February’s new movies jump from rehab facilities to 1990s Iraq to a maybe apocalypse
As Hollywood gears up for the March 15 Academy Awards ceremony, the film world continues to turn with February releases. Whether these five features will be part of next year’s Oscar conversation is anyone’s guess, but audiences reeling from a particularly brutal winter could certainly do worse than spending an evening with one of them.
‘Honey Bunch’
After Diana (Grace Glowicki) wakes up from a coma, struggling to remember what happened, her husband Homer (Ben Petrie) whisks her off to an eerie, remote rehab facility. As she begins to recover her memories, she also begins distrusting the motives of the staff, including the coldly clinical Farah (Kate Dickie) and even Homer himself.
Directors Dusty Mancinelli and Madeleine Sims-Fewer (“Violation”) deliver a deliberately disorienting slow burn that erupts into chaos in the movie’s second half, delivering a film that is “thrilling but ponderous, darkly comedic but genuinely disturbing, thoughtful but deeply silly, and 100% weird at all times,” said Jim Vorel at Paste Magazine. (Feb. 13 on Shudder)
‘Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’ (Feb 13)
Sam Rockwell is an outstanding actor who rarely gets the chance to headline a project, but in “Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die,” he sizzles as a nameless man from the future who takes a group of strangers hostage in a Los Angeles diner and tries to enlist them to stop what he claims is an impending AI apocalypse. It’s a kind of tongue-in-cheek, sci-fi “Groundhog Day.” As “bold as it is clever,” this time loop thriller from director Gore Verbinski (“The Ring”) is “dizzily ambitious in its gallows-tinged nihilism about the technology ruling and ruining our lives,” said David Crow at Den of Geek. (in theaters Feb. 13)
‘Redux Redux’
Irene (Michaela McManus) uses a device that allows her to jump around the multiverse, hunting iterations of her daughter’s murderer, a serial killer named Neville (Jeremy Holm). She can’t seem to save her daughter, but gladly kills Neville over and over, confronting the limits of vengeance — until she has the chance to save someone else.
Directors Kevin and Matthew McManus (who helmed the 2021 cult classic “The Block Island Sound”) have created a “smart, terrifying” thriller that “takes elements of the serial killer genre, aspects of grief drama and a splash of multiverse storytelling and mixes them into something that feels fresh and new,” said Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert. (in theaters Feb. 20)
‘The President’s Cake’
A parable about ordinary life under dictatorship has never been more relevant than in 2026, even if the subject matter ostensibly focuses on 1990s Iraq. At the direction of the country’s brutal dictator, Saddam Hussein — who would be overthrown in a 2003 US-led military intervention—ordinary Iraqis are ordered to bake cakes to honor his birthday.
In director Hasan Hadi’s first full-length film, 9-year-old Lamia (Baneen Ahmad Nayyef) is put in charge of gathering the supplies for her school’s offering, a daunting task given the punishing sanctions that were imposed on the country at the time. Lamia encounters corruption and predation at every turn, and her “cake becomes a classic MacGuffin” in this “darkly comic odyssey through scarcity, fear and moral erosion,” said James Murphy at The Scoop. (in theaters Feb. 27)
‘Dreams’
Jessica Chastain plays Jennifer, a socialite and philanthropist whose hush-hush romance with a much younger Mexican ballet dancer named Fernando (Isaac Hernández) spirals out of control when he illegally crosses the border and turns up at her San Francisco condo. Jennifer operates an arts foundation for her ultra-wealthy family and met Fernando on one of many trips to Mexico to distribute grants, but his sudden presence in her carefully curated American life triggers a crisis. A “clear-eyed and detail-focused moral drama” from director Michel Franco (“Sundown”) offers “provocative social critique with an extra-sharp sting in the tail,” said Peter Debruge at Variety. (in theaters Feb. 27)