Six months in, and Nollywood has given us a lot to work with. At NollyCritic, we have reviewed 29 titles between January and June 2026, spanning cinema releases, streaming originals, series, and short films. The slate has been busy, occasionally exciting, and frequently frustrating in ways that feel depressingly familiar. Big casts, recognisable names, and ambitious premises have arrived with reliable regularity. The storytelling craft needed to carry those ambitions has arrived considerably less often.
That is the headline from the first half of 2026. Not that Nollywood is struggling, it is not. The industry remains productive, culturally alive, and capable of genuine excellence when the right conditions align. But the average NollyCritic score across this half sits at approximately 2.5 out of 5.
Squarely in the territory of films that are watchable without being satisfying, competent without being compelling, present on screen without being fully alive. For an industry that keeps raising its production ambitions, the storytelling consistency is not keeping pace.
Here is what the first half looked like, in full.
The Best Nollywood Films of H1 2026
Love and New Notes – 3.5/5
The year’s best cinema release so far, and it is not particularly close. Kayode Kasum‘s period romantic thriller, set during Nigeria’s 1984 currency swap crisis, gave Nollywood something it rarely produces: a film that earns its genre fusion. The 1984 setting grounds the tension in real historical pressure. The romance between Boma and Chioma has stakes that feel structural rather than decorative.
The film opened with a ₦106.5 million Valentine’s weekend, the biggest non-December cinema opening in recent Nollywood memory, and went on to gross between ₦328 and ₦380 million. Commercial success and critical quality aligning in one package remains rare in this industry. Love and New Notes is what that looks like when it happens.
Call of My Life – 3.35/5
Dammy Twitch’s feature debut is a warm, unabashedly female-gazey romantic comedy that trusts its audience and its lead. Uzoamaka Power’s Soluchi, a heartbroken call centre agent who finds the possibility of love in a routine phone call, is written and played with a self-awareness that the genre does not always afford its heroine.
The film earns its clichés, mostly. It is colourful, funny, sometimes awkward in ways that feel intentional, and emotionally honest about what it costs to open yourself to love after being publicly humiliated. Call of My Life went on to debut at number ten on the all-time highest grossing Nollywood films list, a commercial landmark that reflects both its quality and the appetite audiences have for films that treat women’s desire as a story worth telling.
Blood Debt – 3.25/5
Chukwuka Kenechukwu Ndife’s crime thriller is the kind of film that rewards close watching. Set against the backdrop of Nigeria’s vigilante justice culture, Blood Debt follows Superintendent Danjuma Okoro and the volatile Detective Nwagu as they investigate murders targeting corrupt politicians and former vigilantes.
Patrick Diabuah gives the year’s most controlled lead performance so far: a man whose internal architecture is communicated entirely through what he does not say. The film has a stretched middle and a score that actively works against its atmosphere, but its visual storytelling is confident and precise, its moral argument is properly earned, and its final twenty minutes restore everything the middle briefly loosened.
To Adaego With Love – 3.35/5
One of the most emotionally satisfying films of the half, and one that arrived early enough in the year to set a standard several films since have failed to meet. Directed by Nwamaka Chikezie and a winner at AFRIFF 2025, the film delivered grounded storytelling and strong performances in a romantic drama that felt genuinely inhabited rather than assembled from genre parts.
The Boy Who Gave – 3/5
An intimate drama about duty, poverty, and the particular weight of being the person everyone else leans on. Allison Precious Emmanuel’s Idah, a teenager from Bonny Island who drops out of school to raise his younger siblings after their parents’ death, is rendered without sentimentality. The film trusts suffering without wallowing in it, and that trust is the source of its emotional power.
Evi – 3.1/5
One of the quieter highlights of the half, Evi brings careful character work and thematic ambition to territory that Nollywood does not always handle with this kind of restraint.
The Middle Pack: Watchable, But Not Enough
The majority of the half’s reviewed titles live here, and the density of this band is the story of H1 2026. Films with good ideas, committed casts, and visible production effort that stop short of fully delivering on what they set up.
Ajosepo: The Gathering (2.75/5) earns its laughs and loses its stakes. Kayode Kasum brings the same visual energy that made the first film work, and the KAP Film Village setting gives the sequel genuine scale. But where the original built real dramatic stakes beneath the comedy, the sequel substitutes spectacle for consequence. It is warm and frequently funny, and it leaves you slightly emptier than it found you.
Onobiren (2.75/5) showed that thoughtful, female-driven stories can find a cinema audience when marketed right. Laju Iren’s film ran for seven weeks and closed at ₦138 million. It carries clear ambition in its focus on female resilience and South South cultural identity, but does not always push beyond familiar dramatic territory.
Son of the Soil (2.75/5) lives in similar territory: a film with ideas and performances that do not quite cohere into a fully satisfying experience.
Okanjuwa (2.5/5) translates greed, and delivers exactly the chaos that title promises. The comedy-drama around Waheed and Aaliyah’s Eid celebration has energy and an appealing cast, but the predictability of its moral arc, where the good people win and you always knew they would, is the film’s defining limitation.
Iwe Ala: An Ojude Oba Story (2.5/5) is a film with a visually beautiful festival setting and a story that cannot quite settle into what it wants to be. There is a version of this that works completely. The version released is not quite it.
Echoes Before the Wedding (2.5/5), Aba Blues (2.5/5), The Other Side of the Bridge (2.5/5) — all three share the same postcode. Films that have enough going for them to hold attention without having enough going for them to stay in the memory.
Blood Sisters Season 2 (2.5/5) returned to Netflix with higher stakes and bigger betrayals, and rushes through both so quickly that neither lands. The pacing is the season’s defining failure: what should be the emotional centrepiece, the trial, is processed in minutes, and the story has already moved on before the audience has had time to feel anything. The Netflix formula has served Blood Sisters well commercially. Here it becomes the thing that prevents the story from breathing.
Efunroye: The Unicorn (2.25/5) is the half’s most contested film, and its most telling. A historical epic about Madam Efunroye Tinubu that had the courage to dramatise the drowning of enslaved people and did not have the courage to make that moment the film’s moral reckoning. The sound is the film’s most honest element: the Yoruba musical tradition carries emotional weight the screenplay cannot consistently generate. History gave this film a genuinely complex subject. The writing gave her a softer version of herself. In 2026, with the Tinubu name carrying its specific political charge in Nigeria, a hagiographic film about this particular historical figure is not politically neutral, whether or not it intended to be.
Alive Till Dawn (2.35/5), Everything is New Again (2.25/5) both occupy the lower edge of the watchable zone.
On Different Grounds (2.2/5) — Mildred Okwo’s return has the right veteran ensemble and the wrong protagonist. Bob-Manuel Udokwu and Jennifer Eliogu do genuinely affecting work as the estranged couple at the film’s emotional centre. Aurora, the daughter who is nominally the film’s lead, passes through scenes without wrestling with them. The second-chance romance at the film’s core deserved a film that committed to it as the primary story. The film that surrounds it does not.
The Lower End: Where Expectations Met Reality
Headless (1.75/5) and Mother’s Love (1.75/5): two very different films that land at the same score for very different reasons. Mother’s Love arrived as the first major disappointment of the year, familiar tropes handled without the emotional depth the premise seemed to promise. Headless followed. Together they established that 2026 was going to have a lower tier.
The Creek (1.6/5): a film caught, as our review put it, “between urgency and incompletion.” The Niger Delta setting carries genuine weight. The execution does not.
The Return of Arinzo (1.5/5): thirteen years of franchise memory and a build-up that refuses to pay off. Arinzo’s return should have disturbed. It registers as a delay.
Trade by Bata (1.45/5): the half’s lowest rated title, and a film whose problems compound across its runtime in ways that patience cannot rescue.
Series
The Covenant – 3/5
The strongest series of the half. Clear storytelling intent, confident execution
Anikulapo: The Ghoul Awakens – 2.4/5
The third chapter of Kunle Afolayan’s franchise expands into darker mythology but arrives as an unnecessary addition rather than a bold elevation. The franchise carries weight. This chapter does not quite justify why it needed to exist.
Blood Sisters Season 2 – 2.5/5
See above.
Special Mentions
Silence is Loud: We watched this short film and were moved by it. As a short, it falls outside our rating system, but it earns its mention here as evidence that some of the half’s most precise storytelling came in the smallest packages.
Dust to Dreams: We reviewed this, and chose not to rate it. Not because the film defied evaluation, but because the evaluation itself became the story: a film that promised more than it had the means or the clarity to deliver, and whose disappointments required a different kind of accounting than a number. Read our full review for the full picture.
What H1 2026 Is Actually Saying
The 2.5 average is not a crisis. It is a pattern. What it describes is an industry that has standardised production values without standardising storytelling quality, that can put together a convincing-looking film without always knowing what the film is actually for.
The genres that dominated screens this half were romantic comedies, family dramas, and historical epics. The romantic comedies, when they worked (Love and New Notes, Call of My Life), worked because they trusted their premises and their performers.
When they did not (various entries in the middle pack), it was because the genre mechanics replaced the emotional honesty that makes those mechanics worth sitting through. The historical epics had the most visible gap between ambition and delivery. Efunroye: The Unicorn is the clearest example, but not the only one: a genre that demands moral complexity from its material and keeps retreating from it.
The Nollywood films that scored highest had one thing in common across very different genres: they knew what they were trying to say and committed to saying it. Love and New Notes committed to its thriller mechanics and its period setting. Blood Debt committed to its moral argument about the limits of revenge. The Boy Who Gave committed to its refusal of sentimentality. Call of My Life committed to its heroine’s interiority. That commitment is not a technical quality. It is a writing quality, a directorial quality, a quality of intention that either exists at the conception of a film or cannot be added in post-production.
The second half of 2026 has an opportunity to push above this average. The titles already announced suggest both the ambition and the familiar risks. We will be watching, as honestly as we know how.
What was your personal Nollywood highlight of the first half? Drop it in the comments and let’s talk about it.
