The 5 Best Movies of 2026 (So Far)

Congratulations on surviving the first quarter of 2026. You’ve made it through another almost-WW3 (but you never know), you also made it through another awards season that we pretend to care about, and probably another round of discourse about whether cinema is dying (it’s fine, it’s not fine, it’s always fine, we’re all fine).

The good news is, that between all this noise, some genuinely good films actually came out this year. We cried over a pet rock, argued over a gothic romance and gave Bronte purists an aneurysm, and finally got a good heist movie.

Best Movies of 2026

So, here are five movies we’ve liked (so far) this year.

Project Hail Mary

This is the hottest release of the year and the most successful spring film drop since Ryan Coogler’s Sinners — and it’s a movie about a science teacher and an alien made of rocks trying to save two solar systems simultaneously.

Project Hail Mary follows Ryland Grace, a middle-school science teacher who wakes up alone on a spaceship with no memory of how he got there, only to slowly piece together that the Sun is dying and he’s Earth’s last shot at survival. Ryan Gosling carries practically the whole thing on his back, and the miracle is that he makes it look easy. We live in a time where traditional movie stars are becoming rarer and rarer, but after this, there’s no doubt Gosling can count himself as one of the few true screen idols of modern Hollywood. The real secret weapon, though, is Rocky — a mouthless, crab-looking alien who, between the puppetry and the stellar vocal performance from James Ortiz, feels genuinely alive. It’s a buddy comedy set in deep space, and it works completely. It opened to a record-breaking $140.9 million worldwide, the biggest March opening for a non-franchise film. See it in IMAX. You’ll thank yourself later.

Crime 101

The result will reflexively be compared to Michael Mann’s crime thrillers — adapted from Don Winslow’s novella, Crime 101 shares Mann’s obsession with stoic, self-reliant characters and has a film-noir-in-colour look reminiscent of Heat and Thief. Hemsworth plays against type — awkward, restrained, genuinely interesting. Ruffalo’s detective is basically a scruffy Columbo. And Barry Keoghan, volatile, unpredictable, genuinely terrifying, is a shot of pure adrenaline who sends the plot careening into darker territory.  A great crime film that deserved better.

Wuthering Heights

Emerald Fennell made this entirely on her own terms and the internet has not recovered since then. This adaptation has a Charli XCX soundtrack, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi perpetually drenched, and a lot of sexual yearning.

Cinematography that takes full advantage of the Yorkshire countryside — the fog, the hills, the grey everything. Is it faithful to Brontë? Absolutely not. Is it Fennell’s best film? Also no. Will it enrage the purists? Absolutely, yes. Should you watch it anyway? Yeah, f**k it, we’ll die soon anyway.

People We Meet on Vacation

Firstly, let’s just get something out of the way: no, the movie does not do any justice to Emily Henry’s book. Compared to the book, it’s a horrible take. But watch it as a standalone? It’s the comfort watch of the year. This book adaptation stars Emily Bader and Tom Blyth as polar opposites who’ve shared one summer vacation a year for a decade — until they finally have to reckon with what that actually means.

Yes, the critics are split and we think the ending was a bit soggy, but Bader and Blyth have chemistry that most rom-coms spend their entire runtime begging for and never find. Stop overthinking it.

Dhurandhar: The Revenge

Whatever you think of it politically — and plenty of people have thoughts — you cannot deny that Aditya Dhar and Ranveer Singh have done something seismic here. The film crossed ₹1,006 crore worldwide in its first week, making Dhar only the second Indian director after S.S. Rajamouli to direct two successive ₹1,000 crore films. That’s a cultural moment.

Ranveer Singh goes all out — his transformation from Jaskirat to Hamza is quick and impressive, balancing massive intensity with an emotional core in his lonely, vulnerable moments. he film is, as critics have noted, a literal bloodbath, and its hypermasculine hero’s journey falls in line with a new wave of Bollywood epics that rely on weaponry, war, and brutality to entertain. Whether that’s a feature or a bug depends entirely on who you are and what you bring to the seat. What isn’t deniable: Dhar knows how to construct a world, and Ranveer in this mode is a genuine phenomenon. Bollywood’s biggest bet of the year paid off.