The first few weeks of January for theatrical film releases are dichotomous, to say the least. We get a combination of the movies that studios have lost all faith in and want to dump quickly and cheaply released with Oscar nominees and some future winners. It’s the best and worst of what was created the previous year, all served to an audience starving for something of substance (or something as badass as “The Substance”). When the Oscar nominees are announced on Jan. 22, all of the best picture nominees will get thrown back into theaters for a week or two, so we hopefully can then balance our time between forgettable nonsense and works of actual import.
So far in the first week and a half of 2026, it’s been a fairly mixed bag, but nothing could ever be worse than the first horror movie of 2012, “The Devil Inside,” which smash cut to black in the middle of the climactic exorcism and told the stunned audience that if we wanted to see what happened next, we would have to go to the website. True story. Nothing will ever be worse than that. The audacity!
This was better. I started the week out with “Dust Bunny,” a fractured fairy tale from the deeply disturbed imagination of Bryan Fuller, the madcap genius behind some of my favorite shows of the 21st century like “Pushing Daisies,” “Hannibal” and “American Gods.” The film follows Mads Mikkelsen as an unnamed hitman in a dangerous and uncaring city who is hired by an eight-year-old girl to kill the monster under her bed, which just brutally murdered her parents.
It’s beautiful to look at and listen to: from the hyper-saturated cinematography by Nicole Hirsch Whitaker, the darkly dreaming score from Florence and the Machine’s Isabella Summers, Jeremy Reed’s playful production design and the stylish shot compositions of Fuller himself that evoke the best of Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam, while remaining solely his own. If you’re in the mood for a lightly dark monster movie that plays fast and loose with Grimm’s fairy tales and our own childhood fears of the unknown, “Dust Bunny” is a minor miracle of singular vision.
Next up was “We Bury the Dead,” a somber, slow-burn of a zombie movie about a military disaster that kills almost everyone in Tasmania…for a little while. The dead begin to reanimate and after standing around for a few hours, they start (very graphically) grinding their teeth and then attacking you like a, you know, regular zombie. Starring a perfectly calibrated Daisy Ridley and a charismatic Brenton Thwaites, the film follows Ridley (playing an American), who joins a body disposal unit in Tasmania in the hopes of finding her husband, who was there on a work retreat.
What we have here is an episodic road movie that works much better as a treatise on grief and the horror of society breaking down than it does as a zombie movie. In fact, every time director Zak Hilditch forgoes the drama for cheap jump scares, it loses the credibility it built as something bravely original and becomes another “Walking Dead” knockoff. I can’t remotely say it’s a bad movie because Hilditch has a lovely eye as a filmmaker and Ridley is an insanely underrated performer, but there are too many missed opportunities here for it to feel like anything other than a mixed bag of zombie parts.
Finally, “Greenland 2: Migration,” which picks up five years after a comet killed most everyone on Earth except for Gerard Butler and his family. I was excited for this because I have a soft spot in my heart for the original, which came out in 2020 just when COVID had me worried we might not ever get any new movies ever again. It’s a big, dumb, warm-hearted post-apocalyptic survival thriller that follows Butler as he tries to get himself and his family to a complex of underground bunkers in Greenland.
The sequel sees the bunker collapsing from an Earthquake and the Gerard Butler Trio traveling toward a meteor crater South of France to be the spot where humanity is rebuilding. The film is very much another episodic road movie similar to “We Bury the Dead,” except we have Butler acting up a (“Geo”) storm, treating “Greenland 2” like he’s post-apocalyptic King Lear, chewing scenery like he’s starving for camera time.
I respect that the film is much more focused on family drama and emotional character beats, but it kept me feeling sleepy during what should have been an exciting end-of-the-world picture. For the people who liked the original because of its breathless pace and intense stakes, “Greenland 2” will feel like a bizarrely miscalculated swing at something more dramatic and way less entertaining.
We have some very exciting movies coming out over the next few months, so I’m not worried about 2026 so far, but I never would have guessed the movie about a hitman vs. a monster under a little kid’s bed would be the clear winner here. Here’s to some positive surprises in our movie-going futures.
Dust Bunny
Dir. Bryan Fuller
Grade: B+
Now Playing at Tin Pan Theater
We Bury the Dead
Dir. Zak Hilditch
Grade: C+
Now Streaming
Greenland 2: Migration
Dir. Ric Roman Waugh
Grade: D+
Now Playing at Regal Old Mill, Sisters Movie House
This article appears in the Source January 22, 2026.
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