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Donnie Darko (Richard Kelly, 2001) Selected by @000mikewilliams000 for our 21st century sci-fi special “Long before multiverses became blockbuster cinema's dominant language, Donnie Darko imagined a tangent universe as a temporary unstable reality, split off from the primary universe then collapsing back into it. This is not a parallel world but a corrupted duplicate that Donnie must repair before it destroys existence. In that respect, the film feels as important a precursor to the century's biggest sci-fi series, Stranger Things (2016-25), as the Spielberg films it more openly imitates, both transforming nostalgic 80s suburbia into a site where alternate realities seep through the cracks of everyday American life. “Donnie Darko's afterlife is its most distinctly 21st-century quality. After flopping at the box office, it became one of the internet's first great decoder films, endlessly theorised on forums, mapped into timelines and reinterpreted through rewatches. Frank, with his toothy grin and specular eyes, seemed to anticipate the logic of online image culture: uncanny, reproducible and detached from fixed meaning, a proto-meme waiting to circulate. “Seen now, Donnie Darko no longer plays as a cult puzzle film. It feels like an early vision of a century defined by fractured realities, conspiracy thinking and damaged timelines, by the growing feeling that the world continues to move forward on the wrong track.”

The top 10 films of #cannes2026, as selected by our editors, from the competition and beyond Look for more S&S reviews of Cannes titles in the coming days, and extended coverage of the festival in our upcoming Summer 2026 issue Top 3 pictured 1. A Man of his Time (Emmanuel Marre) 2. Fatherland (Paweł Pawlikowski) 3. Rehearsals for a Revolution (Pegah Ahangarani) 4. La bola negra (Javier Calvo & Javier Ambrossi) 5. The Beloved (Rodrigo Sorogoyen) 6. All of a Sudden (Hamaguchi Ryūsuke) 7. Diary of a Chambermaid (Radu Jude) 8. Minotaur (Andrey Zvyagintsev) 9. The Dreamed Adventure (Valeska Grisebach) 10. Red Rocks (Bruno Dumont)

The Devils (Ken Russell, 1971) Now seen as a classic of British cinema, The Devils was dismissed by many critics as an exercise in excess – S&S's Tom Milne included: “Long before Sister Jeanne and her bevy of nuns have been sufficiently provoked to embark on their frenzied ballet of sexual possession, it is abundantly clear that The Devils has itself been invaded by hysteria. In the opening sequence, the King, naked but for a dainty G-string, steps out of a huge shell to dance the birth of Venus for the delight of an audience of rouged and twittering courtier-queens in drag… “Ken Russell substitutes a tabloid newspaper approach to the sex, violence and corruption, showing Grandier's torture and the nuns' aberrations in full gory detail but forgetting to explain what they are all about. Not surprisingly, the actors can make little headway against the director's persistent comic-strip overstatement.”