Just when you think that you’ve seen and heard all sides of the human migration debate, and long after you fear that the cruel, the ignorant and the scapegoaters have won that shouting match, a film comes along and defies ignorance and prejudice by both embracing and upending the conventional “immigrant” narrative.

“I Was a Strranger” is the first great film of 2026. It’s cleverly written, carefully crafted and beautifully-acted with characters who humanize many facets of the “migration” and “illegal immigration” debate. The debut feature of writer-director Brandt Andersen, “Stranger” is emotional and logical, blunt and heroic. It challenges viewers to rethink their preconceptions and prejudices and the very definition of “heroic.”

The fact that this film — which takes its title from the Book of Matthew, chapter 25, verse 35 — is from the same faith-based film distributor that made millions by feeding the discredited human trafficking wish fulfillment fantasy “Sound of Freedom” to an eager conservative Christian audience makes this film something of a minor miracle in its own right.

But as Angel Studios has also urged churchgoers not just to animated Nativity stories (“The King of Kings”) and “David” musicals, but Christian resistence to fascism (“Truth & Treason” and “Bonheoffer”) , their atonement is almost complete.

Andersen deftly weaves five compact but saga-sized stories about immigrants escaping from civil-war-torn Syria into a sort of interwoven, overlapping “Babel” or “Crash” about migration.

“The Doctor” is about a Chicago hospital employee (Yasmine Al Massri of “Palestine 36” and TV’s “Quantico”) whose flashback takes us to the hospital in Aleppo, Syria, bombed and terrorized by the Assad regime’s forces, and what she and her tween daughter (Massa Daoud) went through to escape — from literally crawling out of a bombed building to dodging death at the border to the harrowing small boat voyage from Turkey to Greece.

“The Soldier” follows loyal Assad trooper Mustafa (Yahya Mahayni was John the Baptist in Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints”) through his murderous work in Aleppo, and the crisis of conscience that finally hits him as he sees the cruel and repressive regime he works for at its most desperate.

“The Smuggler” is Marwan, a refugee-camp savvy African — played by the terrific French actor Omar Sy of “The Intouchables” and “The Book of Clarence” — who cynically makes his money buying disposable inflatable boats, disposable outboards and not-enough-life-jackets in Turkey to smuggle refugees to Greece.

“The Poet” (Ziad Bakri of “Screwdriver”) just wants to get his Syrian family of five out of Turkey and into Europe on Marwan’s boat.

And “The Captain” (Constantine Markoulakis of “The Telemachy”) commands a Hellenic Coast Guard vessel, a man haunted by the harrowing rescues he must carry out daily and visions of the bodies of those he doesn’t.

Andersen, a Tampa native who made his mark producing Tom Cruise spectacles (“American Made”), Mel Gibson B-movies (“Panama”) and the occasional “Everest” blockbuster, expands his short film “Refugee” to feature length for “I Was a Stranger.” He doesn’t so much alter the formula or reinvent this genre of film as find points of view that we seldom see that force us to reconsider what we believe through their eyes.

Sy’s Smuggler has a sickly little boy that he longs to take to Chicago. He runs his ill-gotten-gains operation, profiting off human misery, to realize that dream. We see glimpses of what might be compassion, but also bullying “customers” and his new North African assistant (Ayman Samman). Keeping up the hard front he shows one and all, we see him callously buy life jackets in the bazaar — never enough for every customer to have one in any given voyage.

The Captain sits for dinner with family and friends and has to listen to Greek prejudices and complaints about this human life and human rights crisis, which is how the worlds sees Greece reacting to this “invasion.” But as he and his first mate recount lives saved and the horrors of lives lost, that quibbling is silenced.

Here and there we see and hear (in Arabic and Greek with subtitles, and English) little moments of “rising above” human pettiness and cruelty and the simple blessings of kindness.

“I Was a Stranger” was finished in 2024 and arrives in cinemas at one of the bleakest moments in recent history. Cruelty is running amok, unchecked and unpunished. Countries are being destabilized, with the fans of alleged “strong man” rule cheering it on.

Andersen carefully avoids politics — Middle Eastern, Israeli, European and American — save for the opening scene’s zoom in on that Chicago hospital, passing a gaudily named “Trump” hotel in the process, and a general condemnation of Syria’s Assad mob family regime.

But Andersen’s bold movie, with its message so against the grain of current events, compromised media coverage and the mostly conservative audience that has become this film distributor’s base, plays like a wet slap back to reality.

And as any revival preacher will tell you, putting a positive message out there in front of millions is the only way to convert hundreds among the millions who have lost their way.

Rating: PG-13, violence, smoking, racial slurs

Cast: Yasmine Al Massri, Yahya Mahayni, Ziad Bakri, Omar Sy, Ayman Samman, Massa Daoud, Jason Beghe and Constantine Markoulakis

Credits: Scripted and directed by Brandt Andersen. An Angel Studios release.

Running time: 1:43

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The Tiger Is the Tank. Or rather, the type of German tank that gives the film its international title—just in case anyone might confuse this war story with an adventure movie involving wild animals. The tank itself is the film’s container, much as The Boat was in the legendary 1981 film it openly seeks to emulate in more than one respect, or as the more recent tank was in the Israeli film Lebanon (2009). Yes, much of Dennis Gansel’s movie unfolds inside a tank called Tiger, but what it is ultimately trying to tell goes well beyond its cramped metal walls.

This large-scale Prime Video war production has been described by many as the platform’s answer to Netflix’s success with All Quiet on the Western Front, the highly decorated German film released in 2022. In practice, it is a very different proposition. Despite the fanfare surrounding its release—Amazon even gave it a theatrical run a few months ago, something it rarely does—the film made a far more modest impact. Watching it, the reasons become clear. This is a darker, stranger movie, one that flirts as much with horror as with monotony, and that positions itself less as a traditional war film than as an ethical and philosophical meditation on warfare.

The first section—an intense and technically impressive combat sequence—takes place during what would later be known as the Battle of the Dnieper, which unfolded over several months in 1943 on the Eastern Front, as Soviet forces pushed back the Nazi advance. Der Tiger is the type of tank carrying a compact platoon—played by David Schütter, Laurence Rupp, Leonard Kunz, Sebastian Urzendowsky, and Yoran Leicher—that miraculously survives the aerial destruction of a bridge over the river.

Soon afterward—or so it seems—the group is assigned a mission that, at least in its initial setup, recalls Saving Private Ryan. Lieutenant Gerkens (Schütter) is ordered to rescue Colonel Von Harnenburg, stranded behind enemy lines. From there, the film becomes a journey through an infernal landscape of ruined cities, corpses, forests, and fog—a setting that, thanks to the way it is shot, feels more fantastical than realistic.

That choice is no accident. As the journey begins to echo Apocalypse Now, it becomes clear that the film is less interested in conventional suspense—mines on the road, the threat of ambush—than in the strangeness of its situations and environments. When the tank plunges into the water and briefly operates like a submarine, one may reasonably wonder whether such technology actually existed in the 1940s, or whether the film has deliberately drifted into a more extravagant, symbolic territory.

This is the kind of film whose ending is likely to inspire more frustration than affection. Though heavily foreshadowed, it is the sort of conclusion that tends to irritate audiences: cryptic, somewhat open-ended, and more suggestive than explicit. That makes sense, given that the film is less concerned with depicting the daily mechanics of war than with grappling with its aftermath—ethical, moral, psychological, and physical.

In its own way, The Tank functions as a kind of mea culpa. The platoon becomes a microcosm of a nation that “followed orders” and committed—or allowed to be committed—horrific acts in its name. The flashbacks scattered throughout the film make this point unmistakably clear. The problem is that, while these ideas may sound compelling when summarized in a few sentences (or in a review), the film never manages to turn them into something fully alive—narratively, visually, or dramatically.

Only in brief moments—largely thanks to Gerkens’s perpetually worried, anguished expression—do those ideas achieve genuine cinematic weight. They are not enough, however, to sustain a two-hour runtime that increasingly feels repetitive and inert. Unlike the films by Steven Spielberg, Wolfgang Petersen, Francis Ford Coppola, and others it so clearly references, The Tank remains closer to a concept than to a drama, more an intriguing reflection than a truly effective film.

By John E. Finley-Weaver in San Diego

My wife convinced me to watch a movie about ping pong. And, having acquiesced to her proposal, I dove face-first into a kettle of willful ignorance, knowing only that Some Guy Timothée Chalamet of Dune 1 and Dune 2 and A Complete Unknown (another of her suggestions) was the lead, and that what we were soon to watch might move me. Or, at the very least, that it might entertain me.

The movie did not disappoint.

In fact, Marty Supreme is the absolute best film about table tennis that I have ever seen. And I’ve seen all of one of them so far, although I am aware of and have seen a few clips of Robert Ben Garant’s Balls of Fury.

But, holy mackerel, Marty Supreme is not just a movie about some lanky goniff whose inner craving for focused dominance in one specific realm compels him to pursue a shiny, sportsball “X” trophy, culminating in a crowd-pleasing, applause roar of triumph . . . a  n  d . . . cut to the end credits, supplemented by a catchy, happy song . . . . “Honey, let’s get to the restroom, fast!”

Uh-uh. Nay. Marty Supreme is a lived-in world (like the Star Wars universe, but way different and way better) populated by tactile characters, each of whom has their own, inferred history and glob of yearnings. And they have warts. Lots of warts. Warts and all.

Marty Mauser, the Jewish protagonist of Marty Supreme, is a plucky ping pong imp and shoe salesman, in addition to being a nimble and loquacious malarkey artist. He is also a shockingly-gawdawful, verbal bastard person to his mother, played by Fran Drescher, who left her specific, discount Phyllis Diller voice in the dustbin of screen history where it belongs, much to the contentment of my sensitive ears.

Marty Mauser is even more a womanizer and a thief. And he is a delight. And, because boring, nice boys don’t have movies made about them, he does something for his ema that is chutzpahdik, illegal, vandalicious, unhistorical, and tear-inducingly sweet.

And again, dear Reader, I went into this movie knowing most of nothing about it. If you are like me, fear not: I shan’t disclose the plot.

Marty Mauser’s partners in life and “crime” are the facially-delicious Rachel, played by Odessa A’zion and best bud Wally, performed by Tyler Okonma, each complementarily savvy to Marty’s needs and wants.

The remainder of the film’s actors is a gathering of casting directorial genius: Kevin O’Leary, the that guy from some reality television show that I will never watch; Gwyneth Paltrow; director Abel Ferrara; Sandra Bernhard, my lukewarm, high school “bad girl” crush; Géza Röhrig, whose character is seven year’s fresh from a Nazi death camp and hauntingly beautiful; Koto Kawaguchi, the movie-world champion and legally-deaf Tommy-esque pinball wizard of ping pong and real-world champion of the game; Pico Iyer, Indo-Limey travel writer, meditator, and inveterate outsider; George Gerwin, a very retired basketball player; Ted Williams and his golden voice; Penn Jillette, agrarian and blasty; Isaac Mizrahi, obviously “out” in 1952; and David freaking Mamet.

Gush.

And great googly woogly. They all do their jobs so gosh darn well that I don’t notice them as actors acting.

And then, as I have done since I was a child, for science fiction books, for television, and for movies, I recast, in my mind’s eye, all of the characters and their associated journeys as different people. I made an all-Negro cast of the film. And it worked. No radical changes to the script were necessary. I did the same for a spunky, mid-West farm girl as the lead. That worked. I tried again, using a Colombian lesbian. That worked too.

I praise the cinematic vision of Director Josh Safdie. I praise the wide accessibility of the script he co-wrote with Ronald Bronstein: Thank you. The expected plot points, the tropes of moviedom, the “inevitable” happenings of standard movies never really happened. Marty Supreme zaggled and Zelig’d when I expected it to zig.

A lesser film would not have surprised me in most of its story structure, its scenes, or its character paths. A lesser film would have had me in my seat, either smugly prognosticating the next events, or non-thinkingly rapt for entire scenes. This film, this masterpiece of storytelling and visual and aural execution outsmarted me. It outsmarted my movie mind, and for that, I am grateful.

Marty Supreme is a very Brooklyn Jewy movie, but it sings from the standard Humanity of us all, to each of us. And that is movie making at its finest.

*
Cinema buff John E. Finley-Weaver is a freelance writer based in San Diego.