What Comes Next in 2026?

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What Comes Next in 2026?

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By Ben Elliott

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What comes next?
It’s a question that seemed to be at the forefront of filmmakers’ minds this year, as a creeping sense of post-truth paranoia and radical action worked its way into the movies. Ari Aster’s Eddington, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Bugonia, and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another all took on our current political moment through stories of reactionaries and revolutionaries, spanning the spectrum from cautious optimism to outright cynicism.
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, meanwhile, offered powerful explorations of the way the past can haunt us — and the costs we pay when we try to move forward.
Two friends chasing floating legs in a red room from House, 1977Sentimental Value, 2025
Other filmmakers found success by making movies that were such confident throwbacks they wouldn’t have felt out of place on screens 25 years ago (and I mean that in the best possible way). Akiva Schaffer’s The Naked Gun, Darren Aronofsky’s Caught Stealing, Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, Céline Song’s Materialists, Andrew DeYoung’s Friendship, and Michael Angelo Covino’s Splitsville are all wildly entertaining adult movies that brought old school thrills and laughs to the big screen.
A young woman holding a severed head in House, 1977
Sinners, 2025
And that's where these movies were meant to be seen. Watching these movies in a theater makes the emotions bigger, the laughs louder, the quiet more striking. 2025 was a powerful showcase of what movies can and should be — and why it’s still worth seeing them on the big screen in 2026 and beyond.

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