YNOT at the Movies

Frameline has always understood that queer cinema is not a genre, it is a necessity. As attacks on queer and trans rights intensify across the United States and beyond, Frameline50 carries added gravity this year: the festival is both celebration and resistance, a reminder that queer cinema has always been a frontline art form.

The milestone edition features more than 140 films from 35 countries, alongside tributes, restorations, and major premieres that underline the festival's enduring role as a bridge between generations of queer storytelling. Colman Domingo will receive the Variety Creative Conscience Award, while legacy titles like "Paris Is Burning" (1990), "Desert Hearts", (1985), "Bound" (1996), and "Cruising" (1980) return to the screen alongside new works pushing queer narratives into stranger, riskier, and more intimate territories. The programming reflects a festival refusing to become a museum piece. Frameline remains defiantly alive, preserving queer history while documenting the anxieties, desires, and revolutions unfolding now.

The Big Nights span the full range of what queer cinema can be: raucous and local, elegiac and historical, delirious and visionary.D'Arcy Drollinger's "Lady Champagne", written by and starring the San Francisco drag legend herself, opens the festival on June 17 at the Castro Theatre with the irreverent, community-made spirit that has always defined Frameline at its best. The centerpiece is Brydie O'Connor's "Barbara Forever" (2026), a Teddy Award-winning portrait of pioneering lesbian filmmaker Barbara Hammer. Closing the festival on June 27 is Jane Schoenbrun's "Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma" (2026), fresh from its Cannes world premiere, with Schoenbrun receiving the Frameline Queer Lens Award for Filmmaking before the screening.

San Francisco itself becomes part of the story. Opening at the newly renovated historic Castro Theatre and reestablishing a festival hub in the Castro district, Frameline50 reconnects with the neighborhood that helped define queer public life for generations. In an era where LGBTQ+ spaces continue to disappear under economic pressure and political hostility, the festival's return to these communal landmarks feels almost ceremonial, like lighting a beacon that still refuses to go dark.

Frameline50 will run June 17–27, 2026 in venues in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, including the Castro Theatre, the Roxie Theater, the Vogue Theatre, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), and the New Parkway Theater.

What follows are reviews of a few films from this year's program. Taken together, they suggest both the breadth of the current queer cinematic moment and the fierce necessity of a festival like Frameline to bring them into the light.

Click on each film title or poster to view showtimes and ticket details on Frameline's official website.

• Tiger (Japan 2025 | in Japanese | 126 min.)

  

  The film's title, "Tiger," is both the name of its protagonist and the persona he creates. Taiga (Takashi Kawaguchi) is a 35-year-old gay masseuse working in Tokyo's underground queer economy. Tiger is the stage name he adopts when he finally lands his shot at breaking into gay porn — close enough to his real name to feel like a dare; it’s also a version of himself that is bolder, more visible, harder to ignore. That tension between who Taiga is and who Tiger might become runs through the entire film.

  Written and directed by Anshul Chauhan, a Tokyo-based Indian filmmaker who spent three years collecting real stories from Japan's LGBTQ+ community before writing the script, "Tiger," is a fierce and emotionally volatile character study. It portrays queer identity not as a fixed state but as something shaped through confrontation with family, masculinity, and the pressure to survive in a world not built for you.

  When Taiga's father falls terminally ill, he returns to his hometown from Tokyo, stepping back into a family dynamic freighted with unspoken tension. His sister wants their father's house, and the inheritance question creates friction between them, though the film is careful not to turn her into a villain. What the homecoming unlocks more powerfully is Taiga's bond with his young niece, whose guileless affection for her uncle becomes one of the film's warmest and most aching threads. In her company, Taiga is simply himself, without calculation or guard. The contrast with almost every other relationship in the film is quietly devastating.

  Taiga also briefly reconnects with a childhood lover who has since married a woman and built a conventional life. The desire between them hasn't vanished; it has simply been absorbed into a different kind of existence. The encounter passes without resolution, as these things tend to do, and the film moves on. Chauhan never overstates it, but the moment lodges in the memory.

  The film also takes seriously about the dangers gay sex workers in Japan face. Taiga's world in Tokyo is rendered without glamour or condemnation, populated by men making daily calculations about visibility and risk. Kawaguchi carries it all with controlled intensity, never asking for sympathy and getting it anyway. By the end, Taiga's future remains genuinely open, and the film is wise enough not to close it in either direction. You leave the film wondering what becomes of him, the way you wonder about people you actually know. That Tiger earns that feeling is a real achievement.

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• Maspalomas (Spain 2025 | in Spanish | 115 minutes)

  

  "Maspalomas" opens where its title promises: sun, skin, and freedom. Vicente (José Ramón Soroiz) cruises beaches, goes to raves, drifts through sex parties in the gay-friendly resort of Maspalomas, and belongs to all of it without apology. He came out at 50, left his wife and daughter behind, and spent the 25 years since building a life entirely on his own terms. The math of that is devastating before the film even begins: a quarter century of reclaimed life, bought at a steep personal cost.

  Then a sickness changes everything. He wakes up back in San Sebastián, his daughter has placed him in a nursing home, and almost without realizing it, Vicente returns to where he started. The closet reassembles itself around him, piece by piece, not through any single act of cowardice but through assumption, exhaustion, and the path of least resistance. A man who came out at 50 and lived freely for 25 years finds that the institutional world of old age demands he surrender it all again.

  Arregi and Goenaga are patient and precise in mapping how this happens, and they find unexpected warmth in Vicente's relationship with his conservative roommate Xanti (Kandido Uranga), whose blunt certainties gradually soften into something resembling solidarity. The film resists making anyone a villain. It is more interested in the architecture of retreat than in assigning blame.

  The film belongs entirely to José Ramón Soroiz, who won best actor prizes at San Sebastián, the Forqué, and the Feroz Awards for a performance that is disarming in its lack of defensiveness. You feel, in the looseness of his face and the ease of his smile in those early Maspalomas scenes, the relief of a man determined not to waste whatever time remains. That Vicente's delight is informed rather than naive makes what follows all the more painful to watch.

  "Maspalomas" comes to Frameline50 at a moment of fresh urgency. As the generation of LGBTQ+ people who lived through the pre-Stonewall era begins to enter sunset age, and as many of the rights they fought for face renewed political assault, Vicente's story stops being merely personal. The film offers no easy catharsis. It simply watches, with unflinching compassion, as the walls of a man's world close in, and asks what it means to lose your freedom twice in a single lifetime. One of the best films at Frameline50.

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• Dreamboi (Philippines 2025 | in Tagalog | 84 min.)

  

  Seductive and bruised around the edges, "Dreamboi" dives into fantasy, desire, and self-invention with a hazy neon pulse. Diwa (EJ Jallorina) is a trans woman who turns to audio porn to feel something again, until a habit of eavesdropping on a stranger having sex in a basement toilet spirals into obsession. When she discovers the man is also her favorite anonymous audio porn actor, Dreamboi (Tony Labrusca), fantasy collides with reality in ways that are erotic, destabilizing, and not entirely resolved.

  Director Rodina Singh, herself a trans Filipino filmmaker, is working from deeply personal terrain. Her stated intention is to explore how trans desire is often messy, fractured, and shaped by shame, and the film is most alive in its commitment to that interiority. It understands how queer longing often lives halfway between performance and confession, building a world where vulnerability hides beneath swagger and flirtation. The film's visual language, all glam body horror and psychological unease, has a genuine personality. The film holds a defiant creative position that carries real weight given that the film was rated X twice by the Philippine media board before finally receiving an R-18 classification on its third attempt.

  The film doesn't always live up to its ambitions. The lead performance has its moments but struggles to fully anchor the film's more demanding emotional turns, and the narrative often loses traction. Filipino queer cinema at Frameline has historically skewed toward the world of male go-go dancers. A trans woman's interior life as the sole subject is a different proposition entirely.

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The premise is deceptively simple. Rick Power (Paul Rudd), a forty-something American wedding singer in Dublin, shares a remarkable late-night jam session with fading pop star Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas). A song is born. A song is stolen. Six months later, when Danny releases "How to Write a Song" as a smash hit that reignites his solo career, the fallout forces both men to reckon with who they really are. It sounds like a setup for a legal drama, but the film wisely keeps the film grounded in music and feeling, not courtroom procedure.

Those familiar with the director's previous work will feel right at home.John Carney has always used music not as decoration but as emotional argument, the thing characters say when words fail them. This latest film works in the same register, and the original songs co-written with frequent collaborator Gary Clark do their job beautifully. The standout, "How to Write a Song," earns its central importance. One song. Two men. Completely different meanings. That's vintage Carney.

What makes the film genuinely affecting is that you feel for both men equally. Rick's frustration weighs in from years of compromise and talent quietly shelved for the sake of a good life. But so does Danny's desperation, the particular terror of a once-famous man watching the world move on without him. You understand why he did what he did, even as you wince at it. Both artists are chasing the same thing: the reassurance that they matter, that what they made means something.

Paul Rudd is excellent. He doesn't overplay Rick's frustration or sentimentality, and his musical scenes feel earned rather than performed. Nick Jonas brings real authenticity to Danny, drawing convincingly on his own experience as a performer who has known both massive success and the silence that can follow it. Co-writer and co-star Peter McDonald provides reliable comic warmth as Rick's band mate Sandy. What's particularly smart is that the film resists painting Danny as a straightforward villain. He is man still with some conscience. The guilt festers visibly behind the celebrity smile, and Jonas carries that moral weight with restraint. A Danny stripped of any inner conflict would have made the film smaller and cheaper than it deserves to be.

Where the film stumbles is in its third act, when Rick heads to Los Angeles to confront Danny on his own turf. The escalation requires a degree of credulity that the film hasn't quite earned. If bypassing a pop star's security is this straightforward, one wonders how any celebrity in LA sleeps soundly at night. The sequence is played with enough good humor to survive the implausibility, but it's the one stretch where the script coasts on charm rather than logic.

Carney continues to make the most empathetic argument in cinema: that music belongs to whoever needs it most, and that the person who writes a song and the person who makes it soar are sometimes two different, equally valid things.

"Power Ballad" opens in theaters on Friday, June 05, 2026.

"Pressure" (UK/France/USA 2026 | 100 min.), directed with extraordinary precision and urgency by Anthony Maras, could not be better timed to open around Memorial Day and the anniversary of D-day. This gripping World War II thriller offers audiences something rare: a chance to honor heroes whose names history never quite got around to celebrating.

It has been over 82 years since the Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, and yet here is a story from those same consequential days that most of us have never heard. That is, frankly, a regret that this film corrects beautifully.

The film follows the tense 72 hours leading up to D-Day, centering on the collision of two forceful minds: James Stagg (Andrew Scott), a brilliant and stubbornly principled Scottish meteorologist, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser), the supreme Allied commander carrying the weight of the entire free world on his shoulders.

With Operation Overlord hanging in the balance, Stagg must convince Eisenhower and his skeptical high command to delay the largest seaborne invasion in history, based on a weather forecast that contradicts the far sunnier predictions of the General's trusted consultant, Irving P. Krick (Chris Messina). Kay Summersby (Kerry Condon), Eisenhower's sharp and indispensable aide, serves as the human bridge between the General's private doubts and his public authority. Meanwhile, the imperious Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery (Damian Lewis) pushes and prods from every angle. The result is a pressure cooker of a film where the stakes could not possibly be higher, and where the weapon of choice is data, not firepower.

Who knew a weatherman could save the world? That is the astonishing revelation at the heart of this movie, and it is delivered with a storytelling confidence that makes the film feel both intimate and enormous. There are no machine guns in the war room. There are teleprinters and weather charts, and two men who cannot afford to be wrong. The drama builds with the slow, gathering force of the very storm systems Stagg is trying to predict, and by the time the film reaches its climax, audiences will find themselves as breathless as if they had been watching a full-scale battle sequence.

Andrew Scott delivers a performance of remarkable depth and restraint as James Stagg. He plays the man as prickly, demanding, and difficult, someone not immediately easy to love, yet utterly impossible to look away from. Scott makes you feel the particular agony of a man who knows he is right and must somehow make powerful, impatient men believe it before time runs out. It is a mesmerizing portrait of scientific conviction under fire, and one of the finest performances of his already stellar career.

Brendan Fraser is equally commanding as Eisenhower, bringing unexpected warmth and vulnerability to a figure we often think we know. Fraser's Ike is not a marble monument but a flesh-and-blood leader wrestling privately with the terrifying burden of command, a man who has already written his letter accepting personal blame if the invasion fails. It is a performance of enormous humanity. Kerry Condon brings her trademark intelligence and steely composure to Kay Summersby, and Damian Lewis is deliciously combustible as Montgomery, a man who seems to relish every argument he starts.

"Pressure" is captivating and engaging from its first frame to its last, a film that never loses its grip even as it tells a story built almost entirely from argument, data, and the courage to hold firm. It is a reminder that heroism takes many forms, and that sometimes the bravest thing a person can do is stand in a room full of generals and say: not yet, the weather is not right. On this Memorial Day, give James Stagg the recognition he deserved all along. This is the film that makes sure you never forget him.

"Pressure" opens in theaters on Friday, May 29, 2026.

Set in 1990 in the Silicon Valley suburbs, the film centers on Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a furniture salesman drowning in mass-produced recliners and liquidation clearance signs at his pirate-themed store, quietly falling apart from a failed marriage, a failing business, and vanished architectural dreams. He attends therapy with Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), a self-help author who urges her patients to break the cycles keeping them trapped, all while being unable to break her own.

One night, flickering lights lead Clark into the basement of his showroom, where he discovers something that should not exist: a doorway opening into an infinite, labyrinthine expanse of office rooms and corridors. The Backrooms. He enlists his skeptical employee Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and her boyfriend Bobby (Finn Bennett) to help map this impossibly constructed space. When Clark disappears inside it, Dr. Kline crosses every professional boundary she has and follows him in, confronting her own deeply buried childhood memories along the way.

What director Kane Parsons has achieved here is something genuinely rare in modern horror: a film that uses its surreal and intriguing surroundings to scare you, leaning far less on the tired mechanics of the genre than most. While there are a handful of jump scares, they feel earned rather than cheap, deployed sparingly against a backdrop of sustained, creeping unease that does the heavier lifting.

The horror lives in the drop ceiling, in the yellowing wallpaper that shifts patterns for reasons that don't quite add up, in the stop sign inside the Backrooms that reads in reverse, as if its emergence there has been lost in translation. It is like being inside a Dalí painting—you look at some detail and see a distorted image staring back at you.

The film doesn't fully explain everything, as if you are in a dream that cannot be fully figured out no matter how hard you analyze it, but its disturbing power lingers long after you wake up.

Chiwetel Ejiofor is extraordinary, portraying what could have been a purely conceptual film with human feeling. His Clark is not simply a victim. He is a man who finds something darkly comforting in the Backrooms, who lets this strange infinite space mirror his fractured psychology back at him. Renate Reinsve, fresh off her Academy Award-nominated turn in "Sentimental Value" (2025) is equally compelling. She plays a therapist who cannot heal herself, a woman watching her childhood home demolished to make way for suburban development. Her descent into the Backrooms carries the weight of genuine psychological collapse.

The technical achievement is staggering for a debut. Production designer Danny Vermette constructed 30,000 square feet of Backrooms across four soundstages, and the space doesn't just sprawl outward horizontally into an oppressive, maze-like infinity, it also reaches vertiginously upward, with one centerpiece set appearing to stretch 40 stories high, lined with M.C. Escher-like stairs leading nowhere. Anyone with even a passing fear of heights will find themselves gripping their armrest. Cinematographer Jeremy Cox shoots with a wide-angled scope that makes every human figure look small and swallowed, emphasizing the crushing spatial relationship between the characters and the indifferent architecture surrounding them.

This is not a film that wants to explain itself. It wants to get under your skin, rearrange something in your brain, and leave you checking the corners of ordinary rooms a little more carefully than you used to. It is scary, it is beautiful, and it announces Kane Parsons as one of the most distinctively unsettling new voices in horror cinema today.

"Backrooms" opens in theaters on Friday, May 29, 2026.

Few films this year will make you feel as much through your ears as through your eyes. Director Daniel Roher's narrative feature debut "Tuner" (Canada/USA 2025 | 109 min.) is captivating and terrifically made, and in a proper Dolby house it is one of the most immersive sensory experiences cinema has offered in recent memory.

Niki White (Leo Woodall) is a gifted piano tuner with hyperacusis, a painful disorder that makes him acutely sensitive to sound. As he crisscrosses New York City with his blunt and charismatic mentor Harry Horowitz (Dustin Hoffman), he meets Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu), a driven composition student who challenges his musical and moral compass. When security contractor Uri (Lior Raz) discovers that Niki's hypersensitive hearing is worth more for cracking safes than tuning Steinways, he offers a risky opportunity to Niki that could help Harry and his devoted wife Marla (Tovah Feldshuh) manage a mounting medical crisis.

Academy Award-winning sound designer Johnnie Burn has placed us entirely inside Niki's perception, where every creak, overtone and held breath carries psychological weight. When Niki snaps at a client mid-session, "Now shut the fuck up, so I can get back to work," it lands as the film's thesis in miniature: sharp, a little funny, and rooted in the particular loneliness of someone who hears everything. The sound design does not just accompany the story. It is the story. It's a film that doesn't just ask you to watch — it asks you to listen.

Leo Woodall is absolutely stunning. His charming yet unassuming presence makes Niki immediately likable, but he goes far beyond likability. He masterfully builds a character full of heart and genuine emotion, someone flawed and real that you root for even as he makes questionable choices.

His commitment extends to the piano itself: he learned a three-minute piece from scratch and is entirely convincing as a man for whom music is both vocation and wound. Niki is more fully convincing as a pianist than Ruthie is as a composer. When Niki disappears entirely into the world of sound, Ruthie occasionally feels a step removed from the world of music.

Leo Woodall already established himself in "Nuremberg" (2025) for what he is capable of: in a film packed with seasoned veterans, he is able to be the only truly mesmerizing presence on screen. He confirms what that performance first suggested. He is one of the most exciting rising stars to watch in the years ahead.

The film weaves heist mechanics into a story that is, at its core, about identity and loss. There are moments of genuine, unexpected emotion in what is also a propulsive, montage-driven thriller with a real comedic backbeat. There is one plot point involving a watch that feels slightly too convenient for where the story needs to go, but the acting and character work are strong enough that the contrivance dissolves quickly.

This is a heist film with a soul, a romance with real stakes, and one of the best sound experiences you will have in a cinema this year.

"Tuner" opens in the San Francisco Bay Area theaters on Friday, May 29, 2026.

For the uninitiated, Din Djarin (Pedro Pascal) and his adopted son and young apprentice Grogu are bounty hunters working for the fledgling New Republic, in the era after the Empire's fall. When the battle-hardened Colonel Ward (Sigourney Weaver) recruits them for a dangerous mission targeting Imperial remnants, the pair are thrust into new worlds and new threats. Along the way they cross paths with Rotta the Hutt (voiced by Jeremy Allen White), a massive blubbery creature that looks strikingly like an oversized seal.

The production design is ambitious, with sets like the Chicago-inspired Shakari and the swamp planet Nal Hutta built at warehouse scale. But compared to the grandeur and genuine awe of earlier Star Wars films, this one rarely lands the kind of images that burn themselves into memory. The IMAX frame is filled, but not always with something worth the size. And for a universe supposedly set in the future, the technology looks oddly dated. Real-world robotics have evolved dramatically in recent years, yet the droids here carry the clunky retro charm of something assembled in the 1950s, still bristling with big, square, chunky buttons that would look at home on a Cold War-era control panel.

The deeper problem is human connection, or the lack of it. Nearly every significant character is either hidden behind a helmet, buried under layers of CGI, or both. Pedro Pascal removes his helmet in only a handful of scenes, leaving the Mandalorian's emotional presence to be carried mostly by voice and firepower. For the bulk of the runtime, the character functions less like a flesh-and-blood hero and more like a video game avatar completing objectives. The supporting cast fares little better, with most creatures and figures existing at a digital remove that keeps the audience at arm's length throughout.

Grogu remains the exception. Brought to life by a team of over 30 servo-driven operators, the little guy steals every scene he inhabits through sheer expressiveness, a twitch of the ear here, a wide-eyed blink there. He is the film's only genuinely felt presence. A brief encounter with a food stand cook, voiced by the legendary Martin Scorsese, also manages to generate more humanity in two minutes than most of the action sequences do across the entire runtime.

Three time Academy Award winner Ludwig Göransson's score, performed by a 106-piece orchestra and 64-person choir, does its best to fill the emotional gaps the visuals leave behind. It is the most fully realized element of the film, and sometimes the only thing making a scene feel like it matters.

As a television episode stretched to feature length, the film would feel adequate. As a theatrical Star Wars event meant to justify the price of an IMAX ticket, it falls short. The craft is undeniable, but craft alone does not make a great film. The force, this time, is only mildly with it.

"Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu" opens in theaters on Friday, May 22, 2026.

And it can't.

What unfolds over the next however-many-minutes is a breathless, chaotic scramble that somehow manages to be both relentlessly busy and profoundly boring. Jack Ryan (John Krasinski, doing his best with very little) is pulled, reluctantly of course, back into the spy game to chase down a rogue black-ops unit tangled up in some deadly conspiracy. Or something like that. The film's story is so muddled that keeping track of who is hunting whom, and more importantly *why*, quickly becomes a fool's errand. Characters are either running toward things or away from things, and the movie seems largely indifferent to explaining the difference.

Reunited with CIA operative Mike November (Michael Kelly) and former CIA boss James Greer (Wendell Pierce), the team at least has a certain lived-in chemistry. Add MI6 officer Emma Marlowe (Sienna Miller, sharp and underused) and you have a capable cast with an incapable script. When the guns aren't firing, the characters are talking at length, with great urgency, about almost nothing. Dialogue that sounds like it means something rarely does, and by the third act you may find yourself unable to recall a single line worth remembering.

The action, such as it is, follows a well-worn playbook: relocate the characters to an exotic locale (Dubai and London this time), then fill the runtime with gunfights and car chases assembled with kinetic editing that prioritizes noise over clarity. It's a formula that worked twenty years ago in franchises that at least pretended to have something to say. Here it feels like set dressing, expensive wallpaper.

What makes the theatrical experience especially puzzling is the press screening at the Regal Stonestown Galleria. The theater has a perfectly capable sound system, yet the presentation ran with only the front speakers engaged, giving this globe-trotting action film the audio signature of something you'd half-watch on a tablet while doing laundry. If the studio intended this movie as premium streaming content dressed up for cinemas, the mission was unfortunately accomplished.

By the time the credits roll, the question lingers not as dramatic irony but as genuine bewilderment: what was all of this for? The conspiracy is resolved, the bad guys are presumably stopped, and yet the film leaves no impression, no resonance, no reason to have existed. This is less a movie than a content delivery mechanism, and even on those terms, it falls short.

Tom Clancy's estate deserves better. So do you.

"Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan: Ghost War" starts streaming on Wednesday, May 20, 2026.

Bear (Michael Johnston) is a hopeless romantic who uses a mysterious novelty item called the One Wish Willow to make his longtime crush Nikki (Inde Navarrette) fall in love with him. The wish works. Terrifyingly well. What follows is something bizarre and escalating, as Nikki's devotion curdles into dangerous obsession, and Bear finds himself increasingly unable to undo what he has set in motion, all while hiding the truth from friends Ian (Cooper Tomlinson) and Sara (Megan Lawless).

The characters sink into deeper and deeper mental states as the film progresses, and Barker has a rare gift for pacing that descent. Just when you think you've found the floor, the story drops another level. Navarrette is a force, raw, committed, and at times frightening in her intensity, and Johnston matches her well, playing a protagonist who is sympathetic enough to follow but morally compromised enough to make you squirm. The film is smart in that way. It never quite lets you off the hook.

Barker's direction leans heavily on long takes and tight framing, a style that mirrors the claustrophobia of the story itself. You can barely look at the screen sometimes, and that is largely his doing. The world of the film feels physically inescapable, the production design favoring overstuffed, suffocating spaces that externalize what is happening inside the characters. It is filmmaking that understands how the environment shapes dread.

The blood and gore, when it comes, is hard to watch. This is not a film for the faint of heart, and Barker doesn't soften his punches. By the third act you will find yourself desperately wanting to escape these characters and their world, wanting it all to stop, and that is precisely the point. That discomfort is the film working exactly as intended.

The film occasionally struggles to balance its tonal ambitions, part dark romantic comedy, part visceral horror, and some supporting beats feel underdeveloped. None of that, however, takes away from what Barker is building here. This is not for everyone, but for horror fans who are willing to let it crawl under their skin, it offers something rare.

"Obsession" opens in theaters on Friday, May 15, 2026.

The story follows a flock of sheep who, after years of their shepherd reading them detective novels each night, have secretly developed the ability to solve mysteries among themselves. When their beloved owner George Hardy (Hugh Jackman) is found dead one morning, the flock takes matters into their own hooves.

On the human side, an ambitious young reporter Elliot Matthews (Nicholas Galitzine) abandons his assignment covering a local cultural festival to chase the murder story, while the awkward Officer Tim Derry (Nicholas Braun) stumbles through the official investigation.

The arrival of Rebecca Hampstead (Molly Gordon), George's previously unknown daughter, immediately raises suspicions, as does the sharp-tongued lawyer Lydia Harbottle (Emma Thompson), who sweeps into the village in a Mercedes-Benz to read George's will and ends up far more entangled in the mystery than she expected.

Lurking in the background are the village butcher Ham Gilyard (Conleth Hill), who makes no secret of wanting the sheep for himself, the neighboring shepherd Caleb Merrow (Tosin Cole), with whom George had an unresolved quarrel before his death, and Beth Pennock (Hong Chau), who is secretly in love with George. It's a classic whodunit setup, and the film leans into it with genuine affection for the genre.

The sheep themselves are the undisputed stars. Brought to life through photorealistic CGI by a London-based visual effects studio specializing in computer-generated characters, they're undeniably cute and fluffy, with advanced body simulation tools used to capture the natural movement and texture of real sheep. The voice cast makes them even more compelling. Lily (voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the self-described smartest sheep in the flock, leads the investigation with sharp intelligence and warmth, while Sebastian (voiced by Bryan Cranston), the brooding loner sheep , provides a sidekick. Sir Ritchfield (voiced by Patrick Stewart), the elder statesman of the flock , delivers his lines with magnificent pomposity, and Ronnie and Reggie (both voiced by Brett Goldstein), the rowdy sheep brothers, steal every scene they share with rapid-fire bickering.

Nicholas Braun is a comic highlight as the hapless Officer Derry, and Emma Thompson brings an effortless authority that elevates every scene she's in. Hugh Jackman, by contrast, has comparatively little to do, the unfortunate consequence of playing the murder victim. He's warm and charming in his limited screen time, but George exists primarily to be mourned and investigated rather than truly known.

Director Kyle Balda, whose previous work was entirely in animation including "Minions" (2015, makes his live-action directorial debut here, and handles the transition with confidence. The Oxfordshire setting is picturesque without being distracting, and crucially for younger viewers, the accents never veer into incomprehensible British thicket territory.

This film is unambiguously aimed at school-age children, and on that front it largely delivers. It's an entertaining popcorn movie, the kind you happily sit through with a kid on a weekend afternoon, occasionally laughing louder than they do.

"The Sheep Detectives" opens in theaters on Friday, May 8, 2026.

Ben (Aaron Eckhart) is a first officer on an LA-to-Shanghai flight with its captain Rich (Ben Kingsley). When a fire tears through the aircraft, the plane plunges into the ocean. Besides Ben, the survivors clinging to the wreckage include the captain of a Chinese sport team Sheng (Li Wenhan) and his teammate Lilly (Rosie Zhao) who has a crush on him, the insufferable fellow passenger Dan (Angus Sampson), and a mix of others simply trying to stay afloat long enough to be rescued. The wait, however, proves far more dangerous than anyone anticipated, as Mako sharks begin to circle, and it ultimately takes a passing Chinese fishing boat to bring the ordeal to a close.

Once the fuselage settles on the surface, the film pivots into a second chapter of aquatic survival that is effective in bursts but uneven in execution. The choice of Mako sharks over the more familiar great white is a smart one on paper: Makos are faster, more aggressive, and sport a particularly nightmarish tangle of hooked teeth. In practice, the sharks are largely CGI, and while the jump scares land with reasonable, gruesome reliability, the computer-generated creatures never quite shake the artificiality that keeps the tension from fully boiling over. The sound design does much of the heavy lifting, giving each attack a percussive physicality the visuals cannot always match.

Where the film falls short is in the quieter stretches between attacks, where Deep Water reaches, with mixed results, for the emotional depth of the 1970s disaster films that clearly inspired it. None of the characters leave a strong impression. Aaron Eckhart leads the film with a steady enough presence, but the script gives him nowhere interesting to go. Ben Kingsley, an Academy Award winner capable of commanding a scene with very little, is frustratingly underused. And Dan (Angus Sampson), a passenger whose naked selfishness makes him the most grating figure in the water, exists more as an irritant than a dramatic counterweight. The ensemble floats, but it never truly connects.

This is emphatically not Jaws (1975). It does not have that film's patience, wit, or understanding of how dread is built slowly and then released all at once. Composer Fernando Velázquez wisely avoids chasing John Williams' immortal shadow, but the score, like much of the film, is competent rather than memorable. The human drama never lands with the force it needs to, and what the screenplay gestures toward as character depth is little more than a surface ripple.

This is a passable genre exercise from a director who has made better films and who is clearly capable of more. It delivers on the crash and the creatures, which is more than some shark thrillers manage, but it leaves its talented cast and its more ambitious ideas stranded somewhere between spectacle and substance, never quite rescuing either. Watchable, occasionally gripping, and ultimately forgettable, it is the cinematic equivalent of surviving a wreck only to tread water for the remainder.

"Deep Water" opens in theaters on Friday, May 1, 2026.