Let’s Go to the Movies! Summer of ’26 Edition
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
By Laurence Lerman / New York City
This summer at the movies, the biggest titles know exactly what they are: familiar brands, carefully calibrated spectacle, movies engineered to dominate conversation before a ticket is sold. But moving alongside all that industrial certainty is something quieter and less predictable—smaller films, international titles, documentaries, and auteur-driven projects still operating on the possibility that audiences might want discovery alongside reassurance.
This is a summer split between the industrial and the individual, between films built to perform and others reaching for something stranger, riskier, or more personal. The machine isn’t going anywhere—it’s too efficient, too polished, too embedded in the culture. But somewhere between the engineered and the unexpected is where the season becomes interesting: when a movie manages, however briefly, to sidestep expectations instead of merely fulfilling them.
The Machine
If the summer has a backbone, it’s here—films that arrive less as events than as inevitabilities. A new Spider-Man entry, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, doesn’t so much open as continue—another chapter in a story that has learned how to renew itself indefinitely. Toy Story 5 returns to a world that has already said its goodbyes to the series more than once, betting that familiarity can still feel like discovery. And Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu folds a streaming success back into the larger machinery of Star Wars.
What links these films isn’t just scale, but design. They are built to travel—to open everywhere, to translate instantly, to satisfy expectations that have been carefully cultivated over years, sometimes decades. The pleasure they offer is real, but it’s also calibrated: a balance of novelty and recognition, surprise and reassurance. These are movies that don’t need to ask for your attention; they assume it.
And yet, for all their polish, there’s a quiet tension underneath. When everything is engineered to work, the question shifts from whether it succeeds to whether it surprises.
The Branded Visionaries
If the franchises represent the system at its most efficient, the auteurs occupy a more complicated space—still personal, still distinctive, but no longer entirely separate from the machinery around them. Steven Spielberg, Christopher Nolan, and James Cameron don’t just make movies; they arrive with built-in expectation, their names functioning less as credits than as guarantees.
Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, concerning the possible existence of extraterrestrial lifeforms, suggests a return to one of his oldest fascinations—how ordinary life absorbs the extraordinary. Nolan’s The Odyssey renders Homer’s classical tale with the scale and urgency of modern spectacle. Cameron, meanwhile, pivots—at least temporarily—from world-building immersion to a musical concert with the just-released Billie Eilish – Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D), blending performance, technology, and authorship into a single, meticulously engineered experience.
What unites the three projects is not style but stature. These are filmmakers who have turned authorship into brand—whose signatures are strong enough to sell a film before a single frame is seen. And yet even here, the line between the individual and the industrial begins to blur.
The Outside Voices
If Hollywood’s summer tends toward scale and certainty, the most intriguing counterprogramming often arrives from elsewhere—films that feel less engineered than discovered, less obligated to deliver than free to surprise. Pål Øie’s monster-thriller Kraken from Norway leans into regional specificity, environmental horrors and ancient mythology with the destructive awakening of a giant sea creature, while Kenji Tanigaki’s Hong Kong extravaganza The Furious suggests a more inventive and kinetic sensibility. These specialized genre films aren’t designed to open everywhere at once; they’re built to travel more slowly, gathering attention rather than commanding it.
And then there is Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar, whose tragicomedy Amarga Navidad concerning a director of commercials seeking a creativity infusion arrives with unmistakable authorship. Where Hollywood auteurs operate at the edge of the system, Almodóvar has long existed outside it entirely. If the biggest titles promise familiarity, these films offer something rarer: the possibility of not quite knowing what you’re going to get.
The Reality Check
And then there are the films that step outside the entire equation—no franchises, no fictional worlds, no pressure to scale. Just people, reputations, and the uneasy business of telling the truth about both. This summer’s documentaries arrive as a kind of corrective.
Ivy Meeropol’s Ask E. Jean revisits E. Jean Carroll, tracing her path from advice columnist to the central figure in her legal battle against Donald Trump, who has been ordered to pay Carroll more than $88 million in damages across two federal jury verdicts. (These awards have been upheld in appeals courts as Trump seeks to block payment.) Peter Asher: Everywhere Man follows musician/manager/producer Asher from Sixties British Invasion pop through several decades of behind-the-scenes influence. And Flag Day from married couple Andrew and Melissa Shea observes the small farming community of Three Oaks, Michigan, as residents prepare for the nation’s largest Flag Day parade, turning a patriotic ritual into a ground-level portrait of civic life, community identity, and the complicated bonds of American belonging.
These titles aren’t trying to dominate a weekend or launch a universe. In a season built on precision and expectation, that lack of calculation can feel almost radical.
Laurence Lerman is a film journalist and a former editor of Video Business--Variety's digital media trade publication. Over the course of his four-decade career, he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major filmmaker working today, from Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Clint Eastwood to Kathryn Bigelow, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Werner Herzog. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com, the founder and curator of FilmShul.com, a multi-part presentation on the history of Hollywood and Jewish America, and a commentator on various 4K UHD and Blu-ray home entertainment releases.
Nice dossier on what will be going to theaters soon. I circled a few of these.