We are halfway through 2026 already, a year which has been shaping up so far as an interesting one to say the least. I have already heard several people say they like the first half of 2026 better than all of 2025. Strong words!
And July also means that we can once more make a Top 10 list. This time, 23 of our writers contributed, and they created a huge list of 75 titles. That's the kind of numbers we normally only get at the end of a year!
As always, don't take the list too seriously. The choices here are very subjective, and our writers haven't seen all the films in the list (yet). So what does this Top 10 tell you, as a reader? Well... it tells you which of the generally-well-known films we liked the most. But in the lower regions of the list there will be plenty of titles which have only been seen by one or two of us, at a festival perhaps, films which have yet to reach your country. Therefore, you can also consider this list as a "what's coming?" guide for the second half of the year.
Without further ado, here's our list, and we start with the 'runners-up' from 20 till 11. So if you clicked on this article thinking that
The Furious was our favorite title this year so far, don't get too furious when you find out it isn't so. We are just ribbing a bit with the cover image. Great film though!
The top 10 films each get their own tab in this gallery. Click on the edge of the pictures to cycle through them, or on the thumbnails below to go straight to that tab.
Blake Simons, Rino Lu, Jim Tudor, Lia Matthew Brown, Ernesto Zelaya Miñano, Kurt Halfyard, Dustin Chang, Michele "Izzy" Galgana, Peter Martin, George Bate, Daniel Eagan, Mel Valentin, Rob Hunter, Kyle Logan, James Marsh, Lou Cai, Simon Ramshaw, Olga Artemyeva, Theodoor Steen, Shelagh Rowan-Legg, J Hurtado and Martin Kudlac
contributed to this story.
The Runners-up:
11: The Furious (see picture above)
12: Leviticus
13: Alpha
14: The Unknown
15: Rose of Nevada
16: The Sound of Falling
17: The Chronology of Water
18: Marama
19: Hoppers
20: Backrooms
Number 10: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
We are big fans of director Jane Schoenbrun, who made a big splash with her previous two films We're All Going to the World's Fair and I Saw the TV Glow. Her third film is about a director who wants to make a new entry into a Friday the 13th-ish franchise, but finds more than she bargained for when the cast member she brought back from the original film seems to have a wonky sense of reality...
Early word of mouth from Cannes was very good, and even though not many people have seen it yet, it's already in our Top 10 list! Expect a review soon...
Number 9: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
Yes, that special kind of dirty green is a Gore Verbinski color. He's back, and his film is big, bold and a lot of fun.
In his review, our J. Hurtado says the following:
"Verbinski and Rockwell are a match made in movie heaven, a director with a unique sense of visual flair and drama and an actor capable of not only existing in this kind of chaos, but even piercing through it, I’d love to see a dozen more features with these two working this closely. As it stands, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is a wildly entertaining, bracingly messy return to the director’s chair, with a message that manages to remain clear throughout the chaos, and you’ve got to respect that."
Number 8: The Bride!
Next up is Maggy Gyllenhaal's new feature-take on the Frankenstein legend, a film which turned out to be quite divisive. But is that a bad thing? Several writers thought not.
In her review, Olga Artemyeva states the following:
"While some of the elements here are intricately concocted and executed, others decidedly lack nuance, which doesn’t necessarily have to put the film at a disadvantage. Every artistic choice here (including the acting, which can be at times referred to as over the top) seems to work in the service of creating an aesthetic structure that would mirror the movie's heroine. In a way, it is a retelling of a tragically familiar female experience of being someone loud and unapologetic, who, even today, almost a century later, would be quite consistently labelled as 'difficult'.
Which seems to be precisely the point with The Bride!, since it comes off as the film that knows it is not universally likable and wants to make sure you also know it is absolutely okay with that."
Number 7: Obsession
This almost-no-budget film played festivals in late 2025, it got picked up, it got released... and it smashed box office records. It helped that it told what may be a simple story, but it told it very well indeed.
In his review, Kurt Halfyard says:
"Obsession is as much a horror-comedy as it is a stress-induced anxiety attack. This Twilight-Zone inversion of Romeo & Juliet might have inadvertently pioneered a new genre form: the Unromantic Comedy. It's a cringeworthy and terrifying look at asymmetrical relationships, how that desperate kind of puppy love manifests itself in awkward abasement, and self-destruction.
(...)
Obsession has got game, it brings something to the table, and can easily hold its own with the best of them. I think Rod Serling would have loved this one; so might have Shakespeare."
Number 6: The Sheep Detectives
Anthropomorphic animals talking their way through a live-action film with regular humans... it is a sub-genre with some surprisingly decent entries, like Babe (or its insane, dark sequel...). And here is another one, a big surprise favorite in which sheep try to solve the murder of their shepherd. Funny, dark, poignant, layered... it's dâh-âh-âh-âh-âh-amn solid.
OK, I'll let myself out...
But Mel Valentin wrote the following in his review:
"Melding a murder-mystery-centered storyline and non-human characters could have descended into sheer farce or melancholic drama, but The Sheep Detectives does neither. Credit deservedly goes to Balda, making his live-action debut, and Mazin for striking the right balance between humor and solemnity, between the lightness inherent in a film involving talking animals and the seriousness of its themes..."
Number 5: The Drama
It's a rom-com! No it's not! Oh it is! Oh shit it isn't!
Some audiences felt thoroughly bamboozled by Kristoffer Borgli's new film, but plenty of us here liked it a lot.
In his review, Kyle Logan says:
"The Drama is a fantastically constructed film that, for the most part, threads a delicate needle of unnerving and broadly funny; largely sidestepping cringe comedy to create something more unique, and certainly more affecting. (...)
Both Zendaya and Pattinson put on bravura displays of eye acting, flitting between hope, doubt, and sometimes outright horror within seconds. Their performances early in the film welcome the audience in with their well-honed movie star charisma and an easy chemistry that makes their young couple deeply in love who want to overcome a crisis all the more believable later."
Number 4: Is God Is
Two sisters, covered in scars caused by their father when he tried to burn their mother alive, set out to murder the bastard. But it turns out to be a quest with unexpected results. A predictable drama this is not, and the word-of-mouth so far is insane. Mel Valentin says the following in his review:
"It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a bolder, more fearless feature-length debut this year than playwright-turned-filmmaker Aleshea Harris’ uncategorizable feature-length debut, Is God Is. (...)
Unsurprisingly, plays translated to the filmic medium tend toward static, long dialogue scenes, minimal camera movement, and even fewer editorial cuts, but Harris, showing an instinctive skill for the graphic possibilities of the cinematic form, goes in an entirely different, far more dynamic, ultimately rewarding direction. Aided immeasurably by Alexander Dynan’s compelling cinematography and Jay Rabinowitz’s efficient, energetic editing, Harris crafts an exceptionally taut, tense genre mash-up that all but announces her as one of the most exciting filmmakers to watch."
Number 3: Hokum
A few years ago Damian McCarthy gave us the great little horror film Oddity, and now he's back with a new one. And by all accounts, it is a LOT scarier than the previous film. In his review, our J. Hurtado had this to say:
"Hokum is scary as hell, but never forgets to be entertaining, with a black-as-pitch sense of humor from McCarthy’s script that Scott is the perfect vehicle for. The humor never threatens to overwhelm the scares, though, as it is used as a carefully calibrated release valve for the unrelenting tension and dread that Hokum masterfully inflicts upon both his characters and the audience.
That, combined with delightfully disorienting production design around the inn, a musical score and sound design that will set your hairs on end from start to finish, and cinematography that puts us into the world in a way that only perfect lighting can, and Hokum is a damn near perfect horror film."
Number 2: Project Hail Mary
Big-budget science fiction with people saving not just the Earth, but entire star systems... that's a bit too large a problem to believably tackle, right? But Andy Weir's novel made this very enjoyable to read about, hard science and all, proving that you sometimes don't even need an antagonist in your story, just loads and loads of obstacles. And lo-and-behold, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller made a perfectly enjoyable film adaptation of it. Mel Valentin liked the film but did not unreservedly love it. He did say this as well though:
"Returning to feature-length live-action for the first time in over a decade, Lord and Miller handle the outer space sequences, especially a mid-film spacewalk set piece meant to be experienced in large-scale, high-end screens (Dolby, IMAX), with a self-assured deftness that undercuts any claim that they might be too rusty after so much time away. They’re not. Far from it. Individual scenes and set pieces match anything found in classics of the genre like Interstellar, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or even The Martian."
Number 1: 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
Lots of people missed the second part of the new Alex Garland-scripted 28-years-later trilogy, because it was released rather soon after the previous one and the marketing didn't make it look a lot like a different film. Well, they all missed out on a superior genre outing. Nia DaCosta took over the reigns from Danny Boyle, but dayamn, does she run away with them! Shelagh Rowan-Legg says the following in her review:
"DaCosta and her team formally bombard us with this cruel and manic world, from several perspectives, yet it never feels rushed or without purpose. Each character is given their moment, each actor able to convey their story even if in just a single glance. In a world with no rules, what is left but the human spirit: but that spirit is not always right or good. (...)
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a more than worthy follow up to last year's film, visually glorious, a story that deepens the narrative, a great sense of ironic humour, and drops enough literal and proverbial needles to make an audience applaud and craving for more."
The entire list!
Everything everyone offered in their entries, in alphabetical order!
How many of these will remain in the year-end list? We'll find out in six months...
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
90 Meters
Alpha
And Her Body Was Never Found
AnyMart
ARCO
Backrooms
Blades of the Guardians
La Bola Negra
The Bride!
Buffet Infinity
By Design
Castration Movie Anthology 1. Traps
Castration Movie Chapter iii. Junior Ghosts—Premorphic Drift; a fragmentary Passage
The Chronology of Water
Cold War 1984
Colors of White Rock
Coward
Crime 101
The Currents
Death Does Not Exist
Disclosure Day
Divine Hammer
Double Happiness
The Drama
The Furious
Gaua (The Night) (see picture above)
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don´t Die
La Gradiva
Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty!
Hen
Hokum
Hoppers
I Love Boosters
I Swear
If Pigeons Turned to Gold
Is God Is
Jim Queen
Josephine
Lali
Leviticus
Little Amelie (The Character of Rain)
Little, Big and Far
Marama
Mother Mary
Nine Temples to Heaven
Nirvanna The Band, The Show, The Movie
Obsession
Paper Tiger
Peleliu: Guernica of Paradise
The President's Cake
Primate
Project Hail Mary
The Python Hunt
Queen At Sea
Ready or Not 2: Here I Come
Resurrection
Rose of Nevada
The Seoul Guardians
The Serpent's Skin
The Sheep Detectives
The Sound of Falling
Stolen Kingdom
The Stranger
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
Their Town
They Will Kill You
Toy Story 5
Traces
Truly Naked
Tu Ya Main
Two Seasons, Two Strangers
The Unknown
We Bury the Dead
The Wrecking Crew
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