Stories in Motion

"The Pitt" leads with 25 nods, "Hacks" sets a comedy record with 24, and "Widow's Bay" surprises with 19. We break down the biggest snubs (Stranger Things, Sydney Sweeney, The Bear's cast) and surprises from Emmy nomination morning, plus what's new for the Sept. 14 ceremony hosted by Mariska Hargitay.

Twenty shows, two critics' lists, one impossible ranking argument. From the Soviet space race thriller  Star City  to the return to Gilead in  The Testaments , plus  The Pitt 's Emmy-sweeping second season and a vampire rock opera with  The Vampire Lestat  — we run down the best television of the year's first half, unranked and completely unfiltered.

We're halfway through the year, and the multiplex actually has a pulse. From Baz Luhrmann's electrifying Elvis concert doc to the criminally under-seen  Is God Is , plus  Toy Story 5 's victory lap and the $200M horror sleeper  Obsession  — we run down the ten films defining 2026 so far, and argue over which ones deserve way more attention before awards season locks in.

Moshe Rosenthal's  Tell Me Everything is one of the best Israeli films we have seen in years. A boy witnesses the edges of his father's secret in a pool bathroom in 1980s Tel Aviv, and the film follows what that costs both of them across nine years. It is a film about fear, shame, and the silence they enforce on everyone they touch, queer or not. We talk about the structural diptych, the e...

Steven Spielberg's  Disclosure Day  is a whistleblower alien chase thriller that is really about a 79-year-old filmmaker fighting back against cynicism with the only weapon he has ever had. Emily Blunt is extraordinary, the freight train setpiece is the best Hollywood action sequence of the year, and the script can't always earn the optimism the direction insists on. We talk about where th...

Kane Parsons is twenty years old, came from YouTube, and has made the best horror film of the year.  Backrooms  takes the liminal space internet meme and turns it into an Ejiofor-anchored psychological freakout about a divorced furniture store owner who walks through a wall and keeps walking. We talk about what makes the film so effectively unsettling, why the monsters are its least frightening el...

Eligibility ends May 31st, nominations voting opens June 11th, and the Emmy picture is finally coming into focus. This week's update: "Pluribus" is the drama front-runner nobody saw coming, Rhea Seehorn is long overdue and the predictions agree, and "Beef" is eating the limited series category alive. We run through every category — who's surging, who's fading, and w...

Fifty-two films in ten days. We break down everything that mattered at this year's festival, from Cristian Mungiu's devastating Palme d'Or winner Fjord to the quieter miracles nobody saw coming. What Cannes 2026 said about grief, complicity, and the stubborn case for cinema.

Film fifty-two of the festival and Léa Mysius'  The Birthday Party  is the competition disappointment of the final days. A home invasion thriller with Herzi, Magimel and Bellucci that explains itself into irrelevance. We talk about what the Bellucci subplot promises and doesn't deliver, why Herzi deserved a better film, and what happened to the renegade filmmaker who made The Five Devils.

Film fifty-one of the festival and Grisebach's  The Dreamed Adventure  returns to the slow Eastern European Western with a woman at its centre and a genuine discovery in Yana Radeva. The first half is atmospheric and alive. The second half doesn't fully deliver on what the first built. We talk about the film's magnificent faces, what Grisebach does uniquely well, and why the ending lan...

We open day eleven with Maria Martínez Bayona's debut  The End of It , in which Rebecca Hall plays a 250-year-old former provocateur who has decided she wants to die, and her death is her final artwork. The high concept is genuinely fascinating, the birthday party sequence is one of the best scenes at the festival, and Hall is extraordinary throughout. We talk about why the film can't quit...

Film forty-nine of the festival and Lukas Dhont's  Coward  is his most mature and most tender film to date. A queer love story at the WWI Belgian front, two young men finding each other in an environment designed to make that impossible, and a first kiss that is among the most purely romantic gestures the movies have produced in years. We talk about what Dhont gets right this time that Girl an...

Film forty-eight of the festival and Bertrand Mandico's  Roma Elastica  is a kaleidoscope of Fellini riffs, carnival grotesques, feminist cannibal peplums, and one extraordinary scene in which Marion Cotillard turns before a mirror and briefly makes everything feel necessary. We talk about what Mandico does that nobody else does, why it works in flashes and exhausts in bulk, and why Cotillard...

Film forty-seven of the festival and Marine Atlan's  La Gradiva , the Critics' Week winner, is one of the most wholly transporting films we have seen at this Cannes. French teenagers in Naples, a class trip to Pompeii, and a boy named Toni whose entire romantic self is built on a story about his grandparents that turns out to be more complicated than he knew. Colas Quignard is an extraordi...

Film forty-six of the festival and Los Javis'  The Black Ball  is a monument. Three timelines, Lorca's ghost, a Spanish Civil War love story that is simultaneously the horniest and most heartbreaking thing at this Cannes, Penélope Cruz on a tank, and Glenn Close as an American Lorca scholar. The structural achievement alone is almost impossible to fully describe. We talk about why this is...

We open day ten with Zachary Wigon's  Victorian Psycho  and Maika Monroe's complete and total villain era. A Yorkshire governess with dead eyes, a body count, and a voiceover that exists mostly for her own reassurance. The first two thirds are gleefully, dementedly perfect. The ending needed more nerve. We talk about Monroe, the keyhole cinematography, the baby, and why we want a sequel im...

Film forty-four of the festival and Ira Sachs'  The Man I Love  is the finest AIDS film in years precisely because it refuses to be an AIDS film. Rami Malek, Tom Sturridge, a ruinous love triangle in 1980s New York, and a dance floor scene shot in midnight blue that is one of the most alive things at this Cannes. We talk about what Sachs does that no one else does, and why this film will stay...

Film forty-three of the festival and Emmanuel Marre's  A Man of His Time  is the most uncomfortable film we've seen at Cannes. His own great-grandfather collaborated with the Nazis. Not out of evil. Out of ambition and cowardice and a need to belong. Swann Arlaud gives the best performance of the festival. The 80s soundtrack is intentional and correct. This film is a warning addressed dire...

Film forty-two of the festival and Andy Garcia's  Diamond  has one of the best setups at Cannes this year: a 1940s gumshoe nearly flattened by a self-driving car in modern LA. It's a perfect image. The next 118 minutes can't match it. We talk about what great noir requires that this film was too fond of its own protagonist to provide, and why this cast deserved a sharper script. 

We open day nine with Clio Barnard's  I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning , an ensemble drama about five working-class friends from Birmingham hitting thirty with no dreams fulfilled. It starts humbly and earns everything it arrives at. Daryl McCormack, Joe Cole and the whole cast all but follow you out of the theater. We talk about friendship, disappointment, and one image of lights on water...

Film forty of the festival and Almodóvar arrives in competition with  Bitter Christmas , a Möbius strip of autofiction about a filmmaker who feeds on the lives of those closest to him. Three writer-directors, one screenplay, no apology. We talk about what makes this ticklingly complex and where it falls short of his greatest work, and why its abrupt ending is the most honest thing in it. 

Film thirty-nine of the festival and Zvyagintsev returns after nine years with  Minotaur , a domestic thriller set in Russia in 2022 as the war in Ukraine begins. A jealous husband, a dead body, a country with no rules left to tether anyone. The greatest living Russian director has not softened. We talk about his return, the Chabrol source material, and what it means to make a film like this from...

We open day eight with Nicolas Winding Refn's  Her Private Hell , a neo-giallo nightmare set in a futuristic city where a diamond-knuckled demon stalks young women in the fog. Half the audience walked out. We stayed. Pino Donaggio's score is extraordinary, the neon is relentless, and the plot is absolutely not the point. We talk about what Refn is and isn't doing here, and whether stay...

Film thirty-seven of the festival and Sandra Wollner's  Everytime  is the one that broke us today. A teenager falls from a rooftop and the film spends two hours in the wreckage of what remains. Birgit Minichmayr gives one of the festival's finest performances. And the final act does something impossible that the film has completely earned. We needed a few minutes outside before we could ta...

Film thirty-six of the festival and Cristian Mungiu's  Fjord  is the Palme d'Or contender we did not see coming. A Romanian family, a Norwegian village, a child abuse case that refuses to resolve into heroes and villains, and Sebastian Stan giving the most deliberately unsympathetic performance of his career. We talk about why this is the film we will still be arguing about when we get hom...