The good, the great, and the ugly from movies thus far in 2026

January

January

James Cameron’s latest installment in the Avatar franchise… and I think most would agree we could’ve done without it. My wife and I were in New York for New Year’s at the time of its release. We nearly saw it on IMAX in a Manhattan theater. Perhaps it would’ve resonated with me more had I had that kind of first viewing experience; regardless, I simply did not enjoy my time with this.

The first and second movies work because they bring an element of nuance that viewers hadn’t seen before. Cameron and his team truly shocked the world with how these blue people looked and moved. The suavity of the second film had millions in seats to again be astonished by the underwater work. Like the first film, what carried the movie was not the characters, jokes, or even plot, but the movie working as a spectacle.

In January, when we finally got to seeing it, I was in disbelief that there was no real stymie driving the story. It was again a Sully vs. Colonel Quaritch movie. The difference? Spider, that annoying character from the second movie, can now breathe the air on Pandora, and the humans want him for study. The film attempted to portray the pathos of the Na’vi people and the character of Spider, but after seeing these blue people on screen for over 9 hours at the close of the third movie, I just… don’t… care. Spider was a nuisance character that I had nearly forgotten about from The Way of Water. Then, for whatever reason, we are supposed to be all in on the ethical crisis of whether or not they should kill him??

In the film, while Spider is having tests done on him in the lab, Neytiri suggests killing Spider for the good of the clan. Jake is taken back, and Neyitiri essentially portrays her idea as religious, alluding to her deity as she says it must be done. What could’ve worked is keeping that constant, and Neyitiri coming through on this plan. Perhaps had she done this there would be real merit to the annoying marriage issues between Jake and Neyitiri. These little marriage quarrels Cameron throws in are cringy because, well, we don’t care, Neytiri is too intense, and the marriage never seems palpable. A real drift between them could’ve been explored with her killing Spider behind Jake’s back and Jake having to navigate what to do.

I don’t hate everything about this movie; I can turn my brain off and enjoy awesome explosions and action. Generally, I like the idea of a big fish and squid taking over humans… I’m so excited for Whalefall this fall! But two main things bring this movie to the point that drives the premise to the ground—Spider’s character is poorly written and acted, and the Colonel is still living.

Why, why, why, did Mr. Cameron decide to save the Colonel after he dies at the end of the second movie, Vader style, and end the movie yet again with a standoff between Jake and him? Only this time, when the fighting stops, instead of grinning and fighting again, he says “well, this is awkward” and commits suicide. I had to look up the ending to the second movie after viewing this. I thought surely I’m remembering this wrong. Nope. Nearly the same ending, two movies in a row. Not looking forward to Cameron completing the tetralogy.

Solid 6/10.

February

A theatrically released crime movie! That alone had my butt in the theater seat. Maybe a sign for more crime movies to hit the theaters? Crime movies have been existing in and making more noise in the streaming space as of late…Reservoir Dogs is on Prime right now! What I loved about this choice to put it in the theater is that this movie is perfect for Amazon streaming, but the intentionality to hit the theaters first with Hemsworth at the helm shows Amazon means business as a box office player, and studios seeing real good that comes from the box office. Amazon is putting real money and effort into being a big-time contender, and they did just that early this year with a film I will cover next, and with Masters of the Universe.

I had a good time at the theater with this film, but it didn’t resonate with me greatly; to be honest, five months later, I am finding myself jogging my memory to piece together the plot. What I do remember is how much I enjoyed Barry Keoghan in this. Just great. The scene with him slumped on the gas station floor being tossed by Hemsworth into a drink fridge, and he says, “Oh, you wanna kiss me?” and puckers up, just awesome.

This movie had it not been released in theaters, would perhaps have the same slow nonexistant impact as Hemsworth Netflix movies early in this decade (Extraction 1, 2, and Spiderhead). While this was a home run choice for him to be the tough, sleek, do-it-all criminal, I do wonder if audiences will grow tired of his moves. When I was in high school, I remember people would talk about one of his non-Marvel movies as it came out as a movie with “Thor” in it. How long will that pull last? I think if he wants a lasting third act to his career, he will need to break out of the typecast as a sort of couth tough guy.

He was good in this, just a little Hemsworth; what comes next corner is all that was. My only critique is that it appears he maintained the slick-gloves-on-criminal to the point that, when it came time to turn on the heat with the Monica Barbaro character, it fell flat.

Great diamond heist movie, great twist, and we almost get a Ruffalo crash out as good as Spotlight.

6.8/10

March

March

This movie was a BIG THUMBS DOWN. If you haven’t seen it yet, that’s a Rocky reference; his thumbs down are thumbs up. This is a beautiful movie. Time to talk about Gosling as the top A-lister right now? Overreaction? Eh, I don’t care. This was his Castaway. Obvious comparisons this movie draws are Andy Weir’s other novel turned film, The Martian, and this does more than hold up to the previous success of The Martian.

Gosling, from the moment this movie starts, is on a Steph 2016 heater. My whole theater was laughing hard, real hard. He’s by himself doing a solo act, making people laugh with Eddie Murphy-like-charisma.

Like the Martian, my brain just goes uh-huh-yep when the science is being dumped on me, but I’m just along for the ride because wow that alien looks awesome. As most know, Rocky, the alien with rock-like features, was shot with no green screen. I’ve been reading and hearing some on that since around the beginning of the year, but recently saw a video on YouTube with a design crew member showing how he made pieces and parts of Rocky. The video also shows how the Alien was shot. So cool, I’d encourage people to check it out here.

This movie has generated much discussion with its success. It reached over 300 million at the box office! Amazon Studios is here, folks. But most of the people in my life didn’t like the ending, saying it was too long, he doesn’t go back to Earth, why does he like this alien so much? The only thing I can get with is it being a touch long. How do people not love him sending probes to Earth, taking Rocky to Erid, learning the language, and teaching them science? That last scene with him teaching all of them on the beach was perfect. He’s a loner, nerd, science guy, who has discovered a creature with a different language and culture, and he becomes enriched in it all. To me, it was a near-perfect ending.

8/10

April

April

The beginning of April was a relaxing cleanse. Winter semester finished, I was able to exhale with a good LSAT test performance, and my sister got married. After my sister’s wedding, my wife and I decided to hang back and chill for a week in small town Utah with my parents.

This included going to their little theater twice. That little theater was to me an accurate representation of what Gen X and Baby Boomer conservatives who make up much of that area want to watch. The theater for this film was completely empty. Not a soul in there except for my wife and me. Another film we saw later in the week, which I will cover next, was filled. It made for a very unique experience compared to others I’ve talked to. For a movie with such a contentious twist, I wished there was an audience enclosed around us, to build off of and react with.

I saw this film blind as a bat. Which is how it needs to be viewed. If you have not yet seen this movie, just skip this, turn off your device, and go watch it.

Okay, a little Oscar corner here before we get to the movie… This year alone, from the duo of Pattinson and Zendaya we get The Odyssey (both), Dune Part 3 (both), Spider-Man: Brand New Day (Zendaya), Primetime (Pattinson), and all that Zendaya does in Euphoria. Quite a year for the two, maybe there should be an Oscar for just doing a collection of great works in a year??

Now, to the movie. This was far from a casual, listen-to-it-while-you-fold-your-laundry romcom that has been plaguing streaming services and matching my wife’s algorithm perfectly for the past couple years. This is A24’s version of a romcom, rather, maybe romterror?

A friend of mine saw this before I could, and only texted me “The Drama…Nuts dude!” I was confused, didn’t know if he accidentally texted the wrong movie. This movie is nuts?? Oh yes, this movie is quite nutalicious. One of the movie posters and a trailer had Pattinson with a bloodied face, but again, I didn’t seek anything out about this, so I half expected a tongue-in-cheek romcom.

The movie begins with an awkward first meet, that sensuously builds, and might I add, amazingly well. The two build a relationship that is on the foundation of a lie. Pattinson first notices Zendaya while she is reading a book in a cafe. He looks up what book she’s reading on Goodreads, and their first conversation begins with his introduction of him loving what she is reading.

To me, this is very important for later in the movie. Many dates later, he tells her he actually had never read it. Emma doesn’t blow it off easily, but the two like each other enough that it’s okay, the relationship continues to build, and they get engaged.

At this point, I’m legs fully stretched out in the aisle, enjoying the acting, and having to remind myself that something crazy is to come. At the moment, the only unique thing is Zendaya’s character being deaf in one ear.

The moment of twist comes when the two, alongside Emma’s bridesmaid and her partner, are having drinks at an intimate rehearsal dinner. They get drunk enough to where they begin playing a game of saying what’s the worst thing anyone has ever done. It builds slowly, then Alana Haim’s character turns it up a notch by saying she locked a mentally “slow” kid in a closet inside an abandoned RV. Everyone is tense, and Rachel has to mention that the kid was found and is okay, though that was not due to her doing.

Emma, following Rachel, with enough drinks, slips that when she was a teenager, planned a school shooting but didn’t go through with it. The shock value is Amazing. Perfect. When Rachel told her story, I remember thinking, ” Oh, that’s bad”, and then Emma goes, and my wife and I looked at each other like What in the world is Happening!?!

The four at this table acted this part out of their minds. Alana Haim, after having Zendaya confirm that she did in fact do this, rips her apart, saying how she has a cousin in a wheelchair from a school shooting. It’s so tense, and Zendaya just maintains the whole time an act of calm, like I thought we were just playing a game. This is matched with Pattinson’s all-time shocked physical acting of hands rapidly running through his messy hair, and Mamoudou Athie awkwardly trying to calm Rachel down when it got to be so tense, I really thought she would climb over the table. This is my favorite scene in the movies so far this year.

That is probably all I will cover for plot and setup. Now, some premise and underlying meaning of why I loved the movie. The trope I got from this movie is that no one person is better than another.

Charlie begins his relationship on the lie that he loves the book Emma is reading; this lie can be matched by Emma’s first lie that she was born with one deaf ear. I believe the trope of the movie would say that, under the correct context, the lies are equal. Yes, Emma’s entailed not telling that she became deaf because of firing a gun too close to her ear when she was practicing to shoot up a school, but Charlie’s lie was in the moment, a lie that crumbles the foundation of how the relationship began when the organic element of meeting because of reading the same book is taken away.

Next, I believe the movie wants the audience to ask why they didn’t react as shocked when Rachel revealed what she did, as when Emma revealed planning a school shooting. Rachel followed through with her plan; a child could’ve died had he not been rescued. For Emma, she only thought it through and got a gun, but never executed the plan. The rift between Emma and Rachel, I believe, is why it was so intentional for Rachel to have had a family member in a wheelchair from a school shooting. This shows that for people, actions are viewed in a more terrible light when it is closely associated with harming something that you can connect with. Rachel could’ve very well killed a kid, but she laughs it off; she had no connection to that individual. On the other hand, she can connect to the brutality of school shootings because of what has been done to a family member of hers, causing a palpable reaction to come out of her when hearing what Emma did.

The movie beautifully continues to touch on this trope again and again, finally it all bursts together at the wedding when Emma learns Charlie almost cheated on her when trying to make sense of Emma planning something so awful as a school shooting. Emma ditches her wedding, and the two meet up at a diner they joked would be funny to go to after the wedding.

It’s a perfect ending of Emma and Charlie finally seeing each other’s flaws as not one worse than the other, and deciding to start over. Jokingly, Emma reintroduces herself to Charlie, and the movie ends with the two sitting in the booth.

8.5/10

The following day, at the same theater, at the same time, my Wife and I saw You, Me & Tuscany with a full theater. Completely packed. Perhaps there was a random chance of things that made this happen, but I’d like to peel back, perhaps, why this small-town audience showed up for this, and not the Drama.

My first thought is this is a culmination of two things: Romantic Fiction books have taken storm in young and older female readers, and their male partners are being dragged along. My wife genuinely thought this was a book adaptation; it’s not its an original screenplay that originally had the working title Italiana. The font on the posters and the trailer looks exactly like it could be a cover for a Catherine Walsh or Emily Henry book. I asked her when we were in the theater if this was a book; she said yes, she hadn’t read it, and that the author commonly uses the & sign in titles. Not sure where that came from, but I, like the other men in the room, I presume, was dragged along. I think people came to the showing because they saw the poster and ads, then linked it in their minds to something similar to a Colleen Hoover adaptation without really knowing what it was. An article by Michael Fairbanks on Merry-Go-Round Magazine titled You Me & Tuscany Desperately Needs To Sell You Its Cuteness says, “In essence, YOU, ME & TUSCANY is a BookTok movie without a book.”

My second thought is that it was the one safe choice at the theaters for an older audience who doesn’t want something overly childish. They also don’t want anything with too much cursing, any violence, or really anything weird. The theater at the time was showing Goat, Super Mario Bros, The Drama, and You Me & Tuscany, and a day later Lee Cronin’s Mummy was releasing. The Drama, even with its ability to pull off a marketing masterclass, fooling everyone, wasn’t able to get anything from this audience. I think this is because of its R rating and Pattinson’s bloodied look. So there you have it: a packed theater for this, no one for The Drama.

The movie was cute. An original screenplay romcom in 2026 with a theatrical release is enough to celebrate. The movie is essentially an indie film that was picked up by Universal Studios, and it did relatively well. It opened to $7.7 million and finished out with $22 million globally.

This is the first time we see Halle Bailey in a lead role since her big 2023 year playing Ariel in Disney’s remake of The Little Mermaid and her role in The Color Purple. She was okay in this and reads the part a little too ditsy and naive for my liking. It kind of felt like I was watching Ariel trying to adapt to life on land all over again. I thought her character should’ve had a stop-and-go with that kind of girly-clueless reading. But when we are with her alone, Bailey is still seen as not the brightest. Really an odd choice for what looks like an obvious attempt to have a black-female-led movie to make her seem, well, kind of dumb. I guess what I wanted was more schematics from Bailey’s character to pull off living in an empty house in Tuscany and then turn on the blonde when asked why she is there.

Overall I enjoyed Regé-Jean Page and Halle Baileys chemistry, its an enjoyable popcorn romcom.

6.7/10

Hokum! This was very fun to see in theaters. Hokum, starring Adam Scott is an Irish Folktale Horror film written and directed by the one guy really interested in Irish Folktale Horror, Damian McCarthy. This movie did relatively well at theaters making just over 4 times its budget globally at $23.8 million.

This movie was the start of a near-hit for the cycle-run, for me, with going to see horror in theaters. First this, then Obsession, then Backrooms. I haven’t seen any horror in theaters this year. Some notable movies I’ve missed are Undertone and Lee Cronin’s Mummy.

Part of what made this viewing experience so great was that I had no idea about this movie. I was on campus doing homework when I wanted to take a break by seeing what was playing in theaters. I sent this to my sister and brother-in-law, and they were down to go. No one watched the trailer or anything. We just knew it was a horror with Adam Scott.

Adam Scott is terrific and plays the rude I’m better than you guy really, really well. Scott plays a writer who is going to visit Ireland to spread his parents’ ashes near a tree that was important to them. The tree is by a hotel where his parents stayed in the honeymoon suite. Ohm, Scott’s character asks about the Honeymoon suite workers become weird about it, and someone relays to him a tale about a witch living in the Suite.

What worked so well was the movie’s ability to put the audience exactly in the place they don’t want to be. Ohm ends up in the suite with a witch. He’s stuck in a chute with a witch crawling up to him, trapped on a bed with chalk around it so as to be safe from the witch, and there are continually great jumps and scares.