News, reviews and features on cinema
Peter Jackson's most important Cannes screening may still be one that did not contain a complete movie. On May 13, 2001, seven months before The Fellowship of the Ring opened, Jackson brought 26 minutes of unfinished footage to the Croisette. On May 12, 2026, he returned to Cannes and accepted an Honorary Palme d'Or from Elijah Wood.
The awkward question around I Play Rocky is no longer whether Sylvester Stallone is officially making the movie. He isn't credited as its writer, director or producer in Amazon MGM's current materials. The stranger question is much smaller: did Stallone know Peter Farrelly was going to make it? Stallone and Farrelly have now supplied answers that do not fit comfortably together.
Peter Farrelly has a very specific piece of history with Toronto. In 2018, Green Book arrived at TIFF for its world premiere, won the audience award and left with an entirely different place in that year's awards conversation. I Play Rocky will enter the same festival on September 12. That history makes the booking easy to notice. It does not make the outcome repeatable.
Camp Rock 3 is now streaming on Disney+. Its August 14 arrival turns one of Disney Channel's most recognizable 2000s properties into something more useful than a nostalgia special: a launchpad for another generation of performers.
Sebastian Stan is definitely in Avengers: Doomsday. He is apparently a considerably less useful source on what Avengers: Doomsday actually does. Asked about the movie by Le Journal du Dimanche, Stan said he never received the full screenplay and instead shot disconnected pieces of it. For Marvel, ignorance has one extremely convenient production benefit: it is difficult to leak a plot connection nobody told you about.
David Harbour was offered an almost irresponsible interview prompt: give Variety one line from Avengers: Doomsday with absolutely no context. He pointed, slipped into Red Guardian's Russian accent and said, “You… are Tony Stark.” That is a magnificent spoiler if it is a spoiler. It is also an extremely efficient joke if Harbour knew exactly which four words would cause Marvel fans to dismantle the internet for parts.
Avengers: Doomsday has never had a shortage of superheroes. Its harder problem was making that enormous cast look like one movie rather than several reunion specials arriving at the same time. Marvel's new D23 footage offers a surprisingly straightforward answer. Robert Downey Jr.'s Doctor Doom is becoming the point around which everyone else has to move.
The obvious version of a third Dune movie would simply make Part Two larger. More armies, more sandworms, a wider war and another enemy waiting at the end. Denis Villeneuve has spent a decade making these films and seems considerably less interested in the obvious version. His final chapter is a thriller, and the reason is built into Paul Atreides' new position: there is almost nothing left for him to conquer.
Dune already had one of the more unusual image pipelines in blockbuster filmmaking. Denis Villeneuve has decided that two movies were enough reason to change it. Part Three introduces Linus Sandgren, real 65mm acquisition and IMAX film cameras to the franchise, but stops short of turning film stock into a rule. Arrakis itself remains digital.
The most revealing number from Dune: Part Three's August ticket drop is not a box-office total. There isn't one yet. It is three. AMC CEO Adam Aron says traffic across the chain's website and app reached roughly three times the level seen when Spider-Man: Brand New Day tickets launched, enough to slow and glitch the company's systems while fans competed for December IMAX seats.
David Ayer did not want Heart of the Beast to look like Brad Pitt performing beside a well-trained prop. Odin had to feel like somebody James Belmont had survived with long before the audience met either of them. That meant giving the role to a real working dog, then accepting one inconvenient fact of animal filmmaking: the dog gets a vote.
Bleach has found a particularly busy moment for a nostalgia trip. On August 28 and 30, French theaters will host an ADN-organized marathon of all four animated feature films, just as Thousand-Year Blood War is moving through the final cour of the television anime.
Arthur Harari has spent the years since Onoda becoming an Oscar-winning screenwriter, but his return to directing is not exactly modest. The Unknown takes a familiar body-swap device, strips away the comic instruction manual and asks Léa Seydoux and Niels Schneider to make an impossible change feel physically credible for 140 minutes.
Josh Brolin knew Ridley Scott already. That did not stop the first day of The Dog Stars from sending him back to his agent wondering whether he should leave the movie. The problem was not the apocalypse, the weapons or the location shoot in Italy. It was Scott's process.
For years, the International Feature race contained an unusually powerful gatekeeper: the national selection committee. The 99th Academy Awards loosen that structure. A small group of major festival winners can now reach the submission process through their awards, and Cannes champion Fjord is one of the first films positioned to use the change.
A 3,032-admission opening sounds straightforward until the preview figure is placed next to it. For The Condor Daughter, more than five out of every six admissions counted in that French first-day total were recorded before the film officially opened on August 19.
For at least an hour on August 19, the US release plan for Mutiny effectively had an extra window. Prime Video users could play the entire film even though Lionsgate was still advertising a theatrical launch two days later.
France has delivered the first useful box-office number for the new Insidious. Out of the Further opened there on August 19 with 42,954 admissions, enough to lead the week's new releases.
A Palme d'Or can make a film sound like homework before anyone has bought a ticket. Fjord has a much more immediate setup than that reputation suggests. Released in France on August 19, Cristian Mungiu's new film starts with two neighboring families in Norway and turns a child's bruises into a conflict that quickly reaches the school, the wider community and child-protection authorities.
The production problem arrived before the cameras properly got going. Matthew McConaughey was preparing to play an Oklahoma beekeeper when an actual bee sting revealed that he was allergic. Andrew Patterson's movie was still built around real hives, real beekeeping and one shot involving thousands of bees gathering on its leading man's arm.
Spider-Man: No Way Home held Sony's all-time box-office record for years. Brand New Day needed three weekends to take it away.
Christopher Nolan set his previous worldwide record with Batman. He has now beaten it with Homer. Universal officially confirmed on August 10 that The Odyssey had become the highest-grossing film of the director’s career, and the theatrical run did not stop at that milestone: one week later, worldwide estimates were already around $1.29 billion.
Unconfirmed reports indicate advanced discussions between Northline Studio and a major Hollywood studio about bringing the saga to the big screen.
Games, films and series: Autumn 2026 is shaping up to be one of the most packed seasons ever. Here is our selection.
Clara Fontaine's feature debut reveals itself in a dizzying trailer. Sci-fi 2026 has found its masterpiece.
Alexei Voss returns with a breathless film about paranoia in the age of AI. The first footage is striking.
Noa Ben-David delivers an epic film of rare beauty, deeply human despite its supernatural settings.
The 2026 official competition gives pride of place to independent productions at the expense of the usual majors.
We saw the first forty minutes of Clara Fontaine's film. Sci-fi 2026 has a new benchmark.
Media boundaries are dissolving: adaptations, crossovers and shared universes are redefining our relationship with entertainment.
An intense and intelligent paranoia thriller that pushes beyond genre to question our relationship with technology.
Noa Ben-David's film takes home the top prize from the world's oldest film festival.
