Drop is a tightly wound Blumhouse thriller from director Christopher Landon, the filmmaker behind Happy Death Day and Freaky. Meghann Fahy, breaking out after The White Lotus, stars as Violet, a widowed single mother stepping back into the dating world for the first time in years. Her date at an upscale high-rise restaurant is meant to be a fresh start — until her phone begins to buzz.
As Violet sits across from her seemingly perfect date, Henry (Brandon Sklenar), she starts receiving anonymous, escalating messages through an AirDrop-style app. The sender can see her, is somewhere inside the restaurant, and threatens to have her young son killed at home unless she obeys — including a demand that she murder her date. Unfolding almost in real time within a single location, the film turns a candlelit dinner into an agonizing pressure cooker.
Written by Jillian Jacobs and Chris Roach and produced under the Blumhouse and Platinum Dunes banners, Drop opened in April 2025 to an 83% Rotten Tomatoes score and strong word of mouth for Fahy, grossing roughly $28 million against an $11 million budget. Critics praised how Landon sustains tension almost entirely through a woman, a phone and a table she cannot leave.
Now You See Me: Now You Don't is the third film in the heist-thriller franchise about the Four Horsemen, a team of illusionists who pull off elaborate magic-driven crimes. Directed by Ruben Fleischer, of Zombieland and Venom, it revives the series more than nine years after its last installment and blends its returning stars with a new generation of magicians.
Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco and Isla Fisher return as the original Horsemen, joined by newcomers Justice Smith, Dominic Sessa and Ariana Greenblatt as up-and-coming illusionists, with Rosamund Pike as a formidable adversary and Morgan Freeman reprising his role. The globe-trotting caper sends the crew across Europe and beyond in a fresh scheme built around sleight of hand, misdirection and a high-stakes diamond heist.
Released in November 2025, the film became the best-reviewed entry in the trilogy, at around 61% on Rotten Tomatoes, and a solid box-office performer, grossing well over $200 million worldwide and proving the franchise's enduring appeal. It streams on Starz.
Final Destination Bloodlines is the sixth entry in the long-running horror franchise and its first film in fourteen years, directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein and released by Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema. It revives the series' signature premise — Death stalking those who cheat a mass-casualty disaster — while digging into the origins of the deadly premonitions that have haunted the saga since 2000.
The story follows a college student, Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana), plagued by a recurring nightmare about a catastrophe atop a 1960s revolving-restaurant tower. Tracing the vision back to her grandmother, she uncovers a family curse and races to break Death's design before it claims her relatives one by one. Teo Briones, Richard Harmon and Brec Bassinger co-star, and the film features the final performance of franchise mainstay Tony Todd.
Bloodlines became the biggest hit the series has ever had, grossing well over $285 million worldwide on a modest budget and posting the franchise's largest opening. It also earned the best reviews in the series' history, around 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, with critics praising its inventive set-piece kills and its emotional farewell to Todd. It streams exclusively on HBO Max.
Tron: Ares is the third film in Disney's long-running Tron franchise, directed by Joachim Rønning and arriving roughly fifteen years after Tron: Legacy. It pushes the series' neon-lit vision of the digital frontier into the physical world, and is scored by Nine Inch Nails — Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross's first film score credited under the band name in decades.
Jared Leto stars as Ares, a highly advanced program dispatched from the digital world into the real one on a dangerous mission, in what becomes humankind's first encounter with an artificial being. Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Jodie Turner-Smith, Gillian Anderson and franchise icon Jeff Bridges fill out the cast, as the story flips the premise of the earlier films by sending its Grid-born hero into our reality rather than pulling a human onto the Grid.
Released in October 2025, the film drew a mixed critical response, holding around 52% on Rotten Tomatoes, and underperformed at the box office against a hefty budget. Its striking visual design and NIN score won admirers, however, and it found a far larger audience after arriving on Disney+, where it quickly climbed the platform's charts. It streams on Disney+.
Send Help is a 2026 survival-horror thriller directed by Sam Raimi from a screenplay by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, released by 20th Century Studios. It marks a return to the horror-comedy register that made Raimi's name, trading haunted cabins for a corporate power struggle stranded far from civilization.
Rachel McAdams stars as Linda Liddle, an underappreciated corporate strategist, opposite Dylan O'Brien as Bradley Preston, the company's newly appointed and much younger CEO. When a plane crash leaves the pair marooned on a remote island, the office hierarchy that once kept Linda in her place is violently upended: as she proves the more capable survivor, the balance of power shifts and curdles into something far darker. Dennis Haysbert, Xavier Samuel, Chris Pang, and Edyll Ismail feature in supporting roles.
Released in late January 2026, Send Help became a critical and commercial success, earning strong reviews for its tension, tone, and McAdams's against-type turn as a morally slippery anti-hero, and grossing well beyond its modest budget worldwide. It sparked plenty of debate over how far an audience's sympathy could stretch. It is now streaming on Disney+.
Mercy is a 2026 science-fiction thriller directed by Timur Bekmambetov and released by Amazon MGM Studios, with Sony Pictures handling international distribution. Set in a near-future 2029 Los Angeles, it imagines a justice system in which violent crimes are tried at breakneck speed by an artificial-intelligence court rather than by human judges and juries.
Chris Pratt stars as a detective who suddenly finds himself in the dock, accused of murdering his own wife and given a mere ninety minutes to prove his innocence to an unyielding AI judge before an automatic sentence is carried out. Rebecca Ferguson, Kali Reis, Annabelle Wallis, and Chris Sullivan round out the cast as the evidence mounts against him and a deeper conspiracy begins to surface. The film unfolds as a race against a literal countdown, its confined setting amplifying the pressure on a man fighting an algorithm for his life.
Released in January 2026, Mercy landed with a thud critically, drawing harsh reviews and frequent unfavorable comparisons to Minority Report, and it underperformed at the box office against its reported sixty-million-dollar budget. Audiences were somewhat kinder, and the film found a larger, more receptive audience once it reached streaming. It is now streaming on Prime Video.
Michael is the long-awaited 2026 biographical film about Michael Jackson, directed by Antoine Fuqua and released theatrically by Lionsgate in the United States and by Universal Pictures internationally. Positioned as a definitive big-screen account of the King of Pop, it stars Jaafar Jackson — Michael's real-life nephew — in the title role, a casting choice that drew enormous attention when the project was first announced.
The film traces Jackson's journey from the formation of the Jackson 5 in the mid-1960s through his childhood stardom and the grueling rehearsals overseen by his father, to his ascent as the biggest solo artist in the world, closing around the era of the Bad World Tour. Colman Domingo plays the family patriarch Joseph Jackson, Nia Long appears as Katherine Jackson, Miles Teller plays entertainment attorney John Branca, Laura Harrier is Suzanne de Passe, and Mike Myers takes on music-industry executive Walter Yetnikoff.
Released in April 2026 after a premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, Michael became a commercial phenomenon, grossing close to a billion dollars worldwide to rank as the highest-grossing music biopic in history and the most successful release in Lionsgate's history. Critics were sharply divided — many praised Jaafar Jackson's uncanny performance while faulting the film's polished, sympathetic portrait — but audiences responded warmly, awarding it an A-minus CinemaScore. It is streaming on Starz.
Nuremberg is a 2025 historical drama written and directed by James Vanderbilt, adapted from Jack El-Hai's nonfiction book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist. Released by Sony Pictures Classics, it dramatizes the months surrounding the first Nuremberg trial, when the surviving leaders of the Third Reich were brought before an international tribunal, and centers on the unsettling relationship that formed between a captive Nazi and the American doctor assigned to gauge his sanity.
Rami Malek plays Douglas Kelley, the U.S. Army psychiatrist tasked with evaluating the imprisoned Nazi high command, while Russell Crowe delivers a commanding turn as Hermann Göring, the charismatic and manipulative Reichsmarschall who becomes both his subject and his adversary. Michael Shannon plays Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, the chief American prosecutor determined to build a lasting framework of international law, with Richard E. Grant, Leo Woodall, John Slattery, and Colin Hanks filling out the ensemble.
Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival to one of its longest standing ovations, the film earned praise for Crowe's magnetic, chilling performance and for its sober reckoning with how ordinary-seeming men rationalized atrocity. A courtroom drama and a psychological duel in equal measure, it grossed more than $70 million worldwide. Nuremberg is streaming on Netflix.
Hamnet is a 2025 historical drama directed by Chloé Zhao, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Nomadland, adapted from Maggie O'Farrell's acclaimed 2020 novel. Zhao co-wrote the screenplay with O'Farrell, and the film reframes one of literature's great mysteries as an intimate family tragedy, imagining the private grief behind the writing of Hamlet. It was released by Focus Features in the United States and by Universal Pictures internationally.
Jessie Buckley stars as Agnes, the fiercely intuitive wife of a young glovemaker's son played by Paul Mescal, whose name is never spoken but whom the audience understands to be William Shakespeare. When their eleven-year-old son Hamnet dies of plague, the marriage buckles under a grief the two cannot share, until Shakespeare pours it into a play that gives his lost boy's name to its doomed prince. Emily Watson, Joe Alwyn, and young Jacobi Jupe round out a cast anchored by Buckley's shattering central performance.
Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival and winning the People's Choice Award at Toronto, long a bellwether for the Oscars, Hamnet became one of the most acclaimed films of the year, earning eight Academy Award nominations and winning Best Actress for Buckley, along with the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture, Drama. Devastating and tender in equal measure, it is streaming on Peacock.
A House of Dynamite is a 2025 political thriller directed by Kathryn Bigelow, her first feature since 2017's Detroit, working from a screenplay by former NBC News president Noah Oppenheim. Distributed by Netflix after a limited theatrical run, it applies Bigelow's signature procedural intensity to the most unthinkable of scenarios: the minutes after a single, unattributed intercontinental ballistic missile is detected heading for the United States.
The film fractures those tense minutes across multiple vantage points, replaying the same crisis from different rooms of power and following the civilian and military officials who must decide how to respond without knowing who fired or why. Idris Elba plays the president forced toward an impossible choice, with Rebecca Ferguson as a White House Situation Room officer and an ensemble that includes Gabriel Basso, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Moses Ingram, Greta Lee, and Jason Clarke. Bigelow stages the emergency less as spectacle than as a study of institutions and human beings straining under a clock that never stops.
Premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival before reaching Netflix, the film drew strong reviews for its nerve-shredding tension and its refusal of easy catharsis, earning awards-season attention for its editing. Critics hailed it as a return to form for one of America's most exacting filmmakers, a nuclear-age nightmare told with clinical urgency. A House of Dynamite is streaming on Netflix.
The Ballad of Wallis Island is a British comedy-drama directed by James Griffiths and written by and starring Tim Key and Tom Basden, expanded from their earlier BAFTA-nominated short film. A gentle, bittersweet story laced with original folk songs, it was released by Focus Features to widespread critical affection in 2025.
Tim Key plays Charles Heath, a lonely, motor-mouthed two-time lottery winner living alone on a remote island, who uses his fortune to lure his favorite musician — the reclusive Herb McGwyer, played by Tom Basden — to perform a private concert. Complications multiply when Charles has also, without telling Herb, invited Herb's former musical and romantic partner Nell (Carey Mulligan), forcing the estranged duo to confront their shared past amid Charles's relentless, well-meaning chatter.
The film earned rapturous reviews — including a near-perfect critical score — for its warmth, its melancholy humor, and the ache beneath its comedy, with particular praise for Key's performance and the original songs. A quiet word-of-mouth success, it became one of the year's most beloved small films. The Ballad of Wallis Island is streaming on Peacock.