The Movies You Should Check Out As We Slide into 2026
Frankenstein
If there is one man who can pull off Frankenstein it has to be the the monster guy himself, Guillermo del Toro. The film Stars Oscar Isaac as Dr. Victor Frankenstein and Jacob Elordi as his Monster. Mia Goth, Christoph Waltz, and Charles Dance also star.
This time the monster is assembled from the body parts of frozen soldiers in the Crimean War. Brought to life their many memories plague The Monster. “This is a resurrected soldier out of a mass grave, basically.” says del Toro.
Del Toro is in his wheelhouse with this subject matter, and he obviously had a lot of leeway to do whatever he wanted, sometimes with a hit, sometimes with a miss. This isn’t his best film ever, but if someone was going to make a movie about what it is to be the true monster then it was going to be him. Fans are raving because they finally have a film adaption where the monster has a certain elegance, rather than just being a shambling mess.
“My favorite novel in the world is Frankenstein,” he told Collider in 2010. “I’m going to misquote it horribly, but the monster says, ‘I have such love in me, more than you can imagine. But, if I cannot provoke it, I will provoke fear.’
“This film concludes a journey for me that started at age seven,” Guillermo del Toro says, “when I saw James Whale’s Frankenstein films for the first time. Gothic horror became my church, and Boris Karloff my Messiah.”
At 2 hours and 29 minutes the film sometimes starts to outstay its welcome, but you can’t rush Frankenstein.
The Choral
Set during WW1 in England villagers and parishioners wrestle with the horrors of being grist for the machinations of war with the only thing they have, humour and a bit of singing. Young men who return with less than they started find solace, and even younger men wrestle with the fate that awaits them. Ralph Fiennes stars as the choir master and is directed by Sir Nicholas Hytner. The writing is by Alan Benett who usually has to prove his stories on the stage before they’re adapted for the screen.
Rental Family
Oscar winning Brendan Fraser continues his streak of emotionally packed movies about a man learning to grapple with his feelings. This time he’s playing a washed up actor living in Tokyo doing commercials and mascot gigs when his agent suddenly thrusts him into an unusual new role. He becomes an actor in people’s real lives, pretending to be old friends, a groom, and a father. Because the agency needed a token white guy. This is a real job in Japan, and the film explores the blurring lines between artifice and reality when it comes to relationships. The movie follows an episodic structure and isn’t without rocky choices, but ultimately gets carried by Fraser who sells this easy sentimental crowd pleaser.
Stray Dog, A Kurosawa Great
After last issue’s review of High & Low I am now dedicating this section of the mag to Kurosawa films until I get bored and move on.
Stray Dog is an early procedural crime noir predecessor to buddy cop films by legendary director Kurosawa. It brings to life the world of post-war Japan in its immediate aftermath. The film was released just 4 years after WWII had finished. The first words spoken in the movie are “Someone stole my gun” and the film roars into action from there. The story follows a young policeman, long time collaborator Toshiro Mifune, who’s desperately searching the streets for his sidearm, becoming increasingly more guilty of what it might be capable of in the hands of someone he’s quickly discovering is desperate and bloodthirsty. Later he’s joined by a cop played by Takashi Shimura who’s been around long enough to not be quite so full of the youthful zest of his less experienced partner. Seeing Mifune’s character so single-mindedly driven is inspiring. He’s a better example of the rise and grind lifestyle than Christian Bale’s American Psycho.
Two sequences in particular linger far too long as if they’re trying to pad the runtime. But any boredom is staved off by the flavour these scenes add showing us the shambling lives of hustlers and Tokyo street life trying to scratch a living in the 40s.
It ends with aplomb and the slow peeling of layers and logical footwork that must be done to find and hunt the culprit is more satisfying than any Agatha Christie or Knives Out movie could ever hope to achieve.
Do I recommend it? Yeah, I do.