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. 

I Love Boosters (Boots Riley, 2026)

Marximum overdrive

Boots Riley's I Love Boosters is a truckload of fun. Gang of shoplifters (The Velvet Gang-- Corvette (Keke Palmer), Mariah (Taylour Paige), Sade (Naomi Ackie)) prey on a chain of fashion stores (Metro Designers) owned by ultrarich Christie Smith (Demi Moore); they're joined by Chinese factory worker Jianhu (Poppy Liu) and her band of laborers: high-style hijinks ensue. 

Lord of the Flies (1954) v Lord of the Flies (1963) v Alkitrang Dugo (Clotted Blood, 1975) v Lord of the Flies (1990) v Lord of the Flies (Netflix, 2026)

Pig hunt

(Warning: plot and surprise twists in book and TV series discussed in explicit detail)

I remember reading William Golding's 1954 debut novel as a teen and having nightmares about running through the jungle with other boys in pursuit, waving sticks sharpened at both ends-- did not help the development of my socialization skills, lemme tell you. 

The book comes off as a fable, the characters barely sketched-in symbols, the theme clear enough and neat enough for literature majors to milk for their theses: humans have this ingrown tendency to violence, and we flirt with or ignore it at our peril. Really that simple, the novel's chief virtue and key weakness, and folks who seek to adapt it flirt with this fact or ignore it at their peril. 

It Was Just An Accident (Jafar Panahi, 2025)

We have ways of making you talk

Give Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi this much credit: he shoots what he sees. Intrigued by the look on a young girl's face, he made The Mirror (1997), about a child acting in a film production and the sudden plot twists she introduces in both the film and her life. Seeing how women are treated in Iran, he made The Circle (2000), a series of interlinked stories about different women, and Offside (2006), about a group of young women determined to see the World Cup qualifying match between Iran and Bahrain-- even if women are banned from attending. 

The Circle, Offside, and the crime drama Crimson Gold (2003) helped earn Panahi a 6-year prison sentence and 20-year filmmaking ban; he responded with This Is Not A Film (2011), and the surreptitiously shot Taxi (2015). He was arrested and imprisoned again in 2022 for following up on the arrest of a fellow filmmaker, and his response is this film-- about former prisoners and how they react when meeting their former prison interrogator.   

One Battle After Another (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)

The neverending struggle

Paul Thomas Anderson has taken Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel Vineland and turned it into an epic production about immigration raids, white supremacy, radical leftist groups, generational conflicts, a father's love for his daughter and vice-versa-- the picture feels so overstuffed with high drama low farce and handheld ordnance you don't feel much if any of the 166 minute running time. 

I'll call it: easily Anderson's best most ambitious most appealing work to date. 

Eddington (Ari Aster, 2025)

'Who is that masked man?!'

I have yet to warm up to Ari Aster, a talented filmmaker who does inventively staged and shot twists on classic horror but has yet to deliver a cohesive feature. Hereditary his debut starts off with a fairly unique premise-- a mildly dysfunctional family where the horror arises not from supernatural evil or witches' covens but from a peanut allergy; later Aster drags in the evil and covens, in a weak-tea attempt to emulate Rosemary's Baby. Midsommar is Aster's stab at remaking The Wicker Man with twice the budget and half the subtle wit. Beau is Afraid is arguably his most original work-- or at least his work with the most wide-ranging influences such that it seems original, even autobiographical-- and perhaps the one feature I like best to date. 

Eddington feels like a step backwards. Aster starts off well-- he almost always starts off well-- introducing a small town and half a dozen of the interlinked characters of that town, mainly Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) and his boss Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and as Phoenix usually plays characters who lean into their awkward grotesqueness and Pascal usually plays charismatic patriarch figures you can be sure these two alpha males will lock horns at the mayor's re-election campaign. 

Superman (James Gunn, 2025)

The man with the golden Gunn

A lot riding on James Gunn's latest movie: not just the reboot of DC Films (now called DC Studios, with James Gunn and producing partner Peter Safran as co-CEOs) but also a reboot of not just a DC comic book superhero but arguably the foundational superhero (not the first ever but damned close and arguably the most influential)-- in effect, the salvation of an entire movie genre, which lately has been in a box-office slump generating more bad publicity than Elon Musk on a ketamine binge. 

So did Gunn do it? I'd say you're asking the wrong question. 

Black Bag (Steven Soderbergh, 2025)

Lies like us

Steven Soderbergh's Black Bag-- his second feature released in the first three months of 2025-- is arguably his best in years: a stylish, sexy thriller that of all things celebrates the bond of marriage, a relationship espionage writer John Le Carre might have once characterized as a significant weakness in an intelligence officer.

Mickey 17 (Bong Joon-ho, 2025)

Hidden Mickey

Bong Joon-ho's latest film Mickey 17 is out and disappointing some folks-- in part because it isn't making the boxoffice they're hoping from the director of Parasite ($262 million worldwide from an $11 million budget), in part because it doesn't have the sharp edge of Parasite with its literal upstairs-downstairs allegory or bloody melancholic finale. Basically the complaint I'm hearing is that it isn't Parasite, which won a goldplated Oscar doorstop for Best Picture, and that he should just do more of the same only better for the rest of his career. 

And for the rest of us? Well lemme tell you... 

One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien Anos de Soledad, Alex Garcia Lopez, Laura Mora, 2024)

One hundred years of telenovela

I remember the first time I opened Gabriel Garcia Marquez's celebrated novel and read the sentence "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." It was an intriguing opening line and I was hooked, but for some reason never made it past the second page. I put the book aside, and didn't bothered touching it again for two years.

Then sitting in a beach-- in the shade, away from that ridiculous scorching sun,  while friends were in the water enjoying themselves-- I had no other choice but to pick up the book again, and this time (I think it was when Jose Arcadio, Colonel Aureliano's father, after many intricate calculations, announced to his wife that the world was round like an orange) I was well and truly hooked. I read till the sun gave up its plan to burn me and sank back into the sea to bide its time; read deep while the moon rose and kept me company; read till the moon gave up and bade farewell and sank back down and the cocks started to crow; read till there was nothing left to read, and when I put the volume aside saw my old nemesis peeking out from over the ocean's edge with a spark in its eye, fresh and ready for another round. 

Conclave (Edward Berger, 2024)

Succession

Edward Berger's Conclave is more fun than the process of choosing a world leader has any right to be. 

The Apprentice (Ali Abbasi, 2024)

Birth of a supervillain

Calling it: there will not be a more terrifying film to come out this year than Ali Abbasi's The Apprentice, a startlingly evoked, reasonably entertaining, essentially accurate biopic of the former and possibly incoming president Donald J. Trump.

The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974)

Down the rabbit hole

(Warning: plot twists discussed in explicit detail)

Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View, inspired by the assassinations of both John and Robert Kennedy is perhaps not the best film on the subject-- arguably near the top is Fred Zinneman's Day of the Jackal, a lean hide-n-seek thriller about a coldblooded Englishman (but are there any other kind?) plotting to shoot President Charles de Gaulle; on the apex sits John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate, about an American vice-presidential candidate doubling as Russian agent (Hilarious idea! Now where have we seen that before?) plotting to assume top spot by having his running mate killed (?!). 

Arguably this film isn't even Pakula's best-- I'd nominate All the President's Men for the honor, the director's crackerjack smart adaptation of Woodward and Bernstein's bestselling account of the Watergate Hotel burglary, and the consequent investigation that helped pull down the Nixon Administration. 

That said, and despite the inherently silly premise (all-powerful secret organization grooming political assassins), the bizarre bits peppering the narrative, I call this Pakula's most emblematic film, and lemme explain why--

Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024)

This means war

Alex Garland's Civil War is set in the near future (from Max Headroom: "20 minutes into the future") but traces its roots to the recent past, particularly films on journalists or photojournalists wading into war zones trying to catch the story: Under Fire, The Year of Living Dangerously, The Killing Fields, Salvador.

El Conde (Pablo Larrain, 2023)

Bloodsucker

I remember mentioning a notable name in the Filipino film industry to one of our better filmmakers, who declared him "an impakto" --Tagalog for 'bloodsucker.'

I looked at him. "Really? How about--" and mentioned someone else. "Another impakto." "And--?" "Yet another impakto!" I tossed off several more names and all he could say was "impakto, the lot of them."

Which conversation I remember while watching Pablo Larrain's latest feature, a rather obvious high concept horror comedy that answers the question: what if Augusto Pinochet was a vampire? Not a political or metaphoric monster draining Chile of its economic prosperity but a literal supernatural leech?

World Trade Center (Oliver Stone, 2006)

This is not a political film

That was the mantra Oliver Stone reportedly repeated to himself while making his latest feature -- the idea being to show what happened on September 11, 2001, when two passenger jets hit the Twin Towers and sent them tumbling down. "The details are the details are the details," he says, having been told in no uncertain terms by producers Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher (who gave him the aforementioned mantra) to keep the paranoid conspiracy theories to a minimum (JFK anyone?) and stick to facts.

Batang West Side (West Side Avenue, Lav Diaz, 2001)

Street child

Lav Diaz's Batang West Side (West Side Avenue, 2001), about the killing of a young Filipino-American and the murder investigation that follows, was at five hours the longest Filipino or Southeast Asian film ever made at the time. 

Kapag Wala Nang Mga Alon (When the Waves are Gone, Lav Diaz, 2022)

Vengeance is mined

Lav Diaz's Kapag Wala Nang Mga Alon (When the Waves are Gone) premiered out-of-competition at the 2022 Venice Film Festival to muted if appreciative applause. If the acclaim isn't as loud, that may be because the film isn't as epically proportioned as A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery or as politically incendiary as The Halt or Season of the Devil. What it is tho is Alexander Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo told only as Diaz can: leisurely paced, crudely recorded (on severely monochrome Kodak 16 mm), with absolutely no music whatsoever (all onscreen singing or dancing performed a capella).

And it's a revenge story.

12 Weeks (Anna Isabelle Matutina, 2022)

Three months

Anna Isabelle Matutina's debut feature 12 Weeks is powerful both for what it says and doesn't say. It's a laser-focused look at a woman (Max Eigenmann as Alice), firmly in charge of her life and career, suddenly blindsided by the fact that she's pregnant at 40-- what she feels, what she (implicitly) thinks, what she faces in terms of social and practical challenges in the Philippines, where abortion is illegal.

West Side Story (Steven Spielberg, 2021)

Batang West Side

Not sure why people are surprised Spielberg has done a dance musical--arguably he's been making them throughout his career, from the deadly pas de deux between the colossal Peterbilt and little red Valiant in Duel to the lines of police cars snaking behind Goldie Hawn in The Sugarland Express to the Ferris Wheel strolling down a seaside dock in 1941 to the alien ships playing tag across the clear Wyoming skies in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg isn't just a master at shooting people dancing (see the USO dance hall sequence in 1941), he's a master at shooting anything dancing, from cars to saucers to Ferris wheels; the first time we manage to view the entire Great White in Jaws (after teasing us for about an hour) Spielberg cuts to a high overhead shot of the creature gliding smoothly past the fishing vessel (accompanied by John Williams' eerie harpstrings) and we see with an electric tingle shooting up our spine that it's about the size of the vessel. That's why the quip "You're gonna need a bigger boat" lingers so in memory--turns out Police Chief Brody was right.