At NollyCritic, we have reviewed over 29 Nollywood 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.
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 – 3.2/5
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 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.
What’s your best Nollywood movie of 2026 so far? Drop it in the comments and let’s talk about it.
