The Best Movies of 2026 (So Far)

You can’t evaluate a movie year — not really — when you’re only halfway through it. But you can take its temperature. And at the midway point, what we can say is that the patient looks healthier than it has in a long time. If the box office were up (which it is), but only because of processed franchise hits, that would be a mixed blessing. But the box office is up thanks to a great many commercial films that audiences experienced as unabashed and organic pleasures, from the bantery, media-savvy “The Devil Wears Prada 2” to the tricky, exbullient “Toy Story 5.” Then there were the megahit horror films, like “Obsession” and “Backrooms,” that came from outside the box, not to mention the pop performance spectacles (“EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert,” “Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft”), the crowd-pleasing behemoths with soul (“Project Hail Mary,” “Michael”), and the independent films with a bold spirit (“Is God Is,” “The Drama,” “I Love Boosters,” “The Furious,” “The Invite,” “Our Hero, Balthazar”…the list goes on). As Variety chief film critics Owen Gleiberman and Guy Lodge roll out their choices for the best movies of 2026 (so far), the news isn’t just that movies are alive but that they’re (almost) (kind of) thriving.

• Blue Heron

  Image Credit: Courtesy of MoreThan Films

  In the mid-’90s, a Hungarian immigrant family attempts to settle and integrate itself into suburban Vancouver society, though their best intentions are frequently hijacked by the deteriorating mental illness of the black-sheep eldest son; through the eyes of his younger sister, caught between fear and hero worship, a formative tragedy plays out in slow motion. From a raw chapter of her own family history, Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari’s quite miraculous first feature extracts both devastating drama and a radically inventive formal inquiry into the boundaries between memory, memoir and imagination. That sounds like a lot, but “Blue Heron” wears its ambitions with humility, and its broken heart with a gauze of wise, measured perspective. This isn’t a film that leads with trauma, but with richly specific domestic detail and a vivid awareness of how children see and process the world around them. If the story on screen were pure fiction, it would be just as deeply affecting, though the elegance with which Romvari pivots into documentary is something to behold. — Guy Lodge