Bourne, an improviser and noted smart Alec who could bring the violence when need be. I worry that Nolan might be too PG-minded for Homer – that banquet hall massacre requires the hand of a Peckinpah – but one thing is for sure: it’s going to be big.
John Bleasdale’s novel Connery will be published in February
