Film
The Invite. Image: A24.
We’ve already established that 2026 is a great time to love horror movies on the big screen. With Saccharine, Evil Dead Burn, Penny Lane Is Dead, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma and Resident Evil among the films still headed to cinemas this year, that trend looks set to continue.
Beyond the unsettling and scary, Australia’s picture palaces have plenty more highlights on the way – epic treks, amusing animated sheep, eagerly anticipated follow-ups and award-winning comebacks included.
Here are 10 upcoming films to add to your calendar, whether you’re interested in awkward dinners or spicy sci-fi franchises.
Olivia Wilde is a director worth paying attention to, as cemented by her outstanding debut Booksmart (even if the off-screen stories surrounding her sophomore feature Don’t Worry Darling eclipsed its on-screen impact).
Next up for the actor-slash-filmmaker is The Invite, the first movie that she’s co-leading as well as directing. Starring opposite Seth Rogen (fresh from his inside-Hollywood comedy series The Studio), Wilde plays one half of a married couple who are hosting a dinner party. Their guests: Penélope Cruz and Edward Norton as their neighbours.
The Invite is a remake, so its narrative will be familiar to anyone that has seen 2020 Spanish comedy The People Upstairs. Still, that didn’t stop Wilde’s version, which is scripted by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones (Celeste and Jesse Forever), from being one of the hits of this year’s Sundance.
Releases 9 July.
For two decades now, the release of a new Christopher Nolan movie has been an event. Of all of the Academy Award-winning director’s films, perhaps none deserve that status more than his adaptation of the quintessential epic, Homer’s The Odyssey.
Apart from Nolan favourite and Oppenheimer Oscar-winner Cillian Murphy, virtually every actor that you can think of is in the ensemble, including Matt Damon as Odysseus, Anne Hathaway as Penelope, Tom Holland as Telemachus, Robert Pattinson as Antinous, Lupita Nyong’o as both Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra, Charlize Theron as Calypso and Zendaya as Athena.
Given his impressive strike rate (there’s no such thing yet as a bad Nolan film, even if Interstellar and Tenet proved somewhat divisive), as well as his knack for pairing superb performances with striking visuals, The Odyssey is unsurprisingly the most anticipated movie of the year.
Releases 16 July.
The tale of a banjo-playing beekeeper, his former foster daughter and the cut-throat nature of the honey trade, The Rivals of Amziah King couldn’t have cast its namesake better. Matthew McConaughey is excellent in one of just two live-action roles on his resume since 2019.
He isn’t this Oklahoma-set film’s only highlight by far, though. In her debut big-screen role, his co-star Angelina LookingGlass is a revelation and a true find by filmmaker Andrew Patterson.
In scale, story, style and stars (Kurt Russell also features), The Rivals of Amziah King’s writer/director is worlds away from his 2019 sci-fi gem The Vast of Night. Patterson again embraces a distinctive space as his setting, however, this time for a heartfelt and gripping picture that’s a heist film, a revenge flick, a coming-of-age tale, a family drama and an ode to the power of community.
Releases 20 August.
Since woolly farm animals sit at the franchise’s centre, every Shaun the Sheep film is technically a creature feature. Both 2015’s Shaun the Sheep Movie and 2019’s A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon are as entertaining, engaging, smart and delightful as family-friendly fare comes, too.
Only Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom is serving up a creature feature in the horror-leaning sense, though – still in an all-ages-appropriate way, of course.
From the woods beyond Mossy Bottom Farm, a mysterious beast emerges, giving Shaun and his ovine pals a new reason to save the day. Hopefully, as well as Halloween-themed hijinks, viewers can expect more sublime, silent era-influenced visual comedy from Aardman Animations.
Releases 17 September.
Fans of Na Hong-jin have waited a decade for his fourth film. After crime-thrillers The Chaser and The Yellow Sea in 2008 and 2010, then unforgettable supernatural horror The Wailing in 2016, now comes the sci-fi-leaning Hope – again playing at the Cannes Film Festival, as every one of his features have.
The South Korean writer and director sets his new story in Hopo Port near the demilitarised zone, which is soon facing a strange creature. Steven Spielberg isn’t the only acclaimed filmmaker with a must-see close-encounter movie out this year, then.
Among his homeland’s talents, Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook might garner more attention, but Na is every bit as exciting a cinematic force. The Wailing’s Hwang Jung-min is back as his lead in Hope, with Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander and Taylor Russell also in the cast.
Releases September, with the Australian date yet to be announced.
Thanks to the ubiquity of Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook-started tech empire, it was probably always a matter of when, not if, another movie would explore his story and Facebook’s world-changing and destabilising impact after 2010’s The Social Network.
The Social Reckoning is that film. With David Fincher off directing a sequel to a Quentin Tarantino movie (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood follow-up The Adventures of Cliff Booth), Aaron Sorkin is behind the lens, after winning an Oscar for writing its predecessor’s screenplay.
Jeremy Strong takes over from Jesse Eisenberg as Zuckerberg – and, based on the trailer, puts in as committed a performance as seen in Succession and The Apprentice. His Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere co-star Jeremy Allen White also features, as a Wall Street Journal reporter helping Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison).
Releases 8 October.
If you were a fox catcher, and a talking fox with the voice of Olivia Colman offered to fix your romantic woes if you let the animal live, what would you do? And is a bargain like this destined to be too good to be true, in classic monkey’s-paw style? So ponders Australian comedy The Fox.
Following his career-best turn in Dangerous Animals, Jai Courtney hunts a different kind of prey as protagonist Nick, while Emily Browning plays the unfaithful fiancée, Kori, that he hopes the fox’s proposition will change. Also co-starring: Damon Herriman and Aussie The Boys talent Claudia Doumit, plus Sam Neill as a talking magpie.
Danger 5’s Dario Russo makes his feature directorial debut with this darkly comic folktale, which has been scurrying around the festival scene from Adelaide to SXSW in Austin to Sydney.
Releases 29 October.
ScreenHub: Sydney Film Festival 2026 announces Audience Award winners
Sam Rockwell, John Malkovich and Steve Buscemi as CIA officers. A journey to Easter Island. A 1973-set narrative that starts just before the overthrow of the Chilean government. Tom Waits and Parker Posey also among the cast. Trust Martin McDonagh to weave all of the above together for Wild Horse Nine, his next comedy.
The tone is black, obviously, because that’s the Irish playwright-turned-filmmaker’s way, as In Bruges, Seven Psychopaths, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Banshees of Inisherin have already demonstrated.
Plus, Rockwell already has an Oscar for one of McDonagh’s movies, and unleashing chaos upon an island worked spectacularly well in nine-time Academy Award-nominee The Banshees of Inisherin.
Releases 5 November.
So far in 2026, Timothée Chalamet has mirrored his off-screen ambition in ping-pong anxiety caper Marty Supreme, missed out on a Best Actor Oscar for the second year running and lived his best basketball-loving life as a New York Knicks fan. Next comes the third chapter in cinema’s spiciest space-opera saga, returning to the role of Paul Atreides in Dune: Part Three.
While David Lynch’s Dune has long been unfairly maligned, and the world will always wish that Alejandro Jodorowsky’s version had come to fruition, Denis Villeneuve’s adaptations of Frank Herbet’s novels have proven stunning to date.
After 2021’s Dune and 2024’s Dune: Part Two, the franchise’s concluding entry sees Paul Atreides grappling with the consequences of becoming Emperor. Zendaya, Jason Momoa, Florence Pugh, Rebecca Ferguson, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlotte Rampling and Javier Bardem all return, with Robert Pattinson a new addition.
Releases 17 December.
Nine years, not 10, might’ve elapsed since Andrey Zvyagintsev’s last film – but like Na Hong-jin’s Hope, the Russian auteur’s Minotaur marks one of 2026’s big cinematic returns.
Made in exile, the corruption thriller puts Putin’s Russia in the 2020s firmly in the spotlight, as a successful company director’s comfortable existence comes under threat.
ScreenHub: Sydney Film Festival 2026 – Minotaur takes out top prize
If picking up Cannes’ Grand Prix and the Sydney Film Prize are any indication, Zvyagintsev’s latest is well and truly worth the wait. Based on his remarkable filmography, including his 2003 Golden Lion-winning debut The Return, plus the Cannes-awarded quartet of 2007’s The Banishment, 2011’s Elena, 2014’s Leviathan and 2017’s Loveless, though, that was always likely to be the case.
Release date yet to be announced, but Minotaur is expected to arrive before the end of 2026.
Sarah Ward is a film and television critic; arts, entertainment and culture editor and journalist; and film festival organiser. She is the film and TV critic for ABC radio Gold Coast, the Australia-based film critic for Screen International, and a critic and member at the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. Sarah’s background also spans stints as film and television editor at both Concrete Playground and Variety Australia, and as Goethe-Institut Australien’s Kino in Oz critic and writer. Her work has been published by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Birth.Movies.Death, SBS, SBS Movies, Flicks, Lumina, Senses of Cinema, the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts, Junkee, FilmInk, Broadsheet, Televised Revolution, Metro Magazine and Screen Education, the City of Gold Coast, the World Film Locations book series and more.
Jun 22, 2026
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