The common consensus is that 2025 has been a fairly weak year. It seems safe to say that 2026 will be a much stronger one. At least 20 humdingers, by my count, and an impressive roster of grade-A directors (Inarritu, Fincher, Guadagnino, Spielberg, Nolan, Mungiu, Farhadi, Sorkin, Gilroy, Farhadi).
Two days ago World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy posted a roster of 70something 2026 films that struck him as noteworthy at the very least, and in some cases high expectation-level. In this post I’ve pruned the list down to 20, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff. Most of these represent my idea of festival toppers or possible award-worthy titles, or both.
1. Untitled Black Comedy a.k.a Judy (d: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, p: Tom Cruise)
2. The Adventures of Cliff Booth (d: David Fincher)
3. The Oydssey (d: Christopher Nolan)
4. Untitled UFO Movie (d: Steven Spielberg)
5. Artificial (d: Luca Guadagnino)
6. Wild Horse Nine (d: Martin McDonagh)
7. Jack of Spades (d: Joel Coen)
8. The Entertainment System is Down (d: Ruben Ostlund)
9. Fjord (d: Cristian Mungiu w/ Renate Reinsve, Sebastian Stan)
10. Parallel Tales (d: Asghar Farhadi)
11. Minotaur (d: Andrey Zvyagintsev)
12. Coward (d: Lukas Dhont)
13. The Way of the Wind (d: Terrence Malick)
14. Resident Evil (d: Zach Cregger)
15. 1949 (d: Pawel Pawlikowski)
16. The Basics of Philosophy (d: Paul Schrader)
17. Switzerland (d: Anton Corbijn)
18. Michael (d: Antoine Fuqua)
19. The Social Reckoning (d: Aaron Sorkin)
20. Behemoth! (d: Tony Gilroy)