The best films of 2026 so far

Jessie Buckley is dug up to marry Christian Bale, while Ian McKellen and Michaela Coel are the double act of the year in Steven Soderbergh’s dark comedy. Here’s our round up of movie magic from the last six months in the UK, in order of release

A Neil Diamond tribute act gets a sweet treat of a movie thanks to Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson, in a film that follows a Milwaukee married couple as they rise to fame with a real-life band called Lightning and Thunder.

What we said: “Here is a startlingly strange, undeniably entertaining true-life story from the heartland of American showbusiness; a lovable crowdpleaser whose feelgood flavour won’t prepare you for the way the plot repeatedly and savagely twists like an unsafe fairground ride.” Read the full review

Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley captivate in Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s myth-making novel, an audacious Shakespearean tragedy that powerfully reimagines the agonising loss of a child as the source of Hamlet’s grand stage drama.

What we said: “It is an unselfconsciously beguiling performance from Buckley, who gives every look and smile a piercing significance.” Read the full review

A murderous Clockwork Orangey gang take on the zombies in this gruesome and energised fourquel, the finest of the 28 franchise by a blood-curdling mile.

What we said: “Fiennes’s dance to Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast is basically one of the most extraordinary moments of his career. At the screening I attended, we were on our feet, looking for a speaker bin to headbang into.” Read the full review

Fierce, urgent docufiction in which director Kaouther Ben Hania reconstructs the killing of a five-year-old in Gaza using her real voice as she is bombarded by the Israeli army.

What we said: “With startling audacity, Ben Hania has used the real audio recording of Rajab’s heartwrenching voice, while fictionally reconstructing the drama of the emergency responders in their call-centre office, with real people played by actors, talking, shouting and emoting in response to Rajab’s actual voice.” Read the full review

Sensational state-of-the-nation satire from The Handmaiden and Oldboy director Park Chan-wook, in which an unemployed paper worker hatches a cunning plan to murder his way back into the job market.

What we said: “It starts out like an Ealing comedy-type caper then somehow morphs into something else: a portrait of family dysfunction, fragile masculinity and the breadwinner crisis.” Read the full review

There’s a great deal of unpretentious B-movie fun to be had in Johannes Roberts’ brief, brutal and slickly made creature feature, where a pet chimp gone wild makes for a giddy, gory good time.

What we said: “Roberts, who also directed hit shark thriller 47 Metres Down and its superior follow-up, is mostly at his savviest and most ruthlessly efficient here, a confident levelling up for a genre film-maker finding his sweet spot.” Read the full review

Riz Ahmed’s tortured prince drives Aneil Karia’s intelligent and stark retelling of Shakespeare’s tragedy, set in the world of a shady family business.

What we said: “It’s an austerely challenging reading and incidentally nothing could be further from the richly empathetic and redemptive approach of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet, about the play’s imagined origins.” Read the full review

A riotously funny, painfully honest film about facing death, in which a cancer diagnosis becomes the catalyst for gallows humour, rage and hard-won emotional openness.

What we said: “There are a zillion films, fiction, nonfiction, and everything in between, about people coping with cancer, so kudos to the team behind this one for finding a relatively fresh way to tackle the subject.” Read the full review

James Sweeney’s dark, inventive comedy takes an unexpected path, a tightrope-mastering mix of genres and tones that is an incredibly effective film, veering from funny to creepy to devastatingly sad.

What we said: “Sweeney makes his confounding and psychologically complicated film glide. He’s a delicate director but an unsparing writer, displayed most brutally in the character he creates for himself, confronting uncomfortable truths about the specific weirdnesses that can come with being queer.” Read the full review

British-Nigerian film-maker Akinola Davies Jr makes a strong directorial debut with a subtle and intelligent coming-of-age story set in 1990s Nigeria, a deft and intriguing tale of an absent father briefly reunited with his two young sons.

What we said: “Is absence love? Will we all feel love for someone most intensely when they are overtaken by the ultimate absence of death? This is a rich, heartfelt and rewarding movie.” Read the full review

Amy Berg’s arresting documentary is a sympathetic, urgent look at a life cut tragically short, delving into the early life and untimely death of the 90s singer-songwriter with extensive contributions from his mother and girlfriends.

What we said: “It was singing at his dad’s memorial service that astonished the congregation and kickstarted Jeff’s career; he was a superb vocalist with a range and delicacy inspired by Nina Simone and Judy Garland.” Read the full review

A toughly revealing story of a kid on a mission for Saddam Hussein’s birthday: a nine-year-old is obliged by her school to make a birthday cake for the Iraqi president, and meets a series of vivid characters as she shops for sanctioned ingredients.

What we said: “The film saunters and meanders along, accelerating occasionally to a mad dash for the many scenes in which the children are being chased by grownups. The cake-tasting itself turns out to be an explosively important climax.” Read the full review

The pedal is pressed hard to the metal for this very stylish, high-stakes armed robbery thriller starring Chris Hemsworth and Barry Keoghan, a bracing tale of a master thief that lifts a trick or two from Michael Mann.

What we said: “This is a movie that revs the engine entertainingly and loudly, though it is less convincing when it claims the moral high ground of social comment by perfunctorily showing us LA’s homeless. But overall, it is a highly watchable spectacle, leaving a sizzling streak of rubber on the tarmac.” Read the full review

A welcome archival delve into Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles era, after the Fab Four fell and Wings took flight, in which McCartney embodies a strange, stylised sense of uncool, and which led to bestselling success.

What we said: “You may find yourself wondering why we are going over this ground again, but it’s an engaging film, and there is always something mesmeric in McCartney’s face: cherubic, and yet sharp and watchful.” Read the full review

A devastating account of disaster and denial in the 2011 nuclear catastrophe, which foregrounds the heroism of the “Fukushima 50” while raising questions about corporate secrecy and nuclear safety.

What we said: “The film plunges us into the awful story moment-by-moment, accompanied by interviews with the chief players of the time, prominently nuclear plant employee Ikuo Izawa, a shift supervisor and de facto leader of the ‘Fukushima 50’ (actually 69 people) who became legendary in Japan and beyond for their self-sacrificial courage.” Read the full review

This Brit prison drama is as lethal and nasty as a sharpened toothbrush, a brutally violent and gripping film that sidesteps the cliches with committed acting and fierce storytelling punch.

What we said: “The scene is an overcrowded jail (filmed in Shepton Mallet) whose ugly savagery and chaos we periodically see through the smartphone screen of someone gleefully filming it.” Read the full review

Kleber Mendonça Filho’s brilliant Brazilian drama of an academic on the run in the murderous 1970s, a study of a man attempting to escape corrupt politics in a tremendous, novelistic study of corruption in high and low places.

What we said: “Its visual brilliance, sensual big-city intrigue, shaggy-dog comedy, gruesome lowlife walk-ons and epically languorous mystery combine to create something special.” Read the full review

Rose Byrne is tremendous in pitch-black horror-comedy as a therapist, counselled by an impatient Conan O’Brien, being pushed to the edge by the stress of parenting.

What we said: “It’s a scary movie with a heroine shot almost solely in looming closeup, but instead of supernatural apparitions, there are simply the banal problems of childcare and no time to deal with them.” Read the full review

Restored 1971 concert film captures Black American stars’ joyous and emotional return to Ghana for a historic independence day show in Accra, featuring electrifying performances from Tina Turner, Wilson Pickett and more.

What we said: “The concert and film can be seen now as part of the American Black consciousness debate of the time, which specifically prized the concept of the African motherland and the spiritual importance of returning to the wellspring of Black American inspiration.” Read the full review

Told in four different timeframes in the same German farmhouse, Mascha Schilinski’s story of intergenerational angst, national guilt and yearning is powerfully unsettling.