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May 22, 2026 
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Hi, film fans!
Normally at this time of the year, I’m tearing my hair out trying to keep up with the Cannes Film Festival and the start of the summer movie season. But this May feels different.
For starters, Cannes has been, to quote our chief critic Manohla Dargis, “generally lackluster.” Certainly there have been interesting films, but they have largely been in the sidebars, the programs that play alongside the main competition. Dargis herself singled out an entry in the Directors Fortnight sidebar: “Clarissa,” a Nigerian set adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” that the critic described as “one of the most exciting movies” of the festival. It was directed by the brother filmmakers Arie and Chuko Esiri, who told Dargis that they saw many commonalities between England in the 1920s and Nigeria in 2026, especially in their similarly conservative cultures.
Our columnist Kyle Buchanan has also been covering Cannes, and reports that the city’s beach clubs have turned into battlegrounds as festivalgoers at after-parties get into heated arguments over divisive movies. “Mixed reactions are a given at any film festival, but I’ve rarely seen as many that are this mixed,” he writes, adding that the most polarizing might be “Hope,” starring Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander as rampaging aliens. “I found it to be stultifying slop made by people who should know better,” Buchanan added, but there are critics campaigning for it to win the Palme d’Or.
(As I write this, there’s no obvious front-runner for the festival’s top prize, which will be handed out Saturday. Stay tuned.)
Meanwhile, far from the South of France, blockbuster season is kicking into gear with the latest entry in the “Star Wars” saga: “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” out Friday. But it’s a quieter start to the season than I’m used to: The movie isn’t expected to set any box office records and has generated mixed reactions of its own. Reviewing the film for The Times, Natalia Winkelman writes that it “is more or less a chain of fight scenes” but also that “the saga could do worse than this movie.”
On a different wavelength altogether, “I Love Boosters” is Boots Riley’s much-anticipated follow-up to “Sorry to Bother You.” In my head, “Boosters” is the anti-“Devil Wears Prada,” looking closely at the costs of fashion for laborers and others. “Riley leads with his progressive labor politics, but his aims in ‘I Love Boosters’ are more ambitious,” writes our critic Maya Phillips, who adds that ultimately the “satire goes in too many directions and the rest of the movie starts to lose its focus.”
Lastly, when it comes to critic’s picks, the reviewer Brandon Yu recommends “Tuner,” a crime thriller about a former musician turned safecracker with an unusual hearing condition, while Alissa Wilkinson has much praise for the documentary “Everybody to Kenmure Street.”
Whatever you decide to watch, enjoy the movies!
