Simon Crook

Is it safe to say movies are back? Sure, there’s still plenty of anxiety around the film industry and its future. But cinematically speaking, 2026 has gotten off to, arguably, the most blazing hot start since the pre-pandemic glory days, both critically and at the box office.  Of course, for our purposes, we like to focus on the creative successes, and it’s rare for the first quarter of any year to produce so many achievements of various scopes and budgets. Any time you get both a Project Hail Mary and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple – not to mention leftfield triumphs like The Testament of Ann Lee, Sirât and Little Amélie or the Character of Rain – all before the calendar’s halfway point, you know it’s a good time to be a film fan, especially when there are new spectacles from Christopher Nolan, Steven Spielberg, Marvel and the Dune franchise on the horizon.  But that’s later. Here’s the best of what we’ve seen so far.  📺 The best TV and streaming shows of 2026 (so far)📕 15 book-to-movie adaptations to get excited about in 2026🔥 The 40 best movies of 2025

The horror business is booming right now. Over the last few years, it’s become one of the movie industry’s most bankable genres, financially and creatively. Ryan Coogler has already made Oscar-nomination history with a vampire flick of all things, while the combination of Barbarian and Weapons has made director Zach Cregger one of Hollywood’s most exciting new voices – and that’s to say nothing of the huge box-office success of franchise entries like The Conjuring: Last Rites, Final Destination Bloodlines and Five Nights at Freddy’s 2.Only a few months into 2026, and the year in horror is already off to another good start, between 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, entertaining killer monkey ripper Primate and Sam Raimi’s return-to-form, Send Help. Nothing on the docket for the rest of the year immediately screams ‘blockbuster,’ but that’s the great thing about horror: like a bump in the night, the hits often come from unexpected places. Here’s what has stood out like a bloody knife so far. 📽️ The best movies of 2026 (so far)🔥 The best TV and streaming shows of 2026 (so far)🧟 The 100 greatest horror movies ever made

Updates for 2025: New monsters are made every year, so we’ve added a few modern beasties we’re sure we’ll be haunting our nightmares for decades to come, including the latest interpretation of Nosferatu, the most grotesque of many abominations in The Substance and the horrifying, multi-mouthed demon from 2022’s Smile.  The movie industry has always been crawling with monsters, and we don’t just mean predatory agents and old-school studio heads. We’re talking about the monsters borne from childhood nightmares, or the deranged imaginations of some very creative adults. We’re talking predatory aliens. We’re talking vampires and werewolves. We’re talking skyscraper-sized apes, sentient globs of carnivorous space goo, interdimensional leather daddies and razor-toothed sewer clowns. In some cases, the monsters of cinema have become as famous as any actor – movie stars unto themselves.  It’s those most iconic beasts, demons and kaiju we’re saluting in this list of the greatest movie monsters of all-time. A few caveats: this list largely follows the same parameters as our monster movies list, meaning that it steers away from non-mutated animals – sorry, Bruce the Shark and the spiders from Arachnophobia – as well as slasher villains such as Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers. But zombies? Trolls? Brundleflies? You’ll find them all below.  Quick picks: 📍 Best vampire: Nosferatu (Nosferatu, 1922)📍 Best kaiju: Godzilla (Godzilla, 1954)📍 Best zombie: Bub (Day of the Dead, 1985) 📍 Best d

Horror works best in short bursts. Think of your own nightmares: they aren’t sprawling epics but quick, disquieting shocks of dread. No wonder, then, that horror anthologies go back to the earliest days of the genre. In 1919, Austrian director Richard Oswald bundled together a series of eerie tales into the film titled, well, Eerie Tales, inaugurating a subgenre that persists today. But by their very nature, anthology films can also act as tossed-off stopgaps for directors in between more serious projects. Done right, however, these cinematic short-stories can pack enough scares into a tight runtime that are every bit as terrifying as any feature-length fright. Here are 11 standout collections, chosen by film journalist and horror author Simon Crook. Recommended: 😱 The 100 best horror movies of all time🩸The 15 scariest horror movies based on true stories🎃 Best Halloween Movies🤔 The 20 best movies based on true stories

Visiting the wilds of Ireland to scatter his parent’s ashes, Adam Scott’s cantankerous horror novelist Ohm Bauman checks into the Bilberry Weeds Hotel. An arrogant, insufferable tool, Bauman’s dark cloud pisses on everyone he meets – from the hotel bellhop to the local crank, who warns him dark forces lurk in the woods. When a hotel employee goes missing, convinced her body’s in the honeymoon suite, Bauman breaks into the forbidden room – a dismal, fetid pit of mildewed wood, creaking doors, a ragged four-poster bed and an undrained jacuzzi just waiting for Bauman to get sheep-dipped in. It’s also rumoured to house a witch.  It’s here where auteur Damian Mc Carthy launches a sustained assault of nerve-jangling horrorcraft. Alone, trapped, his own demons surfacing as his mind unravels, Bauman’s only way out appears to be a dumbwaiter down to the hotel’s basement. Descending into a bricked-up catacomb, slow zooms grope through unlit corridors and unseen horrors lurk in the cackling dark… Tempting as it is to tag this the Irish Shining, Hokum’s horror hotel draws heavily on the spirit of Barton Fink – the tortured writer, the decrepit interiors, the clanking caged elevators and chirpy bellboy. But this is very much a Mc Carthy movie, and those familiar with Caveat and Oddity will note all of his signatures are present – the eerie figurines, sharp tinging bells, his deeply peculiar rabbit fetish. Punctured with jump scares to puncture the unease, it’s also his most mainstream chi

Welcome to the snowbound flatlands of Normal, Minnesota. Population 1,890 – although you might want to downgrade that come the end of this unapologetic blast of old-school mayhem.Bob Odenkirk is caretaker sheriff Ulysses Richardson, shipped into Normal after the previous lawman perished in a whiteout. ‘Good people, small problems’ is Ulysses’ appraisal after calming a petty local dispute, but something isn’t quite right. The nice lady in the yarn shop has a police radio scanner. Shotguns deck the walls of the local diner. And the cop shop armoury has enough C4 to blow up Luxembourg. A botched bank heist by two bungling drifters exposes Normal’s dirty secret: gold bullion stashed by the townsfolk in return for a cut from the Japanese mafia. The Yakuza money is Normal’s lifeblood – and now Ulysses knows, everyone in town, from the postie to the doctor, wants him dead.     Normal is a film of two halves. The first, a smalltown mystery populated with eccentric western stock: Lena Headey’s grungy barfly, Billy MacLellan’s doofus deputy, Henry Winkler’s dodgy mayor, face like a haunted flannel. And the second? The pneumatic chakka-chak of gunfire is absolutely relentless. A throwback to the B-movie thriller that packed the shelves of your local Blockbuster Exploding cop cars. Exploding heads. Ninety minute runtime. No CG. Who makes these films any more? Director Ben Wheatley, whose warehouse shoot-‘em-up Free Fire showed a fluency in the grammar of action cinema, piles on the blac

Aquesta inofensiva comèdia de terror es confabula com un frenètic homenatge a pel·lícules com 'La purga'. Per raons que mai no s'expliquen, els pares comencen a assassinar els seus fills: les mares esquarteren els recent nascuts, els avis maten els nets i a l'escola hi ha grans massacres. Mentre l'epidèmia es va estenent per tot Amèrica, dos germans es troben tancats en el soterrani de la seva casa. Podran evitar que esbotzi la porta una lliga d'invasors liderats pels seus propis pares? I el millor de tot és que, tant si està pronunciant un monòleg sobre joguines anals o cantant 'The hokey Cokey', la presència d'un Nicolas Cage desencadenat i sense perruca està en perfecta sintonia amb la sobrecafeïnada direcció de Brian Taylor.  

Powered by a vintage Nicolas Cage wig-out, this merrily tasteless horror-comedy plays like a frantic mash-up of ‘The Purge’, ‘The Crazies’ and ‘Serial Mom’. For reasons never explained, let alone explored, parents start butchering their offspring: mothers murder newborns, granddads kill grandsons, and school runs mutate into rabid massacres. As the epidemic burns across America, siblings Anne Winter and Zackary Arthur find themselves bunkered in the basement of their suburban home. Can they fend off a home invasion staged by their own frothing parents? And can anyone survive Cage’s freeform jazz interpretation of a raging dad? Whether he’s delivering a monologue about anal beads or singing ‘The Hokey Cokey’ while sledgehammering a pool table, Cage’s performance is wildly in sync with Brian Taylor’s over-caffeinated direction. As a horror movie, ‘Mom & Dad’ is a fiasco – Taylor’s frantic visuals suggest a man mainlining Red Bull, a style too impatient for anything remotely approaching tension. As a satire, however, it’s a scream. Granted, the delivery’s as shrill as a banshee stepping on a Lego brick, but here’s a film with something to say about ageing anxiety, Middle America’s materialist vacuum and the parasitic resentments triggered by raising children. Luis Buñuel he most certainly isn’t, but Taylor wack-a-moles taboos with an infectious glee that will have anyone with kids emitting a cathartic howl. Fun for all the family, then.

Esta inofensiva comedia de terror se confabula como un frenético homenaje a películas como 'La purga'. Por razones que nunca se explican, los padres empiezan a asesinar a sus hijos: las madres descuartizan a los recién nacidos, los ancianos matan a sus nietos y en la escuela hay grandes masacres. Mientras la epidemia se extiende por toda América, dos hermanos se encuentran encerrados en el sótano de su casa. ¿Podrán evitar que una liga de invasores liderados por sus propios padres derribe la puerta? Lo mejor de todo es que, tanto si está pronunciando un monólogo sobre juguetes anales o cantando 'The hokey Cokey', la presencia de un Nicolas Cage desencadenado y sin peluca está en perfecta sintonía con la sobrecafeïnada dirección de Brian Taylor.

'I was a little chimp with a chip on my shoulder. Then I became a gorilla…’ Shot over four years, this excess-all-areas bio-doc chronicles the evolution of mixed martial artist Conor McGregor, a silverback blessed with whack-a-mole-hammer fists, a talent for trash talk and ferocious, swaggering charisma. He’s introduced to us living in his mum’s spare room, claiming benefits and dreaming of his Ultimate Fighting Championship debut. By the end of Gavin Fitzgerald’s film, the Irishman has powered through a rags-to-riches arc, flooring champions with a single punch and attracting the adoration of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Sports docs like this are all about luck, and Fitzgerald gets plenty of it, despite the film wrapping before that infamous Floyd Mayweather brawl. McGregor’s trajectory is like four Rocky movies crushed into one – the underdog rise, staggering victory, chastening defeat, then a dogfight revenge match that goes right to the final round. You couldn’t make it up. Still, there’s a question here: how close do you get to your subject before you become a disciple yourself? With no distancing voiceover, the film submits to McGregor’s will completely. Given the fighter’s taste for controversy, you’d expect Fitzgerald to land a few probing counter-shots but he seems more fixated on McGregor’s sudden vast wealth (the mega-mansion, the supercars, the private jets), which is drooled over with a suspiciously covetous gaze. As a bombastic insight into twenty-first-century sport