Dynamic Top Tens of 2026

[Red Screamer]

01 Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (Johnson)

[Omensetter]

01. Sound of Falling
02. Magellan
03. Resurrection
04. Mirrors No. 3
05. Silent Friend
06. What Does That Nature Say to You?
07. Kontinental '25
08. Bitter Christmas
09. The Love That Remains
10. La grazia

Runners-up (Tier 1):

Runners-up (Tier 2): The Moment; The Drama, Dreams, Father Mother Sister Brother

Not a fan: Young Mothers

Rubbish: I Love Boosters; Blue Heron

To see: Romería; Two Prosecutors; Dry Leaf; Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma; The Samurai and the Prisoner; La bola negra; Coward; Fatherland; Fjord; Gentle Monster; Minotaur; Paper Tiger; Club Kid; La Gradiva; The Currents; Everytime; Late Fame; The Wizard of the Kremlin; Queen at Sea; A Man of His Time

2025—2024—2023—2022—2021—2020—2019—2018—2017—2016—2015—2014—2013—2012—2011

[Lowry_Sam]

"Here we go again."

1. All That’s Left Of You
2. I Swear
3. L'Étranger/The Stranger
4. My Undesirable Friends: Chapters 1-5
5. A Poet
6. The Love That Remains
7. The Invite
8. Maspalomas
9. On The Sea
10. The Plague


Very Good: Test, Mr. Nobody vs Putin, 10s Across The Border, Blue Film, The Drama, Pillion, On The Road, The Last Guest Of The Holloway Hotel

Good: The Christophers, The Librarians, Kokuho, Silent Friend, Natchez, The Odyssey

Meh: Magellan, Leviticus, Our Hero Balthazar, Trial Of Hein

Hated It: Rose Of Nevada

Restoration screenings: Nadja, Fleischer Cartoons, Ben-Hur: A Tale Of Christ (1925), Queen Kelly, The Headless Woman, Days & Nights In The Forest, Janko The Musician, The Crowd, Hitler: A Film From Germany, Toni, Lumiere d'ete, 1900, St. Michael Had A Rooster, Beau Geste, Landscape In The Mist, The Spook Who Sat By The Door, The Devil Queen, Virgina, My Best Girl, Letty Lynton, Teresa la ladra, Io so che tu sai che io so, The Story Of Yanagawa's Canals, The Black Pirate (MOMA Technicolor restoration print)

[Swift]

My understanding from my teenager is that the 6-7 meme is beyond played out and cringy so this already feels outdated.

[big ticket]

1. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

2026 here we come!
The Secret Agent
No Other Choice

[JamesF]

Sentimental Value
It Was Just An Accident
The Testament of Ann Lee
Project Hail Mary
The Secret Agent
Sirat
The Drama
The Christophers

[DarkImbecile]

Top Ten:
1. Para Perasuk [Levitating] (Wregas Bhanuteja)
2. Night Nurse (Bernstein)
3. Everybody to Kenmure Street (Bustos Sierra)
4. American Doctor (Teng)
5. Who Killed Alex Odeh? (Osder; Youmans)
6. The Lake (Ellis)
7.
8.
9.
10.

Also Seen:

[Altair]

1. The Drama
2. Wuthering Heights
...
3. The Moment
4. The Rip
5. The Devil Wears Prada 2
6. Crime 101
7. How to Make a Killing
8. Erupcja

[Persona]

1. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
2. The Odyssey
3. Obsession
4. The Sheep Detectives
5. Project Hail Mary

[nitin]

1. The Odyssey
2. Rose
3. Disclosure Day
4. Everytime
5. The Bride!
6. Minotaur
7. Bitter Christmas

Honourable Mentions: I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning


Others Seen: The Drama, Send Help, Project Hail Mary, The Invite, 9 Temples to Heaven, The Diary of a Chambermaid, Crime 101, Queen of Sea, Backrooms

[Michael]

BLUE HERON, Sophy Romvari
CACTUS PEARS, Rohan Kanawade

[lacritfan]

Disclosure Day
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
The Rip

[Aunt Peg]

01. Minotaur (Andrey Zvyvagintsev)
02. La Bola Negra (Javier Ambrossi & Javier Calvo)
03. Queen at Sea (Lance Hammer)
04. Mouse (Kelly O'Sullivan & Alex Thompson)
05. Coward (Lukas Dhont)
06. All of a Sudden (Ryusuke Hamaguchi)
07. Ben'Imana (Marie-Clementine Dusabejambo)
08. Everytime (Sandra Wollner)
09. On the Road (David Pablos)
10. Fjord (Cristian Mungiu)

[colinr0380]

I had better take advantage of seeing a film at the cinema this year now to start my list (spoiler: there may probably still only be one film on here by the year's end!):

1. Backrooms

[beamish14]

The Spook Who Sat By The Door

Did you see Spook Who Sat by the Door in 35mm as well? That print looks incredible, and it was followed by a very interesting Q&A from the daughters of Ivan Dixon and Sam Greenlee. Talk about a film we need more than ever.

[Lowry_Sam]

I thought it was a digital projection of the 4K restoration, not a print, but it did look good and captured that 70s film look/feel very well.

[zedz]

Post-film festival (70+ films from 40+ countries) I’ve seen enough that my crop is full and I can regurgitate a few lists for you.

TEN BEST (No real preferences among these, so I’ve listed them by descending age of director)

Liebniz: Chronicle of a Lost Painting (Edgar Reitz, 2026)
You want brainy filmmaking? This late masterpiece from 94 year-old Edgar Reitz (who does he think he is, Manoel de Oliveira?) is erudite and exquisite in equal measure. An aged philosopher’s encounter with a young woman painter provides intellectual sparks for both of them. A sublime chamber work occasionally opened out with magnificent location shots and, more importantly, the limitless horizons of human intelligence.

The Blood Countess (Ulrike Ottinger, Austria, 2026)
Whose idea was it to fuse Ottinger at maximum extravagance, Vienna at its most photogenic, Countess Bathory, and Isabelle Huppert, and why didn’t they think of it sooner? How many eighty-something directors are making films as bold and energetic as this one? How many twenty-somethings? Easy top five for my vampire list if I’d seen it sooner.

Silent Friend (Ildiko Enyedi, Germany, 2025)
Ildiko Enyedi always makes films you’ve never seen before, and with an extraordinary level of craft. This intricate triptych, set in three time periods and shot in three contrasting visual styles, revolves around a university campus in Frankfurt, and more specifically a magnificent ancient ginkgo in its grounds. In the early twentieth century, the university’s first female student struggles to find her place in a hostile male environment; in the late sixties, a lovelorn literature student takes on his housemate’s botanical experiments; and during the Covid lockdown, Tony Leung finds himself one of only two people living on the campus, and is bored enough to undertake a radical offshoot on his neurological research. Each of the stories is concise and intelligent, but in combination they present multiple aspects of their shared themes, united by common spaces and time-travelling match cuts.

Rose (Markus Schleinzer, Austria, 2026)
I think I officially like Schleinzer’s films more than those of his alleged mentor Michael Haneke. This is a grim, austere, starkly photogenic period piece starring Sandra Huller (astonishingly strong, but so is her partner Caro Braun) as a soldier returning from war to settle in a tiny community and obliged to marry another woman. As with Schleinzer’s previous Angelo, there can be no happy ending for characters like these in circumstances like those. Grim as fuck, but precision tooled filmmaking at a very high level.

All of a Sudden (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2026)
Yes, it’s talky. Yes, it features intelligent characters exchanging abstract ideas. Have you not seen any other Hamaguchi films? People that complain about such things apparently don’t understand that this is a film about an intellectual crush (as is, in its own funny way, Liebniz): all these characters want is to stay up all night talking, exchanging ideas and honing their own intellect on the whetstone of another’s. If you’ve never experienced that kind of relationship: 1) I feel sorry for you; 2) I don’t know if you’ll ever understand this film. Of course, being a Ryusuke Hamaguchi film, it’s also about so much more: theatre and life, the sustaining of micro-communities, how to apply abstract notions to real world situations. Enchanting and uplifting while also being tough and formally rigorous.

9 Temples to Heaven (Sompot Chidgasornpongse, Thailand, 2026)
The first of four first films in my top ten, this languid family drama owes a lot to Hou Hsiao-hsien in its long-take mise en scene, use of off-screen sound and eschewal of exposition (apart from a clever opening scene), but it mixes in a very Thai gentleness and spirituality. Weerasethakul is clearly the reference point for that element of the film, but the phantasmagoric is much more contained here. The first two-thirds is a very relaxed, beautifully observed domestic comic-drama – an extended family, based on the dream of the youngest son’s boss, embark on a pilgrimage to nine Bangkok temples on behalf of the aged matriarch, with little general enthusiasm. All kinds of small tensions are gently evoked, as we get to understand the relationship dynamics thoroughly. Then a dark cloud crosses the sun and the film enters a new dimension. . .

The World of Love (Yoon Ga-eun, South Korea, 2025)
A second first film, this was one of those film festival gifts where you book a film just because it fills a gap between two other screenings and it turns out to be magnificent. This is a well-made, well-acted film, but the real star here is the script (also by Yoon), which starts out as a fine high-school romantic drama and then keeps opening trapdoors beneath you, so that small mysteries have startling – but perfectly rational – solutions, and details that you didn’t even realize were mysteries are unveiled as part of the puzzle. I don’t want to spoil too much about the superbly crafted plot, but this is a film that gets darker and messier as it unfolds, and the final scene is brilliantly conceived and utterly devastating.

Everytime (Sandra Wollner, Austria / Germany, 2026)
I saw three very similar films almost all in a row, all of them excellent, but this is the one that made my top ten. They all deal with teenage trauma (so far so standard) and its impact(s), and they all take wild left turns in the second half. The issue in this film is the death of a teenage girl and the family’s having to deal with the continued presence of the boy who was responsible, but not culpable. It’s a thorny issue, to be sure, but the way it’s resolved in the film is spectacular and somewhat indescribable. By the end of the film I felt like I was floating a few inches above the ground. Also deserving special mention: a shot early in the film that is the best use of a telephoto lens I’ve seen in a very long time.

La Gradiva (Marine Atlan, France / Italy, 2026)
A third first film that effortlessly, confidently outdoes most seasoned directors. This one is already getting plenty of accolades, and they’re well-deserved. I suppose this is another teens-in-crisis film, but rather than flip out into something strange and wonderful, it simply follows a classical straight line to its conclusion. A class of French students visit Naples. There’s the usual extracurricular hijinks, the usual casual cruelties and tensions (the first section of the film could have been called Dicks on a Train), and the usual unlikely / reluctant bonding, but the writing and acting is so adept that characters continuously evolve and surprise or disappoint us with their behaviour, rather than with imposed ‘plot developments’.

Flesh and Fuel (Pierre Le Gall, France, 2026)
My fourth first film in the top ten, a gritty wonder about two gay truckers where the obstacle to their relationship basically comes down to scheduling. It’s refreshing that the film isn’t overburdened with all your typical tragic baggage (closeting, homophobia, economic impossibility etc.): it’s just a simple situation without a simple solution and it’s utterly compelling because of the realness of the characters and their contexts and the through-the-roof chemistry of the two lead actors. The ending of this film is to die for.


TEN MORE (Alphabetical by director)

Flies (Fernando Eimbcke, Mexico, 2026)
Eimbcke has such a brilliant eye and such fantastic comic timing that watching his films is simply a joy. His best since, as least, Lake Tahoe.

The Dreamed Adventure (Valeska Grisebach, Germany / Bulgaria, 2026)
More action in testosterone-soaked border territories after the excellent Western. The main attraction of this film is its enveloping recreation of a very specific local world, but it also brilliantly works in genre elements as Veska, an archaeologist working in a remote Bulgarian village, slowly becomes something like a detective in an impromptu film noir. There’s a constant throb of dread through much of this film that was draining in a good way.

The Ice Tower (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, France, 2025)
Weird and dreamlike, but what else would you expect? My favourite Hadzihalilovic film so far.

Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze, Georgia, 2025)
This was by far the strangest film I’ve seen this year, and I still don’t know for sure if it is genius or a debacle, but I don’t think I’ve thought more about any film after seeing it than this one. First things first: this is the ugliest film I’ve seen in a very long time, simply because it was shot on a very old mobile phone, with all the smeary, inaccurate colours, inconsistent contrast and super low resolution (sawtooth edges abound!) that entails. Second things second: it’s more than three hours long, and the plot is basically compressed into the first and last twenty minutes, with the rest being a highly repetitive running gag. But it does such a formally interesting thing that you really need to interrogate what’s going on under the hood of this movie:

Spoiler

The story is about a father trying to track down his missing daughter, a photographer. The only clue he has is an unfinished assignment to photograph Georgia’s small town football fields. There’s no itinerary available, and his only lead is his daughter’s friend Levan, who had accompanied her on a scouting trip. Levan agrees to retrace their steps and guide the father. Three things immediately stand out about this quest: 1) nobody knows whether this is what Lisa is actually doing, it’s just a very vague lead; 2) it immediately becomes clear that Levan can recall almost nothing about where they went on the scouting trip; 3) Levan is invisible. Yes, the second lead of the film is invisible. Not imaginary, but simply invisible. He’s a full character who interacts with the other characters in the film, but for some mysterious reason his appearance doesn’t register on the film. So these two characters toddle off around rural Georgia visiting football fields and asking the locals if they’ve seen Lisa (they haven’t), and seeking directions to the next football field. For more than two hours the film consists primarily of shots of damp meadows and livestock and these formalized, informal, near identical encounters with locals (some of whom are also invisible). The effect is lulling and hypnotic, and you soon find yourself pondering the film’s bizarre choices, particularly the decision to shoot it with technology that’s far, far worse than your average cellphone. I have three theories about this: 1) the film’s subject matter is intrinsically photogenic, but this technological choice completely sabotages that characteristic, meaning that you can’t just engage with the film on the surface level of beautiful landscapes; 2) the film is a statement about the democracy of art, asserting that you can make a feature film with even the most meagre resources. You don’t even need to worry about missing a lead actor; 3) after a short time, the utterly deteriorated image fuses with the fundamental oddness of the film itself to make it feel like you’re watching the last surviving record of a lost film, a bereft stopgap pointing to an unobtainable pristine original, thereby giving the film a strange semiotic frisson.

Anyway, as you can see, it’s a film I can’t get out of my head.

Landmarks (Lucretia Martel, Argentina, 2025)
In many ways, this is a very conventionally structured activist / true crime documentary, but there’s always a difference when you’re in the hands of a filmmaker who really knows what she’s doing. One of the many delights of this film is the way Martel deals with that grand cliché of the modern documentary: drone footage. Rather than being an invisible floating eye, the mechanics of the drones are foregrounded by motor noise on the soundtrack, jarring robotic, movements and – in a moment that left me elated,

Spoiler

a collision with a bird that sends the drone crashing to the ground.

Whispers in the Woods (Vincent Munier, France, 2025)
There’s a nice intergenerational human frame to this film (which creates a couple of structural problems), but the real focus is on astoundingly beautiful natural history footage, including a stunning murmuration.

Strange River (Jaume Claret Muxart, Spain / Germany, 2025)
Another superb debut that formed a triptych with Everytime and Blue Heron by doing smart and unusual things with familiar material. Strange River seems like it’s going to be a coming out film, but it turns out that Didac’s parents are fully aware of and accepting of his sexuality (even to the point that all their positivity seems to be an active irritant), then it seems to become a psychodrama, with Didac’s crush appearing to him during their family cycling holiday, but then it turns into something much stranger. A visually beautiful film with an expert control of tone.

Hen (Gyorgy Palfi, Germany / Hungary, 2025)
A chook’s eye view of human folly, with all the visual invention you’d expect from Palfi.

Below the Clouds (Gianfranco Rosi, Italy, 2025)
Another vivid, immersive documentary from this great filmmaker, here working in crisp, nocturnal black and white.

Memory (Vladlena Sandu, France / Netherlands, 2025) – The real country of origin of this film is one that no longer exists: Chechnya. Sandu relates her harrowing personal history of living in Grozny during the Soviet invasion by whatever means available: family photos, archival footage, animation and – most strikingly – Paradzhanovian tableaux (some of them quoting directly from The Colour of Pomegranates.) A great hybrid documentary.


ALSO RECOMMENDED (Alphabetical by English title)

Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari, Canada / Hungary, 2025)
Blue Heron is a bit looser and less measured that the two films I linked it with above, but it’s more emotionally urgent. The teenage issue here is the impact of a disturbed sibling on the rest of the family, and there’s a slow reveal of the depth of the problem in the first half that’s alarming and involving, Then we leap forward to the youngest daughter as an adult, trying to make sense of her childhood experiences as a budding filmmaker. All perfectly normal, until

Spoiler

the adult daughter re-enters her past in the role of a social worker and the movie continues to its conclusion in fused timelines. The climax of the film is the ‘social worker’ reading a letter she, as the adult daughter, has written to her parents about just what is going to happen to them, the troubled son, and their family.

Coward (Lukas Dhont, Belgium, 2026) – Fine queer WWI drama.

Dao (Alain Gomis, France / Guinea-Bissau, 2026) – Rivette meets Sembene under the sign of Cassavetes. Two elaborate extended scenes intercut with one another and their auditions / rehearsals, over three hours.

Elephants in the Fog (Abinash, Bikram Shah, Nepal, 2026) – Lots of fog, not so many elephants. Fascinating drama about a trans family in crisis in a small Nepalese village, elevated by a powerful ending.

Fjord (Cristian Mungiu, Norway, 2026) – I was a little trepidatious about how the hot-topic aspects of this story would be dealt with, but Mungiu is generally messy, ambiguous and even-handed, to the movie’s benefit.

Minotaur (Andrey Zvyagintsev, France / Latvia, 2026)
Fatherland (Pawel Pawlikowski. Poland / Germany, 2026) – Two hugely impressive works from two modern masters, but I didn’t fully warm to either of them. Pawlikowski’s film is intellectually rigorous, beautifully shot and miraculously concise (as you’d expect). Zvyagintsev’s has his usual fantastic sense of place, but I found its dramatic ironies heavy handed. On the other hand, there’s an absolutely brilliant extended sequence in the centre of the film that everything builds to and unravels from.

Spoiler

it’s basically a very long elaboration of the “will the car sink?” scene in Psycho, with a character trying to cover up a crime in the most haphazard and incompetent manner imaginable. You feel like yelling “FINGERPRINTS!” at the screen.

Mouse (Kelly O’Sullivan / Alex Thompson, USA, 2026) – Evidence that all you need to do to freshen up tired indie material is pay close attention to character and detail.

Narciso (Marcelo Martinessi, Paraguay, 2026) – A mean and moody political film noir centred around the brief flowering of rock ‘n’ roll and the advent of dictatorship in Paraguay.

No Good Men (Shahrbanoo Sadat, Germany / Afghanistan, 2026) – Who knew you could make a romantic comedy about the fall of Kabul?

Paper Tiger (James Gray, USA, 2026) – An extremely tense crime drama that deals with its plot contrivances by getting them out of the way all at once (let’s just say this family has a Very Bad Day), and then proceeds with inexorable plausibility. A bunch of great performances, excellent mood maintenance, and the last shot of Scarlett Johansson is beautifully done.

Portobello (Marco Bellocchio, Italy, 2025) – Yet another octogenarian making ambitious, lively modern cinema. This is an absorbing mini-series based on the true incident from the 1970s / 80s about a television personality accused of being a Camorra druglord. Bellocchio gets his teeth into the political subtext, or course, but it’s also an excellent procedural and a tense courtroom drama, which even indulges in a couple of Fellinian flourishes.

The Red Hangar (Juan Pablo Sallato, Chile / Argentina, 2026) – Yet another excellent first film, this is a expertly paced paranoid drama set around September 11 (the Chilean one).

Remake (Ross McElwee, USA, 2025) – McElwee has never made a bad film (though there are two I haven’t seen). I’d rank this somewhere in the middle of his output, and I don’t know how it would play with somebody who hasn’t grown up alongside him, his son Adrian and Charleen Swansea.

Sundays (Alauda Ruiz de Azua, Spain, 2025) – Family goes to pieces when the teenage daughter decides to become a nun. There are so many ways this film could have gone, from garish farce to syrupy tearjerker, but this film gets the tone and performances just right, taking all sides seriously and refusing to simplify the complexity of the issues it raises.

Too Many Beasts (Sarah Arnold, France, 2026) – Imagine one of Bruno Dumont’s comic rural whodunnits. Now imagine (and this will be a challenge) that it’s actually funny. This film also calls to mind the quizzical, casual, complex queerness of Alain Guiraudie. Showcases a different side of Cannes’ breakout star Alexis Manenti (Flesh and Fuel). Excellent first feature from Sarah Arnold.

Wolfram (Warwick Thornton. Australia, 2025) – Perhaps the best Australian western yet, and the most flyblown film I’ve ever seen.


THE BAD STUFF (Shittiest to least shitty)

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass (David Wain, USA, 2026) – Painfully unfunny “laff-a-minute” farce that assumes “recognize that guy from TV” is the same thing as “hilarious joke.” Wow, was this terrible. . .

Body Blow (Dean Francis, Australia, 2025) – Garish, poorly written and acted, by-the-numbers closeted cop ventures into queer underworld drama. For people who found Cruising too sophisticated.

With Hasan in Gaza (Kamal Aljafari, Palestine / Germany, 2025) – I really wish this was better. There’s a strong story here (the filmmaker returns to Palestine to seek out a person he met in prison there), but that’s conveyed in a couple of minutes of on-screen text. The film itself is his shaky amateur footage of driving around Gaza in 2001 looking for clues, and it seems to be pretty much unedited, which somehow manages to make even a firefight boring. Also, adding a score (which competes with important ambient sound – “did you hear that?” What, you mean Simon Fisher Turner?) to such unvarnished content seems like a bad idea.

Butterfly Jam (Kantemir Balagov, USA, 2026) – Acclaimed Russian auteur relocates to America and, like many before him, tosses off a bog-standard Ethnic Indie Drama, but with bizarre random elements thrown in out of what seems like desperation. If “adopt a pelican” and “anal rape” are next to one another on your bingo card, I have good news! The latter is so unbelievable the film has to lampshade it mercilessly.

The Fence (Claire Denis, France, 2025) – I’d heard the warnings, but I couldn’t believe Denis had made a film this bad. It’s adapted from a stage play and remains extremely stagy with often embarrassing dialogue. Tom Blyth’s character is particularly poorly written and particularly poorly acted. The film only really comes to life when the characters finally shut up for a moment.

Hope (Na Hong-jin, South Korea, 2026) – The big Korean monster movie from Cannes tries hard, but it just can’t do the basic things competently. The reveal of the monster is implausibly delayed and delayed, to the point that everybody in the movie has seen it except our focal character, who has been chasing it for twenty minutes. And then we realize why: the monster design in this movie sucks, and the CGI is fake fake fake fake. It’s 90% a chase movie, but the chases are also fake fake fake fake, relying for adrenaline on that wrong-headed cliché dating at least as far back as Duel that showing the chaser rapidly gaining on the chase will always be exciting, even if it means that the logistics have to be reset with every cut so that the chaser is somehow instantaneously miles behind again, just so they re-accelerate. It’s the cinematic equivalent of throwing sugar on a fire and calling it fireworks, and after a couple of times it renders the chase scenes inert and uninvolving. A similar problem is the asymmetrical body count of the movie: the monsters kill hundreds of people instantly – unless it’s a main character, in which case they can be flung hundreds of feet in the air, hit a tree, then fall hundreds of feet to the ground and still get up and run away. Do filmmakers not realize that that kind of thing just makes you stop caring about anybody in the film? The wall-to-wall action sequences are rendered impotent by the fakery and contrivance, and Hope only really works in its initial stretch and when it briefly slows down later on. Towards the end of the film they have to resort to random what-the-fuckery to get to the finish line. When you see the film, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Things I liked, conceptually, at least

Spoiler

the scene where the old guy reveals crucial information about the aliens, but can’t get past over-explaining his diarrhoea; the chutzpah of casting big international stars in non-speaking, non-acting roles which could literally have been performed by anybody.