Best of 2026 (So Far)
If you haven’t heard, we’re somehow halfway through 2026 and my legions of fans (an SFCS poll) are asking for my favorite films from the first half the year. As for an overall assessment, I think it’s been a pretty good year for movies, and I can’t remember the last time I was this excited about a slate of upcoming releases. There’s a great mix of new work from personal favorites (Grisebach, Schanelec, Sallitt, Zhou) and newer (to me) names and titles that I’m eagerly anticipating (Chronovisor, A. Rimbaud, The Unknown). Somehow, we’re even getting a new William Greaves in 2026.
Looking over my list, what’s most striking is how de-centralized my viewing habits have been this year. I saw many great films in theaters, but just as many on platforms like Le Cinema Club and Ultra Dogme. These online programs parallel the micro-cinemas and curated screening series that have become increasingly popular over the past few years. It’s a difficult time to produce, distribute, and exhibit challenging cinema, but resourceful cinephiles are still finding ways to create spaces for these films outside of rarified festival settings.
2026 has been a good, if relentless, year for me. Personal update rundown: there was a monthlong period where I got into grad school, thought I was going to grad school, then decided to withdraw. I was in a whirlwind romantic situation for a few months (that resolved pretty ideally considering the possible mess radius). I’m loving the new (ish) underscores and Kim Petras albums. The events with Sky Hopinka well really well and I’m excited about the screenings I’m working on this coming fall/winter. At the risk of jinxing it, I’m feeling cautiously optimistic.
Hope everyone is doing well. As always, thanks for reading.
(Reviews linked where applicable)
Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze):
I’ve written enough about Dry Leaf at this point, so I’ll just link this review. I finally got to see Dry Leaf projected at the Northwest Film Forum in March. Being able to see those pixelated, pulsating images in a theatrical setting felt like such a privilege. Surely this has the best soundtrack of the decade?
Dry Leaf is distributed by Cinema Guild and in theaters now.
La Libertad Doble (Lisandro Alonso):
Thankfully, the rumors that La Libertad Doble would be Lisandro Alonso’s last feature were debunked, but this very sad, very angry film would have made a worthy sendoff for one of the 21st century’s signature filmmakers. Revisiting both the subject (Misael, a farmhand from Alonso’s family farm) and the production methods (a crew of ten, largely the same as the original) of his landmark 2001 debut, La Libertad, this sequel considers the intervening 25 years of Argentinian and cinematic history. After re-acquainting us with Misael’s solitary (free?) life as a woodcutter, the “twist” occurs when Misael’s sister Micaela is released from a mental institution as a result of Milei’s austerity measures. Her arrival throws Misael’s Edenic, docufictional routine into disarray, reshaping what was Alonso’s most open-ended film into a narrative triptych not unlike Eureka, the starry international coproduction that nearly caused Alonso to retire.
Miroirs No. 3 (Christian Petzold):
Miroirs No. 3 is Christian Petzold’s first Vertigo riff to center the criss-crossing projections between two women, and the film accordingly takes a gentler, no less mysterious approach. It’s one of his most beautiful, and heartbreaking, films. The makeshift mother-daughter relationship that forms between Barbara Auer and Paula Beer’s characters, informed by decades of Petzoldian tragedies, is a reprieve from traumas textual and metatextual. While Petzold’s films have inevitably lost some of their political insight since the death of Harun Farocki, these recent works have used his sinuous classicism to burrow into the fantastical. Miroirs shows a world on the outskirts of reality where for a moment, it’s possible to heal.
Miroirs No. 3 is distributed by 1-2 Special and is available on VOD.
Victim of Circumstance (Kalil Haddad):
Victim of Circumstance is Kalil Haddad’s best film to date, a Price-ian assault of sex and death constructed out of nightmarish footage from gay porn. At the center of Haddad’s work is the problem of representation, the suggestion that the limited representational models for gay men in the late-20th century contributed to the tragic stories of child exploitation and sociopolitical neglect that comprise his ouevre. Now, Haddad’s perversely seductive images exist in conversation with a hegemony of positive images, corporate, smol bean media whose insistent “niceness” tell us everything is okay in the world of gay rights, even as Trump 2.0 makes the opposite readily apparent.
Victim of Circumstance plays as part of He Never Dies: The Films of Kallil Haddad, in theaters now.
With Hasan in Gaza (Kamal Aljafari):
To illustrate what’s so special about Kamal Aljafari’s With Hasan in Gaza, I’ll make an example of a film I appreciated, for the most part. One of the problems with a film like Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36, a handsomely-mounted period drama about the 1936 Arab Revolts, is that it’s a historical corrective that feels decades too late, directed at a moviegoing audience and mode of pedagogical consumption that doesn’t really exist anymore. With Hasan in Gaza is a film that’s thinking about the place of cinema in an age of social media. As opposed to reportage or historical re-enactment, Aljafari’s film takes miniDV home video footage from 2001 and basically presents it as-is. Loosely decontextualized, this road trip cum existential missing-persons narrative constantly gestures towards negative space around it. In its implicit conversation with contemporary images, the film becomes a poetic about the violence of historical slippage.
With Hasan in Gaza is distributed by Cinema Guild and is in theaters now.
10 more recs:
The Joyless Economy (Marjorie Conrad)
The Currents (Milagros Mumenthaler) - in theaters now
Unstable Rocks (Ewelina Rosinka) - streamed on Le Cinema Club
Debut, or Objects of the Field of Debris as Currently Catalogued (Julian Castronovo) - Available on VOD, streamed on Le Cinema Club
Everything Else is Noise (Nicolás Pereda)
Chime (Kiyoshi Kurosawa) - in theaters now
The Temple Woods Gang (Rabah Ameur-Zaïmeche) - available on VOD, streamed on Le Cinema Club
in the air (Rushnan Jaleel) - streamed on Ultra Dogme Movie Club
Practice Towards Light (Jonathan Seungjoon Lee, Yun-hee Huh) - streamed via Deluge Contemporary Art
Joan of Arc (Hlynur Pálmason) - available to stream on the Criterion Channel
i hadn't heard omg