Every July one can look back at the first half of the year to take the temperature of our current cinematic landscape. By this time last year we already had the dizzying peaks of Sinners and On Becoming a Guinea Fowl and the subterranean lows of Jurassic Park: Rebirth and Snow White. Will 2026 ultimately prove to be a more artistically daring year at the cinema?
It’s still too early to tell. But the past six months have birthed several remarkable triumphs and hideous failures. Here is an exceedingly non-comprehensive look at some of the best and worst of 2026 so far.
Best—Project Hail Mary: While the narrative is essentially just a loving, big-budget mashup of E.T., Interstellar and The Martian, this nearly two-man show between Ryan Gosling and a faceless rock alien possesses so much genuine empathy that it’s impossible to begrudge its more predictable storytelling beats. Propelled by Drew Goddard’s breezy script and the visual alchemy of Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the film makes a very strong case for why the theatrical experience remains a vital, wonderful necessity in 2026.
Worst—Michael: I’ve never received more hate mail in my life than I did for my negative review of this film, so I’ll double down and dig this ditch a little deeper. When the inevitable sequel arrives to cover the second half of Michael Jackson’s life, it will not retroactively fix this sanitized opening chapter, regardless of how unblinking and honest it is about the allegations that surrounded Jackson’s later life.
Michael is an aggressively generic biopic given a free pass solely because the soundtrack is stacked with banger after banger. Antoine Fuqua stages the musical numbers well and Jaafar Jackson lip-syncs and dances admirably, but a person could gain more psychological insight into MJ’s life from a cursory glance at a Wikipedia page. If a lavishly produced music video is all someone wants out of a Michael Jackson biopic, more power to them.
Best—The Sheep Detectives: If someone had told me this was one of the best movies of the year just based on the trailer, I would have said they were crazy. Yet, against all logic, this absolute marvel about a computer-animated flock of anthropomorphic sheep solving their shepherd’s murder is a hilarious, heartbreaking, emotional powerhouse that I’ve already watched three times.
The vocal work from Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Chris O’Dowd and Bryan Cranston is flawless, drawing immense soul from the beautiful words of writer Craig Mazin. Two decades from now we will speak of this film with the same reverence that’s reserved for the Babe duology.
Worst: Postmodern horror movie parodies and satires: The irony here is thick enough to choke on. Two of the worst movies of the year so far are Scream 7—the sixth sequel to a classic original that brilliantly deconstructed and rebuilt the slasher genre—and Scary Movie, the fifth sequel to a comedy that originally parodied Scream by mocking those exact horror tropes.
Scream 7 has so little meat on its bones and such a fundamental misunderstanding of Wes Craven’s original that it has actively transformed into the very thing it used to mock. Meanwhile, the latest Scary Movie is so painfully out of touch and regressive that it’s significantly less funny than the movies it attempts to spoof. It’s depressing as hell, no matter how one slices it.
Best—Horror that takes the genre seriously: Even for audiences who detest horror movies, I still cannot recommend watching Obsession and Backrooms highly enough. Both films take a simple premise—a wish gone wrong in Obsession and an endless, liminal nightmare in Backrooms—and infuse them with enough thematic weight to reward endless rewatches. While Backrooms boasts flashier, more experimental filmmaking, Obsession is an instant classic we’ll be dissecting for decades.
There are plenty of other bright spots scattered throughout the first half of this year. We witnessed a deeply layered, heartbreaking performance from Ralph Fiennes in 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, Callum Turner’s effortlessly charismatic turn in Rose of Nevada and David Lowery’s characteristically virtuosic filmmaking in Mother Mary—which also features a career-best performance from Anne Hathaway. Add to that Boots Riley’s madcap vision in I Love Boosters and the squirmy uncomfortable morality play of The Drama—anchored masterfully by Zendaya and Robert Pattinson—and it’s clear 2026 is off to quite a solid start.
