Two masterpieces just shattered critical consensus on Rotten Tomatoes. Both A Poet and All That’s Left of You have garnered rare perfect 100% scores from critics, dominating March 2026’s excellence rankings. These dual releases represent a historic moment for international cinema.

A Poet Achieves Unanimous Critical Acclaim

Simón Mesa Soto‘s A Poet stands as one of 2026’s finest achievements. Starring Ubeimar Rios as Oscar Restrepo, a once-promising writer turned tragic failure, the film examines fatherhood’s weight with devastating wit and elegance. The Colombian-Swedish-German co-production premiered at Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section last year and has conquered every distribution market since.

The ensemble cast includes Rebeca Andrade, Guillermo Cardona, and Humberto Restrepo, delivering layered performances that anchor the film’s four-chapter structure. Critics hailed the film as a triumph of tone, mixing tragicomic observation with genuine emotional devastation. The New York Times called it “The Romance of Misery”, recognizing its ability to find beauty in human failure. The film’s philosophical depth and formal precision explain its unprecedented critical consensus.

All That’s Left of You Shatters Records as Palestinian Saga

Cherien Dabis wrote, directed, and starred in All That’s Left of You, a sweeping three-generational epic set in the Occupied West Bank spanning decades of family trauma and resilience. Featuring Saleh Bakri, Mohammad Bakri, Adam Bakri, and Maria Zreik, the film follows a teenage boy swept into a pivotal protest with consequences that ripple through his family’s future.

Produced by Watermelon Pictures, the film premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2025, where it immediately earned Certified Fresh status and near-universal praise. Filming relocated to Cyprus, Greece, and Jordan after production complications, yet the result feels seamlessly authentic. Critics point to Dabis’s multi-media mastery (she directs, performs, and produces) as essential to the film’s emotional authority. The film’s scope rivals the greatest epics while maintaining intimate character work that defines recent international cinema.

All That’s Left of You arrived in selected theaters on January 9, 2026 and steadily expanded throughout early March. The film’s 100% Rotten Tomatoes score reflects not just critical respect but genuine reverence for Dabis’s artistic vision. This achievement represents Palestinian cinema reaching its greatest artistic and commercial moment.

Why These Two Films Dominate March 2026’s Conversation

Rarity defines these simultaneous perfect scores. A Poet and All That’s Left of You occupy the rare 100% Tomatometer tier reserved for films of historic excellence. The 2026 FilmFare recognized both as front-runners for major awards, acknowledging how they’ve elevated the expectations for drama itself. Industry observers note that achieving perfect critical consensus in today’s fractious landscape represents not consensus but unanimous recognition of artistic achievement.

Both films reflect cinema’s global moment. Simón Mesa Soto‘s Colombian vision and Cherien Dabis‘ Palestinian perspective prove that international storytelling now commands the cultural conversation. Rotten Tomatoes‘ Official Rankings place both films in its exclusive Certified Fresh top tier. March 2026 becomes the month cinema decided: universal critical acclaim belongs to filmmakers willing to transcend borders.

“All That’s Left of You is a sweeping multigenerational epic that captures the thematic breadth of great cinema while exploring what it means to endure generational trauma.”

— Rotten Tomatoes Critics Consensus, Officials

The Future of International Cinema Starts Now

Both films expand to more theaters through March 2026 and beyond. A Poet hits streaming services and digital platforms simultaneously, making it accessible to audiences beyond Select Release cities. All That’s Left of You continues rolling out across regional markets, having already secured international distribution. Industry observers expect both to capture major festival awards at upcoming spring cinema celebrations.

These perfect scores matter beyond accolades. They signal to studios, streamers, and investors that audiences hunger for international voices and authentic storytelling. March 2026 becomes a watershed moment where Colombian drama and Palestinian cinema proved they belong in the conversation with any major market release. The critical paths of A Poet and All That’s Left of You forecast how cinema itself will evolve toward greater global representation.

Where Can Film Lovers Watch These Perfect-Score Masterpieces?

Both films remain available in theatrical releases across the United States and expanding internationally. A Poet plays select theaters with plans to widen release through spring 2026, while All That’s Left of You continues broader theatrical circulation. Check major ticketing platforms for showtimes and streaming availability. International audiences should consult local cinema schedules for release dates and language availability. These 100% Rotten Tomatoes achievements deserve the big screen experience both directors envisioned.

Sources

• Rotten Tomatoes – Official Tomatometer scores and Critics Consensus for both films
• The New York Times – Critical analysis and reviews of A Poet’s artistic achievement
• Watermelon Pictures – Official distribution and production information for All That’s Left of You

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At the end of it all, a flabbergasted detective asks a survivor what’s just occurred. The victim, battered and exhausted and covered in blood, grunts out just two words: “Rich people.”

That’s about the extent of the social commentary on offer from They Will Kill You, a new action-horror-comedy set in a Manhattan luxury building whose Satan-worshipping tenants engage in ritualistic killings of their mostly poor and marginalized staff. But it’s all the excuse writer-director Kirill Sokolov (Why Don’t You Just Die!) and his co-writer Alex Litvak need to unleash great big arterial sprays with gonzo style, to enjoyably giddy, if ultimately insubstantial, effect.

Arriving just one week after Ready or Not 2: Here I Come hit theaters — and having first debuted at SXSW just a few days after Ready or Not 2: Here I Come did — They Will Kill You will inevitably draw comparisons. It’s impossible to argue they aren’t fair.

Both films are about ordinary women brought into a tightly guarded enclave of the one percent, where they’re to be hunted for sacrifice by entitled sociopaths who’ve struck a literal deal with the Devil. Both films saddle their heroines with estranged younger sisters who harbor lingering resentment about having been abandoned by their big sisters in their youth, but now must make up with them in order to survive. Both films devolve into frenetic yet stylish melees deploying all manner of unusual weaponry before, finally, confronting the supernatural head-on.

But any assumption that they’re the same movie will be wiped out the moment the satin-cloaked Satanists of They Will Kill You corner Asia (Zazie Beetz), the newest maid at the exclusive Virgil apartments, in a closet — only for her to come out literally swinging with a sword, slicing one of their heads clean off to uncork the first of what will be many, many geysers of blood to come.

Asia, we learn through one of several flashbacks, is no oblivious victim but an “avenger,” as her boss (Patricia Arquette‘s Lily) puts it, with an irritated sigh suggesting she isn’t the first. Asia has come here under false pretenses with the intention of rescuing her sister, Maria (Myha’la), another recently hired maid. She’s thus armed to the teeth with blades and guns and ammo, though perhaps nothing is deadlier than her fighting spirit, honed over years of prison brawls. The residents of the Virgil, for their part, are more than ready to defend what’s theirs, with one major supernatural asset up their capacious sleeves that gives them the upper hand.

The simplicity of the plot — the only way out is a fire escape at the top of the building, forcing Asia to fight her way up its nine floors, á la The Raid: Redemption or Dredd — gives Sokolov a relatively blank canvas across which to splatter a grand and gory pastiche of seemingly everything he has ever found cool, from video games to animé to John Wick to Sergio Leone and Quentin Tarantino. If he’s yet to coalesce all those influences into his own distinctive style, he wields them with gleeful enthusiasm. He dials the violence up to Looney Tunes silliness while Beetz infuses it all with an effortless cool, giving Asia an athleticism that makes her a pleasure to watch and a defiance that makes her a joy to root for.

Asia never swings an axe when she can swing a flaming axe so that she can set her enemies on fire even as she hacks off their limbs. Furniture getting hurled through the air is captured in slow-motion, all the better to admire when it shatters on someone. Gunshots are punctuated by flurries of mattress stuffing falling through the air like snow. And I haven’t even revealed the big twist that accounts for the film’s most eye-poppingly gruesome sights; those, I’ll leave you to goggle at in the theater for yourself.

But even with that endless appetite for mayhem — and even with a trim 94-minute run time — there’s a point at which They Will Kill You starts to leave intriguing ideas on the table in favor of repeating itself. Take the layout of the building. We’re told each floor is themed after a different deadly sin, but aside from a brief glimpse of a writhing orgy on the “fuck floor” (Lust, obviously) and a set piece in an empty kitchen (Gluttony, presumably), we don’t get to see any of the others. Instead, we spend much of that time crawling around dark underground tunnels and climbing up nondescript shafts. It seems a missed opportunity to set the Virgil apart from any of a million hallways we’ve seen action stars punch their way through before.

Then there are the characters. They Will Kill You barely bothers fleshing out its robed and masked masses of villains; the ones played by Heather Graham and Tom Felton are distinguishable only because they’re played by Heather Graham and Tom Felton. But it has not much more interest in key characters like Maria, whose motives shift with the needs of the plot. Or Lily and her husband Roy (Paterson Joseph), about whom I could tell you almost nothing beyond that Arquette seems to have decided halfway through the shoot to adopt a “local newscaster on St. Paddy’s day”-level Irish accent, and Joseph to pick up a gently Southern one.

Even its haves-versus-have-nots posturing turns out to be less about exploring social injustice than allowing us to root for ultra-violence guilt-free, secure in the knowledge that these rich actually are not like the rest of us because they are much, much, much worse.

But perhaps it’s for the best. For all the weapons in Asia’s arsenal, thoughtfulness or emotionality or complexity are nowhere among them. They Will Kill You is simply not equipped to serve up a nuanced exploration of class division, or a poignant drama of sisterly devotion, or what have you. What it is armed for is violence — lots and lots and lots of violence, so brutally nasty it comes all the way back around to childishly funny. That, it is happy to dish out in spades, with enough gusto to sate even the most bloodthirsty filmgoer.

Christian Petzold’s beguiling and restorative new drama “Miroirs No. 3” begins with a glance and a car crash.

Wreckage and its long-term aftermath have long marked the movies of Petzold, arguably Germany’s foremost filmmaker. In his finest and most exquisitely haunting film, 2014’s “Phoenix,” an Auschwitz survivor and cabaret singer (Nina Hoss, colossally good) returns unrecognized to her German hometown with a reconstructed face, to a husband who’s said to have betrayed her to the Nazis.

“Miroirs No. 3” doesn’t have that film’s grandiosity of melodrama; it’s more of a lightly enigmatic chamber piece. But it’s likewise preoccupied with piecing life together again after tragedy, and maybe finding some catharsis in music. (The title comes from a Ravel piano piece.) And its startling power will, like “Phoenix,” sneak up on you.

Laura (Paula Beer, the star of Petzold’s “Undine” and “Transit”), a piano student from Berlin, is reluctantly riding in the backseat of a car. Our first glimpse of her, before this road trip, was staring blankly, maybe suicidally, into a river. With Laura is her musician boyfriend, Jakob (Philip Froissant) and a producer that Jakob is hoping to impress. As they drive through the countryside, Laura locks eyes with a solitary middle-aged woman standing outside her home. For a fleeting moment they share a mysterious connection, maybe of some shared strain of depression.

Soon after, Laura says she wants to return to Berlin and Jakob, annoyed, drives her to the nearest train station. But just after again passing the same woman’s house, they skid off the road in a wreck that kills Jakob and throws Laura from the car. The woman runs to help. After the paramedics arrive and treat a still dazed Laura, they’re surprised at her request. She asks if she can stay at the woman’s house, rather than go to the hospital.

What follows is a sweetly oblique, even dreamlike interlude of recuperation. But it’s not just Laura’s. It’s also healing for the woman who happily takes her in. Betty is her name, and Barbara Auer’s performance is as deft and delicate as any you’re likely to see this year. Their time together is spent not discussing their own traumas, but with soft, unspoken kindnesses and daily routine.

Petzold, who also wrote the script, is masterful at meting out backstory. He does it in a way that never feels like withholding to the audience or girding for a big twist, but remains tied to the psychology of his characters. As much as his films might ebb and flow with grief and recovery, their backbone is that of a thriller. Petzold, a great admirer of Hitchcock and “Vertigo,” in particular, makes movies where identity, rather than people, can go missing.

The source of Betty’s pain isn’t revealed until well into “Miroirs,” but it’s not hard to guess at. We learn that her husband Richard (Matthias Brandt) and their adult son Max (Enno Trebs) — auto mechanics who look skeptically on Laura’s arrival — live separate of Betty. Meanwhile, Betty gives Laura her daughter’s clothes to wear, and encourages her to play the piano her daughter used to. Together, they paint a fence and restore a herb garden.

Strange as their domestic life might seem, something warm and good is taking place. We have the feeling Richard and Max haven’t been around much, even though their shop is just a bike ride away. But the four soon begin to almost resemble a family unit. In a movie about two women who intuitively understand each other, Brandt and Trebs are charmingly oafish as men who are eager to fix a dishwasher but less keen on how to repair trauma.

That this idyll is bound to expire, sooner or later, goes without saying. But while another filmmaker might steer such a story toward either disaster or, more likely, schmaltz, Petzold ends “Miroirs” without sacrificing the ambiguous grace that came before. And he turns “Miroirs,” a slender and sweet 86-minute puzzle, into one of the more lovely and profound little movies about how hearts can be mended by just opening a door.

“Miroirs No. 3,” a 1-2 Special release in theaters, is not rated by the Motion Picture Association. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 86 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.