YNOT at the Movies

Now in its 69th year, the San Francisco International Film Festival, the longest-running film festival in the Americas, returns April 24 through May 4, 2026, for eleven days of cinema spanning the full breadth of human experience. This year's program brings together 79 programs from 40 countries, a genuinely global slate ranging from intimate family dramas and experimental poetry films to crackling genre thrillers, urgent political documentaries, and animated adventures for the youngest moviegoers.

Across narrative features and documentaries alike, filmmakers grapple with displacement and belonging, addiction and recovery, colonial legacy, queer identity, ecological grief, and the quiet heroism of ordinary people. There are films rooted in Gaza hospitals and Scottish villages, Congolese refugee camps and suburban Tokyo, the streets of San Francisco and the highlands of Montenegro. Several titles carry the heat of the present moment, touching on immigration, the Palestinian conflict, and political resistance, while others find their power in the timeless: grief, ambition, and love in all its crooked forms.

Opening Night returns to the newly restored Castro Theatre with an audacious double feature. Director Kent Jones's "Late Fame" (USA 2025) sets a warmly witty tone before director Olivia Wilde's "The Invite" (USA 2026), a San Francisco-set story screening on 35mm with the director attending in person, closes the evening on a wilder, more transgressive note as a genuine hometown celebration.

Closing Night on May 4th could not be more perfectly timed. On a date that fans everywhere celebrate as Star Wars Day ("May the 4th be with you"), "Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back" (USA 1980) screens at the Castro Theatre with actor Anthony Daniels in conversation.

The 2026 SFFILM Festival is exclusively in theaters and event spaces in San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley including the Castro Theatre, the Premier Theater at One Letterman, the Marina Theatre, the Presidio Theatre, the Roxie Theater, the Grand Lake Theatre, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).

Here is a closer look at a few of the films at this year's festival.

• The Fox King (Malaysia/Indonesia 2025 | in Malay/Indonesian | 94 min.)

  

  Having previously brought "Monday Morning Glory" (2005) and "Woman on Fire Looks for Water" (2009) to the SFFILM festival, Malaysian filmmaker Woo Ming Jin returns with "The Fox King", his most poetically charged work yet.

  Fraternal twin brothers Amir (Hadi Putra) and Ali (Idan Aedan) grew up in the shadow of their mother's death in childbirth, and as teenagers find themselves displaced again when their father remarries and takes a new wife. Left to fend for themselves, the brothers work for a local fisherman who provides them with basic shelter.

  The two could not be more different. Amir is a young man of few words who communicates largely through animal names, yet his deep love of books forges an unlikely bond with Lara (Dian Sastrowardoyo), a new English teacher carrying wounds of her own. As that connection grows, Ali's jealousy quietly festers, and what began as two brothers against the world slowly curdles into something more painful and complicated. Against a backdrop of human trafficking and their father's murky schemes, a looming kite flying competition becomes the test where everything between them finally comes to a head.

  Woo Ming Jin captures the tenderness, rivalry, and fierce love between the two brothers with extraordinary sensitivity. These performances, naturalistic and unguarded, are the film's beating heart. The storytelling is captivating and at times genuinely heartbreaking, grounding its fable-like quality in the textures of a world, rural Malaysia with its sand beach and shadowy undercurrents, that cinema rarely visits. If the ending feels somewhat deflating given the emotional stakes so carefully built, it is a minor frustration in an otherwise arresting piece of work. This film is exactly the kind of film a festival like SFFILM exists to bring to light.

  ---

• Filipiñana (Singapore/UK/Philippines/Netherlands/France 2026 | in Tagalog/English | 100 min.)

  

  "Filipiñana" is a visually sumptuous and thematically rich debut from Rafael Manuel, using the manicured lawns of a Manila golf club as a subtly damning canvas for exploring class, colonialism, and power in the Philippines, and there are moments where its slow-burn atmosphere genuinely crackles with intrigue. But the film too often lets its deliberate pace tip into stagnation, and a handful of tonal missteps, comic beats that sit awkwardly against the film's otherwise cool, unsettling mood, keep it from fully cohering into the sharp social fable it clearly aspires to be. It's the kind of film that will find devoted admirers on the arthouse circuit, and rightly so, but for all its creative vision and impressive cinematography, it ultimately remains a little too remote and uneven to leave the deep impression it deserves.

  The film is slated for a later theatrical release by Kino Lorber.

  ---

• Elder Son (Hijo mayor | Argentina/France 2025 | in Spanish/Korean | 118 min.)

  

  Winner of the Best Emerging Director Award at the Locarno Film Festival 2025, director Cecilia Kang's debut feature "Elder Son" comes to the SFFILM with considerable festival pedigree and an ambition that is immediately evident on screen.

  Structured in three distinct parts, the film is clearly a deeply personal excavation of the filmmaker's own identity and family history. The first part centers on a young Korean Argentinian teenager Lila (Anita B Queen) grappling with her sense of belonging, caught between two cultures, two languages, and two worlds. The second shifts into a reenactment of her father Antonio's (Sang Bin Suh) journey, a young Korean man who left his homeland behind and built a new life in South America, capturing the particular loneliness and quiet resolve of the immigrant experience. By the third part, the director abandons narrative filmmaking altogether, moving into documentary territory as if the weight of the story could no longer be contained by fiction alone.

  That structural boldness is both the film's greatest strength and its most significant liability. The intimacy of Cecilia Kang's inquiry, watching a filmmaker search for herself through the lives of those who came before her, gives the film its most affecting moments. Yet the film drifts constantly between its three registers without always giving the audience enough emotional footing to follow. The meditative pace occasionally tips into inertia, and the episodic structure, while intentional, creates a detachment that keeps viewers at a distance precisely when closeness is most needed.

  Cecilia Kang's visual instincts are assured and the Locarno recognition is well deserved. But as a cinematic experience, this film feels more rewarding as a personal artistic statement than as a story that draws you in and refuses to let go.

  ---

• Two Pianos (Deux pianos | France 2025 | in French | 115 min.)

  

  "Two Pianos" is a film that promises a duet but delivers a solo, following the brooding Mathias (François Civil) as he returns to Lyon and confronts the unresolved mysteries of his past, a journey that is intermittently compelling but ultimately too opaque to fully resonate. Director Arnaud Desplechin crafts the film with his characteristic literary sensibility, drawing on a story rooted in impossible love and the weight of solitude that connects all his characters, yet the emotional payoff feels elusive. The title itself proves a little misleading: rather than a true two-hander between Mathias and Elena (Charlotte Rampling), the legendary pianist who serves as his former mentor and guiding force, the film is largely consumed by Mathias's inner turmoil, leaving Charlotte Rampling's formidable presence as little more than an afterthought, never given enough screen time to justify her place as the so-called second piano of the title. François Civil carries the burden of the story with magnetism as Mathias, but the film around him never quite rises to meet the depth it reaches for.

  The film is slated for a later theatrical release by Kino Lorber.

• Who Moves America (USA 2026 | 87 min. | Documentary)

  

  Directed by Yael Bridge, the documentary "Who Moves America" embeds itself within the lives of UPS Teamsters as they inch toward a potential historic strike, marking it as one of the more essential portraits of contemporary America in this year's lineup. Following workers across California, New York, and Kentucky, the film foregrounds the grind of organizing, not as a triumphant march but as something more tangled: a tug-of-war between solidarity and self-interest, between collective hope and individual survival. Archival fragments from the 1997 strike echo through the present, giving the story a sense of cyclical struggle, like footsteps retracing and reshaping an old path.

  The film succeeds most in humanizing the "brown uniform" workforce, turning what is often an invisible labor force into a mosaic of specific lives. You begin to see the delivery not as convenience, but as consequence. In that sense, it accomplishes its core mission: to make the audience reconsider the hands behind the packages.

  Yet for a story rooted in one of the largest labor negotiations in North America, the film oddly pulls its punches when it comes to scale. We're told these workers are vital to the U.S. economy, that their decisions could ripple across global supply chains, but the magnitude remains more stated than felt. The documentary stays close to its subjects, sometimes so close that the broader picture blurs out of view. A wider lens could have better conveyed just how deeply these workers are woven into everyday consumer expectations.

  There's also a lingering sense that the film could have dug deeper into its own characters. The access is there, the stakes are there, but the storytelling doesn't always press hard enough to uncover the more revealing contradictions or emotional undercurrents. As a result, the narrative can feel less gripping than its subject matter promises, occasionally settling into observation when it might have benefited from sharper excavation.

  This documentary is a thoughtful, well-intentioned look at labor in motion, one that sparks reflection even if it doesn't fully ignite. It opens the door, but doesn't quite walk us all the way through.

A young painter and sometime-forger named Lori (Michaela Coel) is hired by the estranged children of aging artist Julian Sklar (Ian McKellen) to infiltrate his cluttered London home and complete a series of long-abandoned canvases. The series, known as The Christophers, represents some of Julian's most personal and unfinished work, its incompleteness tied to a past love whose absence haunts both the paintings and the man himself.

Julian's children's scheme is straightforward enough: get the canvases finished, get them sold, and secure an inheritance before the old man dies. What unfolds from this decidedly corrupt arrangement is one of the most captivating exchanges between two characters you're likely to see on screen this year. Savvy audiences may find themselves ahead of the story at times, as certain turns telegraph themselves early, but the journey remains compelling enough that predictability rarely diminishes the pleasure of watching it unfold.

Ian McKellen delivers what can only be described as a masterclass. As Julian, caustic, brilliant, broken, and achingly lonely, he inhabits a man reckoning with mortality, irrelevance, and a lifetime of self-imposed emotional exile. Every line lands with the weight of decades behind it. He can be devastating and darkly funny within the same breath, and watching him dissect his own character's subtext feels like witnessing something genuinely rare. This is acting at its most fearless and most human.

Michaela Coel more than holds her own opposite him. Her Lori enters the story under false pretenses, yet she makes her completely magnetic, sharp, guarded, and electrified by the world she has stepped into. The chemistry between the two artists is the film's beating heart, and their exchanges crackle with intelligence, antipathy, and a strange, grudging tenderness that neither character quite knows what to do with.

What's refreshing, genuinely and deeply refreshing, is Steven Soderbergh's confidence in restraint. Working from Ed Solomon's tightly crafted screenplay, he trusts that two extraordinary people in a room talking is more than enough. There are no elaborate set pieces, no narrative pyrotechnics. Just faces, words, and the weight of what goes unspoken. A reported 33-minute dialogue sequence in the film's second act could feel like a risk; instead, it feels like a gift. His camera, handheld inside Julian's house and deliberately steady outside it, keeps you subtly unsettled without ever calling attention to itself, direction so assured it disappears into the storytelling.

The house itself functions almost as a third major character: a monument to self-imposed seclusion, packed with the accumulated detritus of a brilliant life half-lived. Production designer Antonia Lowe has crafted a space that feels genuinely inhabited and genuinely haunted.

The film is a reminder, one we apparently need, that a film can be intimate in scale and enormous in emotional scope. It is funny, sad, morally thorny, and largely satisfying despite its occasional predictability. In an era of relentless visual noise, the filmmakers have made something genuinely radical: a story about art, legacy, family, and fraud that trusts its audience completely.

"The Christophers" opens in theaters on Friday, April 17, 2026.

From the opening minutes, Nadav Lapid signals that conventional storytelling is not his priority. The camera moves with restless, dizzying energy, and the soundscape is deliberately overwhelming, designed to leave viewers feeling unmoored. This is a conscious artistic decision, and there is a certain integrity to that commitment. Whether it translates into a rewarding experience, however, will depend enormously on what you are looking for from a film.

Those hoping for a clear narrative thread may find themselves adrift. The movie moves freely between musical sequences, satirical set pieces, and moments of genuine provocation, with little interest in traditional story logic. Y. is written as a passive figure who composes rather than speaks and submits rather than resists, while Yasmin channels her own complicity through movement and dance. As a thematic statement about artistic complicity in wartime, this makes sense. As a viewing experience across two and a half hours, it asks a great deal of patience from its audience.

There are genuine highlights here. The film's musical tragedy elements have real energy, and film brings an undeniable visual boldness to several sequences. Naama Preis as Leah, Y.'s former lover and arguably the film's only true voice, offers a grounded and compelling performance that stands apart from the surrounding chaos. These moments hint at what a slightly more disciplined version of this film might have achieved.

Ultimately, this is a work that prioritises ideology and sensation over connection. Nadav Lapid's anger at the state of modern Israel is sincere and deeply felt, and that sincerity deserves acknowledgment. But a film that intentionally disorients, shocks, and withholds narrative coherence will find only a narrow audience willing to meet it fully on its own terms.

"Yes" opens in the San Francisco Bay Area theaters on Friday, April 10, 2026.

Anna (Halle Bailey) is a drifting twenty-something in New York who has abandoned her dreams of becoming a chef and lost her housing after a disastrous house-sitting job. A chance encounter with charming Italian Matteo (Lorenzo De Moor) leads her to impulsively fly to Tuscany to crash at his empty villa, just for one night. When Matteo's mother Gabriella (Isabella Ferrari) and grandmother Nonna (Stefania Casini) show up unexpectedly, Anna panics and pretends to be his fiancée. The lie unravels further when Matteo's cousin Michael (Regé-Jean Page) arrives, and Anna finds herself falling for entirely the wrong person in entirely the right place.

To its credit, that shameless escapism is precisely the film's engine. On paper, Anna could easily read as a con woman, a liar who breaks into homes and strings people along. Yet, the film's feel-good spirit is a masterclass in audience manipulation, in the best possible sense. That is because Anna is so disarmingly charming that you forgive her every transgression and you want her to get away with it, and so she does, again and again. The audiences don't come to a romantic comedy for legal plausibility; they come to root for someone.

Michael, steadfast and kind, runs the family vineyard while his cousin gallivants around the world, and provides exactly the kind of smoldering counterweight the story needs. Their chemistry is undeniable. The supporting Costa family, warmly drawn and enthusiastically performed, gives Anna's deception real emotional stakes, which is more than the script strictly deserves.

Then there is Tuscany itself. The film is absolutely gorgeous: sun-kissed vineyards in Val d'Orcia, a UNESCO-listed Pienza streetscape, the grandeur of Cinecittà Studios reimagined as an elegant family home. Cinematographer Danny Ruhlmann captures Italy not as a postcard but as a living, breathing world. The food, prepared by a Michelin-level chef, looks extraordinary. If the film's only ambition were to make you book a flight to Florence, it would be a resounding success.

But the film has a language problem, because it is a persistent, nagging one. The film's characters slip between Italian and English as though the two languages are interchangeable, which anyone who has spent time in rural Tuscany will tell you is far from the reality. The film's constant switching between English and Italian never finds a coherent logic. Why would a Tuscan father argue with his son in English? The answer, of course, is so that audiences don't have to read subtitles. But this kind of contrivance breaks the spell of the authentically Italian atmosphere the production worked so hard to create. For a film that pushed its cast and crew to embrace genuine regional detail, and that boasts real Italian locations and an Italian-born lead actor, the language treatment feels oddly lazy and strangely random.

This is not a film that will ask anything of you; not belief, not logic, not patience with subtitles. It is beautiful people in a beautiful place doing implausible things, wrapped in warmth and good food. Depending on what you need from a weekend night, that may be exactly enough. But a story this unbelievable, told this prettily, earns admiration for its charm and gentle contempt for its craft.

"You, Me & Tuscany" opens in theaters on Friday, April 10, 2026.

Based on Kotake Create's wildly popular indie video game, the film follows a man known only as The Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya), trapped in an endless underground passage and forced to spot subtle anomalies in its repeating design in order to inch closer to the exit. It is the kind of high-concept that feels urgently cinematic: claustrophobic, surreal, ripe with dread.

The early sequences deliver on that potential. The sterile corridor hums with unease, and Kazunari Ninomiya carries the film almost entirely on his face, his bewildered stillness pulling you into the loop alongside him. Each repetition lands with a low, creeping dread, slightly off in ways that take a moment to place.

But cinema is not a video game. Where the game's loop functions as an interactive puzzle and the player determines the repetition meaning and resolves the tension, the film asks its audience to be passive witnesses to the same corridor, again and again. What feels intriguing and enigmatic in the first act calcifies into tedium by the second. Without a hand on the controller, the looping loses its power. It becomes not a mechanism of dread but a structural crutch.

Director Genki Kawamura attempts to open the world by introducing additional figures: a robotic The Walking Man (Yamato Kochi), a mysterious The Woman (Nana Komatsu), and a confused The Boy (Naru Asanuma). These characters appear as potential anomalies, as possible keys to the puzzle. But the screenplay offers them little to do beyond existing as visual riddles. They orbit The Lost Man without deepening his story or meaningfully expanding the film's themes of guilt and eternal recurrence.

Sensing that atmosphere alone cannot sustain a 95-minute feature, the film pivots in its third act toward outright horror: grotesque imagery, jarring sound design, incidents that lean into the bizarre and the shocking. But these moments register more as gross than terrifying. They feel less like organic escalations and more like a filmmaker rattling the cage of his own limitations, reaching for sensation when the story has run out of ideas.

The film wants audiences to feel they have "wandered into one of M.C. Escher's optical illusions," and structurally, the film does echo Escher's impossible staircases. The trouble is that an Escher drawing is something you study and then leave. The film locks you inside one for an hour and a half.

After the accumulation of loops and strangeness, the resolution arrives with the emotional weight of a shrug, as if the corridor simply stops repeating without ever explaining why it mattered that it did. The film is formally faithful to the source material's setting and rules, but it captures little of what made the game compulsive. In a game, failure sends you back to the beginning with new resolve. In this film, you just go back to the beginning, waiting for a way out that never quite materialized.

"Exit 8" opens in the Bay Area theaters on Friday, April 10, 2026. Director Genki Kawamura will be in San Francisco for a Special Q&A screening on Sunday April 12, 2026.

The premise is deceptively simple. Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) are blissfully engaged and the wedding is just days away. They sit down to finalize the wine selection for the wedding reception with the bride's maid Rachel (Alana Haim) and Rachel's husband Mike (Mamoudou Athie), also Charlie's long time friend. A game, What's the Worst Thing You've Ever Done?, is all it takes. Emma reveals a moment from her adolescence, an episode from when she was fifteen years old, and the atmosphere in the room shifts irrevocably.

From here, the filmmaker engineers a masterfully escalating second act. The revelation itself is withheld just long enough to let dread pool in the silence before it finally lands, and when it does, the film's already-taut emotional architecture begins to crack in every direction at once.

What makes the film so compelling is how scrupulously it refuses to take sides. It presents both Emma and Charlie as people we genuinely like, which makes their unraveling truly painful to watch. Emma, shaped by a difficult Louisiana childhood and a lifelong hunger to belong, is sympathetic without being a saint. Charlie, buttoned-up and fragile behind his charming British composure, is believably both decent and flawed. The film asks a very difficult question: how much of a person's past are we entitled to judge? And it has the integrity to leave it unanswered.

Zendaya brings a genuine warmth to Emma, a woman who has spent a lifetime trying to earn the love of rooms she was never sure she deserved to be in. Every flicker of insecurity, every brave attempt at openness, registers with aching specificity. Robert Pattinson, meanwhile, does what few actors can: he makes repression fascinating. Charlie's slow implosion, his inability to simply feel something and let it pass, is as funny as it is heartbreaking, a portrait of a man who has never had to confront anything truly hard until now. Together they are a couple you believe in completely, which means you feel every fissure as the ground shifts beneath them.

But not everything lands with the same conviction. A subplot involving Charlie and a coworker feels somewhat perfunctory, the character dynamics too thinly sketched to be convincing. It reads less as an authentic strand of the story and more as scaffolding, a mechanism put in place to nudge the plot toward where the film needs it to go toward the climax.

Threading through it all is Daniel Pemberton's score, a miracle of restraint and it never swells manipulatively to tell us how to feel. It doesn't mimic the film's mood or condescends to the audience; instead it breathes alongside the characters, rising and retreating with an intuition that feels almost novelistic. There is not a single cue that overstays its welcome or arrives a beat too early.

This is a film that trusts its audience enough to sit with discomfort, and generous enough to leave something tender beneath all the turbulence. A few awkward plot mechanics aside, it is a sharp, funny, and surprisingly captivating piece of work.

"The Drama" opens in theaters on Friday, April 3, 2026.

The film assembles an impressive roster of interviewees. Tech leaders such as Sam Altman (OpenAI), Demis Hassabis (Google), and Dario Amodei (Anthropic) appear alongside skeptics, historians, and ethicists including Yuval Noah Harari and Tristan Harris. The access is striking, the conversations urgent, the stakes framed in nothing less than existential terms.

Yet for all its formidable lineup and apocalyptic rhetoric, the film often circles its subject rather than pinning it down. We hear repeated warnings that AI could spiral beyond human control, that corporate incentives favor speed over safety, that a geopolitical race dynamic could accelerate catastrophe. The sound bites are ominous, but the dangers remain largely abstract.

Concrete examples are surprisingly scarce. While the documentary speaks in sweeping hypotheticals about extinction level risk and runaway systems, it avoids sustained engagement with documented incidents in which AI systems have already caused harm, including reported cases of chatbots encouraging self harm. Without these illustrations, the alarm can feel abstract. We are told the is near, but rarely shown the terrain beneath our feet.

The film also leans heavily on handmade animation, stop motion, and collage. The tactile aesthetic is designed to counterbalance the cold logic of code with something recognizably human. At times, the craft is inventive and charming. At others, the constant visual embellishment distracts from what could have been a tighter, more coherent argument about AI safety and governance.

The film's guiding philosophy, "apocaloptimism," proposes a carefully measured hope, a call for regulation and democratic oversight rather than blind acceleration or fatalism. But after nearly two hours of polarized camps and high stakes speculation, viewers may leave feeling less galvanized than adrift. The documentary insists that we still have agency, yet offers few specifics about how that agency might realistically be exercised. The suggestion that lobbying politicians might solve the problem hardly feels convincing.

This documentary is undeniably timely and asks urgent questions about technology, power, and responsibility. What it lacks is the granular evidence and structural clarity that might transform unease into understanding. It leaves us at that crossroads, fully aware of the fork in the road, still squinting for signposts.

"The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist" opens in theaters on Friday, March 27, 2026.

The premise picks up frame-for-frame where the first film ended. Grace discovers she hasn't escaped anything; she's merely advanced to the next level of a far larger and older game. As it turns out, the Le Domas family was only one of several elite dynasties bound together by a supernatural pact, and whoever hunts down Grace and claims the High Seat of the Council controls it all. Four rival families are now competing to do just that: the old-money Danforths, the opportunistic El Caídos, the calculating Wans, and the blustery Rajans. They are hunting Grace, but also actively trying to sabotage each other, since only one family can claim the throne. On paper, this sounds like delicious anarchy. In practice, it's a crowded and unwieldy contraption whose rules keep shifting just when you're trying to care about any of it. The game felt menacingly specific in the first film; here it feels like mythology that exists primarily to justify more carnage rather than generate genuine suspense.

The original film's genius was its economy. One house. One bride. One terrible night. Everything escalated within a closed pressure cooker, which is precisely why it worked. The sequel sprawls across hospitals, country clubs, golf courses, and a gothic temple built inside an abandoned church, but spatial grandeur doesn't replace the claustrophobia that made the first film tick.

Then there are the eruptions. The first film's wicked signature joke was watching characters suddenly explode in a full-body burst of blood, equal parts grotesque and absurd. Used sparingly, it landed with perfect comic horror timing. The sequel, which reportedly deployed around 325 gallons of stage blood through a custom-built 360-degree air cannon, treats the gag as a recurring main course. By the third or fourth time someone goes off like a geyser of crimson, the shock has curdled into a numbing routine. The brilliance of those moments was always their surprise; you cannot repeatedly sell an audience something they now fully expect.

Samara Weaving remains a force of nature, and her commitment to Grace is beyond reproach. But the film asks us to accept that a woman absorbing injuries that would hospitalize anyone simply keeps sprinting and brawling with barely a pause for consequence. The first film made Grace's survival feel desperate and earned. Here, the physical accumulation becomes an unintentional comedy of its own, though not quite the kind the filmmakers intended.

Faith (Kathryn Newton), Grace's estranged sister, is brought to life with energy and genuine comic timing, and the chemistry between the two leads has real warmth. But the sisterhood subplot keeps pulling the brakes on the film's momentum. Every time the violence machine begins to generate heat, we're redirected to the sisters' unresolved feelings. Neither thread gets quite enough room, and the horror-comedy engine and the emotional reconciliation story run on different rhythms that never fully synchronize.

This horror movie is not without pleasures, and fans who want more of everything the first film offered will find it served in heaping portions. But excess is not the same thing as intensity, and the sequel mistakes scale for stakes. The original's wit came from knowing exactly when to pull the rug. Here, the rug has been pulled so many times there's nothing left beneath your feet but chaos.

"Ready or Not 2: Here I Come" opens in theaters on Friday, March 20, 2026.

Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), a middle school science teacher, wakes up on a spacecraft light years from Earth, his memories returning in slow, disorienting fragments. As he pieces together the truth, one thing becomes clear: he is humanity's last, best hope of stopping the sun from going dark. It's a fascinating setup, intimate and eerie, and for its first act the film makes superb use of that solitude. Grace alone in the void, rationing his wits alongside his oxygen, conjures the same stripped-back tension that made "Gravity" (2013) so viscerally effective.

Then Rocky (voiced by James Ortiz) arrives, and the film becomes something else entirely.

Rocky is a spider-like, rock-armored alien who has traveled from his own star system chasing the same solar mystery. The craft involved in bringing him to life is genuinely remarkable, puppetry work that reportedly pushed the limits of what has ever been built for cinema. If you have a soft spot for multi-limbed, faceless creatures, Rocky will win you over. If not, no amount of personality will overcome the instinct to recoil.

The friendship that develops between Grace and Rocky is earnest, and the filmmakers clearly love it, treating it as the beating heart of the film. The intention is sweet. The execution, though, never quite achieves the emotional altitude it reaches for. The bond is charming rather than moving, and it never delivers the gut-punch the third act demands. Instead of drawing its power from something raw and primal, as "Gravity" did by stripping its story down to one person's pure will to survive, "Project Hail Mary" places all its emotional weight on a friendship that, despite everyone's best efforts, remains at a certain remove.

Part of the problem is that Grace himself is difficult to feel the full weight of. Ryan Gosling is excellent, funny and physically committed, doing precisely what the role asks. But the film struggles to make us feel the crushing burden of his mission, or what truly drives this unlikely hero to keep going when every rational option has run out. Without that core conviction, the stakes, however planetary in scale, drift.

Greig Fraser's cinematography is stunning in its warmth and intimacy, and the production design, a ship assembled by multiple nations with each capsule built by different hands, is one of the film's genuine triumphs, visually inventive and thematically coherent. However, at 2 hours and 36 minutes, the film also outstays its welcome. There is a tighter, more piercing version of the movie inside this one, a film that earns its emotional ending rather than simply arriving at it.

What remains is a movie with a genuinely big heart, impressive spectacle, and a belief in human connection that feels both sincere and, in the current moment, necessary. It just doesn't quite stick the landing it's been running toward for nearly three hours.

"Project Hail Mary" opens in theaters on Friday, March 20, 2026.

The premise is heartfelt: Kenna Rowan (Maika Monroe), released after seven years in prison for an accident that killed her boyfriend Scotty Landry (Rudy Pankow), returns to Laramie hoping to reunite with Diem (Zoe Kosovic), the daughter she has never been allowed to raise. Scotty's grieving parents, Grace (Lauren Graham) and Patrick (Bradley Whitford), guard the girl like a fortress. Into this minefield walks Ledger (Tyriq Withers), Scotty's oldest friend and local bar owner, who finds himself drawn to the very woman the family blames for their son's death. It is a genuinely rich setup. The film, unfortunately, does not know what to do with it.

To the screenplay's credit, there is not a villain in sight. Every character here is drawn with a recognizable decency: Kenna carries her guilt without self-pity, Grace's cruelty comes entirely from grief, Ledger's conflict is rooted in loyalty, and even the most obstructive characters are acting from a place the audience can understand. That generosity of spirit is genuinely disarming, and it earns the film a measure of goodwill early on. The trouble is that sympathy and resonance are not the same thing. We understand these people, we do not begrudge them, but we cannot quite feel what they feel. Their grief stays at arm's length. Their longing does not pull at us. Their hope, when it finally surfaces, registers as a plot development rather than a release. The film secures our sympathy with ease, then mistakes that for emotional connection, never doing the harder work of making us truly inhabit the story alongside them.

The film charts this territory in a mostly linear fashion that is easy enough to follow, perhaps too easy. The storytelling rarely surprises, and scenes that should accumulate into something devastating too often tick by at a pace that feels not just unhurried but sluggish. A significantly tighter cut would have helped. What the script mistakes for restraint repeatedly reads as stalling, and the film's two-hour runtime begins to feel like a test of patience well before the third act arrives.

More damaging is how thoroughly the script undermines its own surprises. Kenna's maternal longing is so overwhelming and so constant that every plot turn becomes predictable long before it arrives. The emotional revelations the film builds toward, the moments meant to catch the audience off guard, land with a familiar thud. All its cards are on the table within the first half hour.

The relationship between Ledger and the Landry family compounds the problem. For a man established as Scotty's oldest childhood friend, Ledger is conspicuously absent from any depiction of Kenna and Scotty's life together. The film offers no explanation for this gap, no falling out, no distance, nothing. Then, without acknowledgment of the inconsistency, Ledger has assumed a near-paternal role in young Diem's upbringing. It is a thread the screenplay never bothers to untangle, and it quietly undermines the emotional logic the entire story depends on.

Maika Monroe works hard in the lead role and occasionally breaks through, giving Kenna a worn, interior quality that suggests a performer capable of more than the material demands of her. Tyriq Withers is likable and physically credible. But these are performances in service of a script that has not done the necessary work, and the gap between what the actors are reaching for and what the writing actually provides becomes increasingly difficult to ignore.

This film tries very sincerely to break your heart, and there is something almost poignant about watching it fall short. It populates its world with people worth caring about, then fails to build the bridge that would make us care deeply. Sympathy without resonance is a lonely thing to sit with for two hours. The film reaches toward something real, stumbles over its own construction, and never quite recovers.

"Reminders of Him" opens in theaters on Friday, March 13, 2026.