Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother (2026)

"You take her from me, and expect me to bow down to you?"

I loved this one. I barely blinked for 110 minutes.

It starts with the look. The colours are gorgeous and the direction is some of the best I’ve seen this year. Bassam Tariq paints picture after picture, and Katelin Arizmendi’s photography makes every one worth stopping on. I kept wanting to pause a thriller just to look at it.

On the face of it, this is a hitman-with-a-heart story, but killing is far from the point here. Latif is a devout man in a violent job, and the film is about grief, faith and fatherhood, and how badly the three fit together. After his wife dies, he gets more desperate to feed and protect his kids, and every move he makes to save them drags him deeper in. Meanwhile the faith he’d normally lean on is being tested by the loss. He’s a man in contradiction, and the film trusts you to sit with that.

Mahershala Ali plays Latif with his whole body and hardly any words. He’s soft-spoken and stingy with both dialogue and violence, so when the blade comes out you feel it. The action is rationed, which is why it hits so hard. At one point a Rambo clip plays on a screen and invites the comparison. Your Mother comes out of it well, because violence here costs something.

The moody score is fantastic. It gets under your skin early and never lets go. Driving the tension forwards.

Ali usually walks away with best actor in the room, but this is a career high from John Cho. You always know his fundamentalist pastor is the antagonist, but he’s not a psychopath. His faith is genuine, just misaligned, and Cho plays it with total sincerity. Next to Latif, whose belief is cracking, that certainty is the frightening part.

If you can find this showing on a big screen, book a ticket right away.