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  • ‘MTV Was a Lot Like Kabul’

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    Cyndi Lauper leading the crowd at the first MTV New Year’s Eve party at Times Square.
    Photo: Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images

    The news that MTV is shutting down its music channels does not come as a surprise to me. Starting in 1986, I ran MTV, VH1, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, and other cable TV networks for 17 years as the CEO of MTV Networks, the sun in Viacom’s solar system. It hasn’t been that for a while. MTV has been losing credibility for years, and it’s devolved into a dumping ground for B-grade reality shows. No new music energy has been pumped into it for ages. 

    Only the U.K. music channels are affected for now, but the United States can’t be far behind. The business case for running music videos on a linear TV cable network in this increasingly digital, on-demand world is terrible and only getting worse. Why sit around and wait for Beyoncé when you can summon her video with a simple click?

    David Ellison, who recently acquired Paramount Global from Viacom, has an opportunity to step back and try to reimagine MTV as a new destination outside the confines of a linear TV network. The music space is now dominated with increasingly predictive and boring algorithms. Maybe there is a way to shake up at least a corner of the huge music market like we did back in 1981, when I was just the marketing guy arriving at the start-up that would become MTV. 

    After we busted through the cable-operator gates with “I Want My MTV,” we became the new gatekeepers. Everyone wanted to be on MTV. Labels and artists lobbied to get their videos in heavy rotation. We could catapult nobodies to stardom in weeks. There was a lot of power to wield, and power doesn’t always bring out the best in people.

    We were in the Zeitgeist business, so we took a lot of chances with new things, not always successfully. If something didn’t work, it died a quick death, and we moved on. We decided we weren’t going to grow old with our audience the way Rolling Stone magazine had — they were still writing about Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton. We would refresh and reinvent MTV every four to five years as one group aged out and a new one replaced it.

    Advertisers pay a higher premium to reach young people. The thinking is: Hook them on Crest or Pepsi or Ford early on and you’ve got a customer for life. When MTV said, “We have a direct line to them,” Madison Avenue lined up at our door.

    One by one, record labels agreed to give us clips for free, and they set up whole departments dedicated to servicing MTV. But they never stopped grumbling. They complained about the money they had to spend to increase the quantity and quality of their music videos. So we agreed to pay them millions of dollars through new, multiyear “output deals.” Buried in those deals was a clause granting us exclusivity for six months over any other 24-hour channel on 20 percent of their music videos. The 20 percent of the videos we picked were all the big hits. No potential competitor could take a run at us without access to the hits.

    I was against using hard-nosed tactics with the record companies and artists. Gatekeepers with a heart seemed the best way to prolong our prominence. As “the biggest radio station in the nation,” I argued, we should be fair, humble, and walk softly; the labels were predisposed to resent us. My opinion didn’t always carry the day. I watched some of our talent-relations people blossom into megalomaniacs. I guess it’s human nature that if you are hanging out on boats with Billy Idol and partying with Van Halen and strolling into every dressing room while giving thumbs-up or down to anxious managers, it will eventually turn you into an asshole. I saw it happen again and again.

    A recruit to the Music & Talent department with good ears and a deep knowledge of pop and rock might last three years. To fire them, we might have to find a concierge to kick down a door in an L.A. hotel and revive them after a three-day cocaine binge. We needed a strong human-resources department.

    Tom Freston at a promotional event in 1987.
    Photo: Alan Gilbert/Fairfax Media via Getty Images

    We were witnesses and eager participants in the last display of the legendary excesses of the music business. The party really kicked into gear when Bob Pittman made former radio DJ and label executive Les Garland the head of programming. Les was the one who had gotten Mick Jagger to scream, “I want my MTV.” He referred to himself in the third person as “the Gar Man,” which tells you a lot. Les Garland wasn’t his real name. Like many former radio people on our staff, he created a radio name. “Les Garland” was really Lester Schweikert.

    He looked about my age, but to this day I don’t think his date of birth has ever been revealed. He was an effervescent, good-looking guy with stylish curly brown hair, confident that he was the king of cool. In many ways he was. MTV’s fingers were in every pie of the music-industry machinery and for a while, most things came through or went out from Les. He arrived with deep music-business relationships, full of war stories from the rock-and-roll trenches of the ’70s, which he recounted to entertain his younger minions. It was like David Lee Roth had arrived in an Armani suit and taken over the floor.

    Amid towering speakers, gold records, stacks of videotapes, Sony Trinitrons, overflowing ashtrays, and a bar stocked with tequila and a lineup of squat green Dom Pérignon bottles sent over by the labels, the Les Garland Show streamed. Every time a big ad sale landed, he rang a huge bell. Grizzled label-promotion men in satin jackets and facial hair would slink in and out, usually laughing. Rod Stewart would drop by to play his newest tracks. When female artists came calling, his staff would vacate, and according to office lore, the Gar Man would fornicate with a lucky few. At least, that’s the legend. With Les, it was hard to tell what was true, what was myth, and what was scandal.

    When he wasn’t there, others would sneak in to have sex in his office. At one Christmas party, a staffer full of holiday bravado cozied up to Garland and said, “Les, I just want you to know that I fucked one of your assistants last night on your desk.” Les clinked his glass, said, “Congratulations, Bud,” and walked away.

    Big blowout parties became part of company mythology. “Tequila girls” in short shorts and cowboy hats, decked out in bandolier sashes packed with shot glasses, always circulated. Tequila bottles were nestled in holsters strapped across their hips. Bands like the Fabulous Thunderbirds would play. These parties could go on to three or four in the morning, sometimes devolving into after-parties. You could never get away with this kind of office party nowadays. Nonetheless, the next day, a line would form outside the human-resources offices.

    The Gar Man undeniably upped our game, our profile, our whole tempo. I had spent nearly a decade in the 1970s running a clothing export company out of India and Afghanistan and to me, MTV was a lot like Kabul. An exotic new place with a crazy cast of wild characters and few rules.

    A superfan myself, I had the privilege of attending any concert I wanted. Every day we dealt with the biggest stars in the world, along with all the black sheep and characters who handled them. Even though music drove the culture, the business of music was still considered the lowest rung of the entertainment ladder. To people in film and television, it was a lowbrow world of payola, shysters, and semi-gangsters in sharkskin suits. But these were the folks I liked the most. They had hustle, were clever, and loved music. They were also the most fun. Some label heads, like Gil Friesen, who ran A&M, Jeff Ayeroff, who ran Virgin, and Jimmy Iovine, who ran Interscope, became good friends. Many in the MTV crowd had not been to or finished college. I went undercover with my academic credentials. It sounded a lot better to be “the man from Afghanistan” than the M.B.A. from NYU.

    People worked in flip-flops and bathing suits; some slept in their offices. In 1988, at 2 a.m., an overnighter flipped a lit cigarette into his garbage can and burned down a whole floor at 1775 Broadway. Nineteen firefighters were hospitalized. The local radio stations would play Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” and dedicate it to us.

    “Exotic dancers” would be sent over by the music labels. Bands passed through all the time. Lemmy from Motörhead might wander by with a bottle of tequila. We had one receptionist who sold cocaine. Many of the staff found that convenient. Cocaine was rampant in the ’80s, especially in the music industry. Even your dry cleaner was doing it then. People thought coke was the new No-Doz, a harmless pick-me-up powder.

    One of the programming guys, a jovial, former radio hotshot whom Howard Stern had crowned “Pig Virus,” kept his stash in a little plastic receptacle in his desk drawer, the place where you’d put paper clips. In a meeting, he’d nonchalantly open the drawer and take a hit off a collar stay, then politely look around. “Anyone need their beak packed?”

    MTV wasn’t a job; MTV was a life. We were a second family. People would duck out all the time to the bar around the corner. At night, there was always a smorgasbord of things to choose from … concerts, dinners, listening parties, movie screenings. We were in the middle of everything, so we were invited to everything. Not everybody made it out the other side; there were casualties with all the late nights, alcohol, and drugs. No one except me had a family. Margaret and I had a young son, Andrew, at home, which kept me pretty much on the straight and narrow. Once he went to sleep, I could head back out on the town.

    To try to prop up the business side and bring order to the chaos, Pittman installed a series of general managers. They didn’t take. One, David Hilton, undermined his predecessor and then went down in flames. Hilton had zero music chops, which earned him zero respect. I’ve never seen anyone do a worse job at anything. He sent around a note to announce that if anyone was even one minute late to a meeting, they’d be locked out. He locked his door and put a chair under the doorknob. Sometimes we’d all be purposely late so he’d have to have his meeting by himself.

    Robert Downey Jr. and Slash at the 1988 MTV Video Music Awards.
    Photo: Barry King/WireImage

    In 1984, MTV held the first Video Music Awards at Radio City Music Hall. We were positioning ourselves as the irreverent alternative to the self-serious Grammy Awards. Bette Midler and Dan Aykroyd hosted. The Cars’ “You Might Think” won Best Video, and Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” won pretty much everything else. Madonna rolled around on the stage in a wedding dress while singing “Like a Virgin,” and a star was born.

    When MTV began, we played almost any video we could get our hands on. As we proved our ability to sell records, the bigger stars with bigger budgets pushed aside the punkier stuff. The record companies began to crank up music-video production. Instead of four or five new clips a week, we began to get 50 or 60. Big star holdouts like Bruce Springsteen joined in. Older acts like ZZ Top reengineered their image. Lionel Richie spent $1 million on his “Dancing on the Ceiling” video.

    As MTV became more influential, we also got more scrutiny, and not just from the Christian right. The criticism that stung was that we were not playing Black artists. In a very awkward interview with VJ Mark Goodman, David Bowie challenged him about the channel’s color line. Rick James went on a public crusade about us rejecting his “Super Freak.” He was right.

    Rock radio went backward after the 1960s, when the Beatles and Stones shared airtime and formats with the Supremes and Aretha. The early MTV music programmers came from the world of ’70s FM rock radio, which relied on a format called “album-oriented rock,” or AOR. It was a very researched system but predicated on an underlying racism. “Our audience wants to hear a guitar,” was the refrain from the programming guys. AOR resegregated rock and roll.

    In the 1980s, the record companies all had “Black Music” departments. The trade magazines, Billboard, Cash Box, and Radio & Records, all had separate Black Music charts. It wasn’t just MTV. But we were the only music channel on television. Early MTV did play some Black artists who fit the AOR format — Joan Armatrading, Grace Jones, Eddy Grant’s “Electric Avenue.” We gave heavy play to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” and “1999.” But that doesn’t excuse the sad fact that the music department would put Hall & Oates doing R&B in heavy rotation, while ignoring Luther Vandross and the Brothers Johnson.

    The wall was finally knocked down by Michael Jackson’s Thriller. CBS Records chief Walter Yetnikoff always claimed that he forced MTV to play Michael Jackson by saying that if we did not, he would pull all Columbia and Epic videos from the channel. It’s a good story, but I have never found anyone who worked at MTV who had any idea what Walter was talking about. “Billie Jean” was a smash from day one. We wanted that video on our channel. “Beat It” was even better. By the time MJ released the video for “Thriller” toward the end of 1983, he and MTV were in a mutually beneficial relationship. We played his 13-minute mini-movie on the hour, every hour. I ran ads in People magazine with start times. Our ratings went through the roof, and so did Jackson’s album sales.

    In the late ’80s, we opened the aperture further. We were the biggest music outlet in the world; there was no need to follow anyone. MTV would be the first to mainline hip-hop into Middle America’s living rooms with Yo! MTV Raps, hosted by downtown Renaissance man Fab 5 Freddy. Aerosmith and Run-DMC sanctified the rock-rap connection with the clever video “Walk This Way,” and we were off into a whole new world.

    But before that came our next powerhouse: the July 1985 16-hour Live Aid extravaganza held simultaneously in London and Philadelphia. At the time, it was the biggest satellite linkup and television broadcast ever. It raised almost $200 million for African famine relief and would set a template for the many all-star fundraising concerts to follow.

    Paul McCartney, Elton John, and David Bowie were on the bill in London. Fans saw a career-making performance by U2 and a showstopper by Queen. Phil Collins performed at Wembley, then jumped on the Concorde to play another set at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, where Mick Jagger tore off Tina Turner’s skirt.

    I rented a car and drove from New York with Bob Friedman, my eager marketing foot soldier, known internally as “the V” for reasons no one remembers. When we got there, we realized our credentials were in the hands of a producer who had disappeared. This was the pre-cell-phone era. There was no one to call. We finally found our way to the artists’ enclosure and jumped the fence. I landed in the dirt right in front of Bob Dylan’s trailer, dusted myself off, and then calmly strolled down lanes of trailers, striking the pose of someone who belonged.

    It was like wandering through the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame trailer park. Signs read: Tom Petty, Santana, Madonna, the Beach Boys, the Four Tops, Neil Young. We finally made it to the stage, and I spent the entire show at our news desk, 20 feet from the action. Live Aid was the final step in the legitimization of MTV. We were now like “Kleenex” and “Coke.” That year, we made the covers of Time and Newsweek. As for David Hilton, Pittman finally showed him the door and crowned me general manager. It was my 40th birthday. I had finished my apprenticeship and was ready to run the beast. I got a very warm welcome. Always follow an unpopular person into a job if you can.

    Copyright © 2025 by Tom Freston. From the forthcoming book UNPLUGGED: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu by Tom Freston, to be published by Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Printed by permission.

    ‘Unplugged: Adventures From MTV to Timbuktu’ by Tom Freston









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    Tom Freston

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  • Naked and Unafraid

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    Betsy Aidem, Adina Verson, Irene Sofia Lucio, Audrey Corsa, and Susannah Flood rehearsing the opening scene of Act Two.
    Photo: Sara Messinger for New York Magazine

    Causes for hope can feel perilously scarce these days. In such a dire season of the spirit, it matters to hear from characters like the ones in Liberation, the extraordinary play by Bess Wohl transferring to Broadway in late October. Set in the 1970s at the meetings of a feminist consciousness-raising group — as well as in the present day, when a narrator (Susannah Flood) is telling the story of the group her mother founded — the show goes down like a bracing tonic, an antidote for the dark. It’s powered not by celebrities but by a company of superb New York theater regulars (the cast took home the Drama Desk Award for Best Ensemble) and engages in both exquisite character study and fervent political conversation — a thrilling dose of which occurs at the start of the second act during a pivotal 15-minute scene in which six cast members are entirely naked.

    Like all of Liberation, the scene is funny, contemplative, and paper-cut sharp, a coup de théâtre for reasons beyond its state of undress. The show’s website discloses the nudity, and audience members are asked to put their phones in pouches during the performance, but even so, the actors tell me they’ve experienced a whole gamut of responses. “I remember this middle-aged woman was so scandalized,” says Audrey Corsa. “Guys,” says her castmate Irene Sofia Lucio, raising a practiced eyebrow, “we once heard the word titties!” Everyone groans. But, adds Flood, “the majority of people are swept up in the magic of what the scene accomplishes.” “Yes,” say several voices, one of them Betsy Aidem’s: “They don’t want someone to break the spell.”

    What kind of work goes into building such a bold, prolonged, quite literally exposed sequence? To find out more, I’m sitting in on a rehearsal, and I’m not alone. My mother helped me wrestle the stroller off the subway — in it, my 4-month-old daughter is, for the moment, beatifically passed out.

    Wohl had wanted to write a play about the feminist movement of the 1970s for what she calls “an embarrassingly long time, maybe 15 years.” Her mother, Lisa Cronin Wohl, worked at Ms. Magazine, and Wohl remembers going to the office with her and playing in “the tot lot.” Later, she’d go on marches with her mom and her mom’s friends. These women had been living in her head for years, but it wasn’t until she realized that she was trying to write more than a straightforward “historical play” that the project cracked open. “I didn’t even know I was writing a mother-daughter play for a while,” says Wohl. “It became a quest to understand my mom.”

    Wohl’s drive as a playwright is to “put something onstage that I haven’t seen before.” For her, the image of multiple women “talking about their bodies and being naked but not being sexualized” — not “titillating or gratuitous” but compassionate and curious and rigorous — “felt a little bit radical.” It’s also historically accurate: Some feminist CR groups did indeed hold naked meetings, and Wohl — who interviewed around a dozen members of such groups while researching for the play — quickly discovered how meaningful the practice was. “It was something that the women talked about a lot and were very proud of,” she says. “This felt like a way that I could represent what they actually did — their bravery.”

    Photo: Sara Messinger for New York Magazine

    Susannah Flood, top and above, in rehearsal.
    Photo: Sara Messinger for New York Magazine

    The show’s director, Whitney White (who earned a Tony nomination for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, her Broadway debut), was aware that its nude scene would require real forethought. “I knew it would be something we’d have to dig deep for and get comfortable with and do the right way,” she says before adding wryly, “And full disclosure: I was an actor who had a horrible experience being nude onstage several times. So I often let that guide me. Like, Can you just do better than what you had?” When the show moved into rehearsal for its original Off Broadway run at Roundabout Theatre Company earlier this year, White and her team filled the room with research material. She turned to Adam Curtis’s documentaries and Angela Davis’s writing as well as news clips from the era. “What is the average American digesting?” White asks. “You could look at high art and cinema all you want, but what’s the everyday? What was on ABC at the time?”

    Such sensitive, granular world-building allowed the actors, says White, “to build real women that could be different” from themselves. “We really tried to make Venn diagrams: What is similar between the character of Susie and the actor playing her, and what’s radically different? From gender presentation to all kinds of things. That made the intimacy work feel depressurized.”

    A caring — not to mention playful and deeply feminist — ethos suffuses Liberation’s rehearsal room. As the actors get underway with the big scene, you can feel it. They stretch and shake out their limbs and start to recite the dialogue while White asks questions and drops in reminders from the sidelines. Gradually, they move into more full-fledged scenework. “It is insane to me that my mother ever did this,” says Flood, as the narrator, breaking the scene’s fourth wall to address the audience. “I never even saw her naked.”

    No one, however, is naked right now. That’s not the point of this rehearsal and, according to the show’s team, very seldom was. “We work the text like hell, over and over, because that’s really more important,” White says. “I feel like the great challenge of the scene is to get the audience to remember that there is so much more going on, that the nudity is this tiny fraction.” I’m witnessing this rigor on its feet as White leans forward at certain moments while the actors work: “Clean that up,” she says. “Stay alive … Project it less; mean it more.”

    Wohl’s characters are doing an exercise recommended by Ms. “The idea,” says Corsa’s Dora, who has brought in the magazine, “is we all go around and say one thing we love and one thing we hate about our bodies.” Kristolyn Lloyd’s Celeste, an uncompromising intellectual and the only Black woman in the group, is skeptical: “Frankly, I don’t exactly think we should be focusing on appearance at all.” But Lucio’s Isidora — an irresistibly uninhibited Sicilian filmmaker — is exuberant. “I love … my tits,” she says unapologetically. (“More Hamlet!” calls out White, and Lucio repeats the line with all the gravity of “To be, or not to be.” It kills.) Aidem’s Margie, the oldest in the group in her late 60s, cuts deep as she confesses that she hates her C-section scar, and Adina Verson’s Susie — a motorcycle-riding butch who writes brilliant punk manifestos on the backs of napkins — wins a big laugh every time she delivers the character’s laconic self-assessment: “Ass, good; tits, feh.”

    To get to the moment of removing clothes on the stage during the original production, the actors worked with intimacy director Kelsey Rainwater. As Corsa describes it, Rainwater acted “as a conduit to bring us all to a place where we felt comfortable knowing that we were all going to be at different levels of comfort.”

    “She also set rules and boundaries,” says Lloyd. “ We don’t talk about our bodies. You don’t say anything you like or anything you don’t like.” “My character’s relationship to their body and my relationship to my body are quite different,” says Lucio. “Finding a way to bridge that, and to almost have Isidora’s body be a costume, has been really, really helpful.” She pauses, then grins slyly: “Some of us wear merkins in the show as well, which for me added another layer of This is a flesh costume for me.” There are a few hoots and hollers as the others agree or protest. “I did not want a merkin,” says Lloyd, drawing herself up with Miss Jean Brodie rectitude as her fellow actors cackle. “I’m perfectly capable of growing my own.”

    Audrey Corsa, left, in rehearsal.
    Photo: Sara Messinger for New York Magazine

    Once the scene had been thoroughly rehearsed, the actors switched from doing it fully clothed to attempting it in underwear or camisoles provided by the show’s designers. Team members put up curtains around the room and dimmed the lights, and, says Aidem, “they had anybody male leave the room when we did it the first time in our underwear.” Then, says Verson, “a few times later, we wondered, ‘Are we ready to do it topless?’” For Verson, the tempo eventually started to chafe a little: “It was like, Let’s just fucking do it! ” But Lloyd pushes back: “Being an other in this group and having the only chocolate nipples onstage, I needed the slowness.”

    Still, the actors are passionately united when it comes to the scene’s importance. “We might be providing the audience an opportunity to overcome their discomfort with naked bodies, period — but especially naked female bodies,” says Flood. “And the fact that we’re on Broadway now, we’re saying that this kind of a discussion is commercially viable.” Verson nods in excitement: “I wish when I was a teenager, I could have seen regular bodies onstage. Like, look at all the different labia! Seriously, look at all the different mons pubises! They’re all normal.”

    There’s another world where this cast takes the Broadway stage, at whatever level of dress, under America’s first woman president — another timeline in which Liberation might have felt, says Wohl ruefully, like “a celebratory play about how far we’ve come.” Instead, the show has become a vessel for both deep pain and lasting, unkillable hope. “Back in March when we did it,” Wohl remembers, “people were really coming into the theater with a need to be together in this moment and collectively understand what was happening. Which was also the protagonist’s search: How did this happen? How did we get here? What went wrong? ” She takes a breath. “It’s funny. I didn’t know, when we went back into rehearsals this time, how it would feel. Are the questions going to feel as urgent? Are they going to feel different? Are we more weary now? Are we more angry now? Where are we as a society? And I feel, actually, that so far the questions are still the same. They’ve just deepened in certain ways, and there’s a rawness to them. I guess we’re both more weary and it feels more urgent at the same time. It all turned out to be true.”

    As my mother and I return home, I look at my daughter’s face. She’s sleeping again. “You know,” my mom says, “in college, my friend Beth was incensed that only the men had a sauna in the gym locker rooms. So one day we all just took off our clothes and marched through the men’s locker room in our towels to liberate the sauna. We were  naked and all these big naked football players kept opening the door and — !” She makes a horrified face and laughs. I laugh too, and also I’m in awe. I never knew this till now.

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    Sara Holdren

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  • Mr. Scorsese Could Be Twice as Long and It Still Wouldn’t Be Enough

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    Rebecca Miller has a clear thesis in Mr. Scorsese: There will never be another Martin Scorsese. Over five episodes of the Apple TV+ docuseries, Miller augments this argument through interviews with Scorsese and people from his life — childhood friends, recurring collaborators like editor Thelma Schoonmaker and actor Robert De Niro, relatives including his three daughters — and select clips from his decades of work. Every time Miller whips out a split screen to trace common themes between Scorsese’s various films and influences (like a comparison between the fights in Raging Bull and the shower-stabbing scene in Psycho), she proves her own deep understanding of Scorsese as an artist. Mr. Scorsese is an eye-opening and deeply moving viewing experience, one that had me crying within the first three minutes of the premiere episode. It is also, at a run time of 287 minutes, not nearly enough. Not! Nearly! Enough!

    Mr. Scorsese is convincing in its suggestion that Scorsese is perhaps the defining American filmmaker of his time, someone whose persistent interest in masculinity and money and the corrupting influence of both on our morality is a mirror held up to our national identity. The docuseries is so successful in hitting these points that I wanted to see more of the connections Miller was making; Scorsese’s career is rich and varied enough that Mr. Scorsese could have been, I don’t know, five more episodes? Ten more episodes? An episode released weekly until the end of time? I am being conservative and reasonable, I think! Here are 12 elements of Mr. Scorsese just begging for more screen time.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Mr. Scorsese is chronological, so premiere “Stranger in a Strange Land” spends time with the guys he grew up with in the Bowery. Scorsese bickering with Joe Morale and Robert Uricola about how they met is lovely and warm, which counters the discussion about the prevalent violence in their neighborhood. These men provide real color to Scorsese’s biographical details, like how his asthma led his father to take him to movie theaters for the air-conditioning, helping spark the filmmaker’s early love of cinema. Two men are particularly engaging: childhood neighbor Dominick Ferraro, who talks about a fight they were in at the West Side Club, and Uricola’s cousin Sally, who inspired De Niro’s character in Mean Streets. Ferraro’s description of Scorsese’s reaction after the fight is gold (“Scorsese turns around and says, ‘I wish I had a camera.’ I said, ‘This fucking guy wants a camera, I want a gun’”), and Sally deserves a memoir of his own. When Miller asks if he really blew up a mailbox, as depicted in Mean Streets, his casual admission and shrugging, “Let them arrest me now,” is hilarious.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Real ones know that Scorsese’s longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, is a major reason why his films look so good and move so well. Mr. Scorsese pieces together how Scorsese and Schoonmaker met, separated for nearly a decade after he was taken off the 1970 documentary Woodstock, then reunited for 1980’s Raging Bull and have stayed together since. Schoonmaker is an unparalleled figure in America’s cinematic history, and while I relished the behind-the-scenes information Miller got about how she cut Raging Bull and popularized the use of jump cuts with 1990’s GoodFellas, it would have been wonderful to see a joint interview with her and Scorsese sharing memories of prior projects.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Scorsese’s career has long been fixated on the different layers of the American myth and why they allure and trap us. Mr. Scorsese tackles this through-line from a couple different directions. First is the story of Louis Frezza, Scorsese’s friend who died at 18 from cancer and was buried in a Queens cemetery, above which loomed a gigantic sign for the Continental Can Company. The omnipresence of capitalism in what should have been a place of faith disgusted Scorsese: “I was thinking, What is life? Screw you. I’m not gonna work for the Continental Can Company. … I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it,” he says now. Criticism of capitalism and imperialism undermining individual dignity drives a ton of his work, from the 1967 anti–Vietnam War short film The Big Shave to his 2002 NYC origin story Gangs of New York, and Scorsese comparing that film’s Natives gang to the Proud Boys is thought provoking as hell. I wish Mr. Scorsese had let him cook a little longer about the political angles to his work.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Mr. Scorsese doesn’t feel especially compromised by the filmmaker’s involvement, but there are moments throughout the series when it feels like certain things are only being alluded to. Did Scorsese have an affair with Liza Minnelli in 1977’s New York, New York? Did he and Harvey Keitel fall out, and that’s why they didn’t work together for 30 years? What about Steven Prince, the subject of Scorsese’s 1978 documentary American Boy? Prince was an actor who served as Scorsese’s assistant during his cocaine era and partially inspired Eric Stoltz’s character in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Five years ago, he was the subject of a lengthy New Yorker profile for which Scorsese declined to be interviewed; it would be fascinating to get his perspective on that time in Scorsese’s life. Mr. Scorsese didn’t have to be messy, necessarily, but this man has lived a life. May we please have some gossip?

    Photo: Apple TV+

    This is how you talk about an ex: with warm affection and a sly read.

    She’s right: Sometimes it is just easier to think about lunch! Please, more of Isabella lightly teasing Marty about his tendency to flagellate himself while considering the agony of the human condition.

    It is simply hilarious to watch Scorsese and screenwriter Jay Cocks talk shit about Harvey Weinstein, who produced Gangs of New York and was constantly butting heads with Scorsese. I have many times watched this scene in which Scorsese in an exasperated tone and with pinched fingers complains about how Weinstein wanted to cut the movie’s wardrobe budget because he didn’t understand why so many characters were wearing hats. I would hear a million more of his complaints about Weinstein.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Scorsese’s films have been nominated for more than 100 Oscars, but he only has one personal win for directing 2006’s The Departed. A clip from The Aviator press tour in 2004 shows Scorsese’s gracious answer to an interviewer’s question about whether he wants an Oscar (“Me, personally? The time has gone, I think”), but I refuse to accept that one Oscar is enough for this man. Billie Eilish is 23 years old, and she has two! I don’t care that the categories are different; it’s the principle of the thing. Rebecca Miller, please call every person you know in the Oscars’ Directors Branch and grill them on why Scorsese has been so overlooked. I will happily wait for that companion docuseries in which every one of Scorsese’s peers is interrogated for their lack of respect.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Taxi Driver was a shot in the arm to American cinema: a wildly dark movie about a man lost in his own fantasies and obsessions with access to guns and a strict moral code that he’s willing to die to defend. The MPAA originally gave it an X rating, and the film’s studio told Scorsese to cut it to an R rating, or they would. A classic story of artist versus overlords — which took a turn, well, fitting of Taxi Driver when Scorsese threatened to kill the head of the studio. Steven Spielberg and Brian De Palma describe Scorsese telling them that he was going to get a gun, and the contrast between their bemused recounting of this story and Scorsese’s aggressive eye roll and laughter about the threat is highly entertaining. He now seems to be underplaying the sincerity of his outsize reaction, but it’s illuminating when Scorsese says, “Violence is scary, in yourself,” because he admits he was willing to get wild to defend his art. Hearing more about whether Scorsese felt pushed into violence to defend his other movies would have been compelling, too.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    Scorsese’s cocaine addiction in the 1970s was clearly not a good time — Rossellini talking about how he woke up once to find himself black and blue all over, then learned at the hospital that he was bleeding internally from his heavy drug use, is harrowing. More details about that would feel perhaps voyeuristic. There’s an interesting connection, though, between Scorsese’s near-death experience and his relationship with De Niro, who asked him in the hospital if he really wanted to “die like this” and urged him to get better and direct Raging Bull. I cried when Scorsese quietly said of De Niro’s offer, “I looked at him, and I said, ‘Okay,’” but how much did Scorsese then feel grateful (or indebted) to De Niro? When they worked on movies together that Scorsese says he didn’t particularly enjoy (The King of Comedy) or isn’t sure entirely worked (Cape Fear), did Scorsese agree to the gigs because De Niro was there for him in his worst moment? A little more discussion of how hitting rock bottom affected his working relationships could have helped round out this section.

    Scorsese’s been famous for a long time. He’s been protected by the FBI twice, after John Hinckley Jr.’s Taxi Driver–inspired attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan and after the release of The Last Temptation of Christ. You’ve probably seen at least one of his daughter Francesca’s viral TikTok videos or Instagram photos of her dad. We probably think we know Scorsese, or at least the version of him that comedians like Kyle Mooney have played on Saturday Night Live — which makes his discomfort with fame worth hearing more about. His daughters talk most about this, with Francesca mentioning a time when he didn’t leave their apartment except to go to his office. But how does Scorsese feel about this? He doesn’t speak much about how the ebbs and flows of celebrity have affected him, but I would like to know how he deals with not being able to experience New York City as casually as he once did.

    Photo: Apple TV+

    You probably know that people were very angry about The Last Temptation of Christ, in which Willem Dafoe plays a Jesus Christ who fucks, and Mr. Scorsese traces how the outcry against the movie was led by the increasingly powerful religious right in the U.S. But what about Kundun? Scorsese’s film about the Dalai Lama is only briefly discussed in terms of its amateur cast and its reception as “beautiful but dull.” The missing context is that Disney severely curtailed the release of the film because of the Chinese government’s pushback. Disney’s then-CEO Michael Eisner publicly apologized for the movie, saying, “The bad news is that the film was made; the good news is that nobody watched it.” Kundun has remained incredibly difficult to find — the physical-media release was limited, it’s not streaming in the U.S., and repertory screenings are rare. Why not dig into any of this?

    Photo: Apple TV+

    1991’s Cape Fear, 1999’s Bringing Out the Dead, and 2011’s Hugo all get only a line or so of commentary and a brief little montage clip, so if one of those is your Scorsese favorite you’re not getting much. And if one of your favorites is Killers of the Flower Moon, as it is mine, well, we’re out of luck, too. Despite KOTFM also being an Apple TV production, Mr. Scorsese relegates it solely to a few minutes at the end of “Method Director.” There’s footage of Scorsese prepping a couple of gigantic cork boards and directing scenes, but no real discussion of his motivations for tackling the film. Perhaps Mr. Scorsese wrapped sometime before the film’s release, but the series could have done a way better job encouraging people who already pay for Apple TV+ to fire up KOTFM. Eliding Scorsese’s most recent film makes for a really abrupt ending, and leaves Mr. Scorsese feeling undeservedly incomplete. Where art thou, Lily Gladstone?


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    Roxana Hadadi

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  • The Chair Company Series-Premiere Recap: Not All That Serious

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    The Chair Company

    Life Goes By Too F**king Fast, It Really Does

    Season 1

    Episode 1

    Editor’s Rating

    4 stars

    Leave it to a Tim Robinson character to turn a benign public humiliation into a full-blown conspiracy.
    Photo: Virginia Sherwood/HBO

    I think of Tim Robinson’s characters as existing on a spectrum. Yes, they’re all prone to loud, sudden explosions of cartoonish rage or pain, and they’re almost all anxious, insecure weirdos obsessed with proving they’re in on the joke. But there’s a big difference between the affable “chaotic good” Tim Cramblin from Detroiters and the procession of freaks Robinson plays on his sketch show, I Think You Should Leave. And Craig Waterman, the marketing executive from the 2024 film Friendship, took Robinson into new territory with a darker and more pathetic take on the same neurotic type.

    If Friendship was Robinson’s first real character study, his mysterious new HBO comedy The Chair Company is the logical next step. Like Craig Waterman, Ron Trosper is a hard worker and a family man, doing his best to project confidence and competence at the office and at home. But unlike Craig, he’s not actually that bad at it at first. For the most part, people seem to respect Ron. He has the adoration of his wife, Barb (Lake Bell), daughter, Natalie (Sophia Lillis), and son, Seth (Will Price). He’s a project lead at Fisher Robay, overseeing an ambitious new mall development in Canton, Ohio, and seems to have the office’s support. After a surprisingly successful speech at the kickoff meeting for Canton Marketplace, though, the other shoe drops. When Ron takes a seat, the chair falls out from under him and breaks, leaving him dazed and sprawled on the floor. That public humiliation is The Chair Company’s inciting incident.

    Friendship is the obvious comparison point for the show, especially with Andrew DeYoung directing this premiere and Keegan DeWitt once again contributing a cool, slightly eerie score. But it’s also the third series co-created by Robinson and Zach Kanin, who collaborated on both Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave. There’s a common comic sensibility running through all these projects, an understanding of what people come to a Tim Robinson show to see. Take that argument between Ron and the young server in the opening scene. A celebratory family dinner turns into an embarrassing dispute when Ron bristles at the server insisting she hasn’t been to a mall since she was 14. He takes it as a personal offense, and that’s a common impulse for Ron — he’s also not a fan of his cheerful elderly coworker Douglas (Jim Downey) blowing bubbles everywhere because “life’s just really not all that serious.”

    Like most Robinson characters, Ron really cares about fitting in, fearing attention as much as he courts it. The day after the chair incident, he defuses tension at the office by making fun of himself, only to feel uncomfortable as his coworkers revel in the hilarity of the moment. So he travels down the Tecca rabbit hole, desperate to take action against the titular chair company.

    Here’s where “Life Goes By Too F**king Fast, It Really Does” settles into surreal conspiracy thriller mode, a feeling I expect to stick around. The Tecca website’s phone number only gets him to National Business Solutions, which refuses to transfer him to the manufacturer. Messaging with a customer service agent doesn’t accomplish anything, and the obscure support email address bounces back. “What the fuck!?” Ron says, comically dumbfounded.

    Most of this premiere is about kicking off Ron’s investigation into Tecca, but it’s already interesting to note what the show is and isn’t interested in showing. We really don’t see much of the Trosper family, all things considered; at this juncture, his wife and kids are all (intentionally) archetypes, blandly supportive projections of the traditional fantasy of a loving, stable nuclear family. We know that Seth is looking into colleges, and Ron is continually adding photos and songs to Natalie’s rehearsal dinner slideshow, but that’s about it. The episode prioritizes strange narrative detours over conventional character-building, and I don’t mind that choice for the time being.

    Take the hilarious, unnamed janitor character, who shows up twice: first vehemently denying that his “inside wheelbarrow” goes outside, then appearing outside with the wheelbarrow after all. There’s also Ron’s coworker Amanda, who fully understands that he didn’t intentionally look up her skirt while collapsed on the floor, but still feels the need to report it to HR. Everything at work suddenly seems to be unraveling, especially with annoying Douglas blowing bubbles everywhere and distracting Doris when Ron’s trying to get footage to document her hip problem and the risk of an unsafe chair. (Someone on the phone told him Tecca Legal would contact him directly if there’s proof someone could get hurt.)

    The premiere does get pretty harrowing toward the end, beginning with Ron’s visit to the fenced-off building at the old Tecca address in Newark, Ohio. He finds some weird nudes in a printer and what looks like … a giant inflated red ball? And then, right when an old deviled egg sends him on a panicked run to the restroom, he hears footsteps and a long scream. It feels like something from Beau Is Afraid. He’s forced to flee before he can even wipe properly.

    Back at work, Ron meets with an exec named Brenda and the head of legal for the Canton development. Apparently, teenagers were drinking at the site last night and one of them almost died. Also, a teacher was there, and he was shirtless.

    It’s a weird and underexplained scenario, but the issue is enough to get Ron to lock back into his job and set Tecca aside … for a few minutes. When he leaves for the night, a man swiftly follows him across the parking lot and tells him to stop looking into the chair company, beating him with a baton briefly before walking away. The scene doesn’t stop there, though. When Ron gets his bearings, he stands up and runs after his attacker, the chased becoming the chaser. It’s notable that Ron doesn’t pick up the dropped baton to protect himself, nor does he continue the chase after the guy escapes his reach by leaving his unbuttoned shirt behind. He just stops.

    At this stage, it’s impossible to tell what all of this will add up to in the long run. (It reminds me of Nathan Fielder’s underrated series The Curse a lot in that way, and in others.) But so far, The Chair Company is as funny and strange and watchable as I hoped — different from anything else Tim Robinson has done, but also recognizably a Tim Robinson project. I don’t know what any of this shit is, and I’m fucking scared.

    • “Why the hell are they trying to take that damn thing? They fucking love taking that thing.”

    • “I guess I shouldn’t have had that last Cheez-It this morning.”

    • Three-way tie for funniest physical comedy moment of the episode: Ron’s panicked spasming in the cramped space beneath his desk; his loud dinner prep; and Douglas patting down Doris’s hair with printer paper to wipe the bubbles off.

    • Good background line: While Ron is on the phone eyeing Doris, you can hear her saying, “Oh, fuck! You gave me that paper too hard.”

    • “I just think HR should know that you saw up my skirt. On my birthday.”

    • Ron leaves an earnest comment on the YouTube video for “I Got a Name” by Jim Croce about thinking you’ll do something with your life, but not. Curious how those deeper fears will play into his Tecca mania.

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    Ben Rosenstock

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  • The Chair Company Is a Rich Text for Tim Robinson Sickos

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    Much as it leads Tim Robinson’s Ron down endless rabbit holes, The Chair Company is evocative and weird and captivating enough to make you chase your own theories about the comedian.
    Photo: HBO

    Tim Robinson, who so often plays men consumed by petty fixations or compelled to take things too far, has his own fixations. On I Think You Should Leave, his breakout sketch show with creative partner Zach Kanin, it’s hard not to notice how certain motifs recur across its comedy of unease like intrusive thoughts: peculiar elderly individuals, bursts of yelling, the refusal to take blame, idiosyncratic clothing, denials of reality, and drab corporate workplaces — all of which, the last in particular, were prototyped in the sitcom Detroiters, the pair’s first TV collaboration (alongside co-creators Sam Richardson and Joe Kelly). In this year’s Friendship, a light riff on male loneliness that follows a man’s spiral into obsession with a cool-guy neighbor played by Paul Rudd, we glimpse the emergence of another Robinson motif: Where his Detroiters character was ambiently married, in the A24 film he plays a devoted family man pretending at normalcy as it slips away. That characterization returns in The Chair Company, Robinson and Kanin’s new HBO series premiering October 12, which once again finds Robinson in an anonymous-looking office, playing yet another man losing his grip. Some artists spend their lives working through the same questions that consume them; Spielberg, for instance, has been processing the dissolution of his family for decades. The Chair Company reveals Robinson as one such artist, picking ever more persistently at the knots he seems to keep untangling in his head.

    Robinson plays Ron Trosper, a newly promoted corporate drone at shopping-mall-development firm Fisher Robay. (Motto: Integrating Mother Nature With Centers of Commerce.) His misadventure begins, as so many of Robinson’s sketches do, with a humiliation. After delivering his version of a rousing speech at a companywide presentation for a new project in Canton, Ohio, Ron suffers a modest embarrassment in front of his colleagues and his boss, Jeff (Lou Diamond Phillips). It’s the kind of incident a cooler, more well-adjusted person might laugh off and move on from. But Ron is obviously neither. He refuses to let it go, and in the grand tradition of all great Robinson characters, his fixation curdles into mania. Convinced the incident is part of a larger conspiracy, he digs deeper in search of confirmation … and bizarrely, the universe rewards his paranoia, sending him down a rabbit hole of sketchy scenarios and phantom leads all while he struggles to hold the rest of his life together.

    This description makes The Chair Company sound more conventional than it is. In practice, the show feels like an effort to carry the DNA of individual I Think You Should Leave sketches across a collection of scenes comprising Robinson and Kanin’s first serialized narrative. The connective tissue can be loose — sometimes thrillingly, sometimes bafflingly so. One thread follows Ron’s elderly co-worker Douglas (Saturday Night Live legend Jim Downey, making his second onscreen appearance this fall after One Battle After Another), who lost out on a promotion to Ron and is now making a show of rediscovering a spark for life. It’s not clear how he’ll figure into the bigger picture, but you accept that it may not matter. Another thread has Ron chasing a clue in the form of a bizarrely patterned shirt (a possible Dan Flashes callback?) that leads to a surreal encounter with a clothing-store employee who speaks in a halting, alien cadence and tries to recruit him into a mysterious membership program. At one point, Ron walks into a diner in the throes of chaos. It’s loud and the kitchen is overrun. One table is pelting fries at other customers. A man’s plate shatters on the floor. The scene plays like a fever dream. No explanations, no resolutions, and when Ron gets what he came for, the world spins on as if nothing happened.

    Miraculously, even improbably, it all holds together. The Chair Company coheres into a gestalt, a whole that’s somehow greater than the sum of its absurdities. It’s a more confident expansion of Robinson’s sensibility than Friendship, which often felt like a single joke stretched too thin. The improvement comes down to shape: The Chair Company adopts the loose framework of a conspiracy thriller, giving the show a container in which to corral its spiraling logic and surreal diversions. The series has a hazy, dreamlike quality in which narrative logic bends but emotional coherence holds. The effect is almost Lynchian. Each scene obeys its own strange rhythm, yet together they form a single, deeply felt reality.

    Also like Lynch, Robinson’s onscreen world hums with quiet dread, a sense that something sinister lurks just beneath the veil of the everyday banal. His humor has always been rooted in humiliation and helplessness, in the fragile border between male entitlement and panic. “That’s the problem with the world today,” Ron says at one point. “People make garbage and you can’t talk to anybody. You can’t complain. You can’t scream at them.” But what The Chair Company really achieves is unlocking a latent horror that’s been hanging out within that humor since, at the very least, the Darmine Doggy Door sketch. You could feel it, too, in Friendship, during one of the film’s rare moments of genuine unease when the wife of Robinson’s character, played by Kate Mara, disappears in the tunnels beneath the city. In The Chair Company, that undercurrent intensifies. One episode ends with a chilling cliffhanger that pierces the illusion of safety in your own home (the payoff is equally unsettling); another finds Ron breaking into someone’s house only to stumble on a tableau straight out of Seven.

    That unreality naturally raises questions about what Robinson and Kanin are really after with The Chair Company. Why, again, is Robinson cast as the improbably beloved family man? This time, his wife is played by Lake Bell, and she and their two children (played by Will Price and Sophia Lillis) adore him, almost comically, despite his weirdness and social transgressions. These scenes of familial harmony feel off, like they belong to another reality entirely. They don’t square with how Ron behaves or even how Robinson looks in the role. It’s as if we’re watching a fever dream of a man hallucinating what normal adulthood is supposed to be. Which leads to a stranger question: When other people in the show look at Ron, do they see Tim Robinson? Are we seeing Ron as he sees himself — the gremlin-man weirdo whom the rest of us have come to associate with Robinson’s persona? How are any of these readings complicated when you learn that Robinson himself is a family man with two kids?

    That’s the thing about The Chair Company: It turns you into a guy who’s just asking questions. Much as it leads Ron down endless rabbit holes, the show is evocative and weird and captivating enough to pull you into chasing your own theories about the work and the comedian himself. Whether that mystery will translate beyond the Tim Robinson sickos, though, is another question. The Chair Company’s rhythms are tuned to a very specific frequency of discomfort that not everyone will find funny or even watchable. But for card-carrying sloppy-steak aficionados, it’s a rich text. The series features Robinson and Kanin pushing their sensibility to the edge, testing whether the anxious, combustible energy of I Think You Should Leave can hold steady in a longer, more fragile form. It mostly does and when it doesn’t, the fissures feel purposeful, like they’re part of the experiment. Not all the gags land, but the gags often don’t seem like the point. In the end, it seems almost like Robinson isn’t mocking obsessive male anxiety so much as sincerely expressing how it feels to be trapped inside it. Every surreal interaction, every drab office, every incongruously adoring wife is another turn through the same loop. And you get the sense he’ll be turning it over, again and again, for the rest of his life.

    Correction: This review originally misattributed Friendship to Kanin. It has been updated.


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    Nicholas Quah

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  • Monster Doesn’t Know When to Quit

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    Monster: The Ed Gein Story tiptoes toward a thought-provoking read on the American obsession with true crime. Then it blows right past it.
    Photo: COURTESY OF NETFLIX

    Spoilers follow for Monster: The Ed Gein Story, all eight episodes of which premiered on Netflix on October 3. 

    Much like the other installments of Monster, you can guess the point The Ed Gein Story is making: We don’t know the full story of killer Ed Gein, and maybe if we did, we’d sympathize instead of judging him, and we’d better understand America, its crassness and consumerism. Creators Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy aren’t implicating themselves in that formula, of course, because they’re doing the important work of pointing out all the other filmmakers, law-enforcement authorities, and media professionals who spun the Gein story for their own devices. But their pointed fingers would feel a little cleaner if they weren’t delivered alongside lengthy scenes of Charlie Hunnam’s Gein having sex with a corpse or dancing around in the snow while wearing a suit made of women’s skin. Brennan and Murphy could’ve ended the season with its fourth episode, which features its most insightful observations about the United States’ blinkered perspective on political violence. Monster tip-toes very close to delivering a thought-provoking argument about the way we use entertainment to avoid taking responsibility for our collective sins of complacency and cultural narcissism. Alas. Like Gein, Monster doesn’t know when to stop.

    Monster starts in the early 1940s with Gein’s life in remote Wisconsin, trapped at a failing farm with his abusive religious mother Augusta (Laurie Metcalf). The pair’s routine basically goes like this: She screams at him that he should never have sex, catches him masturbating while wearing her underwear and choking himself with a belt, then screams some more Bible quotes at him until the cycle starts again. Ed’s repressed and lonely, a cowed boy trapped in a broad-shouldered man’s body, and Hunnam’s falsetto-voiced, wide-eyed performance is a little bit Lennie from Of Mice and Men, a little bit Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. When his on-again, off-again girlfriend Adeline Watkins (Suzanna Son) shows him Polaroids taken by a soldier in the Nazi concentration camps and a kinky fetish comic featuring Ilse Koch (Vicky Krieps), the German war criminal nicknamed “the Bitch of Buchenwald,” Gein becomes obsessed. After his mother dies in 1945, he starts digging up graves to mimic Koch’s hobby of using human skin to make home furnishings and furniture, and eventually, remains from more than 200 bodies litter his house, like belts made out of nipples and bowls made out of skulls. Later, Gein begins killing people around town and using their bodies for his creations, too. (It cannot be overstated how distressing this show is to watch. Kudos to the props department, but also, what in the actual hell.)

    Once Monster establishes these rushed motivations for Gein’s increasingly horrifying activities, it jumps around in time: to 1959, when Alfred Hitchcock (Tom Hollander) began thinking about making Psycho; 1968, when Tobe Hooper (Will Brill) tapped into his childhood fear of Gein to conceive The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; and the late 1980s, when Gein inspired Buffalo Bill’s crossdressing in The Silence of the Lambs. Monster traces the massive shadow Gein left on 20th-century horror to convey how far Gein’s lore spread, how well-known he became for acts he didn’t entirely understand himself, and eventually, how disconnected he felt from both those crimes and that reputation. But it’s also trying to make a broader argument that is less about Gein as an individual and more about why we as Americans are more comfortable with ingesting some kinds of gore and brutality over others. Why do we pay money to see Leatherface shove his chainsaw into people’s torsos, but turn off the TV when news coverage of the Vietnam War comes on? Why do we transform images of Jewish misery into lurid soldier’s mementos, shrug off war crimes like My Lai, and treat New York City crime-scene photographer Weegee like a minor celebrity?

    Monster doesn’t have answers for these questions, just a general disdain for Americans and broad observations about our own cowardice. It’s frustrating that the series presents this bloodlust and apathy as a post-World War II development in the American psyche, thus tidily ignoring that the U.S. was born out of genocide and built on the backs of enslaved people. But Brennan and Murphy find thought-provoking tension in these imbalances, contrasting our disinterest in keeping up with America’s imperialist destruction with our never-ending fascination with Gein’s brutality and depravity. And the series incriminates us, of course, when Hunnam looks straight into the camera and says, “You’re the one who can’t look away.” By fourth episode “Green,” Monster has hit all these points, and hit them well. The episode’s final minutes feature Hooper ranting about how he was “fucking bored” by Psycho. When someone tells him he can’t make his movie, he replies, “Why not? They’re mowing down whole villages and putting it on TV. They’re burning babies … I’m not making the movie this country wants. I’m making the movie it deserves. They created it. The ugliness, the violence, the cruelty, the depravity, the lies. We’re humans, but we’re not human anymore.” His tirade is nihilistic and grandiose, but he makes some good points! Gein is the bogeyman, Hooper argues, but he’s a bogeyman for an America that’s already deeply lost its way, and maybe never had it.

    Imagine if Monster had ended there. We’ve seen Gein infantilized and mistreated by his mother, led on and corrupted by Adeline, have his schizophrenia activated by those horrific images from the concentration camps, and become a ruthless murderer of women who made him angry. We understand that headlines about Gein were inspiring copycats and changing true crime as we know it. We feel Brennan and Murphy’s contempt. But Monster just keeps going, making the same arguments and piling on the stomach-churningly awful visuals until you lose all sense of whatever nuance the show once had.

    Consider the finale, which floats a bunch of big-brained ideas about the cruelty of religious moralizing, the churning depravity of the American audience, and the failures of our criminal-justice and public-health systems, only to let them all splatter to the ground like the organs of so many of Gein’s victims. In “The Godfather,” Gein is reformed. With therapy and the appropriate medication, he’s lucid and penitent, but he’s still stuck in an underfunded asylum, surrounded by inmates who insult and bite him. The only people who write him letters are serial killers who adore him, especially serial killers who were portrayed on the Netflix series Mindhunter (which Monster, for some reason, takes a swipe at with a frankly exhausting, metatextual parody). He has information from serial killer “Birdman” Richard Speck about Ted Bundy, who is still on the loose beheading young women, but the FBI is ignoring Gein’s tips — until finally, a cop meets with Gein and uses his information to catch Bundy. This is allegedly a fantasy sequence, but one of Monster’s greatest flaws is how flimsy it is at differentiating Gein’s imagination from what the series is presenting as objective truth.

    The most needless scene of all is a bizarro fantastical sequence where Speck, who describes Gein as his role model and hero for faking insanity (even the killers who idolize Gein didn’t know him, Monster argues), narrates a letter he wrote to Gein in which he asks Gein if he’d like to masturbate while touching Speck’s estrogen-enhanced breasts. Look at all these freaks and opportunists, Monster tells us, unlike good boy Gein, who as he dies imagines himself going down the middle of a Soul Train-style line of asylum patients and employees and the people from his life, all bumping and grinding to Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart.” His final thoughts are of reuniting with Augusta, who greets him warmly at the top of a set of stairs. (If you’re picturing a Glee performance mashed up with Leo and Kate’s reunion at the ending of Titanic, that’s exactly what it’s like.) Ed has made her proud, Augusta tells him, and although “only a mother could love you,” she does.

    The final image of Monster is the pair drinking lemonade on the front porch of their home. Is this a rare moment of familial pleasantness we didn’t see? A hypothetical, what the Geins could have been like if Ed had received treatment earlier? Or a vision of Ed and Augusta in heaven, somehow? It’s unclear! Regardless, this is an exceedingly genteel way to end a show that previously had shown us not one, not two, but three shots of removed and preserved vulvas. Monster practically insists that Gein changed in the later years of his life, and Hunnam’s performance shifts into a man more self-possessed and calm, his voice pitched downward and his body language steady after years of proper treatment for his schizophrenia. (Although the show struggles to really clue us into Gein’s interiority, Hunnam admittedly tries his hardest to make him accessible.) But Monster is gratuitous in conveying both Gein’s deviance and reform, leaning into the excessive characterizations and flourishes it previously criticized Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, and Mindhunter for demonstrating, too. In the season’s back half, neither its overloading of vile desecrations nor maudlin sentimentality adds anything that Monster hadn’t already established four episodes ago. We already know how the tale of Ed Gein ends, with commercialization and infamy. What Monster fails to consider is that it’s part of the problem.

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    Roxana Hadadi

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  • Are Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo Still Holding a Grudge?

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    Remember when?
    Photo: @oliviarodrigo via Instagram

    The obvious drama on Taylor Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl is “Actually Romantic,” the alleged response track to Charli XCX’s “Sympathy is a Knife.” While the petty lyrics are aimed at a certain someone who calls Taylor “Boring Barbie,” the song sounds directly from Olivia Rodrigo’s guts. Wait, is that feud still a thing? Swift digs deeper on “Father Figure,” a song that posthumously doles out writing credits to George Michael, propping herself up as inspiration and guidance to “a younger version of me.” “I saw potential,” she sings on the outro.

    When Olivia Rodrigo emerged from her Disney+ cocoon with “drivers license,” her identity as a devout Swiftie was well documented. She caught the attention of Swift, they mutually posted loving photos together when they finally met at the BRIT Awards, and Rodrigo quickly became a meaningful part of the first “Taylor’s Version” rollout. Rodrigo even intentionally interpolated the piano chords of “New Year’s Day” on her Sour track “1 step forward, 2 steps back.” But her open affection eventually cost her millions in royalties after she gave Swift a retroactive credit on Rodrigo’s hit “Deja Vu” for interpolating the bridge of “Cruel Summer.” Ever since, fans have speculated about a falling out between the two pop stars. Drake and Kendrick, step aside, because breadcrumbs about the rift have seemingly been spread throughout the pop stars’ songs ever since. Below, every lyric that could lead back to the bad blood between the diaristic songwriters. Who’s afraid of this little old beef? You should be.

    Olivia Rodrigo has claimed she was “very surprised” when fans interpreted lyrics from her sophomore album’s debut single as digs at Taylor Swift. Years later, I’m even less convinced by that. The first possible dig at Swift comes almost immediately: “How’s the castle built off people you pretend to care about?” The vision of Taylor, high up in a castle protecting her kingdom, comes up regularly in the fight. Swift has built a… reputation… as a maternal figure fighting for younger artists’ rights, but if we are to believe the rumors about the feud, is it all pretend?

    Rodrigo sings, “Six months of torture you sold as some forbidden paradise. I loved you truly.” Yes, this could be her situationship with disgrace-to-my-first-name Zack Bia. But given “drivers license” was released in January 2021, and the songwriting credit was officially doled out to Swift and her “Cruel Summer” co-writers in July that year, could these six months be the brief period in which Taylor took Olivia under her wing?

    As with everything Taylor, it always comes back to the money. Olivia sings, “The way you sold me for parts,” and “Bleedin’ me dry like a goddamn vampire.” While Taylor would never “fame fuck” Olivia (I’ll leave another sect of fans to discuss that), these lyrics may point to the financial stakes of Taylor’s team demanding credit for the interpolation on “Deja Vu.”

    Finally, the lyrics “And every girl I ever talked to told me you were bad, bad news / You called them crazy, god, I hate the way I called them crazy too,” don’t immediately seem like Taylor call-outs remembering the mentors who have filled the private-jet-sized vacancy left by Swift in Olivia’s life, they could be. Think Katy Perry and Alanis Morissette, who she agreed with about the “bullying and a lot of jealousy” coming from former idols who ended up “being mean girls.”

    If “the grudge” just sounds like a breakup song to you, it should. Being betrayed by a boy is a slap in the face; being betrayed by your hero is a true gut punch. Nestled in that six months of torture, Rodrigo opens with, “I have nightmares each week about that Friday in May, one phone call from you and my entire world was changed.” Sour was released Friday, May 21, 2021. It’s safe to guess that upon hearing her influence on the album, Taylor reached out to Olivia on the day of its release to start the conversation about royalties. (Even if she needed a week to let her vampiric teeth sink in, Friday, May 28, 2021 is on the table, too.)

    Rodrigo sings, “You took everything I loved and crushed it in between your fingers.” Everything is Taylor Nation, naturally. She admits, “I say I don’t care, I say that I’m fine… but you know I can’t let it go, I’ve tried, I’ve tried, I’ve tried for so long.” Olivia’s lifelong “undyin’ love” for Taylor now haunts her. Taylor Swift was everywhere in 2023 (and still is). It makes perfect sense why she’d “hear your voice every time that I think I’m not enough.”

    Since Sour’s release, Olivia has tried her best to act cool when asked about Taylor Swift, notably saying she was “too busy” to attend the never-ending Eras Tour, but then she sings, “I say I don’t care, I say that I’m fine.” .

    In one of the song’s most damning lines, “And we both drew blood, but, man, those cuts were never equal,” she reintroduces the (bad) blood motif from “Vampire,” tying the songs together thematically. She  even appears to address the “cuts” of the profits that Taylor received from Sour. “Do you think I deserved it all? Ooh, your flower’s filled with vitriol,” paints a vivid picture of Taylor, vindicated in teaching Olivia a lesson she deserved to learn, possibly sending make-up flowers to prove her point. In the aftermath of “drivers license,” it seemed Taylor was thrilled to have a protege? All signs on social media pointed to a fruitful mother-daughter partnership (Taylor commented “I say that’s my baby and I’m really proud” on Olivia’s post about being two spots below her idol on the iTunes charts.), but instead Olivia cries, “You built me up to watch me fall.”

    In the climax of the song, Olivia belts, “You have everything, and you still want more.” Taylor is a billionaire. She does “have everything.” But for some reason, she needed a songwriting credit from a similar-sounding bridge on a 17-year-old’s debut album.

    Possibly the most intentionally scary she’s ever written (with recent addition “CANCELLED!” as a close second), this searing rant could be about any number of beefs Taylor Swift engages in. “The scandal was contained. The bullet had just grazed. At all costs, keep your good name,” she sings.

    In my vision of Taylor’s Female Rage: the Musical, she wrote this song immediately after hearing “The Grudge.” She whispers, “So tell me everything is not about me. But what if it is?” – stunned that someone would write a diss track about her. The first substantial clue that the song could be about Olivia comes from the lyrics “So all you kids can sneak into my house, with all the cobwebs.”  There are plenty of breakup songs on The Tortured Poets Department – and Taylor has a long list of revenge songs about Scooter Braun and the music exec who sold her masters, Scott Borchetta – but no one’s calling them “kids.”

    The most obvious lyrics — “That I’ll sue you if you step on my lawn,”– reference the legal back and forth that happened when Rodrigo metaphorically stepped on Swift’s lawn by borrowing her chorus structure.

    “Put narcotics into all of my songs. And that’s why you’re still singing along,” seems to directly reference “The Grudge,” when Olivia sings, “Even after all this, you’re still everything to me.” Taylor knows that even after all this battle, Olivia still loves her idol’s music – taunting her with her complicated devotion.

    The latest entry in this canon of beef is “Father Figure” from The Life of a Showgirl. Could the central interpolation of George Michael’s 1987 year hit meant to drag Olivia for the songwriting credit that started the feud? She paints a picture of taking a younger, poorer artist to the Chateau (no, not Audrey Hobert), singing, “You remind me of a younger me. I saw potential…” This twists the closing lines  on The Tortured Poets Department: “You look like Taylor Swift in this light. We’re loving it. You’ve got edge; she never did. The future’s bright, dazzling” from “Clara Bow.”

    In the second-most cringe-inducing “dick” mention on TLOAS, Taylor brags, “I can make deals with the devil. Because my dick’s bigger.” She’s puffing her chest with business acumen. “This love is pure profit, just step into my office,” she sings.“I dry your tears with my sleeve.” These lyrics make more sense remembering that the initial feud happened as Taylor was deep in her fight with Shamrock Capital, the owners of her original masters. She sneers, “Said, ‘They want to see you now. They don’t want you to reign.’ I showed you all the tricks of the trade.” Olivia herself once noted she was inspired by Taylor’s tricks of the trade when she signed her record deal and maintained control of her masters from the start. So when Taylor vows, “I protect the family. Leave it with me,” is she implying that if Olivia had left the “Deja Vu” songwriting credits with her, she’d be protected by Taylor Nation?

    “Your thoughtless ambition sparked that ignition of foolish decisions, which led to misguided visions,” could reference Olivia’s ambition to echo Taylor’s writing on “Deja Vu,” but she “foolishly” didn’t offer credit at first. “Then to fulfill your dreams, you had to get rid of me.” Once the feud dissipated, Olivia stopped mentioning Taylor Swift entirely.

    “You want a fight you found it. I got the place surrounded.” isn’t a direct reference, but four years after the initial songwriting-credit fallout, Taylor has befriended pop girls who allegedly appear in Rodrigo’s songs: Sabrina Carpenter and Gracie Abrams.

    In one of the more haunting deliveries in Taylor’s discography, “All I ask for is your loyalty. My dear protege,” she clearly draws a line between herself and her younger-me. But the bridge throws in a possible red herring: “I saw a change in you, my dear boy.” Is the song actually about Troye Sivan, her once-opener who has since gone distinctly team XCX? Or could she be shading another former devout Swiftie – Olivia Rodrigo’s best friend Conan Gray, who helped promote early snippets of Fearless (Taylor’s Version). “They don’t make loyalty like they used to,” clearly, because Conan Gray famously didn’t listen to Midnights for months after its release. Maybe the song is about all of the attached-at-the-hip former Swifties.

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    Zach Schiffman

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  • This Isn’t Your Typical Regina Hall

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    Photo: Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures

    Regina Hall’s inherent Regina Hall–ness — her magnetic fusion of poise and charisma — never shows in One Battle After Another. Instead of that usual charm, Hall is sober-minded and serious. As Deandra, a guerilla involved with a revolutionary sect called the French 75, she’s waging war against oppression, whether that’s militarized police, migrant detention camps, Christmas-worshipping white nationalists, or fascism at large. Paul Thomas Anderon’s newest movie is very much a comedy, but Hall is mostly on hand during its graver political insinuations. Even as the French 75 splinters, Deandra remains committed to the cause, resurfacing when called to shepherd the targeted teenage daughter (Chase Infiniti) of a dopey ex-radical (Leonardo DiCaprio) to what she hopes will be safety. To fail the mission would be to fail herself.

    Having made her name with The Best Man, Scary Movie, and Ally McBeal, this new, different note satisfies Hall’s longtime dream of working with Anderson. They’re neighbors in Los Angeles, and one day the director approached her to say that, finally, he had a part for her. One Battle also exemplifies where Hall’s career has taken her, which is to say across genres, moods, and Hollywood whims. Even when she’s bossing her way through movies like About Last Night and Little, Hall’s well-dressed polish carries an immense likability. Soon enough, Hall will return to the Scary Movie franchise for the first time since 2006. But for now, she’s soaking in the momentum around One Battle. To her, this film is “special.”

    Not every movie can be special. What’s different about this one? 
    You certainly don’t feel it with every job. The timing of this movie feels divine. This certainly isn’t what the film is about, but it couldn’t feel more pertinent to many things that are going on. It’s also a time when we really need to laugh, and there’s a lot of levity in the way the story is told.

    It’s fascinating that Paul wrote this movie in 2023 and shot it in early 2024, before our current president had been elected.
    And Paul actually started thinking about this project 20 years ago.

    Based on Vineland. 
    I think he was going to shoot it as early as 2017. Now it’s just incredibly — let’s call it psychic.

    Did you, Paul, and the rest of the cast discuss its real-world politics while making the movie?
    You know, we didn’t. We discussed the world that Paul wrote about and what would feel real. We were looking for authenticity. I read books about these times in our history and what revolutionaries are like, so it was, What’s truly in the heart of these characters? What do they do? Why do they do it? How do they feel about it? I think it’s taking the judgment off of it, and that includes the Christmas Adventurers with Tony Goldwyn and all of them.

    That divinity you talked about, though — in the months since you shot it, we’ve seen federal troops sent into cities, new migrant detention camps, and political violence. Was there a moment when everyone involved realized the movie’s relevance had been magnified?  
    Just speaking for me, I certainly thought that. I think there’s no way to be informed and not see some commonalities.

    What did Paul tell you about why he thought of you for this role?
    He didn’t say why. He said, “I have a role I would love for you to do,” and I was like, “Yes.” Deandra is not a role that I’ve played before, but I didn’t wonder why he thought of me. I’m gonna ask him. When he told me about it, he said he’d give me the script, and I didn’t get it until a few months later. I was like, Oh boy, did he forget? Did he change his mind? It’s interesting to see what someone sees in you.

    Now that you’ve had such a wide-ranging career, how do you think you are perceived as an actress?
    I think I am perceived in many different ways. I haven’t thought about it. I don’t know! How do you perceive me? It’s a good question.

    I think you’re primarily perceived as a comedic actress, but I think that canvas has broadened. One thing I notice is that you often play ambitious characters, and many of those characters are high glam. It goes back to Ally McBeal. We see it in About Last Night, Little, Black Monday, Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul — ambitious characters who are also very presentational. Deandra, in her own way, is quite ambitious, but without the glam. That’s an interesting change. I guess you could say the same thing for Master.
    Maybe Support the Girls.

    Yes, although your character in that film, Lisa, is very put-together in spite of what’s going on in her life.
    Yeah, a small-town kind of put-together. Even Dawn in Black Monday was very put-together, but she was a mess. Deandra is probably the most stoic character that I’ve ever played, coming from characters that are quite verbose or animated, like Brenda in Scary Movie. There was a lot of performance that had to exist nonverbally, and that was certainly different. With revolutionaries and what they’re doing, anything else wouldn’t feel honest.

    Was there a moment when you first saw yourself in that all-black, seemingly makeup-free look?
    Paul did a lot of camera tests just to see what cameras he was going to use. I think my first time in wardrobe was my first test, which was with Shayna — Junglepussy — and I will say, it felt alive. Deandra is stripped of many things, but she’s strong. I was in the beginning stages of working with PTA, and that had always been something that I really wanted to do. I was about to experience a dream. And the next time we toyed with the cameras, Leo was there. It was building, and it was such a ride.

    You mentioned reading about revolutionaries and this particular type of activism. What of that did you put into Deandra?
    I talked to people who had been a part of the Black Panthers. For me, it wasn’t about what they did. It was about, “What did you feel like, and what did you think you were doing?” Many of them were very young, and it’s a very idealistic time. You think that you’re going to be at the beginning and on the precipice of change, so I really was curious about the idealism in terms of what they were up against and who they were fighting for and how. Deandra is still part of the fight all those years later, so I used that to create her backstory. When you’re young, you kind of think you’re the first to have gone through something.

    Did you come away with any grand ideas about this particular type of extremist activism?
    There’s something to be said about the human spirit when it believes that it is right, when you believe you have cause or reason or purpose. What was interesting in Paul’s movie is we see that, with Willa, it continues. Whatever a collective believes in, it continues. For me, it was really wonderful to meet people who fought but who believed their purpose is to do good. There was a self-righteousness that they held about it. With the French 75, we saw goodness from them, even if many times things do go wrong. I walked away with more understanding of idealism.

    Tell me about your first encounter with one Leonardo DiCaprio.
    In real life, I saw him somewhere years ago, said hi, and that was it. When he and Teyana met, they had a big moment at Diana Ross’s birthday party. I had just seen him around. I think the first time I spoke to him was when we had our work session where we were auditioning with Chase. From then on, he was very funny, great to work with, and sweet. He was down-to-earth.

    In terms of where culture has gone, it feels like there’s a sort of spiritual progression from screaming into the void at the end of Support the Girls to the all-out political scream that this movie lets out. Several years out, can you take in what that Support the Girls ending has meant to people?
    Gosh. Support the Girls was such a special film. In doing research, I went to a lot of those restaurants, and I was surprised to see that there did exist this familial feeling — how protective some of the female managers were and how hard-working people were. With the scream, it’s that cathartic moment that we all need. After what had happened to all of them, in those last moments, they got to be together. I didn’t necessarily know how it would resonate, but I loved the ending when I read it. I think all of us knew what that scream meant.

    What did it say on the page?
    It just said, “They let out a scream.” I don’t know if it explained it or not, but I inherently knew what it meant. I remember when I read the script, I was thinking, Oh my goodness, what does she do? Something terrible? She’s going to steal the money. I was so used to reading that sort of thing. But they were just people, and when they screamed at the end, it’s a moment where life’s been a little bit hard. The whole film just had a sweet feeling. Ironically, Paul Thomas Anderson went to see the movie, which I gather he enjoyed. Junglepussy is in it!

    I wondered if there might have been something in Support the Girls that Paul pinpointed for Deandra. 
    That would make sense. Lisa in Support the Girls went through everything to take care of those girls, and Deandra does have a heart and a capacity to be incredibly selfless. We talked about the moment in One Battle After Another at the end when they got caught. She feels like she failed. She doesn’t have the girl anymore. That was her job. She wasn’t five steps ahead, and I think for her, she had failed the mission.

    When Support the Girls came out and got all that acclaim, a lot of Oscar pundits were rooting for you to get a nomination. Was it a disappointment for that not to come to fruition? 
    No. I had never really thought I was necessarily in the conversation. I was really happy with all the critical acclaim that the film had gotten. It would have been great, but it wasn’t anything I was disappointed by. Because it was an independent film, I was really, really thrilled to get the Gotham and Indie Spirit nominations. That was truly like the pinnacle for me because it’s an indie film.

    What have you observed thus far about the early awards-season momentum that One Battle After Another is picking up?
    The great thing is that the critics have really responded well, and audiences who have seen it also love it. You want the people to love it. I haven’t gone beyond that, but it’s incredible to feel that amount of energy surrounding the film from the start.

    One of the movies that launched your career, Scary Movie, required a type of broad comedy that I think a lot of actors probably can’t pull off. What was your audition like?
    I had about four or five. I had a lot of auditions. I hadn’t done a comedy. I had only done The Best Man. I had to preread for casting, and then go in for casting, and then go back, because this was when you were not submitting a tape. You had to go in person and do callbacks, and then another set of callbacks for Keenen Wayans. It was exciting. I wasn’t the first person cast. I was cast in the movie-theater scene, which was a separate scene, as Marlon’s cousin who was coming to visit. Brenda was a different character. A wonderful actress, Tamala Jones, had been cast, but Tamala couldn’t do it. They were going to offer Brenda to someone else, but the studio said, “We like this girl right here,” which was myself. Keenen combined the roles. It was a long process — months!

    That feels like a tough audition to me because you might not know exactly what tone the movie is going to take until you’re making it. 
    One scene I for sure did was the movie-theater scene. And where I talk to Cindy in the beginning and say, “She’s as fake as press-on nails.” Really, at that point, regardless of getting the movie, I just wanted to make Keenen laugh. I was a big fan of his from In Living Color. I was excited for any part that I could have gotten. I thought I was just going to go work for three or four days in the movie theater, so when I found out it was going to be run of picture, I didn’t even know what comedy was, necessarily. I didn’t know anything about intonation, and I was so green.

    How did your experience of the franchise change once Keenen and Marlon left after the second movie?
    Yeah, that was tough. You never know what’s happening with the powers that be, but it was scary. Anna Faris and I had to just be like, “Okay.” David Zucker and Craig Mazin were great too, but it’s great to be able to go back with that history. We’ve come full circle.

    The Wayans are returning for the first time since Scary Movie 2. Was their involvement crucial in your agreeing to do another one?
    Hm. Yes, I would say so. It was really important to have the original cast and directors back from Scary Movie 1 and 2 because that’s what made it nostalgic.

    In the years since Scary Movie 5, the horror genre has really widened. Are we going to get a parody of the whole A24 elevated-horror thing? Feels like an obvious target. 
    I don’t think so from what we’ve discussed. I signed my NDA and I should be getting something any second now.

    Oh, you haven’t seen a script yet?
    I have seen a very early draft, but that script has since had rewrites and other ideas. It sounds amazing.

    Did you really sign an NDA?
    Yes, I did.

    Is that because this is such a high-profile franchise? 
    Yeah, but it also is dependent on the jokes not being known.

    You and I spoke in 2021 when Nine Perfect Strangers was coming out, and at the time, you told me that you were writing an anthology series that Showtime had picked up, and Barry Jenkins was attached as a producer. What’s happened with that in the years since?
    Yeah, that was a tough one. Barry was doing Lion King, which was great, and at the time it was at Showtime. It’s done, and we’re headed out to pitch it now to networks. Hopefully we’ll know soon where it will have a home.

    When you say it was a tough one, do you mean because it didn’t come together as quickly as you might have liked?
    No, but we had done a lot of work and there were many changes that happened at Showtime. My executive left, and then you get it handed back to you. I think the timing for us was just tough.

    We’re talked about the range you’ve shown over the years, and you said working with Paul Thomas Anderson is like living out a dream. What else are you hungry to do?
    If you would ask me a year ago, I certainly wouldn’t have thought about a revolutionary. I just want to be in great hands and be able to have fun. I look forward to Girls Trip 2. I want to do some jobs that are scary and out of the box. I feel like my career has been a journey, and I look forward to the journey because it’s always better than I can imagine anyway. Imagine calling and telling your agent you got a PTA film!


    See All



    One Battle After Another is a loose update of the Thomas Pynchon novel, a Reagan-era satire that’s also about an ex-revolutionary tracking down his daughter after she’s kidnapped by the opposition. In addition to Inherent Vice, this is Anderson’s second Pynchon adaptation.

    Anderson first met with DiCaprio about the role after wrapping Phantom Thread, but he opted to make Licorice Pizza next instead.

    As Hall told the Associated Press, “She came from a good home, a loving home, [and] thought she could take that into the world. When she joined the French 75, she had a very strong awakening about the realities of life. Cut to 17 years later, she had seen things that had left a few scars. She had quite a bit of loss, but she still had a hopefulness — and a sadness.”

    Teyana Taylor plays Perfidia Beverly Hills, the leader of the French 75 and girlfriend of DiCaprio’s character. “I had on this Diana Ross kind of dress, and I had [a wig on]. I was living when she was performing. I either bumped him or, like, hit him with the hair,” Taylor recently told Jimmy Fallon.

    They made Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4.

    Hall signed a first-look deal with Showtime in 2020 while Black Monday was airing on the network. She hasn’t wanted to disclose the series’ plot publicly. In 2021, she told Vulture, “It’s kind of based on real things.”

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    Matthew Jacobs

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  • One Battle After Another Is Our New Oscar Front-runner

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    Photo: Warner Bros.

    This summer came and went with decidedly few awards contenders, especially compared to the last few years’ yield of summer Oscar fare like Oppenheimer, Barbie, Top Gun: Maverick, and Elvis. Sinners established its case for Oscar consideration back in April, but since then, anything with a pedigree — be it Celine Song’s Materialists or the TIFF People’s Choice award winner The Life of Chuck — revealed itself to be a nonstarter in the awards conversation.

    Into this relative void steps Paul Thomas Anderson, whose films have been nominated for 28 Academy Awards over the course of his career. His latest, One Battle After Another, is loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland, and was described half-jokingly by the director during a post-screening Q&A on Monday as “an action-comedy with a dash of postpartum depression.” The film, which stars Oscar winners Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio del Toro, and Sean Penn, alongside Teyana Taylor, Chase Infiniti, and Regina Hall, has been enjoying an incredibly effusive reception from critics. It holds a score of 96/100 on the review aggregator Metacritic, making it the best-reviewed film of 2025 (tied with Julia Loktev’s documentary My Undesirable Friends: Part I — Last Air in Moscow.) Headlines have touted the film as a masterpiece, a triumph, and a wonder. Our own Alison Willmore ranks it as top-tier PTA, and I’m inclined to agree.

    So: An Academy-favored filmmaker has a new film starring a bunch of Oscar winners, and it’s burning up review pages in a year where Oscar front-runners have been hard to come by. This isn’t advanced calculus. One Battle After Another is our new Best Picture front-runner. Right? Well, aside from a general reticence to hand out trophies in September, I’d point out that a number of questions and caveats need to be answered on the road from here to the Oscar podium.

    If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times: An Oscar winner in Best Picture needs a hook; preferably more than one. “Just give the award to the best movie” sounds like an incredibly simple task until you ask as many as two people what they think the best movie is. “Paul Thomas Anderson is due” could be a great hook — look how well it worked for Christopher Nolan just two years ago. But the trickiest needle to thread will be how the Warner Bros. team behind One Battle After Another is going to market the movie in relation to the terrifying state of events in the U.S. The film blends eras and references as it follows the members of an anti-fascist group called the French 75, including Bob (DiCaprio) and Perfidia Beverly Hills (Taylor), as they carry out 1960s-style guerrilla attacks on 2020s-style immigrant-detention centers. Meanwhile, the U.S. government is represented alternately by macho-psychotic military types like Sean Penn’s Colonel Stephen J. Lockjaw and an executive regime looking to racially purify the country. This should all sound familiar. If you haven’t noticed, things are pretty intense out there, with the Trump administration pushing things farther and farther toward authoritarian fascism and activists on the ground actively resisting ICE raids, and that was all before the killing of Charlie Kirk lit the fuse on MAGA promises to crush the left. With One Battle After Another presenting fascist raids on sanctuary cities and the French 75 presenting as the kind of terrorist outfit Trump claims Antifa is, it’s a safe bet that the film will be touching a few raw nerves.

    What Anderson is saying about this moment, however, is bound to be an open question. Does PTA support armed revolution? What does it mean when he undercuts that revolution with comedy? Are the villains depicted too broadly? Based on the Q&A after Monday’s screening — which gathered Anderson, DiCaprio, del Toro, Taylor, and Infiniti — the answers may ultimately be left to us. Anderson replied to one question about current events by saying that “details of the world become unplayable” when making a film, choosing instead to focus on things like character motivation and heart. DiCaprio at least twice referenced the “polarization” in the current climate but went no further, for now. That said, if the filmmakers choose to let One Battle After Another speak for itself, I think it speaks rather loudly against white-supremacist fascism, while not shying away from the costs of “doing the revolution,” as DiCaprio’s character at one point says.

    All that said, how far One Battle After Another can take its message about our political reality will likely be up to the awards voters themselves. The last few weeks have had many in the mainstream media and general public calling to tone down the rhetoric, and you have to wonder if a pervasive wish to de-escalate could move some skittish voters away from a film that depicts active violent resistance.

    Regardless of how current events end up impacting One Battle’s awards chances, it feels certain that several cast members are going to wind up in the mix for nominations. DiCaprio enters a Best Actor race that isn’t uncrowded, competing with the likes of Michael B. Jordan (Sinners), George Clooney (Jay Kelly), Jeremy Allen White (Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere), Dwayne Johnson (The Smashing Machine), and Timothée Chalamet (Marty Supreme). After winning the Oscar for The Revenant in 2016, DiCaprio has only been nominated once more, for 2019’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood. That justly lauded performance holds similar DNA to what he’s doing in One Battle, with a performance that pivots freely from paranoid buffoonery to dialed-in emotion. The lead performance in the Best Picture winner has won either Best Actor or Best Actress in four of the last five years, and the Academy has gotten a lot less reticent to award second (or even third) Oscars lately, so I’ll be slotting Leo right near the top of my list.

    Speaking of repeat Oscar winners, Penn hasn’t been Oscar nominated since he won his second Best Actor trophy for Milk in 2010. In fact, Penn has been more notable for giving his Oscar statues away than giving the kind of performances that could earn him a third one. Until now. Lockjaw is the kind of standout supporting villain of which Best Supporting Actor victories are made. Penn’s personality has never been cuddly (to put it quite mildly), and he’s almost certainly the most likely cast member to send the film’s Oscar campaign off course with a reckless comment to the press. But he’s also historically been popular among actors. And he really is a hoot in the movie, bestowing his character with a ridiculous gait and a maniacal affect that could prove very difficult for award voters to resist.

    One downside of a Penn supporting actor campaign is that it would likely crowd out Benicio del Toro, who is doing much quieter but no less effective work as Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, a martial-arts instructor and community leader in the sanctuary city of Baktan Cross. Not only is del Toro’s decision to underplay his character a smart and funny counter to the frantic action and paranoid flailing from the likes of DiCaprio, he’s a great conduit for the film’s less bombastic ideas about resistance to government aggression.

    Best Supporting Actress offers the most intriguing angle on One Battle After Another and the Oscars, with Taylor, Infiniti, and Hall all delivering performances that deserve to be mentioned among the year’s best. Taylor owns the first third of the film with a righteous fury that only betrays an inner vulnerability at the most crucial moments. It’s a performance that lingers whenever she’s not onscreen, and the only reason she’s not a Best Actress contender is screen time. In Taylor’s absence steps young Infiniti, whose performance presents initially as softer and quieter, before transforming as the film barrels toward its climax. My guess is that Hall will end up as the odd woman out in this scenario, as her character’s screen time and prominence is more limited, but in those small moments, she shines through with a grit and determination that’s remarkable given how well she’s known for her comedic skills.

    Paul Thomas Anderson has only ever directed two movies that were ignored completely by the Academy: his debut feature, Hard Eight, and his lamentably overlooked masterpiece Punch-Drunk Love. (And if you’re looking for a spare Oscar-season narrative, an Adam Sandler Oscar breakthrough for Jay Kelly coming in the same year that Paul Thomas Anderson might finally win an Oscar is a good one.) Despite the fact that he has never won, Anderson is a filmmaker who Academy voters pay attention to pretty much every time. And with One Battle After Another, he’s delivered perhaps his most accessible, audience-friendly film since Boogie Nights. It’s a straight-up action-comedy that doesn’t get bogged down in the excesses of Pynchon’s Vineland, instead putting a tight focus on the father-daughter relationship between DiCaprio’s and Infiniti’s characters.

    Intentionally or not, Anderson’s masterpieces have carried with them alienating elements, from Magnolia’s rain of frogs to There Will Be Blood’s gory denouement. “Accessible” may be in the eye of the beholder with PTA, but after The Master and Inherent Vice pushed as far as he’s ever pushed in the direction of formal and narrative standoffishness, he’s been inching closer to something friendlier to mass audiences. Phantom Thread was a romance, after all, however comedically dark and twisted it was; he then opted for pure nostalgia with Licorice Pizza. Both films picked up Best Picture and Best Director nominations for PTA, but both remained a bit limited in their appeal. If the Academy was composed entirely of people whose love language was poison mushrooms and grew up in the San Fernando Valley, Anderson’s mantle would be lousy with Oscar statues right now.

    But even for those queasy about this country’s inexorable turn toward fascism, I think One Battle After Another will prove to be a crowd-pleaser: well-paced with action and comedic beats and with a strong undergirding of the kind of clear emotional through-lines that award voters go for. If I wasn’t already sold on the film’s Oscar potential, its ending — which delivers catharsis over ambiguity in a way I wasn’t really expecting — convinced me. Couple that with a campaign that emphasizes Anderson’s nearly unparalleled body of work, and Warner has a ton to work with. Yes, it’s a long road to March 15, and the last thing a studio wants is to be saddled with the weight of too-early Oscar expectations. But in a film year that’s been yearning to take shape, One Battle After Another is what a lot of us have been waiting for: the film to beat.

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    Joe Reid

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  • The Lowdown Ambles Toward Glory

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    A spiky character study of Ethan Hawke’s dirtbag “truthstorian” Lee Raybon reveals itself as a surprising showcase for Sterlin Harjo’s creative vision.
    Photo: Shane Brown/FX

    Ethan Hawke’s face, an angular, beautiful cinematic presence since Dead Poets Society, gets put through the wringer on The Lowdown. In the closing minutes of the pilot, we see him behind the wheel, bloodied and gashed, left eye swollen shut, teeth smeared with red. The image grips you, but its gnarliness is undercut by absurdity: He’s laughing maniacally, having cheated death through no effort of his own. Creator Sterlin Harjo’s follow-up to his pantheon-great Reservation Dogs for FX, debuting this week, riffs on mid-century noirs and hard-boiled detective fiction, in which snooping protagonists are routinely roughed up, shaken down, and driven to the brink of madness. So it goes in The Lowdown, but Harjo filters the genre through his distinct sensibility, equal parts comic, hopeful, fatalistic, and regional. Hawke’s character is not the smooth, trench-coated detective of yore but a mangy dirtbag, repulsive and charismatic. Imagine plucking one of Richard Linklater’s Slacker oddballs and dropping them into a Raymond Chandler novel: familiar yet skewed, in a noir world refracted through Harjo’s sly humor and lived-in specificity.

    Hawke plays Lee Raybon, a self-described “truthstorian” who runs a rare-books shop in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but moonlights as a citizen journalist — or is it the other way around? — filing longform investigations for a scrappy local magazine, The Heartland Press. The series kicks off when Dale Washberg (Tim Blake Nelson), a member of a powerful Oklahoma family, pens a suicide note, hides it inside a book on his shelves, and then shoots himself in the head. His death comes just after Lee’s exposé into the Washbergs’ long, sordid history in the state, but Lee doesn’t buy the cause-and-effect implied by the suicide. “Everything is connected,” he says. “Darkness is always afoot.” Could there be a cover-up? To him, the bigger picture is suspicious. Dale’s brother, Donald (Kyle MacLachlan), is running for governor, and he seems a little too intimate with Dale’s widow, Betty Jo (Jeanne Tripplehorn). At the same time, Lee is digging into Akron Construction, a company buying out Black-owned businesses in the region. He suspects a coordinated effort to strangle competition, which would hurt the local economy. Akron’s owner, Frank Martin (Tracy Letts), a power broker with deep pockets, is unamused by Lee’s prodding, as is the quiet, menacing Allen Murphy (Scott Shepard), who works for Martin.

    So that’s the board as it’s set. But in true pulp-noir fashion, it’s not long before the pieces scatter to the point where the game becomes unrecognizable. Only five of the season’s eight episodes were provided to critics, and by the end of the batch, I still couldn’t quite tell what we’re supposed to be paying attention to. Not that it matters. The Lowdown isn’t powered by its central mystery so much as the shaggy-dog pleasures of watching Lee stumble through a Tulsa rendered with such vivid texture you can practically smell the Plains dust. It’s the kind of show that rewards kicking back and basking in its world. Lee’s shop sits in an unassuming row next to a tax lawyer with whom he lunches and stores his valuables; a record shop his daughter frequents; and a diner called Sweet Emily’s, where he does his thinking. His odyssey takes him to estate sales, livestock auctions, hidden islands, and a rowdy, violent, surreal kegger for law-enforcement officials. It also detours into his own history, when an old friend (Peter Dinklage) resurfaces midway through the season to check in, commiserate, and spar: “Do not quote David Foster Wallace to me, my brother.”

    At its core, The Lowdown is a loving, spiky character study. Harjo — who serves as showrunner, wrote the pilot, and directed the first two episodes — harbors real affection for Lee, and you feel it in the density of quirks, contradictions, and traits packed into the role, all of which Hawke carries with ease. Lee is a pest and a scoundrel, chronically broke and overconfident, maybe a talented writer or at least one who’s quick with literary references. He’s conspiratorially minded, the sort who keeps one of those murder boards in his ratty apartment above the bookshop. He drives a sketchy white van so conspicuous that another character naturally dubs him a “pedo,” the back doors scrawled with the words You’re doing it wrong. Seen through a contemporary lens, Lee feels like a guy who’s one or two degrees away from a QAnon crank, except there’s a pure, humanistic engine in him. He’s earnest rather than angry, lost but charming in his pursuit of his purpose. “Don’t be scared for me,” he tells his worried daughter, Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong). “Be scared for the people sleeping away their lives. I’m doing exactly what I want to do. I’m living.” You believe he believes what he’s saying, but you doubt the argument as Lee belongs to TV’s ever-expanding fraternity of sad dads (see also Task) and lonely deadbeats. (Francis’s mother, whom Lee’s no longer with, is played by Kaniehtiio Horn, memorable as the Deer Lady on Reservation Dogs and Tanis in the underrated Letterkenny.)

    On the surface, The Lowdown may seem like a curious project to succeed Reservation Dogs. After the latter’s sheer triumph of Native storytelling, Harjo’s choice to center his next project on a sad white guy, a prestige-television staple, may feel to some like an odd reversal. But Harjo circles a fascinating and mischievous idea with Lee. For all his idiocy, brilliance, and noble intent, it’s hard not to notice how easily Lee moves through spaces where anybody who isn’t a white dude likely wouldn’t survive. Over the course of the series, Lee impersonates a white supremacist to enter the home of another white supremacist’s mother and later poses as a U.S. Fish and Wildlife officer to break into a private space to jack some rare books. He’s often saved by his own gift of gab; at one point, he talks his way out of torture and possibly death at the hands of a criminal outfit he blunders into. The show doesn’t frame this as a critique so much as a matter of amusement. Lee is grating and unquestionably benefits from the privileges of his whiteness, but he also weaponizes those advantages for some notion of good — even if it’s self-serving, even if it ultimately leads to his own ruin. Hawke is splendid in the role, which makes deft use of his chatterbox charisma, the very same that can come off as annoying yet attractive in films like Reality Bites and the Before trilogy, or menacing in something like Black Phone. For all the things Lee gets called (“a narcissistic cowboy with a penchant for thinking they’re a good person”) and the things he calls himself (“I’m a good guy, that’s what we do, we call up bad guys and make them answer the phone”), perhaps the truest description comes from Cyrus Arnold (a scene-stealing Michael “Killer Mike” Render), the publisher of a local crime rag: “A fucking white man that cares. Sad as hell.”

    The Lowdown is also quite the showcase for Harjo’s creative vision. His world-building is lush enough to smooth over however you may feel about Lee’s rough edges, and his gift for seamlessly weaving together his expansive cultural appetites gives the show a kind of referential heft that feels inviting as opposed to alienating. It draws on and echoes the great noirs (The Long Goodbye comes to mind) but also the paranoid fictions of someone like Philip K. Dick. You feel the echoes even if you’re not familiar with the reference. Jim Thompson, the Oklahoma crime writer whose reputation flourished only after his death, surfaces as a touchpoint in the notes Dale leaves behind, and hearing the name makes you curious enough to pick up one of his novels. The show sparkles with wit, sharp dialogue (“a faint heart never fucked a bobcat”), and a gallery of memorable, organically diverse characters populating Harjo’s Tulsa. And it finds real magic in small moments. Midway through the pilot, Lee meets Marty (Keith David), a stranger with as much literary flair as Lee has himself. They parry verbally until Marty tilts the encounter toward reflection. “Something brings us to Sweet Emily’s at this hour,” he muses, regarding the other insomniacs in the diner. “Look around.” The camera lingers: a cup of coffee, a man reading his Bible, rain streaking the window — a portrait of nighthawks. Lee shrugs it off. “Just a bunch of night owls, that’s all I see.” Marty corrects him: “No. You see poetry.” In this beat, the show’s essence is crystallized.

    In more ways than one, The Lowdown deepens and extends Harjo’s sensibilities. If Reservation Dogs found beauty in the embrace of community in the margins, The Lowdown draws its spark from what happens when someone in the margins starts to poke back at entrenched power. Both shows wander and amble toward something more than the sum of their parts, and both find beauty and meaning lingering in the details. The heart of noir tends to be nihilism, its abyssal mood a veil that invites you to glimpse the darker machinery of a world ruled by insurmountable powers where resistance leads only to ruin. But Harjo complicates that. “The way you write about Tulsa — there’s bad things about it, but underneath, it’s really good,” Francis tells Lee. He may be a fool, but he’s also a lover who continues to believe in the truth. It may yet end badly for him, but for the moment, he makes you believe there’s still glory in the fight to fix a broken world.


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    Nicholas Quah

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  • What Is Disney Thinking?

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    “If the goal was to simmer down the temperature, it didn’t. It became volcanic.”
    Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images

    Bob Iger and Disney are used to dealing with all manner of PR crises; it comes with the territory when you’re operating one of the best known and most beloved brands in the world. But what has happened with Jimmy Kimmel over the past 24 hours has been something far different (and scarier) than a mere public-relations kerfuffle: FCC chairman Brendan Carr, a MAGA loyalist, threatened to damage a key part of Disney’s broadcast-TV business if its ABC network didn’t “take action” against Kimmel to address his concerns over a few sentences from his September 15 episode that the right-wing outrage machine had deemed problematic. Within hours, ABC announced that Kimmel’s show was being pulled from its lineup “indefinitely,” his future at the network suddenly became unclear — and Iger’s legacy as CEO was very much at risk.

    Keep in mind the timeline of how this madness has played out: On Monday night, Kimmel delivered his monologue, which included a small, admittedly awkward sentence. On Tuesday, Fox News posted video from the monologue; by Wednesday morning, podcaster Benny Johnson, a key ally of the Trump White House, released a podcast with this YouTube subject line: “Jimmy Kimmel LIES About Charlie Kirk Killer, Blames Charlie For His Murder!? Disney Must Fire Kimmel.” The guest of honor on the pod: Carr, who said ABC could “do this the easy way or the hard way.” The rest played out in front of our eyes last night: Nexstar announced it was pulling Kimmel’s show, Sinclair quickly followed suit, and within 15 minutes, an ABC publicist was texting reporters its now-famous seven-word statement: “Jimmy Kimmel Live will be preempted indefinitely.”

    This story is far from over, and it is too soon to render judgment about What It All Means. As of Thursday afternoon, Kimmel’s show had not been canceled and he is still an employee of the Walt Disney Company, despite Donald Trump celebrating the comedian’s demise Wednesday night. Indeed, according to a person familiar with the matter, the whole purpose of ABC’s vague statement was to give the network, Kimmel, and ABC’s major-affiliated-station groups time to react to Carr’s threats in a way that ensured the show remained on the air. “There is a desire to find, and folks are working toward, what a path forward looks like for the show,” one Disney insider says of the company’s thinking. Another person familiar with the matter says that Iger and Disney TV boss Dana Walden jointly made the decision to cancel the show’s Wednesday taping, with Walden personally calling Kimmel to deliver the news. Sources say the talks between Kimmel and Disney continued on Thursday with the goal of finding a way for the host to get back on TV “as soon as possible.”

    All this may sound like spin from Disney, and if this ends with Kimmel leaving the network, that is surely how it will be interpreted in many quarters. The courts of social media and punditocracy have already — and somewhat understandably — charged and convicted ABC with bending the knee to the Trump administration. Whatever happens next, there is no taking back the decision to pull Kimmel’s show, for any length of time, in response to a coordinated, deliberate attack on him and ABC by Carr and right-wing influencers and podcasters.

    But you don’t have to excuse what Disney did Wednesday to accept the possibility that the purpose of its actions were not to punish Kimmel but to get through this crisis with Jimmy Kimmel Live! standing. One veteran Hollywood insider not connected to Disney said the utter blandness of ABC’s Wednesday statement is evidence that the company was winging it and essentially stalling for time. “There was not an ounce of spin in what they said,” this person says. “That means they had nothing to say that could please the government, their employees, the affiliates, or talent. And I don’t blame them. I probably would have done the same.”

    While folks on the right celebrated what they deemed a victory, ABC’s move ended up turning a story mostly limited to the right-wing information bubble into international news. Countless Democratic officials, including former president Barack Obama, denounced what had happened; cable news offered nonstop coverage for hours; creators threatened to boycott Disney unless Kimmel returned to the air; Jon Stewart decided he would host a special edition of The Daily Show Thursday to respond. “Now what you have is a cascading effect,” the veteran Hollywood exec says. “If the goal was to simmer down the temperature, it didn’t. It became volcanic.”

    Nobody should be pulling out the violins for Iger or Disney, but U.S. corporations do not have a ton of experience dealing with a government as ruthless and shameless at going after its targets as this Trump White House has been. While Trump’s bluster was plenty loud during his first term, folks like Carr literally wrote a playbook —  Project 2025 — on how to learn from the mistakes of that administration and better execute their vision of America. With Carr, networks now have not an objective regulator, or even someone with a partisan agenda, but something unprecedented in recent history: a mercenary who seems intent on using the regulatory state to serve the personal whims of the president. Trump perceives late-night comedians and network newscasters as his enemies; Carr has gone after both within his first year on the job.

    Even people outside Disney are shocked at what he has done. “Brendan Carr is drunk with power and glee,” a longtime TV-industry executive says. “He’s like the nerd who was bullied in high school, gets power, and has gone crazy with it.” Furthermore, a person familiar with the matter says that as right-wing outrage over Kimmel’s comments grew, employees inside ABC began getting threats to their personal safety. That has factored into Disney’s handling of the situation, a person with knowledge of the situation said.

    Still, it’s not as if Iger & Co. have not had time now to prepare for these sorts of incidents and devise a clear strategy to fight back. Even if this ends with Kimmel back on the air, Iger’s silence has caused at least some short-term damage to Disney’s brand and his personal image. He has long been regarded as among the most talent-friendly of CEOs, and Kimmel has been among the most loyal of Disney soldiers. Would it have really hurt the cause for Iger (or Walden) to come out with a statement Thursday morning defending Kimmel while showing sensitivity to Charlie Kirk’s death?

    But Disney clearly decided to play things safe and not add any fuel to the fire by saying anything until it decides what comes next. While nobody from Disney or Kimmel’s team would comment on Thursday afternoon, it seems likely the two sides have been in discussions about what, if anything, Kimmel needs to say to make ABC comfortable with putting him back on the air. (The show will remain off the air Thursday night.) Just as important, the network is likely in discussions with Nexstar and other affiliate groups about what they will require in order for them to resume airing Kimmel’s show. ABC would want to get both of them back onboard, but Nexstar — which is trying to get a huge merger deal approved by the FCC — in particular has proved it’s in full suck-up mode to Carr and Trump. “Nexstar saw all this as an opportunity to score points with the FCC,” an industry insider says. And with fellow affiliate group Sinclair joining the Kimmel pile on, it has even more leverage with Disney.

    That said, if ABC can come to an agreement with Kimmel over an appropriate response, Disney could, in theory, decide to just live with Nexstar and Sinclair boycotting Kimmel’s show. While it would mean some loss of ad revenue, it’s not as if late night is a giant profit center for networks; just the opposite. This isn’t 1995, or even 2005, where a Kimmel blackout in, say, 20 percent of the country would be a financial disaster. Much of Kimmel’s viewership now takes place on YouTube and Hulu. Disney could even go with a nuclear option and just make Jimmy Kimmel Live! a Hulu exclusive and let affiliates fill the hour with local news. CBS’s decision to cancel The Late Show With Stephen Colbert at the end of this season makes such a move even less risky, since it’s not as if ABC would be the lone big-three network without a late-night show.

    Regardless of the outcome, what is becoming sadly clear is that this will not be the last time big media companies are forced to deal with the MAGA machine moving swiftly, and with full government support, to achieve its goals. And broadcasters like ABC will keep butting up against this dynamic again and again because they program not only prime-time entertainment shows but topical talk series and newscasts. “It’s the worst time ever to be at a broadcast network, especially if you work in PR. Literally every day now, someone is going to say something,” the Hollywood veteran says. And while such controversies happened long before Trump, the mood in Hollywood is different now. “Before, when you had a backlash, it felt like social justice. Now, it feels like the full power of the U.S. government coming for you.”

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    Josef Adalian

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  • Every Single Thing That Happened at the 2025 Emmys

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    Photo: Valerie Macon/AFP via Getty Images

    According to Nate Bargatze, nobody watched Succession “in the grand scheme of things.” But those who did had to watch him tonight, as the famously milquetoast comedian hosted the 77th Primetime Emmy Awards, where the crème de la crème of post-prestige television duked it out for a couple shelves’ worth of trophies. The Studio beat The Bear for the most wins for a comedy series in a single year, while The Pitt reigned supreme in its rivalry with Severance and Britt Lower pulled an upset in Lead Actress in a Drama over Kathy Bates. Catch up with all of Vulture’s real-time reactions to the evening below, then peruse the full list of winners here. —Nicholas Quah

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    Vulture Staff

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  • Eternity Should Be Sadder

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    Photo: Leah Gallo/A24

    Eternity is an old-school crowd-pleaser. Directed by David Freyne, it’s big and brightly lit, the type of movie you watch during the holidays despite it having nothing to do with Christmas. It’s full of beautiful people and whimsical flourishes and features a premise so instantly appealing it begs the question, How hasn’t this been done before? A woman named Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) arrives in the afterlife and has to choose which of her two deceased husbands to spend her afterlife with: her first husband, Luke (Callum Turner), who died in military service shortly after the pair married, or her second husband, Larry (Miles Teller), whom she was married to for 65 years and raised her family with. It’s an impossible and irreversible choice between pursuing the life she never got to have and continuing to build on the life and memories she did. But for a movie with such high and clear emotional stakes, it sure has a lot of jokes.

    A lot of these jokes add to the movie’s texture, particularly those embedded in the movie’s intricate (after)world-building. For example, each newly dead person has to choose a specific “eternity” to spend forever in, and among the infinite choices they’re presented with are eternities like “smokers’ world: because cancer can’t kill you twice” and “capitalist world: What’s the point of being rich if someone else isn’t poor?” At one point, an announcement plays over a loudspeaker, issuing a reminder to the deceased: “Geopolitical differences don’t matter; you’re dead.” Jokes also land with regularity thanks to the actors who deliver them, in particular John Early and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who play “afterlife coordinators” tasked with helping Joan and Larry plan their afterlife. They function as de facto rom-com sidekicks offering comic relief.

    But the movie never slows the pace of jokes enough for such relief to feel necessary. Even the central characters, for whom you’d think this would all be heartbreaking, constantly deliver quips. Comic beats interrupt otherwise affecting scenes, like when Joan and Luke relive their life together in a video archive of their memories on Earth, and an embarrassed Joan skips past a memory of them having sex: “No, no, no!” Larry and Luke develop a rivalry in which any genuine hurt they are causing one another gets sidelined in favor of petty squabbling; in one scene, Larry tries to discount the valor of Luke’s war death: “It was Korea, buddy. Relax!” The result is that the premise plays like a 1950s-sitcom predicament. Joan, discombobulated by the choice she’s presented with, is appropriately tortured at times by the gravity of it all but seems just as likely to put her hands on her hips, pout, and exclaim, “What a pickle!”

    None of this is to say Eternity needed to be another Past Lives, telling the story of a woman forced to confront the divergent paths of life with two possible romantic partners in as aching a tone as possible. Pure comedies have their place. But in the movie’s final act, Freyne clearly wants to evoke tears. There are big romantic sacrifices, sad good-byes, and wrenching looks of longing and regret that don’t hit as hard as they could, because the audience hasn’t been given space to feel these characters’ emotions build over the course of the film. Eternity didn’t need to be a melodrama, but sometimes a little schmaltz goes a long way.

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    Hershal Pandya

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  • You Can’t Look Away From Cooper Hoffman

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    In Poetic License, Hoffman is like a Gen-Z Vince Vaughn, bullshitting sophistication at a mile a minute, but also too sensitive for this world.
    Photo: Toronto International Film Festival

    There’s an early scene in Poetic License, Maude Apatow’s directorial debut, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival over the weekend, in which an idiosyncratic college senior with family money, played by Cooper Hoffman, floats the idea of creating a LinkedIn account. His best friend, a comparatively buttoned-up economics student named Sam (Andrew Barth Feldman), asks Hoffman’s Ari what he would write on it. Ari chews on the question for a beat, a quizzical expression on his face as it morphs subtly from curiosity to bafflement to worry to contentment. Finally, he retracts his flight of fancy: “Never mind.” There aren’t many actors doing intense character work between the setup and punch line of a joke. In Poetic License, Hoffman establishes himself as one of them.

    Poetic License is a movie about transition. By coincidence or otherwise, it comes from the Apatow school of zooming in on characters at major turning points in their lives (Apatow’s father, Judd, is a producer, and her mother, Leslie Mann, co-stars in the movie). Ari is aimless and has made the executive decision to wean himself off his antidepressants; Sam is tortured by the prospect of going straight from college into a boring and unfulfilling career at Morgan Stanley. Everyone around them is in transition, too. The boys become enamored with Liz (Mann) in a poetry class at their college, which she’s auditing to cope with the fact that her daughter, Dora (Nico Parker), is about to move away after high school. Their professor, Greta (Martha Kelly), is going through a messy divorce. They all turn in stellar work — particularly Mann, who finally gets the role befitting her talents that Judd has been trying to write for years. All of which makes Hoffman’s standout performance all the more impressive.

    Some of this is owing to the script, courtesy of first-time screenwriter Raffi Donatich. The dialogue crackles with witty, fast-paced rapport, and Hoffman gets many of the best individual lines. At one point, upon seeing Liz pull out of the school’s parking lot, he turns to Sam and remarks, “I love a woman who can drive.” When Sam points out that that isn’t an identifiable archetype, he hits back, “It is if you’re from New York.” But Hoffman also imbues the character with an innocent, slippery charisma. He’s Gen-Z Vince Vaughn, bullshitting sophistication at a mile a minute, but also too sensitive for this world. In an early conversation with Liz, she remarks that Sam and Ari have a special connection, and he says with precocious gratitude, “You’re so perceptive of what we have.” He punctuates line deliveries by flashing his eyes and curling his face into endearing half-smiles, which grow more manic as the movie progresses and his medication wears off.

    About halfway through the film, Ari and Liz talk about his decision to stop taking his antidepressants. Liz asks him why he thinks it’s safe to do, and Ari replies that he’s unconcerned because the medications are diminishing his “sparkle.” It’s supposed to be a ludicrous argument: How could anything diminish this guy’s sparkle? a viewer might think. It’s a credit to Hoffman that that comes across.

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    Hershal Pandya

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  • The 2025 MTV Video Music Award Winners

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    Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Live Nation

    Lady Gaga has conquered Wednesday, and now she’s coming for the holiest day of the week. Tonight, Gaga will make this year’s MTV VMAs her temple of Mayhem. She returns to pull double duty as the most nominated artist this year in 12 categories — sharing four of those noms with Bruno Mars for “Die With a Smile” — and as one of the evening’s performers. No word yet if fake blood or raw meat will be her plus-one, but considering that Mars is also sharing nominations with Rosé, they’ll have room. Gaga won the first Moon Person televised on the night, Artist of the Year. And yet the voters said Tate McRae had the song of the summer. Interesting!

    Hosted by LL Cool J, this evening’s awards show will hold a lot of firsts: Rosé was the first Korean artist nominated for Video of the Year, Mariah Carey is getting her first VMAs with the Video Vanguard Award, and it’ll be the first time the show will air live on CBS. Below, the 2025 MTV VMA winners, updated live once the show starts at 8 p.m.

    Video of the Year, presented by Burger King 
    Ariana Grande – “brighter days ahead”
    Billie Eilish – “BIRDS OF A FEATHER”
    Kendrick Lamar – “Not Like Us”
    Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars – “Die With a Smile”
    ROSÉ & Bruno Mars – “APT.”
    Sabrina Carpenter – “Manchild”
    The Weeknd, Playboi Carti – “Timeless”

    Artist of the Year
    Bad Bunny
    Beyoncé
    Kendrick Lamar
    Lady Gaga
    Morgan Wallen
    Taylor Swift
    The Weeknd

    Song of the Year
    Alex Warren – “Ordinary”
    Billie Eilish – “BIRDS OF A FEATHER”
    Doechii – “Anxiety”
    Ed Sheeran – “Sapphire”
    Gracie Abrams – “I Love You, I’m Sorry”
    Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars – “Die With a Smile”
    Lorde – “What Was That”
    ROSÉ & Bruno Mars – “APT.”
    Tate McRae – “Sports Car”
    The Weeknd, Playboi Carti – “Timeless”

    Best New Artist
    Alex Warren
    Ella Langley
    Gigi Perez
    Lola Young
    sombr
    The Marías

    Best Pop Artist
    Ariana Grande
    Charli xcx
    Justin Bieber
    Lorde
    Miley Cyrus
    Sabrina Carpenter
    Tate McRae

    MTV Push Performance of the Year, presented by Bacardí Rum
    Shaboozey – “A Bar Song (Tipsy)”
    Ayra Starr – “Last Heartbreak Song”
    Mark Ambor – “Belong Together”
    Lay Bankz – “Graveyard”
    Dasha – “Bye Bye Bye”
    KATSEYE – “Touch”
    Jordan Adetunji – “KEHLANI”
    Leon Thomas – “YES IT IS”
    Livingston – “Shadow”
    Damiano David – “Next Summer”
    Gigi Perez – “Sailor Song”
    ROLE MODEL – “Sally, When the Wine Runs Out”

    Best Collaboration, presented by Under Armour
    Bailey Zimmerman with Luke Combs – “Backup Plan (Stagecoach Official Music Video)”
    Kendrick Lamar & SZA – “luther”
    Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars – “Die With a Smile”
    Post Malone ft. Blake Shelton – “Pour Me a Drink”
    ROSÉ & Bruno Mars – “APT.”
    Selena Gomez, benny blanco – “Sunset Blvd”

    Best Pop
    Alex Warren – “Ordinary”
    Ariana Grande – “brighter days ahead”
    Ed Sheeran – “Sapphire”
    Lady Gaga & Bruno Mars – “Die With a Smile”
    ROSÉ & Bruno Mars – “APT.”
    Sabrina Carpenter – “Manchild”

    Best Hip-Hop
    Doechii – “Anxiety”
    Drake – “NOKIA”
    Eminem ft. Jelly Roll – “Somebody Save Me”
    GloRilla ft. Sexyy Red – “WHATCHU KNO ABOUT ME”
    Kendrick Lamar – “Not Like Us”
    LL COOL J ft. Eminem – “Murdergram Deux”
    Travis Scott – “4X4”

    Best R&B
    Chris Brown – “Residuals”
    Leon Thomas & Freddie Gibbs – “MUTT (REMIX)”
    Mariah Carey – “Type Dangerous”
    PARTYNEXTDOOR – “N o C h i l l”
    Summer Walker – “Heart of a Woman”
    SZA – “Drive”
    The Weeknd, Playboi Carti – “Timeless”

    Best Alternative
    Gigi Perez – “Sailor Song”
    Imagine Dragons – “Wake Up”
    Lola Young – “Messy”
    mgk & Jelly Roll – “Lonely Road”
    sombr – “back to friends”
    The Marías – “Back to Me”

    Best Rock
    Coldplay – “All My Love”
    Evanescence – “Afterlife (From the Netflix Series Devil May Cry)”
    Green Day – “One Eyed Bastard”
    Lenny Kravitz – “Honey”
    Linkin Park – “The Emptiness Machine”
    Twenty One Pilots – “The Contract”

    Best Latin
    Bad Bunny – “Baile Inolvidable”
    J Balvin – “Rio”
    Karol G – “Si Antes Te Hubiera Conocido”
    Peso Pluma – “La Patrulla”
    Rauw Alejandro & Romeo Santos – “Khé?”
    Shakira – “Soltera“

    Best K-pop
    Aespa – “Whiplash”
    Jennie – “Like Jennie ”
    Jimin – “Who”
    Jisoo – “Earthquake”
    Lisa ft. Doja Cat & Raye – “Born Again”
    Stray Kids – “Chk Chk Boom”
    Rosé – “Toxic Till the End”

    Best Afrobeats
    Asake & Travis Scott – “Active”
    Burna Boy ft. Travis Scott – “TaTaTa”
    Moliy, Silent Addy, Skillibeng & Shenseea – “Shake It to the Max (Fly) (Remix)”
    Rema – “Baby (Is It a Crime)”
    Tems ft. Asake – “Get It Right”
    Tyla – “Push 2 Start”
    Wizkid ft. Brent Faiyaz – “Piece of My Heart”

    Best Country
    Chris Stapleton – “Think I’m in Love With You”
    Cody Johnson with Carrie Underwood – “I’m Gonna Love You”
    Jelly Roll – “Liar”
    Lainey Wilson – “4x4xU”
    Megan Moroney – “Am I Okay?”
    Morgan Wallen – “Smile”

    Best Album
    Bad Bunny – Debí Tirar Más Fotos
    Kendrick Lamar – GNX
    Lady Gaga – Mayhem
    Morgan Wallen – I’m the Problem
    Sabrina Carpenter – Short n’ Sweet
    The Weeknd – Hurry Up Tomorrow

    Best Long Form Video
    Ariana Grande – “Brighter Days Ahead”
    Bad Bunny – “Debí Tirar Más Fotos (Short Film)”
    Damiano David – “Funny Little Stories”
    Mac Miller – “Balloonerism”
    Miley Cyrus – “Something Beautiful”
    The Weeknd – “Hurry Up Tomorrow”

    Video for Good
    Burna Boy – “Higher”
    Charli xcx – “Guess featuring Billie Eilish”
    Doechii – “Anxiety”
    Eminem ft. Jelly Roll – “Somebody Save Me”
    Selena Gomez, Benny Blanco – “Younger and Hotter Than Me”
    Zach Hood ft. Sasha Alex Sloan – “Sleepwalking”

    Best Direction
    Ariana Grande – “Brighter Days Ahead”
    Charli xcx – “Guess featuring Billie Eilish”
    Kendrick Lamar – “Not Like Us”
    Lady Gaga – “Abracadabra”
    Rosé & Bruno Mars – “Apt.”
    Sabrina Carpenter – “Manchild”

    Best Art Direction
    Charli xcx – “Guess featuring Billie Eilish”
    Kendrick Lamar – “Not Like Us”
    Lady Gaga – “Abracadabra”
    Lorde – “Man of the Year”
    Miley Cyrus – “End of the World”
    Rosé & Bruno Mars – “Apt.”

    Best Cinematography
    Ariana Grande – “Brighter Days Ahead”
    Ed Sheeran – “Sapphire”
    Kendrick Lamar – “Not Like Us”
    Lady Gaga – “Abracadabra”
    Miley Cyrus – “Easy Lover”
    Sabrina Carpenter – “Manchild”

    Best Editing
    Charli xcx – “Guess featuring Billie Eilish”
    Ed Sheeran – “Sapphire”
    Kendrick Lamar – “Not Like Us”
    Lady Gaga – “Abracadabra”
    Sabrina Carpenter – “Manchild

    Best Choreography
    Doechii – “Anxiety”
    FKA Twigs – “Eusexua”
    Kendrick Lamar – “Not Like Us”
    Lady Gaga – “Abracadabra”
    Tyla – “Push 2 Start”
    Zara Larsson – “Pretty Ugly”

    Best Visual Effects
    Ariana Grande – “Brighter Days Ahead”
    Lady Gaga – “Abracadabra”
    Rosé & Bruno Mars – “Apt.”
    Sabrina Carpenter – “Manchild”
    Tate McRae – “Just Keep Watching (From F1 The Movie)”
    The Weeknd – “Hurry Up Tomorrow”

    Song of the Summer
    Addison Rae – “Headphones On”
    Alex Warren – “Ordinary”
    Benson Boone – “Mystical Magical”
    BigXthaPlug & Bailey Zimmerman – “All the Way”
    Chappell Roan – “The Subway”
    Demi Lovato – “Fast”
    Doja Cat – “Jealous Type”
    Huntr/x – “Golden”
    Jessie Murph – “Blue Strips”
    Justin Bieber – “Daisies”
    Moliy, Silent Addy, Skillibeng & Shenseea – “Shake It to the Max (Fly) (Remix)”
    Morgan Wallen & Tate McRae – “What I Want”
    Ravyn Lenae Featuring Rex Orange County – “Love Me Not”
    Sabrina Carpenter – “Manchild”
    Sombr – “12 to 12”
    Tate McRae – “Just Keep Watching”

    Best Group
    aespa
    All Time Low
    Backstreet Boys
    BLACKPINK
    Coldplay
    Evanescence
    Fuerza Regida
    Grupo Frontera
    Imagine Dragons
    Jonas Brothers
    KATSEYE
    My Chemical Romance
    SEVENTEEN
    Stray Kids
    The Marías
    Twenty One Pilots

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    Alejandra Gularte

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  • Josh O’Connor Takes Wake Up Dead Man to Church

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    As a priest clinging to faith, O’Connor is silly, sincere, and steals the new Knives Out movie from Benoit Blanc.
    Photo: Netflix

    Like any good mystery series, the Benoit Blanc movies know the value of repetition. You could call it a formula if you felt like knocking this series of films from writer-director Rian Johnson, which kicked off with Knives Out in 2019 and continued with Glass Onion in 2022. As those two films did, Johnson’s latest, Wake Up Dead Man, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival to this year’s most rabid crowds so far. Once again, Johnson has gathered together an all-star cast — this group includes Glenn Close, Andrew Scott, Kerry Washington, Jeremy Renner, and Josh Brolin — to set up the pins so that Daniel Craig’s dapper Southern detective can knock ’em all down. But while Wake Up Dead Man is another murder mystery, the most compelling crime in the film occurs in plain sight, as Josh O’Connor outright steals the film out from under Benoit Blanc, and he does it dressed in the vestments of a Catholic priest.

    O’Connor plays Reverend Jud Duplenticy, a young priest seeking his own salvation. He gets sent to a small upstate New York church to assist Monsignor Wicks (Josh Brolin), a kind of Catholic Colonel Kurtz — aggressive and territorial and half-mad. O’Connor plays his half of the power struggle between the two priests initially as light comedy; the English actor (playing American again, as he did in Challengers) is downright nebbishy in moments. He’s a great fit for Johnson’s tendency to puncture the moment with comic relief, which is kind of infuriating. No one that handsome should also get to have good comic timing.

    But it’s in the film’s surprising degree of sincerity that O’Connor makes himself invaluable. Wake Up Dead Man is the most earnest (and least comedic) of the three Blanc films. And it’s sincere about faith, of all things, and politics, too. My guess is that will occupy a great deal of the reaction to this movie. If Knives Out and Glass Onion were sideswipes at the anti-immigrant right and Silicon Valley fascists, respectively, Wake Up Dead Man is Rian Johnson taking dead aim at Trump and his band of hard-liners. The all-star cast mostly plays Wicks’ parishioners, each with their own little set of personal foibles that at any moment could become a motive to kill. Because yes, there is eventually a murder, and Blanc turns up in town full of theories and brio.

    But this is Father Jud’s movie. We get a third of the way into it before Blanc arrives, and by then, O’Connor has already more than capably put the film on his shoulders. An idealistic priest with a profound belief in the Church’s power to save souls could be a tough sell for another actor, but O’Connor capably lands every beat — he’s awfully formidable for a pretty boy, and awfully sympathetic for a priest. There’s a darkness on the periphery of his performance, too. No man of such intense religious faith can ever be ruled out as a killer, after all.

    Daniel Craig was deservedly lauded for the first two Blanc films, and he’s no less winning in this one. But with Wake Up Dead Man as interested in salvation as it is in its whodunit yarn, Josh O’Connor ends up as the film’s MVP: Most Valuable… Priest. (So dumb.)


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    Joe Reid

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  • The Lost Bus Is an Instant Disaster-Movie Classic

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    The agitated, ominous vibration of giant power lines and quaking transmission towers feels like a Greek chorus throughout Paul Greengrass’s intense new wildfire thriller, The Lost Bus. Over the course of the film, Greengrass regularly cuts away to the churning cables and metal structures, as well as to the roaring flames of the 2018 Camp Fire, as the blaze makes its way across the mountains and cliffs of Northern California. This helps us follow the spread of this real-life disaster, and it also conveys the puniness and impotence of the mortals fighting it. Based on real-life stories from the Camp Fire (still the deadliest wildfire in California history), The Lost Bus, which just premiered at the Toronto Film Festival ahead of a short September theatrical release and an October 3 debut on Apple TV+, offers plenty of suspense and heroism. But it’s all tempered by the knowledge that these fires are inescapable, growing, and unstoppable.

    At heart, The Lost Bus is a disaster movie — a great one — and it has some of the classic moves of a disaster movie, complete with the slightly on-the-nose narrative shorthand designed to introduce characters quickly and efficiently. Greengrass cuts across a number of arenas and people, including the various fire crews trying to deal with this rapidly deteriorating situation, but the central narrative belongs to Kevin McKay (Matthew McConaughey), a down-on-his luck school-bus driver in Paradise, California, who returned here after his life fell apart elsewhere. Kevin is already having one of the worst days of his life even before everything burns down: His dog is dying, his teenage son is home sick from school (and also hates him), his mom is elderly and out of it, and his ex-wife is berating him on the phone. He’s also missed his bus’s inspection appointments, he’s running out of money, and his supervisor thinks he’s a flake. Once the flames come roaring into town, however, Kevin will be the only one in a position to drive a busload of elementary-schoolers, along with their teacher, Mary Ludwig (America Ferrera), through the downright biblical flames and out to safety. It’s Speed meets the end of the world.

    McConaughey was made for parts like this: the good old boy facing extraordinary circumstances. He knows exactly how to sell this character and his desperation — not with confidence, but with a “damn the torpedoes, I’ll try anything once” bravado. Honestly, they should cast him in every disaster movie. Plus, he makes a fine match with Ferrera, whose teacher must exude outward calm for the benefit of her kids while she’s not-so-secretly freaking out inside. (Both Kevin and Mary have their own kids elsewhere that they’re also worried sick about.) As everything falls apart around them in ways both big and small, we enjoy watching these two opposites butt heads and quibble and then learn to function as a team.

    The film feels like a homecoming for Greengrass, who cut his teeth in the world of you-are-there television documentaries before helping redefine the modern action movie with the handheld urgency of hits like The Bourne Supremacy and The Bourne Ultimatum. The director also carried that approach over to docudramas like United 93, Captain Phillips, and July 22 (as well as his earlier, masterful Bloody Sunday, the movie that put him on the map back in 2002). But the “shaky cam” style ran its course some years ago; his last effort was the stately and old-fashioned Tom Hanks western News of the World, a beautiful picture whose release got swallowed up by the COVID-19 pandemic.

    In The Lost Bus, Greengrass combines his thriller side with his reportorial side. He films Kevin and Mary and the schoolkids’ journey through hellfire as a no-holds-barred action spectacle full of immediacy and awe, complete with hair’s-breadth escapes and incredible visions of destruction. (It’s frankly a shame that The Lost Bus isn’t getting a wider theatrical release; it was clearly made to be a big-screen experience.) Some incidents have been a bit sensationalized, but Kevin and Mary’s heroism was very real, as evidenced in Lizzie Johnson’s exhaustively researched and absorbing 2021 nonfiction book Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, on which the film is loosely based. To that end, the film also offers a more diffuse and heavily researched portrait of what goes into battling a wildfire, and Greengrass’s vérité style lends authenticity to the scenes of fire chiefs strategizing, of ground crews and air crews trying to combat the blazes and save lives. The picture thus combines the excitement of an old-school disaster spectacle with a fly-on-the-wall portrait of institutions struggling to function in the face of a calamity. The effect is singular: We enjoy the thrill ride immensely, but it’s the realism that sticks with us. Movies end, but the fires are here to stay.


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    Bilge Ebiri

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  • A House of Dynamite Is Kathryn Bigelow at Her Best

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    The director’s latest, her first film in seven years, is an absurdly riveting thriller with the kind of ticking-clock suspense Bigelow does so well.
    Photo: Eros Hoagland/Netflix

    The very basic premise of Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is gripping on its own: A single missile is launched at the United States, nobody knows where it’s from, and the national security apparatus springs into action. Thankfully, the movie delivers on that promise. The director’s latest, her first film in seven years, is an absurdly riveting thriller with the kind of ticking-clock, military-grade suspense she does so well. Bigelow intercuts multiple arenas and juggles a small army of characters without ever losing sight of the central, upsettingly simple set of dilemmas: Can they stop the missile in time? Who fired it? How should the U.S. respond? The film is already receiving hosannas at Venice and will surely grab its share of eyeballs when it eventually premieres on Netflix.

    A House of Dynamite actually has a predictable set of moves, at least once the main plot kicks in, but this makes Bigelow’s ability to maintain suspense that much more impressive. Her technique gives Noah Oppenheim’s jargon-heavy script conviction and urgency. I probably couldn’t tell you much about what terms like launch azimuth and exoatmospheric kill vehicle and terminal phase and dual phenomenology really mean (not to mention the several dozen acronyms being tossed about), and I sure as hell couldn’t say if they’re being used properly here. But the film has an aura of technical accuracy, which is what matters. The actors sing their lines with a rat-a-tat confidence that’s so convincing we start to worry they’re giving away government secrets.

    Watching Bigelow depict these offices, situation rooms, and control centers all abuzz with increasingly hurrying (and increasingly horrified) officials, we suspect she is drawn to these type-A professionals because she relates to them. Ever since Zero Dark Thirty, her 2012 film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, was attacked for buying too fully into the CIA’s version of events, the director has been accused of unquestioningly laundering the images of the U.S. military and the intelligence industry. There will be those who take one look at a picture like A House of Dynamite and consider it a form of propaganda for the national security apparatus. This is frankly ridiculous — the film is all about how the system, even when functioning perfectly, will surely fail us.

    Bigelow can make a movie like this because she understands the appeal and awe of power. She depicts these powerful spaces with elegant establishing shots and smooth camera moves suggesting control, calm, and certitude. But whenever it steps out into the real world, the film becomes agitated and hurried, our vision obstructed. A House of Dynamite doesn’t have the sweaty humanity of Fail Safe or the dark absurdism of Dr. Strangelove. Rather, it has a fascination with authority and professionalism and their limits: What if everyone follows orders and does their job really well and everything still goes to shit? (Forget what might happen if the people in charge are a bunch of incompetent, ignorant buffoons; surely that would never happen.)

    The film’s action is split into three sections, each focusing on a different set of individuals as they respond to the fact that, in 18 minutes, a missile launched somewhere in the Pacific will most likely hit the city of Chicago and instantly incinerate around 10 million people. The structure elegantly goes up the chain of command: Each level of the government org chart must tackle this problem at a different point in its trajectory. In the first chapter, most of the activity centers on a missile-defense battalion in Alaska, with its command and control center run by Major David Gonzalez (Anthony Ramos), and the White House Situation Room, where watch-floor senior duty officer Olivia Walker (Rebecca Ferguson) tries to respond to the rapidly developing crisis; their job is to identify and ultimately bring down the nuke. In the second chapter, we follow what happens at U.S. Strategic Command, where gung-ho general Anthony Brady (Tracy Letts) begins urging the president to prepare to strike at all U.S. adversaries in case this is a coordinated attack; meanwhile, at the emergency operations center deep beneath the White House, deputy national security advisor Jake Baerington (Gabriel Basso) tries to advise calm.

    In the final section, we watch the secretary of Defense (Jared Harris) and the president (Idris Elba), both of whom, we gather, have only recently entered office, try to deal with what’s starting to look like the ultimate calamity. At one point, they remark that they have been briefed about this eventuality only once, whereas they’ve been briefed about filling a potential Supreme Court vacancy countless times. Even as she depicts the professionalism of her characters, Bigelow makes it clear that they are all totally unprepared for this situation. Lines like “We’ve run this drill a thousand times!” and “We did everything right, didn’t we?” ring not with optimism but with bitter irony.

    Not unlike Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, A House of Dynamite is fundamentally an institutionalist’s outcry about the horrors of nuclear proliferation. The specter of atomic annihilation, once such a major part of our collective fears, has been dormant for so long, even as the danger hasn’t decreased. We get brief, little human details for many of the characters — not enough to edge into corniness but just enough to make it clear they are, in fact, people: One is dealing with a breakup, another with a divorce; one with a pregnancy, another with a child sick at home with a 102-degree fever; one needs a new apartment, another plans to propose to his girl. The secretary of Defense is mourning his wife, which gives weight to his initially selfish-sounding reflection that his daughter lives in Chicago. These tiny bits and bobs of humanity gather power as the film marches on. As a result of the overlapping timelines, certain small moments play out multiple times, each moment with fresh context.

    The fractured narrative replicates the characters’ fractured perspectives. From within their highly secure rooms, where they can’t even bring their own cell phones, these people struggle to reach the outside world. Communication is fragile and inconsistent, reflecting both physical and existential claustrophobia: Nobody really knows or sees what’s going on. Early in the timeline, we see the president attending a WNBA kids’ event with Angel Reese, but this moment out among the public also feels highly choreographed and manufactured. Along with everyone else in this film, he is closed off to the rest of the world — even as he holds in his hands the power to obliterate all of it.


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    Bilge Ebiri

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  • The Complete 2025–26 Movies Fantasy League Draft Guide

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    Illustration: James Clapham

    Welcome back, friends and fools, to year FIVE of the Vulture Movies Fantasy League. We are about to turn the corner into a fall movie season that is packed with box-office behemoths, visionary auteurs bringing their latest films into the bosom of awards season, and a whole lotta questions about whether a vampire movie about race in America can play the long game all the way to Oscar gold.

    If you’ve played the Movies Fantasy League before, the game hasn’t changed much; if you’re new, welcome to the circus. You can check out the rules for how to play on our MFL hub, but here is the nutshell summary: You select a roster of exactly eight films within a budget of 100 imaginary dollars. Once the scoring phase of the game begins, the films you’ve drafted will accumulate points for achieving milestones in box-office take, precursor awards/nominations, critical approval, and more. The movies we expect to do best will cost more, so your first task will be to manage your budget wisely.

    In order to help you make wise choices, we have assembled the following draft guide. Below, you will find a listing for every movie that’s eligible to draft in the MFL this year. You can see how much they cost, the talent behind them, what film festivals they’ve played, and when they will debut to the public, either in theaters or on streaming (if they haven’t already).

    Movies begin to accumulate points on kickoff day, September 26. Any movie that opens on that day or after is eligible to earn box-office points. Anything that has already opened, or will open before the 26th, is box-office ineligible and will be denoted as such in the guide. Between September 26 and the final deadline on December 18, you’ll still be able to draft a team, but during that span, you will only be able to draft films that haven’t started accruing points. That means you’ll be limited to unreleased movies that haven’t been nominated for any awards. So you’ll have to decide carefully when you want to draft your roster. We’ll remove movies from this guide when they’re no longer eligible to be drafted to avoid any confusion and disappointment.

    It’s going to be an exciting few months, so why waste any time — read ahead and start researching!

    ➼ Show me the movies.

    ➼ I’m ready to draft my team.

    ➼ I’m not ready yet! Remind me to draft before the deadline:

    Director: Jon M. Chu
    Stars: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh
    Release date: November 21

    Our top point-earner from last season, Wicked, was priced to sell at $20, mostly because there was still a lot of uncertainty around whether the film would bomb with critics (and subsequently awards voters). It didn’t, though, so last year’s success means a trip back to Oz for your fantasy squad won’t come cheap.

    ➼ Box-office ineligible
    Director: Ryan Coogler
    Stars: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Delroy Lindo
    Release date: Already released

    Sinners is pretty much the only known quantity from the first half of 2025 that you can feel confident will be a major part of this year’s Oscar race. And while you won’t be able to benefit from the film’s hefty box office, the confidence of being able to select a film that you already know critics and audience loved could be worth the price tag.

    Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
    Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Benicio del Toro
    Release date: September 26

    Paul Thomas Anderson hasn’t whiffed with the Academy since 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love (though it’s worth noting that 2014’s Inherent Vice only got a screenplay nomination). Academy members seem to be big PTA fans. Combine that with DiCaprio as a former ’60s radical, plus Oscar winners like del Toro and Sean Penn and breakthrough-ready talent like Teyana Taylor and Chase Infiniti, and things are looking good. Plus, Warner Bros. is said to have pumped up to $175 million into this project, so you better believe it’s going to push hard to get a return on that investment.

    Director: Noah Baumbach
    Film festivals: Venice, Telluride, New York
    Stars: George Clooney, Adam Sandler
    Release date: November 14

    Baumbach had his big Oscar breakthrough with Marriage Story several years ago; now he’s back with a very Oscar-friendly story about an aged movie star (Clooney) and his loyal agent (Sandler). Oscar narratives abound: Clooney has big “we’re so back” potential, while the already-percolating Supporting Actor campaign for Sandler feels like it’s been in the works for 25 years. This has every indication of being Netflix’s top-tier awards push.

    Director: Joachim Trier
    Stars: Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård
    Film festivals: Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, New York
    Release date: November 17

    While it fell short of winning the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Sentimental Value did emerge from the festival with buzz as the most likely of the Cannes competition titles to follow the path to Oscar victory recently traversed by recent Palme winners Anatomy of a Fall and Anora.

    Director: James Cameron
    Stars: Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña
    Release date: December 19

    The first Avatar made $2.9 billion worldwide and got nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. The second Avatar made $2.3 billion worldwide and got four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture but not Best Director. Even with that rate of diminishing returns, the third Avatar should still bring in plenty of points. The question is whether this third one can deliver something that puts Cameron back in the Oscar conversation.

    Director: Guillermo del Toro
    Stars: Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi
    Film festivals: Venice, Toronto
    Release date: October 17

    Del Toro has been hot with Oscar ever since The Shape of Water took Best Picture eight years ago. His strange but artful Pinocchio adaptation turned out to be a huge MFL bargain a couple years ago after it ran the table in the animation categories all season. The question is how much Netflix as the distributor will cap Frankenstein’s value. It’s giving del Toro’s film the rare three-week theatrical run as opposed to the customary two, but that doesn’t mean you should expect much in the way of box-office points. Still, given del Toro’s reputation — and the recent performance of other high-end gothic horror like Nosferatu — this should be a strong player across at least the craft awards (production design, costume, cinematography, visual effects) all season.

    Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
    Stars: Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone
    Film festivals: Venice, Telluride
    Release date: October 24

    With The Favourite and Poor Things, Lanthimos has directed two previous films to double-digit Oscar nomination totals, including Best Picture/Best Director nominations and Best Actress wins for Olivia Colman and Emma Stone. Whether he can do the same with a film from writer Will Tracy (Succession, hooray!; The Menu and The Regime, hmmm) remains to be seen. Plemons and Stone reunite after Lanthimos’s perplexing Kinds of Kindness, but Focus Features is putting out all the indicators that this has big Oscar ambitions.

    Director: Scott Cooper
    Stars: Jeremy Allen White, Jeremy Strong
    Film festivals: New York
    Release date: October 24

    Last year, Searchlight pushed the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown all the way to major Oscar nominations and a near Best Actor win for Timothée Chalamet. This year, 20th Century Studios wants in on that action with its Bruce Springsteen biopic starring TV’s most intense performer, Jeremy Allen White. Cooper has already put a guitar in one actor’s hands and directed him to an Oscar — Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart — and Strong is already starting to build Supporting Actor buzz after his nomination last year.

    Directors: Jared Bush, Byron Howard
    Stars: Jason Bateman, Ginnifer Goodwin
    Release date: November 26

    Last year, Moana 2 opened on Thanksgiving weekend and racked up $225 million right out of the gate, despite pretty much everyone agreeing the film wasn’t good. The original Zootopia cleared the original Moana’s domestic take by nearly $100 million. That math could really end up working in your favor.

    Director: Benny Safdie
    Stars: Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt
    Film festivals: Venice, Toronto
    Release date: October 3

    Of the two Solitary Safdie Sibling movies this year, this is the one about MMA fighting. Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt reunite from their Jungle Cruise days to play real-life Ultimate Fighting Champion Mark Kerr (him) and his loyal, understandably concerned wife (her). If Blunt ends up with two Oscar nominations to her name for playing the Wife, that’s going to be wild, but that’s a conversation for another day. This movie is going to be either too middlebrow for awards appeal or the sentimental fave of awards season. (And I could see A24 making it a bit of a box-office hit, too.)

    Director: Luca Guadagnino
    Stars: Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri
    Film festivals: Venice, New York
    Release date: October 10

    Guadagnino struck out, Oscar-wise, with his two features last year, Challengers and Queer. But this year, he returns with Oscar winner Julia Roberts, Oscar nominee Andrew Garfield, and Emmy winner Ayo Edebiri in a hot-button drama about scandal and the generation gap in academia. Will this be Tár lite or something altogether trashier? It remains to be seen.

    ➼ Box-office ineligible
    Director: Edward Berger
    Stars: Colin Farrell, Tilda Swinton
    Release date: October 15

    Berger has directed two straight films to Oscar nominations in All Quiet on the Western Front and Conclave; he’s trying for his third with this story about a maxed-out gambler (Farrell) who finds himself on the skids in Macau. The trailer looks intense, and Farrell’s part seems juicy. Don’t expect box-office points, however, as Netflix is giving this its customary two-week qualifying theatrical run, where box-office receipts are not usually reported.

    Director: Hikari
    Stars: Brendan Fraser, Akira Emoto
    Film festivals: Toronto
    Release date: November 21

    One big-time potential crowd-pleaser candidate for awards season is this film from Japanese director Hikari (Netflix’s Beef). It centers on Fraser as an American actor living in Tokyo who takes a job as a stand-in for various roles in real people’s lives. Lost in Translation meets a softer version of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Alps? Could really connect with people.

    Director: Chloé Zhao
    Stars: Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal
    Film festivals: Telluride, New York
    Release date: November 27

    Zhao joins the laundry list of Oscar-winning directors releasing films this fall, though she’s looking to bounce back from her Marvel misadventure Eternals. Here, she’s adapting Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, a fictionalized account of William Shakespeare and his wife, Anne, in the aftermath of losing their young son, Hamnet. Yes, that name does look and sound awfully similar to Hamlet. Shakespeare has done well at the Oscars in the past — just ask Gwyneth Paltrow and Judi Dench how they got their trophies — and both Buckley and Mescal are young actors who have been recently admitted into the fold by Oscar voters (she was nominated for 2021’s The Lost Daughter, he for 2022’s Aftersun) and are seeking their first wins. That recipe could add up to a contender.

    Director: Josh Safdie
    Stars: Timothée Chalamet, Gwyneth Paltrow
    Release date: December 25

    The year’s second solo Safdie is also a sporting affair, though in this case it’s about ping-pong champion Marty Mauser (Chalamet) and his exploits at the table-tennis … uh, table. This one looks quirkier than Josh’s more blunt instrument (no pun intended, Emily), but Chalamet has scored at the December box office two years in a row now (Wonka in 2023, A Complete Unknown last year). Maybe the prince of Christmas will deliver again.

    Director: Joachim Rønning
    Stars: Jared Leto, Greta Lee
    Release date: October 10

    Red flags exist if you’re looking for them. Rønning’s most prominent titles are a middling collection that includes the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movie, the second Maleficent, and Young Woman and the Sea. 2010’s Tron: Legacy made decent money but left a lot of its audience nonplussed. But there’s a lot to be said for a visual spectacle (visual effects and sound awards feel like they’re in play), and it’s going to play in Imax for a couple weeks, which should help box-office totals.

    Director: Jafar Panahi
    Stars: Vahid Mobasseri, Ebrahim Azizi
    Film festivals: Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, New York
    Release date: October 15

    Four of the last five winners of the Palme d’Or at Cannes have gone on to become Best Picture nominees at the Oscars, with two of them (Parasite and Anora) winning. So there’s definitely reason to be optimistic about It Was Just an Accident. Even if the film isn’t as broadly appealing as recent Palme winners, there’s a good chance it follows the awards trajectory of previous Cannes hits like The Zone of Interest.

    Director: Kathryn Bigelow
    Stars: Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson
    Film festivals: Venice, New York
    Release date: October 24

    Oscar winner Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) returns to global politics, only this time, the crisis is fictional. The film depicts a U.S. White House scrambling to deal with an impending missile strike on America. It’s been a while since Bigelow was a major player on the Oscar scene, but working off of a script from the screenwriter of Jackie (and, um, The Maze Runner), interest will be piqued.

    Director: Bradley Cooper
    Stars: Will Arnett, Laura Dern
    Film festivals: New York

    Bradley Cooper’s stand-up comedy movie? Bradley Cooper’s divorced-guy movie? Bradley Cooper’s SmartLess movie? (Sean Hayes also co-stars.) Whatever this movie turns out to be, Cooper always makes awards season more interesting.

    Director: Bill Condon
    Stars: Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna, Tonatiuh
    Film festivals: Sundance
    Release date: October 10

    Jennifer Lopez doing a full-blown musical from the director of Dreamgirls sounds like it could be a dream come true … or a fantastic nightmare. Either way, it will be a spectacle. In the old days, Lopez would be assured of a Golden Globe nomination no matter how it turned out. The Globes have gotten more buttoned-up lately, though, so we’ll see how it goes.

    Director: Derek Cianfrance
    Stars: Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst
    Film festivals: Toronto
    Release date: October 10

    There was a while there in the 2010s where Channing Tatum was doing daring work with directors like Bennett Miller, Quentin Tarantino, the Wachowskis, and the Coens. Then he seemed to retreat into safer rom-com fare. Perhaps teaming up with the director of Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines for a film about a thief hiding out in the walls of a Toys “R” Us will get critics and audiences excited once again.

    Director: James Vanderbilt
    Stars: Rami Malek, Russell Crowe
    Film festivals: Toronto
    Release date: November 7

    Vanderbilt wrote the screenplay for David Fincher’s Zodiac, among others, but the only film he’s directed was the real-life journalism drama Truth that premiered in Toronto before fizzling in awards season. Hopefully history doesn’t repeat itself for this biographical drama/psychological thriller about the trials of Nazi officials after World War II. Malek, who hasn’t been nominated for an Oscar since he won for playing Freddie Mercury in 2018, plays a psychologist who examines the Nazi officials before trial. Crowe, who hasn’t been nominated since 2001’s A Beautiful Mind, plays Hitler’s second-in-command, Hermann Göring.

    Director: Dan Trachtenberg
    Stars: Elle Fanning, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi
    Release date: November 7

    After making the direct-to-Hulu Predator-universe movie Prey feel like a legitimate blockbuster a few years ago, Trachtenberg gets to take the next film in the series to theaters where it belongs. With a plot that pairs an outcast Predator (Schuster-Koloamatangi) with an unlikely ally in Fanning’s Thia, Badlands could be the horror-inflected large-format movie that succeeds in the window between Tron and Wicked.

    Director: Clint Bentley
    Stars: Joel Edgerton, Felicity Jones
    Film festivals: Sundance, Toronto
    Release date: November 7

    The buzziest film out of Sundance this year was this lyrical period piece from Bentley, co-writer of last year’s Sing Sing. (That film’s director, Greg Kwedar, co-wrote Train Dreams as well.) Netflix promptly bought it up, which means you shouldn’t expect box-office points, but this kind of movie is an awards play anyway. And Train Dreams could definitely be this year’s indie darling.

    Director: Emma Tammi
    Stars: Josh Hutcherson, Matthew Lillard
    Release date: December 5

    Two years ago, the first Five Nights at Freddy’s took me by surprise, and I dramatically underpriced it before it exploded for $137 million domestic on the backs of its legion of video-game fans. Not this year! If you want those box-office points, you’re gonna have to pay for them.

    Director: Rian Johnson
    Stars: Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close
    Film festivals: Toronto
    Release date: December 12

    Rian Johnson’s two previous Benoit Blanc mysteries were great fun, and both got Best Original Screenplay nominations … and nothing more. That might just be the level for these movies … unless cast members like Close or O’Connor make a particularly attractive case for a supporting performance campaign. There’s also the fact that, with Netflix distributing this one as it did with Glass Onion, you won’t be getting box-office points.

    Director: Craig Brewer
    Stars: Hugh Jackman, Kate Hudson
    Release date: December 25

    Jackman and Hudson — who both have put their musical skills to work onscreen before — play a husband-and-wife Neil Diamond tribute act. Brewer is a talented filmmaker (Hustle & Flow; Dolemite Is My Name) who could absolutely make a Christmas crowd-pleaser like this sing. Doesn’t this sound like a perfect holiday-weekend family-movie compromise? I’d also be willing to bet good money on Globe nominations for one or both of Jackman or Hudson.

    ➼ Box-office ineligible
    Director: Joseph Kosinski
    Stars: Brad Pitt, many cars
    Release date: Already released

    After premiering at the end of June, Kosinski’s follow-up to Top Gun: Maverick has been a bit slept on for just how big a blockbuster it was (a quiet $600 million worldwide). You won’t be able to reap any points for those dollars, hence the bargain price. But this movie will certainly contend for at least some of the technical Oscars come year end.

    Director: Kate Winslet
    Stars: Kate Winslet, Toni Collette, Andrea Riseborough
    Release date: December 12

    Oscar winner Kate Winslet makes her directorial debut with this story of four adult siblings who have to rally around their ailing mother at Christmastime. A star as big as Winslet having her first go at directing a movie is always going to be a big deal, and Netflix releasing this at Christmastime (it hits the platform on Christmas Eve) indicates that it thinks it will be a crowd-pleaser.

    Director: Maggie Kang and Chris Appelhans
    Stars: Arden Cho, Ahn Hyo-seop, May Hong, Ji-young Yoo
    Release date: Already released

    Netflix’s big success story of this year so far has been how well it’s done to ride the wave of KPop Demon Hunters. The songs are hits, the sing-along version of the movie was No. 1 at the box office, and it’s probably going to be a major contender for the Oscars for Best Song and Best Animated Feature.

    Director: Mary Bronstein
    Stars: Rose Byrne, Conan O’Brien, Danielle Macdonald
    Film festivals: Sundance, Berlin, Toronto, New York
    Release date: October 10

    Byrne won the lead acting prize at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this year, which if nothing else is an indicator of just how impactful her performance is as a mother well past the end of her rope. There’s a pretty wide range of outcomes for this one, but look to the indie awards to give this movie some early points.

    Director: Richard Linklater
    Stars: Ethan Hawke, Andrew Scott, Margaret Qualley
    Film festivals: Berlin, Toronto, New York
    Release date: October 17

    Ethan Hawke reteams with Linklater for this biopic of famed songwriter Lorenz Hart, who faces one long night of reckoning after the opening of his ex-professional-partner’s musical Oklahoma! Andrew Scott’s performance as Richard Rodgers won a prize at Berlin, and you have to figure one of these years, Scott is going to break through with an Oscar nomination.

    Director: Lynne Ramsay
    Stars: Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson
    Film festivals: Cannes
    Release date: November 7

    Lynne Ramsay has been a critics’ darling her whole career, but that’s never translated into mainstream appreciation. But she’s never worked with Jennifer Lawrence before, either. The film’s Cannes reception was a bit inscrutable, but Lawrence playing a young mother battling psychosis is a tempting bit of awards bait.

    Director: Edgar Wright
    Stars: Glen Powell, Josh Brolin
    Release date: November 7

    An adaptation of the Stephen King novel and a remake of the Arnold Schwarzenegger film, The Running Man looks to be a great showcase for Glen Powell’s ever-blossoming star power, as well as a get-right opportunity for Edgar Wright after Last Night in Soho disappointed.

    Director: James L. Brooks
    Stars: Emma Mackey, Jamie Lee Curtis
    Release date: December 12

    The legendary James L. Brooks hasn’t directed a movie since 2010’s disappointing How Do You Know. Fifteen years later, Brooks is back with a story about a young idealist trying to balance a professional life in politics with her wacky family. Whether Brooks can recapture the magic of Broadcast News and Terms of Endearment is one of this fall’s big questions.

    Popcorn emoji (🍿) denotes a film that is eligible for box-office points based on its release date.

    Anaconda $5 🍿
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    Black Phone 2 $5 🍿
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    The Strangers — Chapter 2 $5 🍿
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    Anemone $5 🍿
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    The Testament of Ann Lee $5 🍿
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    A Big Bold Beautiful Journey $5
    Black Bag $5
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    Materialists $5
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    Pillion $5 🍿
    The History of Sound $5
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    Caught Stealing $3
    Friendship $3
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    Sorry, Baby $3
    Steve $3 🍿
    Dead Man’s Wire $3 🍿
    Cloud $2
    Eephus $2
    Pavements $2
    Splitsville $2
    On Swift Horses $1
    Preparation for the Next Life $1
    Sacramento $1
    The Friend $1

    Captain America: Brave New World $3
    The Monkey $3
    Honey Don’t! $3
    One of Them Days $2
    The Naked Gun $3
    The Phoenician Scheme $3
    Weapons $3
    Drop $2
    Presence $2
    The Old Guard 2 $2

    28 Years Later $5
    A Minecraft Movie $5
    How to Train Your Dragon $5
    Lilo & Stitch $5
    Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning $5
    Superman $5
    Mickey 17 $3
    Warfare $3
    Thunderbolts $3
    The Fantastic Four: First Steps $3
    Jurassic World Rebirth $3
    The Long Walk $3
    100 Nights of Hero $2 🍿

    Predators $5
    Come See Me in the Good Light $3 🍿
    Cover-Up $2 🍿
    Sally $3
    2000 Meters to Andriivka $2
    Diane Warren: Relentless $2
    Prime Minister $2
    Selena Y Los Dinos $2 🍿
    The Alabama Solution $2 🍿
    The Perfect Neighbor $2 🍿
    Apocalypse in the Tropics $1
    Deaf President Now! $1
    Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore $1
    Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5 $1 🍿
    The Voice of Hind Rajab $1 🍿
    Zodiac Killer Project $1 🍿
    Architecton $1

    Elio $5
    The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants $5 🍿
    Arco $3 🍿
    Ne Zha II $3
    Scarlet $3 🍿
    A Magnificent Life $2 🍿
    Dog Man $2
    In Your Dreams $2 🍿
    Smurfs $2
    The Bad Guys 2 $2
    The Twits $2 🍿
    Pets on a Train $1 🍿

    Caught by the Tides $3
    Sound of Falling $3 🍿
    Sirāt $3 🍿
    Parthenope $2
    On Becoming a Guinea Fowl $2
    The President’s Cake $2 🍿
    Left-Handed Girl $2 🍿

    Couture $2 🍿
    In the Hand of Dante $2 🍿
    Last Days $2 🍿
    Late Fame $2 🍿
    Rebuilding $2 🍿
    Atropia $1 🍿
    Love Me $1
    Lurker $1
    Plainclothes $1
    Poetic License $1 🍿
    Relay $1
    Rose of Nevada $1 🍿
    Sacrifice $1 🍿
    The Captive $1 🍿
    The Christophers $1 🍿
    The Thing With Feathers $1 🍿
    Tuner $1 🍿

    Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale $3
    Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie $3
    The Ballad of Wallis Island $3
    The Man With the Bag $3 🍿
    The Roses $3
    Ballerina $2
    Hurry Up Tomorrow $2
    Snow White $2
    The Accountant 2 $2
    The Legend of Ochi $2
    The Wedding Banquet $2
    Alto Knights $1
    Bring Her Back $1
    Companion $1
    Death of a Unicorn $1
    Echo Valley $1
    Fountain of Youth $1
    Freakier Friday $1
    Havoc $1
    I Know What You Did Last Summer $1
    I Wish You All The Best $1 🍿
    Magic Farm $1
    M3GAN 2.0 $1
    Nobody 2 $1
    Novocaine $1
    Opus $1
    Sarah’s Oil $1 🍿
    Spinal Tap II: The End Continues $1
    Straw $1
    The Assessment $1
    The Conjuring: Last Rites $1
    The Electric State $1
    The Surfer $1
    The Thursday Murder Club $1
    Wolf Man $1
    The Woman in the Yard $1

    Oh. What. Fun. $3 🍿
    All of You $1 🍿
    Swiped $1 🍿
    Ruth & Boaz $1 🍿
    The Woman in Cabin 10 $1 🍿

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    Joe Reid

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  • The Most Devastating Movie I’ve Seen in Years

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    Chloe Zhao’s adaptation of the novel Hamnet reimagines the poetic act of creating the greatest play in the English language.
    Photo: Agata Grzybowska/Focus Features

    We know next to nothing about William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, other than the fact that he and his twin sister Judith were born sometime in 1585 and that he was buried in August of 1596, 11 years later. Even the cause of death is unknown, though the deaths of young children were not entirely uncommon at the time; three of William’s own sisters had died in childhood. Understandably, the scarcity of our insight into the life of Hamnet and his family has inspired writers and artists over the years to fill in the details with their own imaginings. As an opening quote from Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt reminds us, in both Maggie O’Farrell’s haunting 2020 novel Hamnet and Chloe Zhao’s new adaptation of it: “Hamnet and Hamlet are in fact the same name, entirely interchangeable in Stratford records in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.” Which means we know one more thing about this boy: A few years after his death, his father wrote the greatest play in the English language, and it bears his name.

    Premiering at the Telluride Film Festival ahead of a November theatrical release, Hamnet is devastating, maybe the most emotionally shattering movie I’ve seen in years. The book was overwhelming, too, and going into a film about the death of a child, one naturally prepares to shed some tears. Still, I did not really expect to cry this much. That’s not just because of the tragic weight of the material, but because the picture reimagines the poetic act of creating Hamlet. Shakespeare’s play sits on the highest shelf, fixed by the dust from centuries of acclaim. It is about as unimpeachable as a work of art can be. And yet, here is a movie that dares to explore its inception. The attempt itself is noble, and maybe a little brazen; that it succeeds feels downright supernatural.

    Hamnet remains mostly faithful to the novel (O’Farrell collaborated with Zhao on the screenplay), but the two works center on different parts of the imagined timeline. The book ends with our first glimpse of Hamlet, and its final words belong to the Ghost of the play: “Remember me.” The film, on the other hand, directly grapples with the connections between real life and art, showing how the play (and his own role in it) became a vessel for Will Shakespeare (Paul Mescal) to confront his sorrow and help bring his wife Agnes (Jessie Buckley) out of hers. Hamlet is thought of, not incorrectly, as a work about vengeance and the conflict between thought and action; indeed, it was Shakespeare’s version of an already-existing and popular revenge play. But in shifting her focus, Zhao fully embraces something long evident but often overlooked: As reworked by Shakespeare, Hamlet is also a play about all-consuming grief, one driven at all levels by loss and guilt and questions of how to properly mourn.

    It’s a fascinating subject to imagine, but how exactly does one tell a story mired in such unspeakable sadness? Hamnet speculates that the child was a victim of bubonic plague, but it approaches the tragedy with a kind of magical realist sensibility. In this telling, the constitutionally weaker Judith (played by Olivia Lynes in the film) is the one who initially gets sick, and the loving and industrious Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), who often traded clothes with her as a game to fool their parents, makes one final sacrifice, pretending to be his sickly twin sister and thereby drawing the disease out from her and into himself. Transference is thus at the heart of this story — narratively, formally, structurally.

    The novel jumps back and forth in time, but it keeps circling back to Hamnet’s death, as O’Farrell’s garnished prose transmutes a horrific event into something almost unreal, though no less heartbreaking; her efflorescent descriptions of nature capture something uncanny and sinister about the world (not unlike the doomed Ophelia’s florid songs of grief in Shakespeare’s play). Zhao’s film is more linear, so it doesn’t dwell as long on the details of the death itself. Instead, its breathless, queasy energy sweeps us along. Aided immeasurably by Max Richter’s score, Zhao finds melancholy not in stillness and reflection but in movement and activity. We see how young Will, a sensitive and shy Latin tutor, first met the headstrong Agnes, once a child of nature dismissed as “a forest witch” and raised by an uncaring step-mother. Buckley, an actor who can be both ethereal and earthy at the same time, makes an ideal choice for Agnes. This is a woman who doesn’t quite belong in the world and yet seems to have emerged out of its very soil. She loves to lurk in the woods with her pet falcon, she is proficient in herbs and remedies, and she possesses the gift of foresight.  Despite her reluctance to get married, Agnes has already seen that at her deathbed she will be surrounded by two children. But she has already had a daughter, Susanna, before Judith and Hamlet arrive, so the eventual birth of three children terrifies her to the core.

    Will, the “pasty-faced scholar” hounded for his meekness, sees and loves Agnes for who she is, but marriage and a family also mean a taming of her wild spirits. They are kindred souls: He too can work dark magic, just with his words. Zhao suggests that even though Will was rarely home, his family life fed his art. We see the kids doing the witches’ opening incantations from Macbeth, and of course Hamnet and Judith’s cross-dressing and play-acting echo the plots of many a Shakespeare comedy. All this could come off as corny, but the family is depicted with such loving specificity that we buy all of it. Many historians have been perplexed by how such a seemingly simple man as Shakespeare could have written works of such grandeur and depth. So here, then, is a home filled with wonder and play that could have inspired some of it.

    Which, of course, compounds the tragedy. Agnes might have access to certain powers, but she can’t bring Hamnet back. “He can’t have just vanished,” she says. “All he needs is for me to find him. He must be somewhere.” Will simply responds, “We may never stop looking for him.” But the film has already shown us where Hamnet is. As he hovers between life and death, we see a vision of the young boy wandering around a makeshift forest that is clearly a theater backdrop. He then steps into the dark void of a door at stage center, from which Will Shakespeare himself will later emerge, cloaked in white powder, playing the ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father. The undiscovered country is art itself.

    We sometimes forget what a phenomenal actor Mescal is. This is probably because he hasn’t made a good action hero yet, which is a scarlet letter in our day and age. But also, we love to quantify, classify, and dilute complicated performers into simple impressions; despite the fact that he’s only been acting in movies for five years, we think we already know what he’s all about. But he’s not really the softboi that’s been memed to meaninglessness. With his unexpected choices in both cadence and affect, he’s something closer to a young Christopher Walken. In Hamnet, his response at the first sight of his dead son represents some of the best acting I’ve ever seen; it’s matched later when he interrupts a rehearsal of Hamlet’s “Get thee to a nunnery” speech and delivers it himself with such snarling self-loathing (“I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not born me!”) that he instantly and convincingly reinterprets the world’s most famous play before our very eyes. Agnes accuses Will of not grieving enough, but Mescal makes sure we see that oceans of pain lie beneath his hesitancy: He is Hamlet. And yes, we do get to see the actor as William Shakespeare reciting Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy in this movie, one of two very different interpretations of the same speech that Zhao presents, as if to acknowledge that everyone has their own Hamlet.

    It won’t spoil anything to say that Hamnet concludes with a staging of Hamlet, one in which the play’s twisted reflection of the poet’s life becomes more evident and gains complexity. Perhaps the greatest compliment I can pay Zhao is that this recreation of such a familiar work still manages to surprise, because we see it through Agnes’s disbelieving eyes. The drama onstage doesn’t just echo and explain Will’s sorrow, it also serves as a kind of lifeline to Agnes — and when we view Hamlet as an effort by one grieving person to reach out to another, the whole thing opens up in magnificent new ways. There are references to other stories coursing through Hamnet, and one of them is the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which Will tells Agnes during one of their first meetings. It’s a tale of resurrection, passion, and art, and how one final longing glance traps a lover in the underworld forever. As presented here, it doesn’t apply in any schematic or obvious way to the drama of Shakespeare’s life. But it does underline a fundamental truth in both Hamnet, and Hamlet: that to see and be seen is a joyous and terrifying thing.


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    Bilge Ebiri

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