Adventures in Moviegoing: Winter 2026 (By Ciaran Duff)

From January to March 2026, I saw 15 new release features in theaters. Below you’ll find my thoughts on a few of the most notable features among that sampling!

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

This January, I had the pleasure of going to an early screening of Gore Verbinski’s triumphant return to filmmaking after a 9-year hiatus: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die. It’s a dystopian action-adventure absurdist black comedy centering on Sam Rockwell’s “The Man From the Future” (who is never named) and his quest to prevent an authoritarian takeover by AI– building team after team from a Norm’s diner on a random night in LA. The merely $20 million price tag on this blockbuster-sized film is incredibly impressive (especially from the director of the ~$650 million Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy) in its scale, heart, and striking boldness. The zany ensemble pinballs from obstacle to obstacle, with little vignettes expanding on each character until the rupturous finale. Rockwell goes all out here, and with a cast stacked with sleeper stars (Juno Temple, Zazie Beetz, Michael Peña), it should be hard to pick a standout— but it isn’t. Haley Lu Richardson gives a head-turning, heartfelt performance that anchors the movie amidst its silliness and elevates it to truly great territory. Verbinski brings back exciting, sensitive, passionate tentpole filmmaking, and I was elated to be sitting in a full theater so engaged with an original movie.

The Moment

Charli xcx is having a moment right now. With her new music for Wuthering Heights and Mother Mary, to her upcoming film projects from Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex to Daniel Goldhaber’s Faces of Death remake, it seems the time to mark a beginning of a new chapter, and, therefore, bookend the last. A frenetic, nightmarish mockumentary, The Moment seeks to be an idiosyncratic nail in the coffin for the brat era, a final assessment of the joy and misery that comes with an unexpectedly rupturous album cycle and the pressures Charli herself was privileged enough to experience. The film is set during the brat album cycle in a world mirroring ours, with Charli xcx playing herself and surrounded by a cast of fictional characters set within a fictional downfall of her brand and livelihood at the hand of corporate demands. This premise may sound grim, but the core of it is quite funny– an absurdist satire on the state of the pop music industry, brought to fruition handily by a ridiculous Alexander Skarsgård (who also starred in Pillion, a solid queer romcom that was a late cut from this list) and absurd cameos from Rachel Sennott and Kylie Jenner further grounding it in the cynicism of our times. For all its world-weariness, The Moment chooses to end on a powerfully bittersweet reminder that sometimes, it’s okay to let go.

Nirvanna: The Band — The Show — The Movie

Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s webseries-turned-show-turned-theatrical-feature Nirvanna: The Band — the Show — the Movie is nothing short of a comedic triumph. I went in with limited knowledge of the material it was based on and thoroughly enjoyed the surprises that experience brought, so I’ll make my remarks short. Beyond being a laugh-a-minute comedy and having a striking, deeply Canadian sentimentality, N:TB—TS—TM also features sequence after sequence of mind-boggling creativity in independent filmmaking. From a guerrilla stunt set on the *** to cleverly composited and edited ****-****** sequences (censored for spoilers), Nirvanna constantly blurs the lines between what is real, practical, and improvised, and what is tactfully, minutely planned and staged. The result is an illusion rivaled in 21st century film perhaps only by the Avatar films, except instead of the plights of the Na’vi people, it’s about how if you have a best friend, you won’t even notice getting older.

How to Make a Killing

John Patton Ford and Glen Powell, respectively the director and star of How to Make A Killing, are in a very similar position with the middling reception of their film, in that I strongly contest any notion that either of them is doing something wrong with their moviemaking. Ford’s 2022 Aubrey Plaza crime vehicle Emily the Criminal was a huge sleeper hit, but this sprawling, cheeky black comedy crime flick doesn’t seem to be connecting with audiences despite its (in my opinion, at least) upgrade on nearly every front from Emily. And Glen Powell, with his early work as a supporting actor and subsequent move toward eccentric-yet-exciting leading man territory in Hit Man and Twisters, is dogged on over and over again as an actor for his weaker flicks in The Running Man and Anyone but You (both of which, by the way, he is the best part of). It’s incredibly personally important to me to assert that both John Patton Ford and Glen Powell have the juice, and that this movie is a great, fun, clever time at the theater. Filled with hammy supporting work from every angle, a convincing grimy 70’s filmic look (despite being shot digitally), and a punchy screenplay, How to Make a Killing is doing a lot of good things for fun, populist crime cinema.

Hoppers

With the last three movies under their belt as a studio being Elemental, Inside Out 2, and Elio, Pixar has had a rough few years, alternating between critical and financial misses. Leave it to Daniel Chong, creator of We Bare Bears, to bring a truly zany spark back to the studio with Hoppers. Best described as a zany-to-the-max environmentalist animated adventure, the film beautifully marries the absurdity of its events and premise with engaging characterization and thoughtful messaging. Sure, it’s diluted down to the straightforwardness required for a family film, but it manages to sneak in questions about how we treat the world around us and what our priorities are, all while evoking laughs at all times from all ages. There is some visual humor in this that I won’t spoil, but I was gasping for air laughing in the theater.

Forbidden Fruits

Forbidden Fruits was a film I knew nothing about and had no intention of seeing, but I decided to check it out on impulse, and I’m so glad I did. Produced by Diablo Cody, writer of Jennifer’s Body, this horror-comedy is about a cliquey witch coven that runs a mall luxury clothing store (awesome, I know) and their divine downfall into a gloriously violent finale. Director and co-writer Meredith Alloway draws heavily from her producer’s Jennifer’s Body and the burn book of Mean Girls, but with a debut style that still feels wholly unique in its steady management of tone. Lili Reinhart gives a truly star-making performance here, and Victoria Pedretti delivers a gleefully unhinged performance that received the most laughs and gasps out of any character in my theater. It’s a silly movie that knows exactly what it is, and if you get a chance to catch its small theatrical run, I highly recommend it.