2026 Headliners Reconfigured

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Earlier this month I posted a list of 20 safe bets to be released in 2026 — i.e., presumptions of quality based upon esteemed critical regard and/or aspirational histories. Most of these represent my idea of festival toppers or possible award-worthy titles, or both.

Within this list, the big festival attractions will almost certainly include (1) Alejandro G. Inarritu and Tom Cruise‘s Digger, (2) Aaron Sorkin‘s em>The Social Reckoning, (3) Ruben Ostlund‘s The Entertainment System is Down, (4) Asghar Farhadi‘s Parallel Tales, (5) Anton Corbijn‘s Switzerland, (6) Lukas Dhont‘s Coward, (7) Pawel Pawlikowski‘s 1949, (8) Tony Gilroy‘s Behemoth!, (9) Paul Schrader‘s The Basics of Philosophy, (10) Cristian Mungiu‘s Fjord, (11) Joel Coen’s Jack of Spades, (12) Luca Guadagnino‘s Artificial, (13) Andrey Zvyagintsev‘s Minotaur,) and (14) Martin McDonagh’s Wild Horse Nine.

The Joe and Jane Popcorn titles include (1) David Fincher and Quentin Tarantino‘s The Adventures of Cliff Booth, (2) Chris Nolan‘s The Oydssey, (3) Steven Spielberg‘s Disclosure Day, (4) Antoine Fuqua‘s Michael, and (5) Zach Cregger‘s Resident Evil.

As always, Terrence Malick‘s The Way of the Wind remains a wild card.

Asking again: What am I missing?

1. Digger (d: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, p: Tom Cruise)
2. The Adventures of Cliff Booth (d: David Fincher)
3. The Oydssey (d: Christopher Nolan)
4. Disclosure Day, (d: Steven Spielberg)
5. Artificial (d: Luca Guadagnino)
6. Jack of Spades (d: Joel Coen)
7. The Entertainment System is Down (d: Ruben Ostlund)
8. Fjord (d: Cristian Mungiu w/ Renate Reinsve, Sebastian Stan)
9. Parallel Tales (d: Asghar Farhadi)
10. Minotaur (d: Andrey Zvyagintsev)
11. Coward (d: Lukas Dhont)
12. The Way of the Wind (d: Terrence Malick)
13. Resident Evil (d: Zach Cregger)
14. 1949 (d: Pawel Pawlikowski)
15. The Basics of Philosophy (d: Paul Schrader)
16. Switzerland (d: Anton Corbijn)
17. Michael (d: Antoine Fuqua)
18. The Social Reckoning (d: Aaron Sorkin)
19. Behemoth! (d: Tony Gilroy)
20. Wild Horse Nine (d: Martin McDonagh)

Warner Bros.’s “One Battle After Another” Award-Season Strategists Are Panicking

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Anthony D’Alessandro’s Saturday box-office report for Deadline:

In four days, A24’s Marty Supreme will make more than Timothee Chalamet’s Christmas movie from last year, A Complete Unknown, did in 5 days, $26M-$27M to $23.2M.

Rivals are impressed by this number: It’s a period film about a ping-pong player from the Lower East Side, not an easy subject matter that creates a line to the multiplex, but it helps when you have the force of Chalamet in the campaign. The viral of it all sparked with the zoom sketch below. We already told you that the social media universe for Marty Supreme stood at 197M before opening across TikTok, X, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube; that’s with Chalamet standing atop The Sphere in Las Vegas. There was also a Marty Supreme blimp flying over Beverly Hills in further stunts.

When polled by Screen Engine/Comscore’s PostTrak, moviegoers said the most influential form of advertising for Marty Supreme was social media (28%) and friends and family (19%).

Friday was $6.7M, -30% from Christmas Day’s $9.5M for a 3-day that stands at $16M-$17M at 2,668 theaters. Don’t be shocked if it’s higher, like a $17M 3-day and $30M 4-day. A24 has 70MM locations which are generating big bucks, and there’s some PLFs. Comp this to the previous Safdie Brothers movie, the zany gangster drama, Uncut Gems, which went wide over a 2019 5-day Christmas stretch with $18.8M. The Adam Sandler movie finaled at $50M.

The PostTrak definite recommend on Marty Supreme is a great 60% with 4 1/2 stars. Men over 25 are first in line at 36% followed by women over 25 at 27%, followed by men under 25 at 21% and women under 25 at 16%. 18-34 turnout is 66%. Even though women under 25 were surprisingly the smaller to show up yesterday, they love their Marty the most with a 94% positive and a 73% definite recommend. Diversity demos are 51% Caucasian, 23% Hispanic and Latino, 10% Black and 11% Asian American. Very good walk-up business with 52% buying their ticket same days. 50% went for Chalamet.

Marty Supreme is playing best on the East and West with close to half the gross coming from those regions versus a norm of 39% compared to all other films in the marketplace. Overperforming cities are NYC, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, DC, Boston, Toronto and more. The trajectory is showing that this Josh Safdie directed movie is playing more broadly than an art film. Regal Union Square is currently the top-grossing multiplex in the nation for the pic with close to $74k.

“Like I’m Not Here…This Is Gonna Hurt”

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Something’s Gotta Give (’03) is probably a better film that I’ve given it credit for over the last couple of decades.

This is a first-rate dinner table scene. Awkward discussion, truth grenades. Jack Nicholson and Frances McDormand (playing a brutally honest lesbian playwright) are especially good.

The film’s speed bump (a big one) is director-writer Nancy Meyers insisting upon the then-39-year-old Keanu Reeves‘s cardiologist character feeling serious romantic hots for the eternally attractive Diane Keaton, who was then 57.

A 39 year-old doctor might fall into a serious relationship with, say, a 45 year-old woman, or maybe even a 50-year-old if you want to push it. But not a 57 year-old, especially one who refuses to have “work” done (hence the incessant turtlenecks). There’s just no buying it.

Frances McDormand (around 45 or 46 during filming) looks so young here!

Blizzard Pussies on Interstate 95

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HE was out and about during last night’s snowstorm, which began around 6 pm Friday (12.26) and came down hard and heavy. Mounds and ridges of the stuff, 4″ or 5″ deep. Traffic necessarily slowed on Westchester County’s Hutchinson River Parkway and Connecticut 95 northbound, but the real problem wasn’t so much the snowfall (quite heavy with very little snowplowing going on) as the chickenshit drivers.

In a deluge of this intensity you have to keep your speed down to 25 or 30 mph for fear of skidding (everyone had their flashers on), but the 95 was congested as fuck — much slower than necessary because of all the pussies driving 10 or 15 mph, if that. I just pushed on through, bypassing this and that slowpoke as I changed lanes like a champ. Did I slip and slide a little bit? Yeah, but not to any scary degree.

JFK to Stratford usually takes a couple of hours — last night it took a little more than four. If I had kept pace with the wimps it would have taken five or longer.

When I dropped off the client (a Parisian dude) he shook my hand and said “good driver!” What he meant was that my wheel-and-breaking skills were appropriately cautious but Steve McQueen-ish, and that I don’t drive like a 85 year-old candy ass.

“Ultimate Product of Hitler’s Defeat”

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“Since it was announced that the Safdie brothers, the lads behind Uncut Gems and Good Time, would be splitting up, the one question on everyone’s mind has been ‘so which brother has the sauce?’ Having seen Benny’s The Smashing Machine and Josh’s Marty Supreme, the answer, I’m afraid, is painfully obvious” — from Karsten Rundquist‘s “Is Marty Supreme The Movie of the Year?”

HE to Van Sant: Not to Get Overly Anatomical

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….but Herman J. Mankiewicz‘s use of “rosebud” in Citizen Kane‘s wasn’t a reference to Marion Davies‘ “vagina” (as Gus says at 1:45) but her clitoris. That’s a nickname that William Randolph Hearst allegedly used for it. Yes, it was also the name of Charles Foster Kane‘s boyhood sled.

“Omar” Once Again

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Last night, inspired by the idea of visiting the Holy Land, I enjoyed my third viewing of Hany Abu–Assad’s suspenseful, decidedly un-Christian Omar (2013), which began filming in Nazareth Nablus in late 2012.

My first viewing was during the 2013 Cannes Film Festival; I caught it a second time at the Palm Springs Film Festival in January 2014.

Posted on 1.15.14: I was so taken with my first viewing of Hany Abu-Assad‘s Omar, a Palestinian-produced thriller about betrayal and double-agenting in the West Bank, that I caught it again last night at the Palm Springs Film Festival.

It’s a taut, urgent, highly realistic thriller that squeezes its characters and viewers like a vise.

Omar is among the Academy’s short-listed Best Foreign Language Feature contenders, and with my personal favorites, Asghar Farhadi‘s The Past and Yuval Adler‘s Bethlehem (which is quite similar to Abu-Assad’s film) out of the running, I guess I’m an Omar guy at this stage.


Omar costars Waleed_Zuaiter (l.) and Adam Bakri (r.) following last night’s screening at Palm Spring Int’l Film Festival

I’m a serious admirer of the two leads, Adam Bakri, who plays the titular character, a Palestinian youth whose decision to take part in an assassination with two friends seals his fare, and Waleed Zuaiter, an Israeli agent who presses Omar into his service as an informer.

Bakri and Zuaiter did a q & an after last night’s screening.

Bakri, probably 21 or 22, is making his feature film debut with Omar. He’s currently living stateside (either LA or NY). He was wearing a really handsome military-styled dark blue jacket, and so I asked him where he got it. Zara at the Grove, he said, so maybe he’s living here.

From Jay Weissberg‘s Variety review, filed during the 2013 Cannes Film Festival: “As he did with Paradise Now, Abu-Assad refuses to demonize characters for their poor choices. Only too aware of the crushing toll of the Occupation on Palestinians, he shows men (the film is male-centric) making tragic, often self-destructive decisions as a result of an inescapable environment of degradation and violence.

“With Omar he’s finessed the profile, depicting how the weaknesses that make us human, especially love, can lead, in such a place, to acts of betrayal. It’s as if he’s taken thematic elements from Westerns and film noir, using the fight for dignity and an atmosphere of doubt to explain rather than excuse heinous actions. Viewers with a firm moral compass, who see killing as an act always to be condemned, won’t need Omar to tell them what’s right and wrong.”

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Somebody Tell McCuddy

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Late yesterday afternoon at the Jacob Burns Center in Pleasantville, two successive showings of Marty Supreme were sold out. At the AMC Westport today (Thursday, 12.25) three showings of Marty Supreme are currently sold out, according to the AMC app. And a 6 pm showing at the AMC Sono is nearly sold out.

HE to Bill McCuddy: This is what happens when a film is “tanking.”

For Me, 2025 Was The Year….

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…in which I casually, briefly engaged with dozens upon dozens of Average Joes and Janes about this and that chit-chat topic…many times, over and over…and when the subject of the year’s best, most see-worthy films briefly surfaced, Joe and Jane had never even heard of the tip-tops….Sentimental Value, Marty Supreme, Hamnet, et. al.

It would have been one thing if these titles had stirred some level of Joe-and-Jane recognition, resulting in a vague interest in streaming these vaguely-familiar films down the road, but these and other titles drew a total effing blank.

Morever, no one had even heard of last year’s Best Picture winner — Anora.

I chatted with quite a few Yale University undergrads — exceptional, cream of-the-crop Zoomers! — and not a single one had heard of Luca Guadagnino‘s After The Hunt, which is set in New Haven and within an elite Yale academic demimonde.

The finest films used to jar and sometimes electrify large portions of the populace. Moviegoing in general used to be an accessible, mass-interest thing, at least as far as the end-of-the-year Oscar chasers were concerned.

But the pandemic, streaming and woke-lefty instructional theology flicks (a fraternity to which One Battle After Another belongs) suffocated the golden goose. Movies have devolved into an elite cottage industry of concentrated but marginal cultural value, and the Oscars will be moving to YouTube in ’29.

I know, I know…the getting-smaller-and-narrower-and-less-vital trend has been apparent for many years, but 2025 was the year in which this numbing realization became inescapable. The mooks have mostly checked out, given up, lost that lovin’ feelin’.