YNOT at the Movies

Writer-director Michael Sarnoski sets out to strip the nobility from Robin Hood with "The Death of Robin Hood" (USA 2026 | 123 min.), and replace it with honest medieval brutality. He's done that, and almost nothing else.

The film sets the story of the outlaw in the Celtic fringe of 1247 A.D. Robin (Hugh Jackman) appears looking worse than anyone sleeping rough on a city street today, draped in layers of sodden fur and barely distinguishable from the mud he crawls through. He is, by design, a feral, self-mythologizing killer waiting for a death that's long overdue. After being pulled back into violence by his old partner Little John (Bill Skarsgård), Robin winds up gravely wounded at a hillside priory under the care of Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), a prioress with her own obscured past. Also living at the priory is the Leper (Murray Bartlett), another broken man surviving outside of society, who becomes Robin's most uncomfortable companion: part confessor, part provocateur, forcing Robin to look at himself without the mythology.

The Northern Irish locations are breathtaking in their ancient desolation, all rolling hills and rock-face under vast grey skies. Cinematographer Pat Scola shoots on celluloid and the landscape earns every foot of film. The fog, though, almost never lifts, literally or figuratively, and the film mistakes this shroud for atmosphere. Director Michael Sarnoski parks the camera in the murk and waits for profundity to arrive.

It mostly doesn't. The accent work across the ensemble is so thickly regional that key scenes become auditory puzzles rather than dramatic ones. The storytelling compounds the problem. For example, the bloodletting sequences between Brigid and Robin, drawn from the medieval ballads that inspired the film, might be meant to carry spiritual weight, but what exactly Brigid is doing to Robin's arm and why is never made legible enough to bear it.

The violence in the opening act is deliberately sloppy and ugly, distinguished from period-film spectacle. It also comes in waves that are harrowing to sit through and largely disconnected from any emotional stakes we've been given reason to feel. When Robin's death comes, it doesn't feel as earned salvation but as a formality the film was always going to observe regardless of whether we cared.

Hugh Jackman commits fully and there are flashes of something raw in the performance. Jodie Comer brings an otherworldly stillness to Brigid, a woman with a traumatic history the film gestures at without ever revealing. Murray Bartlett plays the Leper almost entirely through layers of bandages. The film hints that the true identity of the Leper has roots in the original Robin Hood ballads, but it is still written more as a vessel for grace than as a person.

However, Jim Ghedi's folk score is the film's most distinctive contribution: raw, ancient in feeling, and dark without overdoing it.

This is a serious film with serious intentions. It's also a difficult, confusing, and joyless experience that offers landscapes worth seeing and almost nothing worth feeling.

"The Death of Robin Hood" opens in theaters on Friday, June 19, 2026.

The film begins as a mystery worth pursuing. Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City television meteorologist, and Dr. Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), a cybersecurity expert for WARDEX (Waived Reporting, Development and Extraction), a shadowy military agency guarding classified evidence of alien visitation dating back to Roswell of 1947, each carry fragments of a past they cannot fully access or explain. David Koepp's screenplay doles out its clues with patience, and the intrigue holds for longer than you might expect.

Then the film becomes a chase picture. Once Margaret and Daniel go on the run from the authority led by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), the film shifts into a fairly conventional government-pursues-whistleblower thriller, complete with car chases, close calls, and narrow escapes. The picture has its exciting stretches: a sustained sequence involving a freight train and the two leads is a genuine piece of old-fashioned Spielbergian engineering.

But the central prop gives the story trouble. "The device," an artifact of recovered alien technology that different characters use in different ways, is a compelling idea on paper. In practice, what it can and cannot do keeps changing, functioning as a mind-control weapon in one scene and a portal to suppressed memory in another, shifting to whatever the plot requires at a given moment. No clear internal logic governs it, and the confusion compounds through the third act.

The climax is where the picture runs out of breath. The eventual disclosure of world-changing evidence, broadcast from a television news studio to a global audience, should arrive with the accumulated effort of all the running and chasing that preceded it. It does not. The staging is oddly perfunctory, the reaction oddly muted, and the scene raises more doubts about plausibility than it resolves. All that pursuit, to arrive here?

That craft is not in question. Production designer Adam Stockhausen's war room headquarters is genuinely imposing. John Williams' score holds back with unusual restraint. Emily Blunt and Josh O'Connor give more than the script asks for.

This film is Steven Spielberg operating at full technical capacity on a story that doesn't quite hold together at its foundation. The opening mystery is real. So is the disappointment when the film cannot sustain it.

"Disclosure Day" opens in theaters on Friday, June 12, 2026.

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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• Public Access (USA 2026 | 107 min. | Documentary)

  

  One of the festival's standout documentaries, "Public Access" Access* excavates the history of New York's public access television with urgency and genuine affection. Before the internet gave everyone a platform, a quirky regulatory mandate required cable companies to open their airwaves to the public, and what flooded in was extraordinary: outsiders, misfits, sexual boundary-pushers, activists, and artists who had no other outlet and nothing to lose. For three decades, Manhattan Cable became an uncurated, uncensored free-speech experiment unlike anything American television had seen.

  The LGBTQ+ dimension of this history is central, and the film is at its most compelling when it gets there. The Gay Cable Network used public access as a lifeline at a moment when AIDS was ravaging the community and mainstream media was largely looking away. In the New York of that era, with its unstable economy, underground culture, and an epidemic tearing through queer lives, these broadcasts did something radical: they made gay and trans people visible on their own terms. More than a nostalgia piece, the film becomes a reminder that visibility was never freely given. It had to be fought for through local stations, pirate sensibilities, and fiercely independent storytelling.

  Director David Shadrack Smith brings encyclopedic enthusiasm to the material, drawing on rare archival footage and interviews. That enthusiasm is also the film's limitation. The materials are fascinating but sprawling, and a tighter editorial hand would have served the story better. The film occasionally feels like the channels it celebrates: you keep watching, not always sure where it's going, but unable to quite look away.

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• Downtown (Netherlands 2026 | in Dutch | 98 min.)

  

  Few dramatic situations are as charged as gay men of a certain generation sitting down to reckon with each other, and with everything they survived. "Downtown" earns that charge fully: a confined reunion, years of accumulated grief and silence finally given a room, a table, and nowhere left to hide.

  In Amsterdam in 1986, the Downtown club is alive with music and bodies and freedom. Ronnie (Daniel Cornelissen) runs the DJ booth. Lennart (Sebastián Mrkvicka) comes to dance and takes whatever the night offers. Then Bas (Thor Braun), a 20-year-old artist, walks in and something shifts between the three of them. What forms is a bond built on love, excess, and the specific euphoria of being young and queer in a city that is, for one intoxicating moment, entirely theirs. Then the regulars begin to disappear, one by one, and the world they built starts to come apart.

  Thirty-five years later in 2021, Ronnie (Yorick van Wageningen), Bas (Roeland Fernhout), and Lennart (Hans Kesting) find themselves at a dinner table together for the first time in decades. Lennart has little patience for the COVID pandemic consuming the world outside. To a man who lived through the AIDS crisis, COVID registers as a "toy virus," an inconvenience dressed up as catastrophe by people who have no idea what a real plague looks like. That bitterness lands with particular force knowing that Kesting himself was diagnosed with HIV in 1996, a biographical fact that film's casting transforms into something close to testimony.

  Director Michiel van Erp cuts between the two timelines with remarkable fluency, never forcing the parallels between AIDS and COVID, letting them surface on their own. Both eras demanded disappearance. Both left survivors accounting for the distance between who they were and who they became. The performances across both timelines are extraordinary: the younger actors electric with physical confidence, the older trio bringing something harder and more weathered, men who learned to live with loss and are not quite sure what to do now that the past has returned.

  Selected as the opening night film of the Netherlands Film Festival later this year, "Downtown" receives its world premiere at Frameline50 at the Castro Theatre, and the weight of that setting is impossible to separate from the film itself. Watching it here feels like laying another panel on the quilt: a tribute to those who loved freely and dangerously, and to those who survived and are still, somehow, finding their way back to each other.

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• Montreal, My Beautiful (Montréal, ma belle | Canada 2025 | in French/Mandarin | 118 min.)

  

  A middle-aged Chinese immigrant in Montreal risks everything she has dutifully built—family, stability, and cultural belonging—when a long-suppressed desire for women finally refuses to stay buried. It is the story that director He Xiaodan's sophomore feature "Montreal, My Beautiful" presents with patience, bilingual texture, and a nuanced performance from Joan Chen.

  53-year-old Feng Xia (Joan Chen) has spent her life shaped by duty: to her family, her culture, and a loveless marriage. A Chinese immigrant in Montreal, she exists in a space between worlds, belonging fully to neither, carrying obligations that leave little room for desire. Then she meets a free spirited 30-year-old Camille (Charlotte Aubin) from a dating app, something that has been buried for decades begins to surface.

  What follows is less a love story than a reckoning. He Xiaodan, a Montreal-based Chinese-Canadian filmmaker and the first Chinese immigrant director to receive governmental grants in Quebec and Canada for a feature fiction film, structures the film around the collision of forces that have governed Feng Xia's entire existence: cultural expectation, maternal obligation, personal longing, and decades of deferred dreams. Each bears down on her with equal weight, and the film is meticulous in refusing to reduce any of them to a simple obstacle. The conflicts are internal as much as external, and the film gives them space to breathe across the film's running time.

  Joan Chen delivers a performance that is her hallmark: feelings expressed through the finest modulations of gesture and expression, an entire interior life made visible without a word spoken. She has always been an actor who trusts stillness, and He Xiaodan's direction trusts her in return. The moments where Feng Xia registers what she is risking and what she has already lost are rendered with a precision that no amount of dialogue could improve on.

  The film is also remarkable for using its bilingualism. Within Feng Xia's household, Chinese and French coexist as a generational fault line: the parents speak Mandarin, the children answer in French, each holding on to its own language as a form of identity and rootedness. That two tongues can share a home and still speak past each other says something profound about immigration, about the distances that open up between people who love each other, and about the particular loneliness of a woman caught between the world she came from and the one her children are already living in.

  This is a deeply felt film that holds its contradictions without resolving them. Liberation, it suggests, always comes at a cost, and the film is honest enough to show us the bill.

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• Trial of Hein (Der Heimatlose | Germany 2026 | in German | 122 min.)

  

  The English title of Kai Stänicke's feature directorial debut "Trial of Hein" indicates a trial of someone. But the original German title, "Der Heimatlose," means "the one without a home," which is closer to what the film is actually about: not whether Hein is telling the truth, but whether he belongs here, and whether here is even where he's looking.

  Hein (Paul Boche) steps off a boat after fourteen years away and walks straight into a wall of blank stares. His best friend from childhood, Friedemann (Philip Froissant), doesn't recognize him. Neither does his sister Heide (Stephanie Amarell), nor his mother Mechthild (Irene Kleinschmidt), who has troubles of her own placing anyone these days. The village, suspicious of strangers and not in the habit of forgiving them, convenes a tribunal to settle the matter once and for all: is this man really who he says he is?

  Director Kai Stänicke stages all of it on an open-walled set built into the dunes: cottages reduced to a wall or two, rooms exposed to the wind and to us—a design inspired by "Dogville" (2023). The court itself is conceived as a kind of amphitheater, a literal stage for what the film keeps insisting is a performance anyway. Everyone here is acting, the staging argues, whether they know it or not.

  That's the point buried in the premise, and also the film's real engine. On paper, a village putting a returning son through a multi-day trial to decide his identity sounds like overkill: how hard can it be to recognize someone you grew up with? But as the testimonies stack up and nobody's memories line up, including Hein's own, the trial stops feeling like it's about facts at all.

  Hein, it turns out, isn't just defending himself; he's also searching, through all of this, for somewhere he might actually belong. The village, meanwhile, is effectively handing down a verdict on his future among them, weighing evidence from a childhood during which, it becomes clear, he never felt like he belonged to them at all. He's asked to prove he's the boy they remember, but that boy was already hiding, already performing a version of belonging he didn't feel. So the verdict the trial produces isn't really about Hein's honesty. It's a ruling on a place's right to claim you simply because you once lived there—and on Hein's own desire, after everything, to be claimed.

  Florian Mag's cinematography finds something genuinely beautiful in all that bleakness, turning the islands of Norderney and Sylt into a backdrop that's gorgeous and faintly hostile at once. It's the kind of debut that announces a filmmaker with a strong visual idea and the patience to let it pay off slowly. Coming off with a Teddy Jury Award at Berlinale, this terrific film comes to Frameline50 as one of the strongest titles in the lineup, and a reminder that the most universal stories about identity are often the most specific ones.

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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.