I don’t typically watch a lot of short films. While I respect the passion, effort, and craft, they tend to be more miss than hit for me. I recognize that’s a me problem, but it’s the truth. That said, the Seattle International Film Festival always has a robust shorts program, so I thought what the hell, why not check out the eight films in the WTF! Nightmare Fuel package. There is certainly some weird and wild things to behold.
Imagine if Greg Araki or Alice Maio Mackay made Cruising and you have an idea of Dean Francis’s Body Blow. Lo-fi and neon-drenched, it follows a sex-addicted, non-masturbating cop (Tim Pocock) as he gets in too deep with a ruthless drag queen crime boss.
Set in 1859, Marama, the debut feature from writer/director Taratoa Stappard, follows Mary Stevens (Ariana Osborne), a young orphaned Māori woman. When she receives a mysterious letter claiming to have information about her parents, she travels around the globe to England, searching for answers to questions about her family and her ancestry. Upon her arrival, she becomes governess to a spooky young girl, the granddaughter of shipping magnate and benefactor Nathanial Cole (Toby Stephens). What begins as an unsettling feeling that all is not quite right quickly spirals into a fight for physical and spiritual survival.
A massive, unexploded bomb left over from World War II is discovered at a construction site in the middle of a busy London neighborhood. The authorities evacuate the area and call in a bomb disposal unit. A crew of thieves use this cover to stage a daring heist. So goes Fuze, the new thriller from director David Mackenzie (Hell or High Water). What unfolds is a taut, fast-paced ticking-clock thriller full of twists and turns, with a few more twists and a handful of extra turns thrown in for good measure.
Because it’s an action movie starring Bob Odenkirk as a seemingly regular guy pushed to extreme violence and was written by Derek Kolstad, Normal is going to get compared to 2021's Nobody, for good and ill. (Honestly, the similar title doesn’t help in that regard.) While there are definite parallels, Ben Wheatley’s new movie is more average-Joe-in-extraordinary-circumstances than it is secret-badass-hiding-in-plain-sight. Quite a bit of Normal is a total blast, but just as much, if not more, sags under curious, often baffling choices. It’s a weird, mixed bag of a film.
It’s springtime in Seattle, which means it’s either sunny and glorious outside or rainy as all hell. Either way, it’s the perfect time to spend a Saturday in a dark movie theater watching horror movies. And let’s be honest, probably drinking. That’s right, the annual BoneBat Comedy of Horrors film festival is once again upon us.
Working within specific, well-worn genre or subgenre frameworks can make it difficult to do something wholly new. How many rehashed slashers have we all sat through? But that doesn’t mean there aren’t worthwhile stories to tell. We still occasionally see exciting, fresh zombie tales, for instance. Post-apocalyptic movies are another example, illustrated nicely by The Well. Documentarian Hubert Davis (Black Ice), in his first narrative feature, uses these familiar trappings to tell a tense, brooding, slow-burn tale of life past the collapse of civilization.
Gabriele Mainetti’s The Forbidden City is a strange movie. It presents as a throwback martial arts actioner about a Chinese woman, Mei (badass stunt performer Yaxi Liu), single-mindedly battling her way through Rome’s criminal underworld in search of her missing sister. And it is that. The Italian picture comes out swinging and plays like a kung-fu movie greatest hits collection: Mei fights her way up many flights of stairs; there’s a kitchen fight, complete with using pots and pans as improvised weapons, boiling oil, and flaming stovetops; and even a red-light brothel fight. This all happens in the first few minutes. From there, it’s an odd assemblage of a face-pummeling action movie, gangster saga, melodramatic rom-com, operatic tragedy, and more. It’s an unexpected mixture and doesn’t seem like it should work, but it does, combining into something singular and unique.
A woman stands in a desert in the darkening twilight, looming over a man, tied to a chair, burning to death at her feet. This is Irene Kelly (Michaela McManus). She’s traveling dimension to dimension, methodically killing every version of Neville (Jeremy Holm), the serial killer who murdered her daughter. It’s a hell of a first image to kick off Kevin and Matthew McManus’s (The Block Island Sound) indie sci-fi thriller Redux Redux.
According to author and famed writing teacher, John Gardner, all fictional stories can be boiled down to one of two plots: someone leaves town, someone comes to town. (OR maybe you subscribe to Christopher Booker’s Seven Basic Plots approach, or one of the many other theories, but for our purposes today, we’ll stick with Gardner.) Hellfire, the latest from direct-to-video action auteur Isaac Florentine (Ninja: Shadow of a Tear, Undisputed 2 and 3), follows this formula to a tee.
The new sci-fi horror comedy Cold Storage is an odd movie to talk about. There’s a good amount to recommend, and it’s pretty fun. However, that’s also the best thing you can say about it, that it’s “pretty fun,” there’s not much more to it. It’s fun, but never as fun as it could, or should be. There’s gore and body horror, but nothing particularly memorable or impactful. We get some laughs, but they’re more light chuckles than full-throated guffaws. This is a movie that you can watch, be moderately entertained by, and that leaves little more impression than that. And given the pieces involved, that feels like a missed opportunity.
When the AI revolution finally comes to destroy the human race, it will look less like the bleak apocalyptic future of the Terminator movies and more like all of humanity staring down at their smartphones, braindead and numbed, incapable and unwilling to think or do anything for ourselves. At least according to Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, the new sci-fi black comedy from Gore Verbinski (A Cure for Wellness).
If horror movies have taught us anything, never blow the Aztec Death Whistle should be high on that list. Especially one you found in a dead kid’s locker. Even if you’ve never watched a horror movie before, your first instinct when you find an old-looking carved skull—again, found in a dead kid’s locker—shouldn’t be to put it in your mouth. That’s just unsanitary and asking for trouble. But without people making this initial bad decision, we wouldn’t have Corin Hardy’s new film, Whistle, and that would be a bummer, because it’s a blast.
2026 came out of the gate swinging when it comes to animals-running-violently-amok movies. There’s the ape-attack-centric Primate, and now this weekend’s Killer Whale from writer/director Jo-Anne Brechin. If you read our most-anticipated movies of 2026 list, you know this is one of three potential killer whale action/horror movies we may see this year. I haven’t seen Primate yet, but there’s plenty of fun chatter about it. Killer Whale, on the other hand, isn’t great, unfortunately.
Hot on the heels of another great year of movies, it’s time to flip the calendar. Which around these parts also means it’s time to look to the future and see what cinema has to offer us this year. With that in mind, here are my 50, or at least 50-ish most anticipated movies coming our way in 2026.
It doesn’t feel entirely accurate to call writer/director Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead a zombie movie, which is how it’s been marketed. At the same time, however, it’s difficult to talk about without mentioning the Z-word. There are undead to be found, though not the swarming, apocalyptic, flesh-hungry variety, nor are they the film’s focus. They exist in this narrative as the impetus, as part of the inciting event to get the ball rolling; they’re presence is unsettling, yes, but not often as dangerous as anticipated.
