This Season’s Top Picks!
BEST MOVIES of 2025 & 2026.
- Hamnet, 2025. Directed by Chloe Zhao, screenplay by Maggie O’Farrell and Chloe Zhao, based on the best selling novel of the same name. Starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal. Nominated for 8 Academy Awards, and in my opinion most deserving of best picture and director, it won one award for Best Actress Jessie Buckley. Available on Netflix, Prime Video and Apple TV. This cinematographically lush and resplendent film, hypothesizes that the death of William Shakespeare’s, Hamnet, at the age of 11, was the inspiration for arguably the greatest play of all time – Hamlet. This movie was used in a brand new learning seminar on grief. In Shakespeare’s time, the names Hamnet and Hamlet were used interchangeably.
- Color Book, 2024 (I didn’t see it until 2026). Starring William Catlett and Jeremiah Alexander Daniels as Mason. Directed and written by David Fortune. Available on Netflix. Color Book is an intimate story of a father, in the wake of his wife’s death, trying to take his son with Down Syndrome to a baseball game. Fortune has brilliantly shot the picture in black and white, putting the focus on the characters rather than the world behind them. More notably, the film offers a sharp, understated exploration of Black masculinity. This movie served as a companion piece to Hamnet in the newly minted learning seminar on grief.
- Being Heumann, 2026. Starring Ruth Madely, directed by Sian Heder. To be released in select theaters on November 4, 2026, then stream on Apple TV. Being Heumann tells the story of disability rights activist Judy Heumann, a force to be reckoned with. She galvanized the disability community, led protests, relentlessly pursued politicians responsible for legislative change and led the charge in getting the Section 504 signed in 1978, which became the predecessor of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
- Frankenstein, directed by Guillermo del Toro, 2025. Starring Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi as the monster. Based on the original 1818 novel by Mary Shelley (written when she was only 18 years old). This Frankenstein explores themes of parenthood, creation, responsibility and ethics. While more violent than the movies I typically recommend, it is dense in context and value. Available on Netflix. The learning seminar created that was inspired by this movie – “Deconstructing Frankenstein” – was our most attended and best reviewed class ever!
- I have screened almost every submission for the 19th Annual ReelAbilities Film Festival, coming up April 8-13, 2027. I can say unequivocally that this is the year best ever! I encourage you to attend as many movies in the Festival as possible. (Continuing Education CEs are awarded to mental health professionals for attendance.) ReelAbilities’ mission is identical to our criteria here at the Frank Ridge Memorial Foundation. In fact, many of the movies you’ll see in our learning seminars are movies I discovered thanks to ReelAbilities. Each year has a dazzling line-up of shorts and feature length films, narratives and documentaries.
Top Pick for Television 2026 and a throw-back to 2022.
- Furious. A Hulu series. Starring Emmy Rossum, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, and Lola Petticrew as serial killer Catharine. And, in a brilliant stroke of casting, wheelchair-user Steve Way stars as Catherine’s client in her day job as a home health aide. The Guardian summarizes “With Furious, I think we might be seeing the birth of a new subgenera of television drama; call it the Epstein thriller. Pre-him, the files and revelations about the depth and breadth of his network of suppliers, enablers and willing (rich, male) participants, we might have thought the plot of Furious preposterous, sitting uneasily with the series’ grimly realistic tone and emotional palette. Now it is an organic, seamless, horrifying whole that asks how individuals survive such predators and how society survives such knowledge. And when we are going to become furious enough to do something to make a difference.”
- The Patient. This chilling series aired on Hulu and FX in 2022, but it is a must see in any season. Steve Carell plays a psychiatrist to Domhnall Gleeson’s serial killer. This may well be Carell’s finest acting ever, as he embodies a psychiatrist every practitioner should aspire to be. And, somehow, due to Gleeson’s finely-tuned performance, we grow to care for a serial killer. Caution: there is violence and some disturbing scenes. It’s about a serial killer, after all.
- Alright – I clearly have a thing for serial killer thrillers. What can I say – these are to die for.
Ongoing best website:
www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org. The Treatment Advocacy Center, founded by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, one of the world’s foremost research psychiatrists, specializing in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. His web site provides a plethora of global information and resources on all mental health conditions.
