News, reviews and features on cinema
Maha Harada has spent much of her literary career writing about the spaces where art and ordinary lives meet. Her first feature as a director stays remarkably close to that territory. Muyou no hito, internationally titled In My Father's Room, has emerged from the 74th San Sebastián International Film Festival with two parallel awards before its Japanese theatrical release next January.
Sanxingdui: Future Memories is moving from technology showcase to theatrical product. Bona Film Group has set an October 23, 2026 Chinese release for its hyperrealistic AI-assisted science-fiction feature, months after the movie received the public-screening permit required to enter cinemas. That distinction matters: regulatory approval was the first threshold. A nationwide release puts the experiment in front of an actual market.
The interesting story in cinema right now is not that Asia has somehow defeated Hollywood. It is that the old hierarchy has become less reliable. Several of the world's biggest theatrical markets overwhelmingly prefer domestic films, Asian productions have expanded their share of global admissions, and a Chinese animation became 2025's worldwide box-office leader. At the same time, Hollywood has just enjoyed its strongest post-pandemic summer in North America. Both things can be true.
Several major releases were competing for Korean moviegoers over Chuseok. The Assassin(s) emerged with the largest audience. Released on September 23, Hur Jin-ho's new film finished its first weekend with 1,199,156 admissions and had already reached a cumulative 1,566,222 viewers by Sunday, according to the Korean Film Council.
It took the lights going down at the New York Film Festival. After months of trailers referring only to a “new threat,” Godzilla Minus Zero finally showed its hand at its September 26 world premiere: Ghidorah is in the movie. And Takashi Yamazaki is not treating Godzilla's famous adversary as a tiny final-act surprise. The three-headed monster is directly tied to the new disaster striking Japan in 1949.
Netflix has found an unusually efficient way to sell a new romance before showing much of the movie itself: reunite Lindsay Lohan with Mark Waters. The director of Freaky Friday and Mean Girls will helm Return to You, starring Henry Golding opposite Lohan. The film is now in production, although Netflix has not announced a release date.
Marvel Studios has another absurdly large number for the corporate history book. Disney says its 38 films have now generated a cumulative $35.075 billion at the worldwide box office. Avengers: Endgame Encore pushed the total over the threshold this weekend, but the more revealing story is how Marvel can use a seven-year-old blockbuster to sell tickets again while simultaneously advertising the next Avengers movie.
Forgotten Island had the reviews, the audience reception and the DreamWorks name. What it lacked on its first North American weekend was more moviegoers. Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado's film opened to $12.8 million domestically and brought its worldwide total to $20.6 million. For Universal, what happens after opening weekend is already becoming more important than the opening itself.
Heart of the Beast did not win the weekend, but its first worldwide tally looks considerably stronger than its North American number alone suggests. Paramount's Brad Pitt vehicle opened to an estimated $50.1 million globally, with roughly 60% of that total coming from international markets.
Seven years after its original run, Avengers: Endgame can apparently still fill theaters. Disney estimates that the Encore rerelease opened to $86 million worldwide, pushing the movie's lifetime total to roughly $2.885 billion and putting Avatar within striking distance once again.
Universal has won a race that no studio officially enters but every major distributor watches. On September 25, its film business crossed $5 billion at the worldwide box office in 2026 before any competitor. The scale is impressive — $1.788 billion domestically and $3.218 billion internationally — but the composition is more revealing: Christopher Nolan, Nintendo and Illumination, a Lionsgate biopic distributed overseas, the Minions and a thriller made for less than $1 million.
Avengers: Endgame is back in theaters as though 2019 never entirely ended. The Encore edition earned $3.8 million from North American Thursday previews and is currently projected to make more than $25 million over the weekend. Marvel is not simply putting its former box-office champion back on screens, however. Endgame has been rebuilt into a direct runway for Avengers: Doomsday, due December 18, with additional material designed specifically to connect the old event movie to the new one.
Particle 6 is trying to move its artificial-intelligence pitch from synthetic personalities into a conventional family-movie structure. Rob Minkoff, co-director of The Lion King and director of Stuart Little, is in advanced discussions to develop and executive produce Storm Dogs. The pairing is easy to understand: a filmmaker whose career repeatedly involved believable animal characters is being brought into a story carried by five photorealistic dogs and a two-year-old child. What is much less developed is the movie around that idea. There is no announced distributor, no public cast and only a 2027 production target.
Built inside an enormous toy-selling machine, The Transformers: The Movie could easily have been a feature-length commercial with better projection. Its ferocious first act, ambitious animation, surprisingly permanent deaths and a voice cast that somehow includes both Orson Welles and Leonard Nimoy gave it something more: a personality. Forty years later, the storytelling remains messy, but its energy is remarkably difficult to reproduce.
Rescued after nearly disappearing into Warner's vaults, Coyote vs. Acme more than justifies making it to theaters. Dave Green turns the Looney Tunes' eternal loser into the perfect plaintiff for a smart, frequently funny courtroom comedy anchored by Will Forte and John Cena. The feature loses momentum whenever its conspiracy plot takes over and never quite reaches the gleeful violence of Chuck Jones' shorts, but it understands Wile E. Coyote well enough to justify its 103 minutes.
Twenty-eight years after the original film, Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman return as the Owens sisters in a sequel designed as one enormous magical family reunion. Their chemistry, Franny and Jet and a handful of affecting generational moments still cast a spell. But 130 minutes of nostalgia, romance and overloaded mythology gradually dilute what should have been the real event: watching these women together again.
Three new wide releases arrive with Robert Pattinson, Brad Pitt and an original DreamWorks animated film. The title currently ahead of all three was released in 2019. Avengers: Endgame Encore took roughly $3.8 million from North American previews, giving Marvel’s reissue an early lead over Primetime, Heart of the Beast and Forgotten Island. Preview figures are not perfectly comparable and they are not final weekend grosses, but they make for an unusually neat snapshot of the theatrical business.
Saw's new ownership structure now has an actual movie attached to it. Mike P. Nelson will direct the next installment for Lionsgate and Blumhouse Atomic Monster, with James Wan, Leigh Whannell and Jason Blum producing. One detail in the first announcement is already worth preserving: the script shown on screen is labeled UNTITLED SAW.
Heat 2 is continuing to fill out its ensemble, but the wording matters. Ebon Moss-Bachrach is in final talks to play Kelso, according to TheWrap. Amazon MGM Studios declined to comment, meaning the casting remains reported rather than officially announced.
Hollow is beginning to put faces to a very old rivalry. Belmont Cameli is set to play Brom Bones opposite Sydney Sweeney's Katrina Van Tassel, according to Deadline, in a Sony project that rebuilds The Legend of Sleepy Hollow around a different point of view.
Netflix has secured a much longer future with Sesame Street. Its deal with Sesame Workshop now covers new seasons through Season 62, while a separate film project brings Rideback into a partnership that increasingly looks like a broader franchise strategy.
Laika did not need another announcement that Atmosphere exists. It needed a route to market. Black Bear's worldwide rights deal gives the live-action project a co-financing partner and a distribution operation built around theatrical release.
Eric Barbier turns the Great War into a picaresque fable about obedience, friendship and revolt. Justin the Just is carried by Alban Ivanov, Birane Ba and a strikingly physical reconstruction, even when its humanist message becomes overly explicit and its final act stretches credibility.
Ray Gunn has flying cars, robots and skyscrapers that appear to have forgotten when to stop growing, but nobody told Brad Bird that film noir was supposed to stay in the past. The first trailer finally reveals the central trick behind a project he has carried for more than three decades: this is not our future. It is the future a filmmaker in 1939 might have imagined, with an old-fashioned private detective dropped right into the middle of it.
The toy box has officially moved from theaters to streaming. Disney confirmed that Toy Story 5 began streaming exclusively on Disney+ on September 23, 2026, placing Pixar's latest sequel alongside the earlier films just over three months after its June 19 theatrical debut.
Jeanne Herry leaves the ensemble film behind to follow an actress across eight years as alcohol gradually shifts from social fuel to dependency. Garance relies heavily on Adèle Exarchopoulos, superb in the tiny variations of denial and exhaustion, but also finds balance through Sara Giraudeau and editing that favors an accumulation of small damage over one grand collapse.
David Ayer largely leaves armed crews and criminal conspiracies behind to strand Brad Pitt against nature with an extraordinarily expressive German Shepherd at his side. Heart of the Beast is simple, predictable and occasionally too sentimental, but its narrative directness, landscapes and especially the bond between man and dog give it disarming effectiveness.
Prime Video has its major September romance. The Love Hypothesis is now available following its September 23 global release, with Lili Reinhart playing a Ph.D. candidate pulled into a fake relationship with Tom Bateman's intimidating professor. Amazon MGM Studios has turned one of Ali Hazelwood's best-known novels into a 112-minute streaming feature.
Georgia Oakley has little interest in recreating the immaculately controlled elegance of Ang Lee's film. Her Sense and Sensibility favors loose hair, muddy hems, windswept landscapes and emotions suppressed almost to suffocation. Daisy Edgar-Jones and Esmé Creed-Miles make a convincing pair of sisters, although the adaptation's heavier mood occasionally smothers Jane Austen's comic spirit.
Ten years after The Neon Demon, Nicolas Winding Refn returns to neon, monumental silences, bodies transformed into icons and stories that behave more like dreams than conventional plots. Her Private Hell is often beautiful and Pino Donaggio gives it extraordinary musical scale, but that beauty serves a film so abstract that its characters and obsessions do not always achieve genuine emotional weight.
September normally sits awkwardly between summer blockbuster season and the fall prestige push. Hollywood has filled that gap rather aggressively in 2026. Mark Wahlberg and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II open the month with a crime thriller, Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman return for Practical Magic 2, Zach Cregger reboots Resident Evil, and Brad Pitt ends September stranded in Alaska with a combat dog.
Twenty years later, the Stone house is about to become overcrowded at Christmas again. Searchlight has officially announced The Families Stone, with Tom Bezucha returning to write and direct and almost the entire surviving principal cast coming back. The new family disruption belongs to Kelly this time: he has fallen in love, and he is bringing the woman into the Stone Christmas gathering.
Independent cinema does not really have a single global Friday. One film opens in France on Wednesday, another begins in a New York theater two days later, and a third is still moving through festivals while distributors decide where it goes next. Late September 2026 is a particularly good example: the films are there, but their routes to an audience look completely different.
Asian cinema at major international festivals is becoming harder to describe as one neat movement. Toronto offered a useful example this year: the number of Chinese and Chinese-language titles doubled from the previous edition, but the films themselves came from very different corners of the industry.
There is no single worldwide movie-release day. On Wednesday, September 23, 2026, French cinemas are opening several international titles before their US or UK debuts, while South Korea is using its own midweek release cycle for an especially important pre-Chuseok slate. Brad Pitt, Robert Pattinson, Nicolas Winding Refn, Daisy Edgar-Jones, Lee Min-ho and Lee Chang-dong all have films entering theaters today somewhere in the world.
Seven years without a new LAIKA feature is long enough to make Wildwood feel like a relaunch. The final trailer suggests the opposite. The studio is still committed to puppets, physical environments and frame-by-frame animation; it has simply made the playground much larger. Instead of one haunted house or one small town, Wildwood asks stop-motion to support an entire hidden civilization on the edge of war.
Sam Mendes is not merely dramatizing Beatles history. He is rebuilding some of its most recognizable images. The latest set photographs from The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event show John, George and Ringo sprinting away from screaming fans in a recreation of A Hard Day's Night, only days after the four lead actors reconstructed the band's enormous 1964 homecoming in Liverpool.
The fairy tale is over. Netflix uses that phrase to describe The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, and it neatly explains what changes when David Fincher inherits Quentin Tarantino's character. Brad Pitt is still playing the same dangerously relaxed stuntman. The difference is that 1977 Hollywood has finally discovered a profession perfectly suited to him: fixer.
Michelle Pfeiffer did not announce her retirement. She did not even announce that she was leaving movies. A deliberately exaggerated comment about never wanting to carry another film by herself was enough to produce retirement headlines anyway. Pfeiffer has now made the distinction clear: she still wants to work.
Ewan McGregor is no longer simply waiting for Lucasfilm to send him an Obi-Wan Kenobi script. Four years after the Disney+ limited series, he is coming up with possible stories himself. One of them would send Obi-Wan looking for Yoda after the Jedi Order's collapse. The important part is what has not happened: Lucasfilm has not put that project into announced development.
Does the next James Bond already have a face? Gary Oldman says the decision has been made. What he does not say is who won the role. His personal hope is Jack Lowden, his Slow Horses co-star, but Amazon MGM Studios has still not announced Lowden or anyone else as Daniel Craig's successor.
Conan Edogawa has survived enough explosions to make any insurance company nervous. His 29th movie adds high-speed police motorcycles and busy highways to the problem. Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway reaches French theaters on September 23 with Chihaya Hagiwara finally moving into the spotlight.
Garance is not introduced as a celebrity or as someone whose life has already collapsed. She works, moves apartments, falls in love, goes out and keeps functioning. Alcohol is simply always there — first as comfort and social fuel, then increasingly as something that reorganizes the rest of her life. Jeanne Herry follows that process across eight years in Garance.
Nicolas Winding Refn has not made a theatrical feature since The Neon Demon in 2016, and Her Private Hell is not exactly a restrained return. The new film mixes science fiction, horror, serial-killer imagery, paternal anxiety and aggressively colored neon inside a futuristic city swallowed by a deadly mist.
Any new Sense and Sensibility has to share the room with Ang Lee and Emma Thompson's 1995 film. Georgia Oakley is not pretending otherwise. Her version finds its distinction by moving away from the simplest reading of one sensible sister and one emotional sister, instead treating Elinor and Marianne as two young women whose survival depends on learning from each other.
To Catch a Predator already had the structure of a thriller: hidden cameras, a trap, an unexpected confrontation and an arrest waiting outside. Primetime is interested in what happened when that structure became entertainment. Lance Oppenheim's first narrative feature stars Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen and opens in French theaters on September 23.
Ari Aster has once again reached the stage where his cast is news before anyone knows what the movie is actually about. Scarlett Johansson is already attached to Scapegoat, and Jacob Elordi is now in negotiations to join her. His deal is not yet closed, while Aster is keeping the story almost completely secret.
Practical Magic 2 brings back Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Dianne Wiest and Stockard Channing nearly three decades after the original. Evan Rachel Wood would have happily joined that reunion. The actress, who played Kylie Owens as a child in 1998, says she offered to return and was told the character was being recast with Joey King.
The biggest film in Warner Bros. history has a surprisingly basic sequel problem: its key creative team was never obligated to make another one. Three years after Barbie earned more than $1.4 billion worldwide, the studio is still negotiating with Greta Gerwig, Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and Noah Baumbach. Those talks have stalled.
Twenty-three years after the love fern, the competing bets and Kate Hudson's yellow dress, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days officially has a sequel in development at Paramount. The reunion most people immediately imagine is not official yet, though. Hudson is producing the movie, while Matthew McConaughey says he still has not seen a script.
La Bola Negra left Cannes with a directing prize. Four months later, Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi have collected a very different signal from Toronto: audiences chose their film as TIFF's 2026 People's Choice Award winner. That matters not because it guarantees anything ahead, but because few festival prizes are watched as closely once awards season begins.
An anonymous image on 4chan became a creepypasta, then a teenage filmmaker turned that mythology into YouTube shorts. Now the feature adaptation has crossed $400 million worldwide. Backrooms has moved well beyond the scale usually associated with a low-budget internet-to-film experiment.
Sony was already expecting a franchise record. The final estimate is much larger than that modest description suggests. Resident Evil has opened to roughly $60 million in the U.S. and Canada, compared with the $26.65 million record set by Afterlife in 2010, while giving Zach Cregger the biggest opening of his career.
A box-office record that survived for more than a decade has finally moved. Spider-Man: Brand New Day has crossed roughly $936.8 million in the United States and Canada, edging past Star Wars: The Force Awakens after only 47 days in theaters. It is an unadjusted record, but within the industry's standard nominal chart, Spider-Man now sits alone at number one.
The Stones are doing Christmas together again, which should immediately concern anyone who remembers the first gathering. Searchlight Pictures has officially announced The Families Stone, a sequel reuniting most of the 2005 ensemble under returning writer-director Thomas Bezucha.
For years, another Inbetweeners movie sounded like a reunion everyone could imagine and nobody quite knew how to make. The cast could not plausibly go back to sixth form forever. Netflix has now found the simpler answer: let them grow up. Production on The Inbetweeners 3 is officially underway in the UK with the entire original quartet.
Netflix and Sega have turned three adaptation announcements into a broader industry play. Crazy Taxi, Sonic and Stranger Than Heaven will anchor a new multi-title collaboration designed to move across live-action film, children's animation and crime drama.
Resident Evil was not initially tracking like a breakout. Then Thursday happened. The new film earned $8.8 million from North American previews, forcing opening-weekend forecasts upward and putting a long-standing franchise record under immediate pressure.
World War Z 2 has spent years looking like one of those sequels Hollywood would keep mentioning without ever making. Paramount has now closed deals for Brad Pitt to return and Edward Berger to direct, while Dennis Kelly is writing the screenplay. There is still no release date and no public story synopsis.
Maya and Anjali think they are joining a college dance team. What they actually enter is a world of late-night rehearsals, bruising competition, creative obsession and enough internal drama to make class feel like the relaxing part of university. Best of the Best arrives on Netflix September 18 with Maitreyi Ramakrishnan and Priyanka Kedia leading a coming-of-age comedy built around collegiate Bollywood fusion.
Prime Video does not have to introduce Alma and Vadim from nothing. Emma Green's Toi+Moi – Seuls contre tous trilogy has already sold close to one million copies in France. The movie arriving September 18 turns that established French readership into a much larger experiment: can a local YA romance travel globally with Vittoria Di Savoia and Lucas Barski in the lead?
Resident Evil cinema has already tried radical reinvention and a more literal return to the games. Zach Cregger is attempting a third route. His new film opens September 18 with Raccoon City intact but Leon, Claire, Jill and Chris nowhere near the lead role. Instead, Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier having an exceptionally bad night.
Most new streaming movies have to build an audience from zero. Perfect Liars starts with more than 140 million Wattpad reads. Prime Video has released the first trailer for its Spanish adaptation of Alex Mírez's novel, betting that an enormous online readership can become a global movie audience when the film launches November 20.
John Abraham usually plays characters who can identify the threat in front of them. Guru is giving him something less convenient. Principal photography has started on Ribhu Dasgupta's psychological thriller, where the central problem is not simply an enemy but a protagonist who can no longer trust his own memory.
Sense and Sensibility has no shortage of romantic complications, eligible men and financial consequences attached to marriage. Georgia Oakley's new adaptation is nevertheless putting a different relationship first. Following its London premiere, the film is presenting Elinor and Marianne less as competing philosophies and more as sisters whose contrasting instincts gradually reshape each other.
The arena is covered in flowers. Mountains rise behind it, sunlight fills the valley and everything looks almost absurdly beautiful. Then the Capitol sends 48 teenagers inside. The latest Sunrise on the Reaping trailer is leaning hard into that contradiction as Haymitch Abernathy enters the most notorious Hunger Games of his generation.
A struggling action star, a glamorous environmental gala, three human sacrifices and an active volcano are all part of Romain Gavras' idea of a comedy. The latest Sacrifice trailer puts Chris Evans at the mercy of Anya Taylor-Joy, whose character is convinced the world can still be saved — provided the right people are thrown into the fire.
Sonic's success has given SEGA little reason to be shy about Hollywood. The company is now expanding its screen ambitions through a multi-title partnership with Netflix, putting Crazy Taxi first and bringing several producers from the Sonic franchise along for the ride.
A 225-minute documentary with a 10-minute intermission is not the obvious definition of a quick theatrical sell. Bleecker Street is moving faster anyway, bringing Alex Gibney's Musk to New York and Los Angeles on October 9 before expanding the film nationally.
Hawaii Five-O has spent decades trying to make the jump from television to theaters. Paramount is now assembling another attempt around Destin Daniel Cretton, although this one still comes with a significant caveat: the deal is not fully closed and the studio has yet to announce a cast, production date or release window.
A butcher fighting a violent urge, a teenager followed by a dead man and a worker unraveling after forced retirement do not immediately sound like parts of the same story. Do You See Ghosts? connects all three through a mysterious haunted hotline somewhere in the Canadian Prairies.
In 1962, a long-suffering insomniac discovers a remote mountain sanatorium promising an unusual cure. She also meets a former nurse who awakens feelings she has spent years suppressing. If Only Tonight We Could Sleep is putting both problems inside the same rather ominous building.
She, Crocodile is not a brand-new project, but it has just secured another important stop on its path toward production. Gabriela Amaral Almeida's body-horror feature has joined the Frontières selection at the 2026 Tokyo Gap-Financing Market, where the international co-production will continue seeking financing ahead of a planned 2027 shoot.
Tom Hanks playing Abraham Lincoln opposite a cemetery full of stop-motion ghosts was already enough to make Lincoln in the Bardo unusual. Now Meryl Streep, Colman Domingo, Bill Hader and Tom Waits have joined a voice cast that already included Willem Dafoe, Jonathan Bailey and Peter Dinklage.
Jonah is moving from the stage to film without cutting itself off from the people who built it. Rachel Bonds is adapting her own play, Danya Taymor is directing again, and Hagan Oliveras is returning to the title role. Greta Lee will now stand at the center of it.
Humanity has lost the surface, its memories and most of its freedom. In 2048, Anthony Hopkins will play Bryant, the man behind the authoritarian system keeping the remaining population underground. He is very much not being cast as the comforting elder statesman.
Charlie and Gabby are ready to get married. Then his estranged father gets out of prison, meets her fiercely independent mother and promptly creates a second love story nobody asked for. Otherwise Engaged has found Halle Berry, Zoë Kravitz, Colin Firth and Jack Whitehall for the resulting family mess.
An underground radio station, a signal buried beneath Montreal's subway system and bodies beginning to change: Replacer is giving Halsey her first leading film role, and it is shaping up to be a considerably stranger project than a standard pop-star showcase.
Jacob Chase still finds some genuinely unsettling imagery inside the Further, helped by grimy physical horror and particularly effective sound design. But this sixth Insidious promises to blow its mythology open only to retreat into a haunted-house and family-trauma formula that has become far too predictable.
Pressure finds a remarkably fresh angle on D-Day: weather charts, scientific disagreement and a handful of hours in which one bad forecast could kill thousands. Andrew Scott carries that tension brilliantly, even if the film's stage origins remain visible and Brendan Fraser proves more divisive.
Élie Chouraqui turns his grandfather's story into a drama about transmission, a Jewish family facing the Occupation and the people who protected the Louvre's treasures. Kad Merad and Marie Gillain give the film genuine warmth, but relentlessly agitated camerawork and overly insistent writing too often prevent an extraordinary story from breathing.
Celebrity gossip rarely needs a press release when it has a hand to photograph. Liam Neeson and Stella Stocker arrived at TIFF together, dressed in coordinated black and holding hands on the red carpet. That part is straightforward. The part where they have therefore become Hollywood's newest couple is still being supplied by everyone except Neeson and Stocker.
Godzilla Minus One made its monster terrifying partly by giving viewers something worth destroying first. The full theatrical trailer for Godzilla Minus Zero suggests Takashi Yamazaki has not forgotten that lesson. The sequel is larger, its response operation is more organized and Godzilla looks considerably harder to kill, but the film is still beginning with people who had only just convinced themselves life could become normal again.
Sebastian Stan says he does not want to inflate expectations for The Batman: Part II. His chosen method was to walk onto Matt Reeves' set and occasionally feel as though he might be making The Godfather Part II. It is an absurdly effective way to accomplish the opposite, but underneath the enormous comparison is a more useful observation: everyone involved appears acutely aware that this sequel has six years of expectation to justify.
Sandra Bullock can point to very few moments when she deliberately engineered her career. One happened before she had any real Hollywood power at all. Another came after she had enough of it to walk away from the genre that helped make her famous.
Fast & Furious has spent more than a decade keeping Brian O’Conner alive without putting Paul Walker back on screen. Fast Forever may finally break that rule. Cody Walker says the technology now exists to recreate his brother — but he will not step in as a double again.
Hirokazu Kore-eda could have approached Look Back as another prestigious manga adaptation. Instead, his Venice competition film obsesses over something much smaller: pencils scratching paper, hands learning how to draw and two girls slowly becoming artists together.
Lee Chang-dong has not made a feature since Burning in 2018. His return is hardly a gentle one. Possible Love reaches back to mass layoffs and the violent suppression of a South Korean labour dispute, then lets that history seep into the marriages, desires and class differences of four people.
Hope was never built to remain a Korean festival success. After Cannes, a record international presales run and one of South Korea's biggest theatrical launches of 2026, Na Hong-jin's first film in a decade is now being pushed overseas with the release strategy of a genuine global blockbuster.
Na Hong-jin did not wait for Hope to finish its global theatrical run before thinking about what comes next. He has already written a follow-up story, with Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander's extraterrestrial characters positioned for a larger role. The script exists. The green light does not — and that distinction matters for one of the most expensive films South Korea has ever produced.
The 31st Busan International Film Festival is no longer behaving like an event content with regional importance. Its 2026 edition brings 246 official selections from 59 countries, 95 world premieres and a main competition whose top prize now comes with an additional route toward the Academy Awards.
Netflix has made the long-rumoured Inbetweeners revival official. Production is underway in the UK with all four leads, original creators Damon Beesley and Iain Morris, and one extremely familiar yellow Fiat.
A July 2025 release became March 2026, then disappeared entirely. Trey Parker and Matt Stone have now apologised to pgLang and Paramount as their long-gestating movie with Kendrick Lamar remains unfinished and undated.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day has made more than $2.4 billion worldwide. The obvious studio response would be to date the next movie before the current one has even left theaters. Sony is doing something more unusual: admitting that it still does not know when Tom Holland's Spider-Man will return.
North American theaters have finally passed a record that stood for thirteen years. Movies generated $4.765 billion between May 1 and September 7, giving 2026 the highest-grossing domestic summer ever in unadjusted dollars. The margin over 2013, however, is remarkably small.
Arthur is still coming back in November. Kaamelott – Second Chapter [Part 2] remains officially scheduled for November 11, 2026 in France. Despite renewed discussion around a possible delay, there is currently no newly announced postponement. The unusual part is that this already-old date was much later than Alexandre Astier originally wanted.
Now streaming on HBO Max, Supergirl has a far more compelling heroine than the movie surrounding her. Milly Alcock gives Kara bruised humor and real emotional weight, but Craig Gillespie's space adventure is held back by muddy action, a thin villain and a screenplay that too often reduces promising ideas to shortcuts.
LAIKA has not released a new feature since 2019. Travis Knight has lived with Wildwood for much longer than that. After what the director describes as a sixteen-year journey, the handmade fantasy is finally leaving the studio and will open the 40th AFI Fest in Hollywood.
Maxwell Smart may be getting another face. Warner Bros. is developing a new Get Smart movie and John Mulaney is being considered for the lead role previously played on the big screen by Steve Carell. There is no deal yet, but the potential casting suggests a very different kind of comic spy.
The Mini Coopers may be coming out of storage. Paramount is developing another The Italian Job movie, with Paul Feig in early talks to direct. For now, though, the studio has the beginnings of a plan rather than a production ready to steal the gold.
Netflix has spent years releasing movies in theaters while keeping one of the theater business's most basic numbers to itself. That exception is beginning to disappear. Starting with La Bola Negra, the streamer reportedly intends to disclose grosses for a selected group of theatrical releases.
Miami Vice already had a theatrical version and an Unrated Director’s Cut. Michael Mann has now made another one. Twenty years after Crockett and Tubbs first disappeared into his feverish digital night, Mann is returning to the edit.
Avengers: Doomsday does not have an opening weekend yet. It does have $50 million in ticket sales. Disney disclosed the figure roughly three months before Marvel's next Avengers movie reaches theaters on December 18.
Kara Zor-El's theatrical flight is giving way to streaming. Supergirl will make its global HBO Max debut on September 10, roughly eleven weeks after opening in North American theaters.
Sony does not have an opening-weekend record yet. It does have a very realistic shot at one. Early tracking for Zach Cregger's Resident Evil points to roughly $35 million in North America, and initial ticket sales suggest that figure may prove conservative.
The endless next-Bond casting cycle may finally have an answer somewhere inside Amazon MGM. Gary Oldman says the choice has already been made. He does not claim to know who won — but he very clearly wants it to be Jack Lowden.
The Odyssey has now made more than $1 billion without counting North America. For a nearly three-hour Homer adaptation without a sequel number, superhero logo or decades-old movie franchise attached to the title, that is an unusual box-office milestone.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day no longer needs to prove that it is a blockbuster. At roughly $923 million in North America, Sony and Marvel's movie is now chasing a record that has stood since 2015.
More than a decade after their last movie, Will, Jay, Neil and Simon are back together. Netflix has started production on The Inbetweeners 3 in the UK, and its announcement immediately reaches for one of the show’s least glamorous icons: Simon’s battered yellow Fiat.
Hollywood finally has a post-pandemic milestone that does not require the phrase “best since 2019.” Domestic summer ticket sales reached roughly $4.76 billion between May 1 and Labor Day, narrowly surpassing the previous nominal record set in 2013.
Ink does use generative AI. Danny Boyle is not hiding it, but the scale matters: the director says the technology appears in roughly thirty seconds of a 116-minute film.
The rumors about Nathan Fielder visiting Elizabeth Holmes in prison were real, but they caught only a fragment of the story. Fielder and Lance Oppenheim had already begun filming her before incarceration, then kept the project hidden as it expanded into a three-year documentary. A24 finally revealed You Can See Everything at Telluride on September 6.
Ink is a newspaper movie with an uncomfortably modern subject. Danny Boyle returns to 1969, when Rupert Murdoch and Larry Lamb rebuilt The Sun around a simple commercial question: what will make more people pick this thing up tomorrow?
The new Resident Evil has a familiar city but a deliberately unfamiliar protagonist. Zach Cregger's film follows one medical courier through the outbreak, using the games less as a screenplay to reproduce than as a model for pacing the nightmare.
Ryūsuke Hamaguchi has never treated runtime as something that needs apologising for. All of a Sudden runs for 196 minutes, follows two women across France and Japan, and arrives in French cinemas with a shared Cannes acting prize already attached to its leads.
A prison camp, a desperate father and enough gold to make every man in the wilderness suspicious of the person walking beside him. The Weight has a deliberately old-fashioned setup, and Padraic McKinley seems perfectly happy with that. The Ethan Hawke and Russell Crowe thriller is now screening at Deauville ahead of its September theatrical release.
Tom Cruise has found another movie from his past worth putting back on the starting grid. Days of Thunder is officially getting a sequel, Anne Hathaway is joining him, and Paramount is treating the project like an event release rather than a nostalgic side project.
The most encouraging number in Hollywood this summer may not belong to any individual movie. It is $4.6 billion: the amount North American theaters generated between May and August, in a season that finally looked less like a post-pandemic recovery exercise and more like an actual blockbuster summer.
The awkward number is not September 10. It is $126 million. Supergirl now has an HBO Max date, giving DC Studios a chance to put Milly Alcock's Kara in front of a much larger home audience after the character's first solo DCU movie struggled badly at the box office.
Avengers: Doomsday is pulling characters from several different corners of Marvel history into one movie. That sounds like a request for an MCU marathon. It is not. Marvel's confirmed cast and its own comments about the film give us a much shorter route to December 18.
Aaron Sorkin spent years resisting the obvious sequel. He did not want to return to The Social Network just because the first film had become a classic. Frances Haugen and Jeff Horwitz eventually gave him a different reason to go back: Facebook itself had changed enough that the old story was no longer the useful one.
James Gunn spent years saying Jaime Reyes still had a future in his DC Universe. Xolo Maridueña was apparently less certain. The Blue Beetle actor says he only knew the promise had become real when Gunn personally called him and asked him back for Man of Tomorrow.
Maria Schrader has found her Wolfgang Herrndorf, and the choice immediately defines the project. Sandra Hüller will portray the German writer in Work and Structure, a film based on the journal he began after learning that he had a terminal brain tumour.
The new Lincoln in the Bardo casting announcement is less interesting as a list of famous names than as a clue to how Duke Johnson plans to handle George Saunders' crowded afterlife. Meryl Streep alone will voice four characters, while Bill Hader and Tom Waits each take multiple parts.
The Odyssey opened on July 17. By ordinary blockbuster logic, its rarest premium screens should now be moving on. Instead, IMAX has added more 70mm film showtimes through September 30.
HBO Max is expanding its presence in Japan, but Warner Bros. Discovery is not asking viewers to install another streaming app. It has chosen two established gateways instead: Hulu Japan and Prime Video. The distribution strategy may be as important as the content arriving with it.
Pixar sends its toys through the fear of obsolescence for a fifth time, but Jessie and Lilypad give that familiar anxiety a genuinely contemporary shape. Toy Story 5 still carries visible franchise baggage, yet its best scenes recover the emotional precision and visual invention that made the series endure.
Cliff Booth survived the Manson Family, an acid cigarette and one exceptionally violent night at Rick Dalton's house. Netflix is now catching up with him eight years later. Quentin Tarantino still wrote the character's next chapter, but the person deciding what 1977 Los Angeles looks like is David Fincher.
On Christmas Eve 1944, 65 Marines played football on Guadalcanal while preparing for a campaign that would take them to Okinawa. Fifteen of those players would be killed there months later. Peter Berg’s The Mosquito Bowl is built around the uncomfortable distance between those two events, and Netflix has now released its first proper look at the film.
Marvel is not simply putting Avengers: Endgame back in theaters to celebrate one of its biggest hits. Joe Russo says the Encore version is required viewing for Avengers: Doomsday, giving the rerelease a much more specific job: reconnecting a 2019 ending to the MCU’s next giant crossover.
The MCU has accumulated enough movies and Disney+ shows to make “what should I watch first?” a genuine logistical question. Marvel’s new Countdown to Avengers: Doomsday Official Podcast answers it with an unexpectedly small syllabus: five films, one episode per week and a straight line from the original Avengers team to Endgame.
Christopher Nolan turns Homer into a 172-minute IMAX blockbuster without sanding away the voyage’s brutality. Matt Damon plays a less sensual and more guilt-ridden Odysseus than Homer’s trickster, anchoring a visually extraordinary adaptation whose liberties with the poem are also among its limitations.
Adaptation normally sounds like a one-way process: a novel becomes a film, then perhaps a game. Dune: Awakening's Filmic Archive is stranger. It takes production design created for cinema and turns it into reusable material for thousands of characters who are not Paul, Leto or Gurney.
Toy Story 5 is moving to Disney+ after already proving that audiences were still willing to leave the house for Woody and Buzz. Disney has set a September 23 streaming date for the Pixar sequel, which opened in theaters on June 19 and has since passed $1 billion worldwide.
The family photograph could belong in a tourism brochure: children gathered around their parents, a quiet harbor and mountains filling the background. Fjord starts dismantling that image when bruises are noticed on the couple's eldest daughter.
Sixteen years after The Social Network, Facebook is no longer an idea being built in dorm rooms and offices. In The Social Reckoning, it is already an institution powerful enough for its own internal research to become the foundation of a whistleblower story.
The Odyssey is a major American hit, but America is no longer the most interesting part of its box-office story. Six weekends into release, more than $900 million has come from international markets.
For The Odyssey, IMAX was never an optional premium badge added at release. It was part of the production, the marketing and even the advance-ticket strategy. Four weekends were enough for that approach to produce the biggest global gross in IMAX history.
Spider-Man has now beaten the Avengers twice in the same theatrical run: first at the opening-weekend record, and now in total domestic gross. Brand New Day has edged past Avengers: Endgame and moved into second place all time in North America.
A famous performance can survive inside a movie. Frank-N-Furter escaped his. Fifty years of costumes, midnight screenings, callbacks and shadow casts turned Tim Curry's role into something audiences repeatedly perform for themselves.
Some actors disappear into characters. Tim Curry often did the opposite: he made the character expand until the rest of the room had to adjust around him. The Rocky Horror Picture Show star has died at 80.
Destin Daniel Cretton brings Spider-Man back to New York, loneliness and a body that is itself becoming unsettling. Tom Holland and Zendaya give the film genuine maturity, while more physical action reminds us why the character still works. The trouble begins when this intimate crisis once again has to prepare Marvel's next chapters.
Three hours of sea, war, gods and faces hollowed out by the journey home. The Odyssey turns Homer into an enormous IMAX experience while keeping hold of its simplest idea: Odysseus may have won the war, but getting home is an entirely different battle.
Avengers: Endgame is returning to theaters seven years after its original run, but nostalgia is only part of the pitch. Marvel Studios is attaching footage from Avengers: Doomsday to the rerelease and giving premium-format audiences an additional preview.
The Mandalorian and Grogu is heading home after its theatrical run, and Disney+ is giving the movie more than a standard catalog launch. September 2 will bring three separate releases built around Din Djarin and Grogu.
Cristian Mungiu did not spend nineteen years trying to recreate the movie that won him Cannes. That may be the most useful way to read his second Palme d'Or. Fjord, a 146-minute drama set in Norway, looks geographically far removed from the Romanian story that gave him his first victory in 2007. Cannes has nevertheless kept finding reasons to reward the films between them.
Cannes opening ceremonies are built to celebrate cinema. Eye Haïdara made the phrase slightly less comfortable on May 12. Before the jury, before Peter Jackson's Honorary Palme and before the opening film, she addressed people trying to resist and moved quickly to filmmakers who choose to point a camera toward things others would rather leave unseen.
A Cannes opening film normally creates scarcity. A few thousand people see it first, photographs travel everywhere, and the wider audience waits for distribution to catch up. The Electric Kiss did almost the opposite on May 12. As Pierre Salvadori's film premiered inside the Grand Théâtre Lumière, French theaters were already screening the same opening-night program across the country.
Peter Jackson's most important Cannes screening may still be one that did not contain a complete movie. On May 13, 2001, seven months before The Fellowship of the Ring opened, Jackson brought 26 minutes of unfinished footage to the Croisette. On May 12, 2026, he returned to Cannes and accepted an Honorary Palme d'Or from Elijah Wood.
The awkward question around I Play Rocky is no longer whether Sylvester Stallone is officially making the movie. He isn't credited as its writer, director or producer in Amazon MGM's current materials. The stranger question is much smaller: did Stallone know Peter Farrelly was going to make it? Stallone and Farrelly have now supplied answers that do not fit comfortably together.
Peter Farrelly has a very specific piece of history with Toronto. In 2018, Green Book arrived at TIFF for its world premiere, won the audience award and left with an entirely different place in that year's awards conversation. I Play Rocky will enter the same festival on September 12. That history makes the booking easy to notice. It does not make the outcome repeatable.
Camp Rock 3 is now streaming on Disney+. Its August 14 arrival turns one of Disney Channel's most recognizable 2000s properties into something more useful than a nostalgia special: a launchpad for another generation of performers.
Sebastian Stan is definitely in Avengers: Doomsday. He is apparently a considerably less useful source on what Avengers: Doomsday actually does. Asked about the movie by Le Journal du Dimanche, Stan said he never received the full screenplay and instead shot disconnected pieces of it. For Marvel, ignorance has one extremely convenient production benefit: it is difficult to leak a plot connection nobody told you about.
David Harbour was offered an almost irresponsible interview prompt: give Variety one line from Avengers: Doomsday with absolutely no context. He pointed, slipped into Red Guardian's Russian accent and said, “You… are Tony Stark.” That is a magnificent spoiler if it is a spoiler. It is also an extremely efficient joke if Harbour knew exactly which four words would cause Marvel fans to dismantle the internet for parts.
Avengers: Doomsday has never had a shortage of superheroes. Its harder problem was making that enormous cast look like one movie rather than several reunion specials arriving at the same time. Marvel's new D23 footage offers a surprisingly straightforward answer. Robert Downey Jr.'s Doctor Doom is becoming the point around which everyone else has to move.
The obvious version of a third Dune movie would simply make Part Two larger. More armies, more sandworms, a wider war and another enemy waiting at the end. Denis Villeneuve has spent a decade making these films and seems considerably less interested in the obvious version. His final chapter is a thriller, and the reason is built into Paul Atreides' new position: there is almost nothing left for him to conquer.
Dune already had one of the more unusual image pipelines in blockbuster filmmaking. Denis Villeneuve has decided that two movies were enough reason to change it. Part Three introduces Linus Sandgren, real 65mm acquisition and IMAX film cameras to the franchise, but stops short of turning film stock into a rule. Arrakis itself remains digital.
The most revealing number from Dune: Part Three's August ticket drop is not a box-office total. There isn't one yet. It is three. AMC CEO Adam Aron says traffic across the chain's website and app reached roughly three times the level seen when Spider-Man: Brand New Day tickets launched, enough to slow and glitch the company's systems while fans competed for December IMAX seats.
David Ayer did not want Heart of the Beast to look like Brad Pitt performing beside a well-trained prop. Odin had to feel like somebody James Belmont had survived with long before the audience met either of them. That meant giving the role to a real working dog, then accepting one inconvenient fact of animal filmmaking: the dog gets a vote.
Bleach has found a particularly busy moment for a nostalgia trip. On August 28 and 30, French theaters will host an ADN-organized marathon of all four animated feature films, just as Thousand-Year Blood War is moving through the final cour of the television anime.
Arthur Harari has spent the years since Onoda becoming an Oscar-winning screenwriter, but his return to directing is not exactly modest. The Unknown takes a familiar body-swap device, strips away the comic instruction manual and asks Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider to make an impossible change feel physically credible for 140 minutes.
Josh Brolin knew Ridley Scott already. That did not stop the first day of The Dog Stars from sending him back to his agent wondering whether he should leave the movie. The problem was not the apocalypse, the weapons or the location shoot in Italy. It was Scott's process.
For years, the International Feature race contained an unusually powerful gatekeeper: the national selection committee. The 99th Academy Awards loosen that structure. A small group of major festival winners can now reach the submission process through their awards, and Cannes champion Fjord is one of the first films positioned to use the change.
A 3,032-admission opening sounds straightforward until the preview figure is placed next to it. For The Condor Daughter, more than five out of every six admissions counted in that French first-day total were recorded before the film officially opened on August 19.
For at least an hour on August 19, the US release plan for Mutiny effectively had an extra window. Prime Video users could play the entire film even though Lionsgate was still advertising a theatrical launch two days later.
France has delivered the first useful box-office number for the new Insidious. Out of the Further opened there on August 19 with 42,954 admissions, enough to lead the week's new releases.
A Palme d'Or can make a film sound like homework before anyone has bought a ticket. Fjord has a much more immediate setup than that reputation suggests. Released in France on August 19, Cristian Mungiu's new film starts with two neighboring families in Norway and turns a child's bruises into a conflict that quickly reaches the school, the wider community and child-protection authorities.
The production problem arrived before the cameras properly got going. Matthew McConaughey was preparing to play an Oklahoma beekeeper when an actual bee sting revealed that he was allergic. Andrew Patterson's movie was still built around real hives, real beekeeping and one shot involving thousands of bees gathering on its leading man's arm.
Spider-Man: No Way Home held Sony's all-time box-office record for years. Brand New Day needed three weekends to take it away.
Christopher Nolan set his previous worldwide record with Batman. He has now beaten it with Homer. Universal officially confirmed on August 10 that The Odyssey had become the highest-grossing film of the director’s career, and the theatrical run did not stop at that milestone: one week later, worldwide estimates were already around $1.29 billion.
