Flickside

Fear and pleasure are two sides of the same coin, and I have rarely felt that as clearly as I did watching Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil (2026) in a theater. After Barbarian (2022) and Weapons (2025), which won Amy Madigan the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, Cregger has earned the freedom to reimagine a long-running franchise through an auteur lens. A confession first: I have never played Resident Evil. Certain video games simply made my anxiety worse.

(A version of this review was first published in September 2024). A man drops his toddler at day care, picks up the mail, runs a few errands. By the end of that day he has been catcalled, told his clothes invited it, and assaulted in the street. Nobody around him treats any of it as remarkable. Majorité Opprimée (Oppressed Majority, 2010) is an eleven-minute short film written and directed by Eléonore Pourriat, and that deadpan style is how she approaches the entire film.

Short film Poppy explores that perhaps underused word “liminal.” Directed and written by London-based filmmaker Julia Schonstadt, and starring Carrie Bunyan as main character Claudia, it’s a flashback piece with necessary weight. Claudia is a middle-aged woman who is meeting with a parole officer, and reflecting on her past relationship with a woman named Poppy. Cut to a run-down, alcohol bottle-strewn living room. Then, cut to a few sentences between a newly-reunited Claudia and Poppy.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey (2026) reimagines Circe as one of the film’s most unforgettable figures, transforming the infamous enchantress from Greek mythology into a pivotal emotional centerpiece of Odysseus’s journey. Samantha Morton’s performance has become a focal point of the conversation surrounding the film, with many already predicting a third Oscar nom for her.

In this edition of Legend Has it, we pay homage to the anniversary of Greek mythology film Clash of the Titans, which was lighting up movie theater marquees 45 years ago this summer, and whose magical legacy can still be seen today in movies like Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster hit The Odyssey. “Release the Kraken.” What menacing words. That was four-time Oscar winner Laurence Olivier in 1981, portraying the highest of Greek gods Zeus in the mythology action-adventure film Clash of the Titans.

From The Return (2024) to The Odyssey (2026), here are the 16 best Greek mythology movies worth your time. In 1950, Jean Cocteau set the Orpheus myth in postwar Paris and reimagined Death as an elegant woman in black who arrives on a motorcycle to collect her victims. Marcel Camus moved the same myth to Rio de Janeiro during Carnival in 1959, where Orpheus’s legendary music became samba, and the underworld became the city itself.

What happens when your location is a real self-driving car, your camera is an ARRI Alexa 35, and you have to return the vehicle without a scratch? Independent filmmakers Kyle Valle and Erin Áine found out making ‘Autonomous,’ a vertical horror series of 16 sixty-second episodes that unfold as one continuous story, shot almost entirely inside a real autonomous vehicle.

Christopher Nolan said something recently that stopped me completely. In an interview with the Empire Magazine, he pointed, “When you start to break down the text and adapt The Odyssey, you find that all of these other films – and all the films I’ve worked on – they’re all from The Odyssey.” Nolan was 5, when he first saw the Ulysses school play in London. It was his first encounter with the story and left a deep impression on him.

Ryan Gosling has made 29 movies in 30 years, and with Project Hail Mary (2026) just out, we’re ranking them all. Call him Hollywood’s renegade, chameleon, or Millennial Hollywood’s answer to Old Hollywood’s Marlon Brando. Whichever moniker, Ryan Gosling delivers. His latest film, 2026’s science fiction blockbuster Project Hail Mary, just hit streaming platform Amazon this July, and cinephiles are out-of-this-world excited (pun intended).

A film on Punjab battled the censors, rallied public support and ultimately exposed an ugly side of the State that the system didn’t want you to see. I’m sure you’re thinking of Punjab ’95. But I’m talking about the year 2016, when Udta Punjab more than ruffled a few feathers with its edgy, grim, borderline-dark, uncompromising portrait of a system that had let down its youth.