2026 mid-year report: stars getting luckier
three movies about stealing // three movies I missed // five recommendations // some summer forecasts
My goal with this newsletter is to write about new films as they reach general release, along with seasonally appropriate commentary on other cinematic events and interests. Kind of a dump before I leave for Japan this week: some movies about stealing, some movies I missed, some mid-year recommendations, and some summer predictions. This newsletter comes out on Fridays, which this week means Saturday.
What a surprisingly great six months at the movies. I have nothing better in the way of a hook than that, sorry. I’m coming off one trip and getting ready for another one and have a bucket of loose ends to dump across this midyear report.There’s plenty to talk about and even more to look forward to, but for now here’s winter/spring 2026 reported in four ways: the state of MOVIES ABOUT STEALING, updates on movies I missed, first-half recommendations, and finally some predictions for the rest of the summer season.
We’ve been blessed? by quite a few MOVIES ABOUT STEALING this year. Starting with what I haven’t seen, we’ve the got Damon/Affleck Netflix slop The Rip, the latest non-existent Guy Ritchie movie In the Grey, the screen-life crypto-heist thriller LifeHack, and I swear something else that I noticed and said “huh they made that?” and then immediately forgot about it. All of these seem to be varying degrees of bad and I don’t make enough money writing this newsletter to see them. Thankfully we also got three watchable theatrical releases this spring about three classic forms of theft that hit on how a director can exceed, meet, or fail to meet the basic expectations of a heist film.
LARCENY. The techniques of stealing, or really the laws of reality in general, don’t get much representation in Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters. Instead we replace materialism with ethics, which is an odd move for an openly Marxist film, but who am I to gatekeep the Left. Instead of expounding on the methods of expropriation, Riley goes straight to the mechanics of dialectical materialism and deconstruction. He gets them both wrong and never gives us any instructions on how to shoplift, but he does pull off a pretty fun time. I knew this would essentially be a propaganda film going in, and I was sort of expecting an evolution from fuck-’em-over, I-get-mine anarcho-libertarianism to organized labor solidarity. It gets there, sort of. Kiki Palmer et al are shoplifters/resellers whose interrogation of the fast-fashion supply chain eventually puts them into contact with (St. Paul’s finest!) Poppy Liu, a Chinese factory worker who has somewhat inexplicably come into possession of a machine that manipulates reality based on the principles of Marxist dialectics sort of. Accelerated by the machine and efficient plotting, Boosters evolves from a shoplifting romp to something more revolutionary, not via a particularly rigorous path but through one that’s more or less satisfying.
Invoking theory and doing it wrong annoys me, but the more serious knock I’d put on Boosters’s theory of revolution is that it skips the hard part in favor of fantasy. A movie that acknowledges the necessity of class struggle needs to be grounded in material reality, and when you skip the labor - and all the setbacks that accompany that labor - and just jump to the general strike, it’s sort of like getting a feast without doing any of the cooking. Organized labor means organized *labor* - every bit as much work as wage labor but reordered toward solidarity, transformation, and a better future. It’s a dodge of the spirit of revolutionary organizing - and also the spirit of the heist movie - to skip over the material details and get right to the results. I realize I am arguing about realism in a film that features a demon that sucks women’s souls out of their vaginas, but I’m not the one who played the dialectical materialism card at the center of my film’s mechanics.
That said, I appreciate that Boosters smashes us over the head with its themes instead of pretending that subtlety matters in the struggle. I like the hammer that Boots is hitting me with, and more importantly I think he wants to hand it to me and start smashing someone else. The question by which all Marxist propaganda has to be judged is: does this work have revolutionary potential? I don’t think Boosters will get anyone out onto the streets, but if it gets a few more retail workers to start reconsidering their economic situations and talking in their too-short lunch breaks about what it might be like to change them, then I think the box gets checked.
BURGLARY. I’m much more suspicious of the politics of Daniel Roher, a documentarian whose most recent contribution to the world of cinema is this winter’s The AI Doc, a film in which Roher sits down with Sam Altman and reportedly walks away saying “he seems kinda chill.“ But it would be silly to rate the success of thrillers by their directors’ politics and general decency, so I was willing to enter Tuner with an open mind, especially after a ringing endorsement from politically awesome and super-decent guy Paul Schrader. Roher sets up but immediately undermines an eat-the-rich narrative and suggests a subplot about anti-Israeli racism I don’t really want to interrogate, but thankfully the only overtly reactionary aspect of Tuner is its plot. This is a straight-down-the-middle, decent-guy-accidentally-gets-in-over-his-head-because-of-his-secret-gift heist movie. It hits every beat you’d expect it to hit: Dustin Hoffman as charming Jewish Uncle character, Tovah Feldshuh as tilted-head “what are you up to” Aunt May, Havana Rose Liu as oblivious but skeptical girlfriend, Leo Woodall as hyper-talented dope with basically the same affliction as Ansel Egbart in Baby Driver. Roher refuses to pass up a crime-movie story beat, and at no point do you ever worry that maybe you’re going to veer into something unfamiliar.
Which doesn’t mean that it isn’t a good time. This isn’t a smart or politically good or even particularly essential heist movie. But is a normal and alive movie that creates tension, maintains bits, and looks decent. It never gets boring, it never gets unbearably stupid, and it ends on a cute punchline. This is the bar, and now that movies are alive and well again I think don’t think we have to make too much hay of that. Watch it on a rainy day and be thankful that Roher is making this instead of ads for Anthropic.
ROBBERY. Right on the other side of the bar is Carolina Caroline, the latest film by Adam Rehmeier, who broke onto the scene with the torture-porn film The Bunny Game, a movie that is illegal in England, and Dinner in America, a Napoleon Dynamite meets Gummo romcom that I wish were illegal everywhere. Caroline Carolina is his grown-up movie, and growing up for this kind of guy is composing a humorless Bonnie and Clyde movie set in the Recession-porn South and shot on cheap cameras like a 2000s country music video.
You need so much more than the Paper Moon change trick, a shiny muscle car, red lipstick, and a Townes Van Zandt drop to make a successful bandit movie. First of all, either compelling characters or an interesting methodology for stealing - preferably both, but it’s tough out there. Samara Weaving is pretty and Kyle Gallner is the sort of dirtbag that some people are charmed by, but Rehmeier’s script gives them less than nothing to work with. They have exactly one trick for robbing banks which I’m hesitant to spoil but it’s Samara Weaving wearing a wig. There’s a scene where she meets her absentee mother at a honky tonk bar and cries. There’s also a scene that is almost shot-for-shot with a scene from the The Bride!. Surely there’s no better sign that you’re playing with dogshit than unintentionally recreating scenes from The Bride!.
I found this movie to be a regrettable watch when I saw it at MSPIFF in April and my antipathy for it has only grown over the past couple months. I thought I was going to forget about it but instead it’s metastasized into a core example of what a heist movie should not be. You just shouldn’t be relieved that it’s finally over when your protagonist goes down in a rain of bullets. Sorry for spoiling it but you’ve already knew it was coming.
Some quick thoughts on three movies I missed this year:
Kyle Balda, THE SHEEP DETECTIVES. Everybody learned the term “four-quadrant blockbuster” this year, but The Sheep Detective hits at least eight, including the obnoxious “don’t put me in a quadrant” quadrant that some people I know like to occupy. If for some reason there was ever an event that brought together my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law, their children (boys and girls, ages 6 to 21), Florine’s parents, Florine’s sister, her husband, and probably all of our respective aunts, uncles, cousins, and dead grandparents, I think this is the only thing on earth that would successful make everyone happy other than maybe ice cream.
If you’re mildly Anglophilic and don’t hate animals then this movie will probably work. I don’t think it’s anywhere near the best movie of the year or even exceptionally great, but there’s something to be said for the breadth of appeal that Kyle Balda has achieved with this nonsense premise. I am about as easy a mark as there is so it won’t be interesting to note the points in this film that made me cry, but I’ve received eyewitness reports of the wiping of significantly more impermeable tear ducts that have not been breached since 1999 during the denouement of October Sky. If you accept cinema as a commercial art form then movies like this are an essential piece of that puzzle. The fact that it’s quietly continuing to make money in theaters months after its release speaks to a certain kind of cultural necessity. It’s still playing at the St. Paul Highland (and also on Prime).
Sam Raimi, SEND HELP. This came out at the height of mischief in Minneapolis and I missed it in theaters. I finally got to it last week - quite bad! “What, you don’t like Sam Raimi?” is the response you get when you put this sort of dangerous perspective out on the internet and indicates a crisis of auteur theory. I do like Sam Raimi, really a lot, and I think this movie, like his last three or four, is Not Good. Hokiness, gore, and Bruce Campbell Easter eggs aren’t what made his early films great - humanity and psychotic cinematography were present too. To call this hack #MeToo script and ugly computer-rendering a return to form is insulting to the form. I found most of this film frustrating, but the peak for me is a particularly stupid sequence in which Rachel McAdams slaughters a CGI boar. Evil Dead levels of blood start gushing from the boar’s orifices, but all of it is rendered in Kool-Aid-ad computer goop until it hits McAdam’s face and becomes the real fake-blood deal. The switch from slop, 21st-century definition, to slop, 20th-century definition, only serves to remind me that once upon a time Sam Raimi was the kind of guy who stuck a remote-controlled hand up his best friend’s sleeve and forced him to punch himself in the face with it. I don’t think we’re going back. It’s on Hulu if you want to see it.
CHARLI XCX DOUBLE FEATURE. Charli obviously has as calculated an appearance as any other pop star, but it’s cool that her approach involves a complete lack of concern for angles, skin care, or eyebrow maintenance. It’s great to see someone intent on world domination willing to be a normal mid-30s slob. I liked Pete Ohs’s very small Erupcja, a movie about friendship and bad decisions set in “the most romantic city in the world” Warsaw, a bit better than Aidan Zamiri’s tour mockumentary The Moment. But both do a nice job of establishing Charli’s post-brat career as an artist with good taste and an interest in indie collaboration. Her self-awareness must be infectious, and the highlight of both films is a conversation with Kylie Jenner outside an elite Ibiza (“eye-beeth-a”) facial clinic in which both women lay out the bullshit of what they do for a living without a wink at the camera. This is the only sort of pop stardom that should exist in SS26. Erupcja is on VOD (including Letterboxd’s new Video Store) and The Moment is on HBO Go.
Emerald Fennell, “WUTHERING HEIGHTS.” Berit requested a minute-by-minute psychosomatic report on my theatrical experience of this movie a few months ago. Unfortunately I didn’t get to it in time and had to watch it at home (you can too, on HBO Go). Here are my notes:
0:30: concerned about volume (was listening to Lords of Acid all day and feeling self-conscious about what the neighbors might think)
2:00: generally annoyed
10:00: frustration re: bad reading pedagogy
14:00: yawned
16:00: fidgety
17:00: eyeroll upon first Margot Robie appearance
18:00: thinking about drum machines, forgot about movie
21:00: audible disgust
24:00: wishing I were drunk
25:00: wanting to text someone about how bad Margot Robie is
28:00: oddly compelled by Romeo and Juliet summary
31:00: thinking about how people describe cleavage in writing
36:00: headache
38:00: yuck
43:00: bored
46:00: eating pasta out of boredom
49:00: thinking about how there is more than an hour left
51:00: eyes closed for two seconds
52:00: paused to talk to Florine for 20 minutes
53:00: yuck
53.5:00: wtf
1:10:00: Jacob Elordi is cool
1:17:00: swing making me queasy
1:22:00: sleepy
1:26:00: falling asleep
1:29:00: notes say I was interested, don’t remember why
?:??:??: fell asleep
1:36:00: loud noise woke me up
?:??:?? fell fully asleep
2:10:00: woke up confused
2:14:00: (credits): informed by Florine that Cathy died
Here are five recommendations if you haven’t seen any movies this year and want to get in on the cultural sensation that’s sweeping the nation:
FOR A LIFE-AFFIRMING GREAT TIME: Matt Johnson, NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW THE MOVIE. It’s very hard to convince anyone that this is literally in no way about the band Nirvana, grunge music, or really music in general. It’s better to pitch it as a remake of Back To the Future, but set in the real world where pulling off stunts is extraordinarily difficult and mostly results in people looking at you like you’re an idiot. It attempts to bring into real life all of the nonsense that drives the plot of an action-adventure movie and ends up making it all the more extraordinary. It’s available on VOD (including the Video Store) and well worth your time if you want to feel happy and alive.
FOR A LIFE-AFFIRMING BUT PRETTY BUMMER TIME: Mascha Schilinski, Sound of Falling. Sound of Falling is the most under-watched film of the year, the kind of artful, multi-generational epic that would have gotten Oscar nominations if it had been made by Brady Corbet. It’s a tough watch because it’s a pretty bad time, but it’s so beautifully shot and fully conceived that it deserves so much more than to languish on Mubi. Get to it on some day that you are OK with feeling bad for three hours but also a little bit enamored with the continuity of human life. Get a free trial for Mubi and then forget to cancel it, which is something I do every couple years.
FOR A GENERATIONAL MASTERPIECE THAT EVERYONE SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT: Sophy Romvari, Blue Heron. I will keep saying it all year, but this is as good as it gets. I’m still working on a longer piece that I’ll publish when this comes out on Criterion Channel (probably?) this summer, but if you get a chance to see it before it’s well worth ninety minutes of your life. If you live in New York, it’s still playing at IFC. And if you have one of those alien sticks from Disclosure Day, you could watch it playing on repeat in my brain at any time of day.
FOR PARTICIPATING IN WHAT EVERYONE IS ACTUALLY TALKING ABOUT: Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama is the most star-powered conversation-starter of the year. It didn’t transform American discourse in the way that it could have if the cards had played out just a bit different, but it’s still funny and fascinating and insightful even if the surprise has been spoiled for you. I wish it could have produced the energy that Curry Barker’s Obsession continues to harness, but that’s not how zeitgeists work. On that front: I’ve heard more people talking on the street about Obsession than anything since at least Barbie. It feels like a genuine cultural reference point less than a “do you watch movies?” shibboleth - not quite monocultural, but about as close as it gets. The Drama is on VOD; Obsession is still in theaters and might be there all summer.
FOR PEOPLE WHO LIKE NORMAL THINGS THAT ARE NICE: The Sheep Detectives. But if you’ve seen that one and your idea of normal/nice doesn’t preclude skin flaying and a premise structured on a joke about one of the most prolific sexual predators in British history, check out the Nia DaCosta’s The Bone Temple (Netflix). If normal/nice doesn’t preclude graphic queer S&M, check out Harry Lighton’s Pillion (HBO Go). If you’re a squeamish prude but don’t hate British people, check out Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers (VOD for a lot of money). And if you define yourself as normal and proud of it (no shame), just go see Project Hail Mary, now on VOD and still playing in at least 75 theaters nationwide.
Finally, some predictions for Q3 2026:
The Odyssey will be the biggest movie of the summer and will starkly divide critics and audiences. It will break some sort of record but I don’t know which one. Toy Story 5 will be number two. Spider-Man: Here We Go Home Again will be number three.
The Invite will be good and a small hit. It’s taking forever to get to Minnesota so I probably won’t get to it until late July unless I can force myself into an early screening this Tuesday.
Minions & Monsters will kill the franchise despite embarrassingly positive critical response.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma will be awesome and everyone will like it.
Someone will write a Variety article about how movies aren’t back enough and that it’s all hot air, and then every film podcast will talk about it for two weeks.
I will write two essays for the Trylon’s Perisphere blog.
I will watch between six and ten movies on the plane to and from Japan and remember all of them negatively for the rest of my life.
I will not actually post two newsletters while I’m in Japan.
Thanks for reading *life is disappointing.* If you found this newsletter slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, sending me money (thanks!) or subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. I’ll be back next week if I can manage to get into an early screening of The Invite. Otherwise next time you hear from me will be from Japan.