2026 has already delivered more than most full years, Here’s the best movies so far.
The year is not yet half over and 2026 has already produced movies ranking worth having. Science fiction has been the dominant force, but the list below pulls from horror, animation, documentary, drama, and literary adaptation. There is something here for most tastes, and several of these films have earned their spots through genuine surprise rather than franchise momentum.
Here are the ten movies of 2026 so far, ranked.
10. Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie
The cult Canadian comedy series that built a devoted following through low-budget absurdism has made the leap to film and brought its sensibility intact. Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol play lifelong friends who form a band in 2008 with the singular goal of playing a specific Toronto music club. Seventeen years later, having still not played there, they climb into a time-traveling RV powered by Orbitz fruit drink and go back to fix things. The result is part existential crisis, part stunt comedy, and entirely its own thing.
9. Pressure
A World War II thriller built around a weather forecast sounds like an unlikely premise, but this chamber drama earns its tension. Andrew Scott plays Scottish meteorologist James Stagg, whose forecast for the D-Day invasion put him in direct conflict with military command, including Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, played by Brendan Fraser. The movie is based on a true story and its stakes feel real throughout the movie.
8. Wuthering Heights
Director Emerald Fennell takes liberties with Emily Brontë’s novel that will frustrate purists and reward everyone else. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi play childhood companions whose relationship deteriorates into a destructive adult love affair built on betrayal and accumulated resentment. Fennell’s visual approach is lush and controlled, and the two leads bring enough heat to make the film’s emotional excess feel earned rather than indulgent.
7. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
The third chapter in the 28 Days Later franchise arrives under director Nia DaCosta and delivers one of the year’s more surprising performances in Ralph Fiennes, who plays the enigmatic Dr. Kelson with an intensity that elevates what could have been a straightforward sequel. Young Spike, played by Alfie Williams, falls under the influence of a charismatic and genuinely frightening cult leader portrayed by Jack O’Connell. The movie earns its place in the series.
6. EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert
Baz Luhrmann assembles never-before-seen footage from Elvis Presley’s 1970s Las Vegas residency into a documentary that functions as both historical record and concert film. The material captures Presley at the peak of his performing powers, loose and commanding in equal measure, and the film makes a strong case that no one before or since has worked a room the way he did.
5. Hoppers
Pixar’s first original property in several years is also one of its most formally ambitious. Mabel, voiced by Piper Curda, is a teenage environmental activist who discovers a technology that transfers her consciousness into a robotic beaver. What begins as an attempt to protect a threatened glade becomes something stranger and more affecting. The film is subversive by Pixar standards and hits emotionally in the way the studio’s best work reliably does.
4. Is God Is
Adapted from Aleshea Harris’ Off-Broadway play, this darkly comic revenge movie follows twin sisters tasked by their dying mother with tracking down and killing the father who scarred all three of them. Kara Young and Mallori Johnson are outstanding together as siblings processing old trauma on a road trip with a body count, and Sterling K. Brown plays the father with a committed menace that makes the film’s genre-bending structure feel necessary rather than gimmicky.
3. Disclosure Day
Steven Spielberg’s science fiction films have earned a certain baseline of trust, and this one justifies it. Emily Blunt plays a meteorologist and Josh O’Connor a government whistleblower who stumble into a decades-long conspiracy involving evidence of extraterrestrial life. The film is less interested in aliens than in what their existence would mean for the people involved, and the two leads bring enough grounded specificity to make the larger premise feel personal.
2. Obsession
The year’s most improbable commercial story is also a genuinely good horror film. Director Curry Barker made this on a budget of $750,000 and has since watched it gross more than $225 million worldwide. The film works a variation on the monkey’s paw premise with Michael Johnston as a young man whose wish for romantic attention produces consequences that escalate methodically into something genuinely disturbing. Inde Navarrette’s performance as the object of his obsession is the kind of work that establishes a career.
1. Project Hail Mary
Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel is the best movie of the year so far and one of the most purely satisfying science fiction films in recent memory. Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a middle school teacher who wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of how he got there or why. The answer involves a dimming sun, an approaching ice age, and a desperate interstellar mission that Grace did not volunteer for. What makes the movie exceptional is not the premise but what it does with the friendship that develops between Grace and Rocky, an alien engineer he encounters in deep space. The film restores a sense of wonder to big-budget science fiction that has been in shorter supply than it should be.