Spring 2026 Movie Review Roundup

It’s time for my Spring 2026 Movie Review Roundup, where I review the movies and streaming shows I watched over the last few months.

As always, they are listed from least favorite to most favorite. The grades are wholly subjective and based on nothing more than my  own opinions and thoughts.

With that disclaimer out of the way, on to the movies!

KICKING & SCREAMING (2005)

A family comedy with Will Ferrell and Robert Duvall. Ferrell plays Phil Weston, mild-mannered vitamin store owner, and Duvall plays his father Buck Weston, owner of a successful chain of sports equipment stores. Buck is one of those hyper-competitive guys who has to win at everything, and Phil has always rolled with it. But when Phil’s son is a benchwarmer on the youth soccer team that Buck coaches, Phil’s had enough and starts coaching a rival team to get his son into the game and to defeat his father.

Along the way, of course, he descends into Will Ferrell-style comedic lunacy. But only the PG version, since this is a PG movie.

Mike Ditka was hilarious as Phil’s sidekick and assistant coach.

It seemed like an 80s family movie. It was the sort of movie where you could have taken the entire family to the theater in 2005 and everyone would have been at least mildly entertained.

Overall grade: C

THE LORD OF THE RINGS (1978)

The animated version of THE LORD OF THE RINGS from 1978. Extremely ambitious, but I think it’s fair to say this landed in ambitious failure territory, where they tried the best they could given the constraints of the technology at the time and the actual available budget. They tried to pack the entirety of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING and the first half of THE TWO TOWERS into about two hours and twenty minutes, and it just didn’t work. Like DUNE, THE LORD OF THE RINGS is one of those books that requires like ten hours of very expensive prestige filmmaking to pull of properly.

That said, I think it is fair to say that this stumbled so the Peter Jackson live action trilogy could run.

Adapting a book, especially a big book, into a movie is a challenge, and I don’t think this quite got there. Too much was cut, and if you hadn’t read the book, you probably would have no idea what was happening or been confused.

Additionally, the movie relied really heavily on rotoscoping, and it didn’t always quite work. Like, the rotoscoped Nazgul looked creepy and unsettling. The rotoscoped orcs just looked bad. You know how in live theatre the stagehands will dress all in black? The orcs kind of looked like that, albeit they were wearing yellow ponchos over their black stagehand outfits, almost like the stagehands were expecting inclement weather backstage.

That said, the vocal performances and the music were very good.

So, an ambitious and admirable failure. I think the filmmakers’ vision exceeded the grasp of their budget and the available technology of the 1970s.

Overall grade: C

AIRPLANE! (1980)

It was interesting to watch this as a cultural artifact. It had the leisurely pace of an 80s movie, but with far more absurdist humor. It was a parody of various airplane disaster movies from the 70s.

It’s also interesting that this is remembered as a Leslie Nielsen movie nowadays, though he’s a supporting character. For all that he’s known for absurdist humor these days, he plays his character stone-cold dead straight, which makes him all the funnier, amusingly enough.

Some of the jokes have aged very badly, but it’s still worth watching as an interesting (and amusing) cultural artifact, given how it influenced an entire genre of comedy movies afterward. There’s also the obligatory three seconds of nudity that can get cut on cable TV.

Overall grade: B-

THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR (1999)

An interesting remake of a movie from the 60s. Pierce Brosnan plays Thomas Crown, a billionaire who has grown bored with his life, so he orchestrates the theft of a priceless Monet painting from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The heist goes off flawlessly, and the museum’s insurance company sends out investigator Catherine Banning, played by Rene Russo, to retrieve the painting and avoid a $100 million insurance payout. Banning immediately intuits that Crown is the thief, and sets about to find the painting.

This is complicated by the fact that Crown and Banning immediately develop a strong attraction and start an affair.

It was interesting to watch, since neither Crown nor Banning are particularly sympathetic characters. In 2026, “bored New York billionaire” has a much more sinister connotation than it did in 1999, and Banning breaks all kinds of laws and sleeping with her target is not a particularly bright idea. That said, the opening heist was interesting, and Crown’s final gambit to return the painting was extremely clever and enjoyable to watch.

So, I liked it, but there was way too much nudity. Cable broadcasts are probably like ten minutes shorter.

Overall grade: B-

WHISKEY GALORE (2017)

A remake of the original WHISKEY GALORE from 1949.

Honestly, this is exactly the same movie as the one from 1949 that I watched in the Movie Review Roundup from Summer 2025, just updated with modern filmmaking techniques. If the movie makers in the 40s could have done it this way, they would have. Though I would recommend watching the 1949 first, and then the one from 2017.

Overall grade: B

SUPER MARIO GALAXY (2026)

I have to admit it felt a little strange to be the oldest person at the theater watching SUPER MARIO GALAXY, but I’ve been playing Mario games since before any of these kids were born. 🙂

Anyway, I would say this movie was about 75% as good as the first one. It was a little overpacked and the plot wasn’t quite as tight, but it was still fun to watch. The animation was excellent, and I enjoyed all the callbacks to the various Mario games, and since I haven’t actually played all the Mario games (I played no console games of any kind between 1998 and 2019), I’m sure there were quite a few I missed.

Anyway, the plot is that Bowser Jr is coming to rescue his father Bowser, who has been held captive since the end of the last movie. To power his doomsday weapon, Junior kidnaps Princess Rosalina, and Princess Peach goes to rescue her while Mario, Luigi, and Yoshi stay to protect the Mushroom Kingdom. But their separate subplots end up crossing when Bowser Jr invades the Mushroom Kingdom to get Bowser.

Glen Powell was an excellent choice to voice Fox McCloud.

I’d say if you could imagine a movie that the audience would enjoy and the critics would hate, you’d end up with SUPER MARIO GALAXY. Since that appears to be what happened to the tune of $970 million dollars, it appears that metaphor was accurate.

Also, to be less glib, “movies you can take your kids to” do serve a valuable social function in my opinion.

Overall grade: B

THE FALL AND RISE OF REGGIE DINKINS (2026)

This was a comedy with a fun premise. Reggie Dinkins, played by Tracy Morgan, was an elite NFL player who got bounced out of the league for placing bets on himself. Years later, he teams up with an indie filmmaker named Arthur Tobin (played by Daniel Radcliffe) to make a documentary to rehabilitate his image.

However, Tobin has his own issues. He has an Oscar, but then he got hired to direct a Marvel movie and cracked under the pressure, and so he and Reggie together have to go on a journey to recover their reputations.

This was pretty funny. Tracy Morgan is a comedic natural, but Daniel Radcliffe turned out to be an excellent comedic actor as well – he was great in the Weird Al biopic a few years ago, and he’s very funny in this. Craig Robinson was also great as Jerry Basmati, Reggie’s sleazy archnemesis.

B+

THE MANDALORIAN & GROGU (2026)

I enjoyed this – it was like three pretty good episodes of THE MANDALORIAN put together. The end result was an adventure movie that kind of reminded me of the best of 1980s fantasy and scifi movies, with a lot of creature work and action scenes.

For an extended stretch of the movie, Grogu takes over as the primary protagonist, and given that Grogu is a very expensive puppet, that’s an impressive feat.

The plot picks up from the end of the MANDALORIAN show. The titular Mandalorian and his adopted son Grogu are now working for the New Republic, helping them to hunt down Imperial warlords. Mando gets assigned to hunt down a mysterious Imperial warlord named Commander Coin, but the only people who have information on Coin’s location are the Twins, a pair of Hutt crime lords and relatives of Jabba the Hutt from RETURN OF THE JEDI. The Twins are willing to give up Coin’s location is Mando does a job for them, but as Han Solo could warn him, working for the Hutts carries its own peril.

I was surprised that the reviews for it were as mixed as they were, but I suspect that was a combination of three social factors: 1.) Cumulative ill-will towards Disney, which has done numerous sketchy things in the 2020s ( I think something similar happened with Microsoft and STARFIELD), 2.) the lingering bad taste of the sequel trilogy, and 3.) the tendency of the hardcore STAR WARS fandom to chronically overthink things.

Overall grade: B+

THE HOBBIT (1977)

Peter Jackon’s HOBBIT trilogy from the 2010s famously stretched THE HOBBIT across three movies, which didn’t really work, and added a bunch of epic battle scenes, which was tonally off for what was essentially a children’s book.

The animated 1977 version of THE HOBBIT, by contrast, went in a different direction, neatly adapting it down into 70 minutes or so, presumably because animation is very expensive.

At the time, this got mixed reviews. But looking back fifty years later, we can appreciate it more because of the sheer amount of work that goes into hand-drawn animation. Like, computer-based animation is unquestionably a lot of work as well, but hand-drawn animation is on a different level in terms of difficulty. That said, I think this adaptation did a better job of compressing the story down than the animated LORD OF THE RINGS I mentioned above.

There’s also a lot of 70s-style singing. I suspect J.R.R. Tolkien would have hated every single adaptation ever made of any of his works, with perhaps the exception of the audiobooks, but he would have approved of the number of songs and poetry in this. Though it was amusing that the High Elves sing in a 70s folk music style. It would be humorous if in THE SILMARILLION Earnedil the Mariner had finally crossed the Sundering Seas to reach Valinor and appeal the aid of the Valar against Morgoth and his hordes, only to hear 70s style folk music echoing across the shining hills of the Undying Lands.

It’s definitely worth watching if you like THE HOBBIT or old-style animation.

Overall grade: A-

HOUSE OF DAVID SEASON 2 (2026)

I wrestled with what grade to give this, because they used a lot of AI for the big battle scenes in Episode 1, and as longtime readers know, I do not generally approve of LLM generated slop.

Ironically, I think episode 1, the Big Battle Sequence with all the AI, was the definite weakest point of the second season. That said, all the character drama and interactions and acting were really good. Which, amusingly, shows that the while LLM stuff can generate blurry scenes of mounted soldiers charging at night, the real human emotion comes from, well, real human emotion.

Anyway, this picks up right off from the end of season 1, right after David kills Goliath, which means it takes place during most of the events of the third quarter of the book of 1 Samuel. David becomes one of the chief commanders of King Saul, but David is secretly the anointed king of Israel. Saul’s deteriorating mental state becomes threatening to David, while Saul’s children scheme for position  (with the exception of Jonathan, who has accepted that God has chosen David as the next king of Israel), and the Philistines prepare for war against Israel.

It is interesting how the show alternates between leaning into the Grimdark aspects of the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age and avoiding them. Like, constant warfare was a fact of life for a Mesopotamian king around 1000 BC. But the show also shows David as having passionate romantic love for Saul’s daughter Michal, and in the Bible David ended up with at least eight wives that we know about (there were likely others) and an unnamed number of concubines. So late Bronze Age/early Iron Age monarchs were not likely to have been in the grips of fervent romantic love. Though based on the psalms he wrote, David seems to have been a man who was definitely in touch with his emotions, and quite possibly he would passionately have loved multiple women at the same time.

Anyway, I enjoyed the show. While I am not an expert, I probably have a higher than average level of Old Testament knowledge. So when the show expanded on something from 1 Samuel (such as the role of Doeg, the murderous Edomite shepherd), I could see where they were coming from. Or the subplot where Jonathan falls in love with an Israelite woman, since in the Bible David took care of Jonathan’s son Mephibosheth, logically Jonathan had a wife at some point. Related to that, as Saul continues his descent, in a moment of rage in 1 Samuel he calls Jonathan the “son of a perverse and rebellious woman”, and the show has a subplot explaining how Saul came to see Queen Ahinoam as a “perverse and rebellious woman.”

So I enjoyed this, and will watch Season 3 when it comes along. The opening episode with all the AI-generated battle scenes is definitely the weakest, though.

Overall grade: A-

MAUL: SHADOW LORD (2026)

This was pretty good.

I think you could call the plot “Sith Noir.” Maul, desiring vengeance against the Emperor for all the pain he has endured, has decided to rebuild his criminal syndicate (previously destroyed in THE CLONE WARS) and use it to bring down the Empire. Meanwhile, Captain Lawson, a detective on a minor world, is trying to rebuild his relationship with his teenage son and keep his career afloat. This becomes tricky when a pair of fugitive Jedi fleeing from the Inquisitors turn up on their world.

But in the younger of the two Jedi, Maul sees a potential apprentice for himself, one he could corrupt to the dark side.

The animation has improved by quantum leaps and bounds since the days of the CLONE WARS show. The lighting and the shadow are excellent.  Maul looks spooky and a little uncanny. The lightsaber fights are quick and fluid. No spoilers, but the final episode is excellent.

I also think one of the best things about the STAR WARS animation shows is how Maul’s character has evolved from simply the cool swordsman at the end of THE PHANTOM MENACE to a sympathetic yet still evil warrior-philosopher, a tragic figure whose every effort always contains the seeds of its own downfall.

Overall grade: A

EMMA (2020)

An excellent adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. Good performances, good cinematography, and it captures the essence of the novel quite well. Probably a must for Austen fans to see. I don’t really have anything negative to say about it, save that it has the three seconds of unnecessary nudity that can be cut in cable broadcasts.

Amusingly, that three seconds of nudity is quite literally the only thing this movie has in common with AIRPLANE!

Overall grade: A

NO PACKERS NO LIFE (2025)

This was a fun documentary about a group of Japanese Green Bay Packers fans. Obviously there are fairly large cultural and linguistics divides between the United States and Japan, so American football is not hugely popular in Japan. However, the Green Bay Packers are the only community-owned team in the NFL, so they’re quite a bit more sympathetic.

Anyway, an American businessman goes to Japan, and stumbles across a Japanese man wearing a Packers jersey at a bar. From there he learns of a small club called the Japanese Packers Cheering Team that gathered to watch Packers games. The businessman in question happened to be from Wisconsin, so he befriended the Japanese Packers Cheering Team and invited them to Green Bay for a game. The invitation snowballed, and so the entire club and their families arrived to watch the game.

Sports fandom isn’t really one of my interests, so it’s always interesting to look at it from the outside. That said, this was an enjoyable documentary about cross-cultural communication at its best.

Overall grade: A

And let us close out with my favorite thing I saw in Spring 2026:

PROJECT HAIL MARY (2026)

This is another “Science Man solves space problem and saves the day with math & SCIENCE!!!” type of science fiction adventure like THE MARTIAN, though with some new twists on the formula.

Dr. Ryland Grace wakes up alone on a spaceship with all the other crew dead and no memory of how he got there. Gradually he partially remembers and partially works out that he is part of Project Hail Mary, a last-ditch effort to stop Earth’s sun from dimming due to an extremophile organism called the Astrophage. Only one other star was showing no signs of Astrophage infection, so Grace’s ship was sent there to try and discover some means of defeating the Astrophage.

While there he encounters an alien ship with a sole survivor, and he slowly works out how to communicate with the alien, who he dubs Rocky. It turns out Rocky was sent on a mission to solve the Astrophage problem as well, and together Grace and Rocky try to work out how to save their respective home worlds.

Quit enjoyable and worth seeing. At the time I typed this in March of 2026, it was the highest-grossing movie of 2026, and I think it deserved that. (Though it did get overtaken by SUPER MARIO GALAXY.)

Overall grade: A

CONCLUSION

I suppose that was an eclectic range of movies, wasn’t it?

Interestingly, I actually saw three of them in the theaters – PROJECT HAIL MARY, SUPER MARIO GALAXY, and MANDALORIAN & GROGU. Three times in three months – I think that’s the most I’ve been to the movie theater in a single year in the entirety the 2020s.

-JM