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

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

Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day is a whistleblower alien chase thriller that is really about a 79-year-old filmmaker fighting back against cynicism with the only weapon he has ever had. Emily Blunt is extraordinary, the freight train setpiece is the best Hollywood action sequence of the year, and the script can't always earn the optimism the direction insists on. We talk about where this sits in Spielberg's alien filmography, what Blunt does that makes the whole thing cohere, and whether any of us were truly resistant to being moved by it. We were not.

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

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

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

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

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

We open day eleven with Maria Martínez Bayona's debut The End of It, in which Rebecca Hall plays a 250-year-old former provocateur who has decided she wants to die, and her death is her final artwork. The high concept is genuinely fascinating, the birthday party sequence is one of the best scenes at the festival, and Hall is extraordinary throughout. We talk about why the film can't quite match her commitment, what the bones room says about immortality and the self, and why this is still worth seeing despite everything it leaves on the table.

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