The End of Oak Street (David Robert Mitchell, 2026)

Spielberg salad

David Robert Mitchell's The End of Oak Street is a bowl of Spielberg movie parts (ET, Close Encounters, Jurassic Park to name an obvious few) torn into bitesized pieces and tossed together, with a dash of Robert Zemeckis for plot dressing. Less obvious are bits of tone and detail from classic science fiction author Clifford D Simak, who liked to set one fantastic premise after another in a smalltown setting ("The Big Front Yard," Way Station).

Spielberg and Zemeckis are quick handy labels to slap on this concoction but I submit Simak is key-- not just to this picture but to much of what Spielberg (and Mitchell here) is doing. You get a patiently built-up portrait of suburban (in Simak's case rural) life, you're introduced to characters and their dynamic within the family, who in turn form relationships with the community at large. Then something happens and we're shown the characters' increasingly panicked reaction to events, the story's eventual resolution ideally a natural outgrowth of what the characters have learned along the way.

Asedillo (Celso Ad Castillo, 1971)

Gun and typewriter

By 1971 Celso Ad Castillo had written and directed a number of features when he was tapped by Fernando Poe Jr. to direct a biopic on one Teodoro Asedillo, a former schoolteacher and police chief turned revolutionary during the American Occupation. 

Apparently the two were feeling each other out. Ad Castillo may be a veteran filmmaker, having written eighteen scripts and nine features previously, but FPJ (as Poe is popularly known) had at this point directed eight, produced fifty, acted in approximately ninety. Ad Castillo must have acquitted himself well; FPJ called him 'my little genius' and asked him to direct three more pictures in quick succession (Ang Alamat, 1972; Sto Domingo, 1972; and Esteban, 1973)

FPJ was said to have impressed Ad Castillo in turn with the scene of Asedillo addressing the people of San Antonio (see pic above) who, thanks to American propaganda, have lost faith in him. The shoot happened in the latter part of the day, involved a high wide shot with plenty of extras, was eight pages long on paper including an intense monologue; on top of which they had already been delayed some three to four hours setting up. FPJ was exhausted; his brow furrowed while reading the script, and no one knew if he was happy or not with what Ad Castillo had written. 

Then the movie star launched into it: a long, involved speech at the end of which he was yelling himself hoarse, and you felt the frustration exhaustion and anger in his voice wasn't all acting.*

The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026)

Long day's journey into night

(Warning: story and plot twists of the movie-- and the three thousand year old epic poem the movie is based on-- discussed in explicit detail!)

First things first: Got no problem with Lupita Nyong'o's Helen/Clytemnestra or Elliot Page's Sinon (not Achilles as conservative pundits had complained about early on); Helen's fierce bitterness about being pawn and property to Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) and Sinon's hauntingly solemn reproaches to Odysseus for using him as bait are rare bright spots in the movie. 

I do have problems with Matt Damon as Odysseus. 

Troy (Wolfgang Petersen, 2004)

Looking a gift horse in the mouth

Wolfgang Peterson's Troy is an odd mix-- a summer blockbuster with the patina of a sincere attempt at adapting a literary classic painted all over its bright surface. David Benioff's script, loosely-- very loosely-- based on Homer's epic, tries to re-imagine the story as it might really have happened, that is, closer to what people might conceivably have thought and felt, filtered through what we might feel happened. For starters, Benioff (a newcomer, but not an entirely inept one--he wrote the novel 25th Hour and adapted it for Spike Lee to direct) does away with all the inconvenient gods and goddesses, without whom you get the impression Greeks and Trojans couldn't put one foot in front of the other much less wage a war. Then he incorporates a more cynical, more realpolitik motive for Agamemnon (Brian Cox) to go into battle: not to win back his brother Menelaus' (Brendan Gleeson) stolen wife Helen (Diane Kruger), but to use her kidnapping as a pretext to move on Troy, a bid to add the mighty kingdom to his already impressive collection of conquered territories (an act of arrogant aggression, in effect, by an established world power).

Leviticus (Adrian Chiarella, 2026)

Abomination

Year is only about halfway done and I'll say it: Adrian Chiarella's Leviticus is the best horror of the year.  I mean-- something better might come in October (Eggers' Werwulf comes out December), but can't imagine what that might be, or how it can be.

Disclosure Day (Steven Spielberg, 2026)

I'm an alien, I'm an illegal alien

Easy enough to call Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day his reworking retelling reboot of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film so elegantly worked out on the big screen you can recall most shots as being not just effortlessly lyrical but inevitable, locking in place to present a vast sound and light show, a once in a lifetime rock concert burnt into your brain the way the shape of Devil's Tower is burnt into Roy Neary's.

Disclosure is a different creature flavorwise. Spielberg's visual grammar (using his present favorite cinematographer Janusz Kaminski) has grown more sophisticated, his color palette more complex and mutedly realistic, his editing chops (with the relatively unfamiliar Sarah Boshar) if anything more daringly intricate. But that wide-eyed spirit is still there, for better or worse, that willingness to lift one's head up and look around to check if there's someone really out there. 

Pressure (Anthony Maras, 2026)

Sunny with a chance of rain 

Anthony Maras' Pressure (2026)-- based on a 2014 play by David Haig-- answers a question no one thought to ask before: can a riveting thriller be made out of weathermen? Not storm chasers (looking at you Twister); not disaster flicks involving climate change (You too Day After Tomorrow and Geostorm)-- I mean weathermen, folk who pore over isobaric maps and stare at thermometers and take windspeed readings. The science nerds.

Apparently the answer is yes if-- big if-- 1) We're talking Operation Overlord, 160,000 troops launched on 7,000 ships supported by 12,000 aircraft, arguably the largest seaborne invasion in history; and 2) Landing point's on the Normandy coast in France, at the center of one of the most unpredictable weather systems on the planet.