The back half of the year flies. At least for me.
No sooner do we enter August’s dog days that, without warning and yet relentlessly advertised online, the fall film festival blitz begins: Locarno, Venice, Telluride, Toronto, Fantastic Fest, New York, with other smaller regional events sprinkled amongst them. It’s a lot to keep abreast of. Once upon a time, festival FOMO haunted me. Now, with so many festivals vying for attention and expanding their profiles, the feeling is closer to exhaustion. In the grand scheme of things, that’s not the worst complaint to make or the worst problem to have. I secretly kind of like the festival chaos.
And now we’re here. At the end of the year. I’ve had enough time to recover and decide which marquee hyped up films are worth your time and attention. Some of these movies, of course, roundly earn their mentions, but plenty of others end up overlooked in the rush among critics and journalists to name the next king of awards season. That’s what I’m here for. To let you know which hot button films fresh off the festival circuit you should be on the lookout for as we head toward year end, and to toss out a few less lauded ones to put on your calendar for 2026.
The Restoration at Grayson Manor
If you like: Glee
You should watch: The Restoration at Grayson Manor
I’m starting this list by cheating. Glee, if you recall, is a television show, not a 73-hour long movie. But the spirit of Ryan Murphy’s 2000s-era high school dramedy is better captured in Glenn McQuaid’s campy queer horror comedy. The association between Glee and the film’s lead, Chris Colfer, helps; Colfer plays Boyd, the overprivileged and especially snarky sole heir to the Grayson family name, who divides his time between halfheartedly pursuing his music career and bedding strangers he picks up at nightclubs. Alice Krige plays his mother, Jacqueline, who unsurprisingly does not approve of her boy’s lifestyle, but nonetheless pays out the nose for high-tech miracle surgery when a bloody accident in the picture’s prologue leaves Boyd literally unhanded. McQuaid echoes EC Comics in his plot, where just about everybody’s terrible and deserves whatever they get. Whether that’s a gory dismissal or, in Boyd’s and Jacqueline’s, each other. All wrapped in a brisk, lively take on queer horror comedy.
Dolly
If you like: The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
You should watch: Dolly
The synopsis printed in Fantastic Fest’s 2025 program connects the dots between Rod Blackhurst’s Dolly and broadly defined inspirations: New French Extremity and “1970s American horror.” The latter’s a clever way of saying The Texas Chain Saw Massacre without saying The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. As much as Dolly has in common with films like Frontier(s), Inside, Martyrs, and High Tension speaking to degrees of gruesome, graphic violence, the bond between Blackhurst’s story and Tobe Hooper’s genre all-timer and masterpiece of American cinema is impossible to gloss over. In Dolly, just as in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the audience observes a vision of prototypical American life performed in the most warped way possible, by a person with simple wants but such a profoundly broken spirit that the only methods they know for fulfilling those wants are barbaric. Fabianne Therese has been a fixture of indie horror for ages, and graduates here to a higher status befitting her skillset as both a petrified victim and determined hero. She’s complimented well by Max Lindsey, who from behind a porcelain mask manages the demanding feat of performing both the hulking brute and the damaged human being tucked within.
The Secret Agent
If you like: The Constant Gardener
You should watch: The Secret Agent
Picking one movie as a comparison point for Kleber Mendonça Filho’s extraordinary period piece thriller makes a Herculean feat look preferable. Alfred Hitchcock, the Coen brothers, Alan J. Pakula, and Steven Soderbergh come to mind. So do films like Giuseppe Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, and even Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, where deep currents of love for the movies themselves run through the plot. The Secret Agent hangs comfortably within both categories, but it’s so personalized to Filho’s childhood in Recife, the state capital of Pernambuco in Brazil, and so attached to an era of authoritarian rule over the country, that it remains thoroughly distinguished from its closest kin. Wagner Moura plays the film’s lead, a mystery man named Marcelo, whose purpose in going back to Recife remains cloudy for roughly the first hour and a quarter of a two and a half hour running time; this is likewise a Filho calling card, the slow-burn where smoldering becomes a pleasure rather than a pain. Neon snapped up distribution rights to The Secret Agent at Cannes, where Filho won Best Director. When the film plays at your local arthouse, amble your way over. There’s nothing else quite like it this year.
Silver Screamers
If you like: One Cut of the Dead
You should watch: Silver Screamers
Shin’ichirō Ueda’s wonderful “let’s put on a show” found footage lite horror film One Cut of the Dead is inimitable, which didn’t stop Michel Hazanavicius from remaking it four years after its debut. Amazingly, Hazanavicius made a solid rejoinder to Ueda’s original. More amazingly, Sean Cisterna’s Silver Screamers, a charming little documentary about retirement home residents who shoot a horror movie of their very own under Cisterna’s guidance, shares stronger with the Ueda film than Hazanavicius’ does. The joy of making movies pulses in both. Granted, One Cut of the Dead is a scrappy movie-within-a-movie and Silver Screamers is a documentary. They function on completely different levels of reality. All the same, it’s a delight getting to know Cisterna’s cast of codgers as they dip their toes in waters only a scant few of them have either familiarity or interest in. It’s important to try new things, folks! Even when you’re an octogenarian.
No Other Choice
If you like: There Will Be Blood
You should watch: No Other Choice
In awards season’s revving din, chatter about Park Chan-wook’s latest picture, No Other Choice, grows ever-louder. Not because anyone has much to say about it that’s worth the click, but because seemingly everyone is eager to call it this year’s Parasite. In fairness. Yes. There’s plenty of connective tissue binding Bong Joon-ho’s 2019 masterpiece of class satire to Park’s tale of bad people behaving badly in a bad commercial environment with bad prospects for labor’s future. And yes, true, Park and Bong are cornerstone figures of South Korea’s New Wave. Be that as it may, there’s just as much of Paul Thomas Anderson’s American oil baron epic, There Will Be Blood, in No Other Choice as Parasite. Here, Lee Byung-hun plays Man-su, an upper middle manager in the paper industry, with a gorgeous wife, a modern, lux house, two kids, two dogs, and indulgences aplenty. Until the day comes when business does what it always does and makes him obsolete. Refusing to accept a downgraded life, Man-su sets out to reclaim his status by murdering potential competition. Park’s cinema is home to a great deal of black comedy, but none of his movies to date engage in gallows humor as consistently as No Other Choice. In fact, it’s arguably the funniest effort in his body of work, which makes its tragedies and horrors all the more excruciating to wrestle with.
