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.
Roofman is a based-on-a-true-story crime drama written and directed by Derek Cianfrance, the filmmaker behind Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines. Channing Tatum stars as Jeffrey Manchester, a former U.S. Army Reserve soldier and father who became one of America's most unlikely fugitives — a courteous armed robber who broke into dozens of McDonald's restaurants by cutting through their roofs, earning him the nickname "Roofman." Kirsten Dunst co-stars as Leigh, a churchgoing single mother with no idea about the double life of the charming man she is falling for.
After escaping from prison, Manchester goes to ground in the last place anyone would look: he secretly moves into a Toys "R" Us store, building a hidden nest in the walls and rafters and living there for months, watching employees on the store's own cameras and slipping out at night. Cianfrance surrounds his leads with a deep supporting cast including Peter Dinklage, Ben Mendelsohn, Uzo Aduba, LaKeith Stanfield, and Juno Temple, mining the stranger-than-fiction premise for warmth, suspense, and unexpected tenderness rather than easy caricature.
Released by Paramount Pictures in October 2025, Roofman premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Tatum and Dunst's chemistry drew strong notices, and went on to earn some of the best reviews of Tatum's career, holding an 86% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics singled out Cianfrance's refusal to judge his subject and Tatum's disarmingly human performance. It streams on Paramount+.
After the Hunt is a psychological drama directed by Luca Guadagnino from a screenplay by first-time feature writer Nora Garrett, released by Amazon MGM Studios. Set in the rarefied world of Yale University, it is a talky, morally slippery chamber piece about ambition, memory, and the uneasy politics of belief on a modern campus.
Julia Roberts stars as Alma Imhoff, a philosophy professor whose carefully ordered life is upended when a star student, Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), accuses Alma's colleague and friend Hank (Andrew Garfield) of sexual assault — a crisis that threatens to expose Alma's own buried secrets. Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloë Sevigny round out an ensemble that trades in shifting sympathies and withheld information.
Premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival before its October 2025 theatrical release, the film sharply divided critics, landing a mixed 36% on Rotten Tomatoes even as Roberts drew some of the strongest reviews of her recent career. Its provocative subject matter and deliberately ambiguous ending made it one of the more debated prestige dramas of the fall.
Black Phone 2 is a supernatural horror sequel written and directed by Scott Derrickson, reuniting him with co-writer C. Robert Cargill and Blumhouse Productions after their 2021 sleeper hit The Black Phone. Distributed by Universal Pictures, it picks up four years after Finney Blake escaped the child-killer known as the Grabber, expanding the story from a single basement into a larger, more mythic supernatural nightmare.
This time the focus widens to Finney's younger sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), whose psychic dreams lead the siblings and a friend to the snowbound Alpine Lake winter camp, where a series of murders from decades earlier refuses to stay buried. Ethan Hawke returns as the Grabber, now reaching his victims from beyond the grave through their dreams, with Mason Thames back as Finney in a story that trades claustrophobia for icy, open-air dread.
Made on a modest budget of around $30 million, Black Phone 2 grossed roughly $132 million worldwide and drew solid reviews, holding a 72% Rotten Tomatoes score praised for its inventive scares even as some found it less tightly wound than the original. It confirmed the property as one of Blumhouse's most reliable modern horror brands.
Zootopia 2 is the long-awaited sequel to Walt Disney Animation Studios' 2016 Oscar-winning hit, once again directed by Jared Bush and Byron Howard. Returning to the dazzling mammal metropolis where predator and prey live side by side, the film reunites rookie rabbit officer Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and con-artist-turned-cop fox Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) as full partners on the Zootopia Police Department — a partnership that is promptly put to the test.
When the duo is framed and forced to go on the run, they chase a slippery pit viper named Gary De'Snake (Ke Huy Quan) and stumble onto a buried civic conspiracy: an entire district of reptiles was erased from the city's history and its true founder written out of the record. The investigation pulls in the powerful Lynxley family, voiced by Andy Samberg and David Strathairn, while Idris Elba's Chief Bogo and Shakira's pop-star Gazelle return to a sprawling ensemble.
Zootopia 2 became a global phenomenon, grossing roughly $1.87 billion worldwide to rank among the highest-grossing animated films of all time, and it landed an "A" CinemaScore alongside a 92% Rotten Tomatoes score. Critics praised its noir-tinged mystery, its expanded world-building, and the continued chemistry of its leads, confirming the franchise as one of Disney Animation's crown jewels.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 is the long-awaited sequel to the beloved 2006 fashion comedy, with director David Frankel and the original marquee cast returning two decades after the first film. Meryl Streep is back as the imperious Runway editor Miranda Priestly, Anne Hathaway returns as Andy Sachs, and Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci reprise their fan-favorite roles as Emily and Nigel.
The story reunites the characters in a media landscape transformed by the collapse of print. Miranda faces the twilight of the glossy magazine era, and in a pointed reversal of the original's dynamic, Emily has risen to become a powerful executive whose advertising dollars Runway now desperately needs, while Andy is drawn back into Miranda's orbit. Newcomers Kenneth Branagh, Lucy Liu, Justin Theroux, and B.J. Novak join the ensemble.
Released in 2026, the sequel became one of the year's biggest box-office successes, grossing well over half a billion dollars worldwide and drawing warm reviews and an enthusiastic audience response for the return of its iconic trio. It is streaming on Hulu and Disney+.
Mortal Kombat II is the action-fantasy sequel to the 2021 reboot of the blockbuster video game franchise, again directed by Simon McQuoid for New Line Cinema and Warner Bros. Where the first film assembled its fighters and set the stage, this installment finally delivers the event the games are built around: the interdimensional martial-arts tournament known as Mortal Kombat.
The sequel is powered by the long-awaited arrival of Johnny Cage, the arrogant, washed-up action star played with gleeful swagger by Karl Urban. Recruited by the thunder god Raiden and warrior Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee), Cage joins Earth's champions to face Emperor Shao Kahn's Outworld forces, with the Edenian princess Kitana (Adeline Rudolph) among the combatants and returning fighters Liu Kang (Ludi Lin), Kano (Josh Lawson), and Jax (Mehcad Brooks) back in the fray.
Arriving in theaters in 2026, Mortal Kombat II was widely called the most purely entertaining entry in the film series to date, leaning hard into the games' over-the-top brutality and fan-service fatalities. It grossed well over one hundred million dollars worldwide, and a third film is already in development. It is streaming on HBO Max.
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the second chapter in the rebooted 28 Years Later trilogy, directed by Nia DaCosta from a screenplay by Alex Garland, who conceived the new saga alongside original director Danny Boyle. Picking up the story of a Britain still quarantined nearly three decades after the Rage virus escaped, it trades the first film's coming-of-age intimacy for something darker, stranger, and more mythic.
The story follows young Spike (Alfie Williams), who falls into the orbit of a violent cult led by the self-styled Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell), even as the reclusive Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes) tends to the dead in an extraordinary temple built from human bones and forms an unlikely bond with an Alpha infected. Cillian Murphy also appears, drawing the wider trilogy together as its threads begin to converge.
Released in January 2026, the film became the best-reviewed entry in the entire franchise, earning acclaim for DaCosta's bold imagery and its meditation on grief, ritual, and what humanity holds onto at the end of the world. Though its box office was modest against a lean budget, it cemented the trilogy's reputation as some of the most ambitious horror filmmaking of the decade. It is streaming on Netflix.
Bring Her Back is a harrowing supernatural horror film from Danny and Michael Philippou, the Australian twin brothers whose 2022 debut Talk to Me became one of A24's biggest horror successes. Their hotly anticipated follow-up trades that film's viral-party premise for something far more intimate and devastating: a story about grief, foster care, and the monstrous lengths a mother will go to in order to undo a loss. It confirms the Philippous as horror filmmakers interested in real human anguish as much as in shocks.
Sally Hawkins, the two-time Oscar nominee best known for gentle, luminous roles, is cast startlingly against type as Laura, a former counselor who takes in two step-siblings — Andy and his partially sighted younger sister Piper — after the sudden death of their father. What first looks like sanctuary slowly reveals itself as something else, as Laura's grief over her own dead daughter draws the children toward a terrifying occult ritual. Newcomers Sora Wong and Billy Barratt anchor the film opposite Hawkins, with Jonah Wren Phillips delivering one of the year's most disturbing supporting turns.
Reviewers greeted Bring Her Back as a rare horror sequel-in-spirit that surpasses expectations, singling out Hawkins' fearless performance and the film's almost unbearable emotional intensity. It performed strongly in theaters and became one of the most acclaimed horror releases of the year before dominating the streaming charts. Bring Her Back is streaming on HBO Max.
Freakier Friday is Disney's long-awaited legacy sequel to the beloved 2003 body-swap comedy Freaky Friday, reuniting Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan more than two decades after the original became a generational touchstone. Directed by Nisha Ganatra, the film picks up the story of the Coleman women years later and expands the premise into a chaotic, warmhearted comedy about mothers, daughters, and the impossibility of ever truly understanding one another until you have walked around in someone else's skin.
Tess (Curtis) and Anna (Lohan) are now navigating a new stage of life: Anna is a mother herself, raising a teenage daughter while preparing to blend her family through marriage, which means a soon-to-be stepdaughter entering the picture. When lightning strikes twice, the swap this time is a tangled four-way affair across two generations, forcing each of them to inhabit a life they thought they understood. Julia Butters and Sophia Hammons play the younger generation, with Manny Jacinto, Mark Harmon, and a returning Chad Michael Murray filling out the cast.
Freakier Friday proved that nostalgia and genuine chemistry still sell: it became the first live-action comedy of 2025 to cross $100 million at the worldwide box office and drew affectionate reviews praising Curtis and Lohan's easy rapport. Its later arrival on Disney+ made it an immediate streaming hit as well, introducing the body-swap franchise to a new generation of families. Freakier Friday is streaming on Disney+.
Eddington is writer-director Ari Aster's fourth feature, a sprawling neo-Western black comedy released by A24 that trades the domestic dread of Hereditary and Midsommar for the wide-open anxiety of the American Southwest. Set in the fictional small town of Eddington, New Mexico in May 2020, at the disorienting height of the pandemic, the film uses a local feud to dissect a country coming apart at the seams — a place where every argument is refracted through social media, conspiracy, and mutual suspicion.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe Cross, the town's beleaguered sheriff, whose simmering grudge against the slick, progressive mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) escalates into a chaotic and increasingly violent campaign for the mayor's office. Emma Stone plays Joe's fragile wife, with Austin Butler as a magnetic online guru who worms his way into their lives, and Luke Grimes and Deirdre O'Connell rounding out the ensemble. What begins as satire curdles, over the film's length, into something far darker and more unnerving.
Eddington premiered in competition at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it drew a lengthy standing ovation and sharply divided critics between those who hailed its ambition and those who found its provocations exhausting. It became one of the most debated releases of the year, a lightning rod for arguments about how — or whether — cinema should depict the pandemic era. Eddington is streaming on HBO Max.
