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Let John Early Cook
John Early (photograph by Eve Alpert)
The creative team behind Maddie’s Secret takes its cues from 1980s TV message movies, Paul Verhoeven, and Bon Appétit’s Test Kitchen.
Scary Movie and the Wayans’ Spoof Empire
Scary Movie (2026)
The latest installment in the Scary Movie franchise is the sixth, though the numeral is pointedly left off the title. This is a form of protest. The Wayans family collectively disowned the three films made in their absence—Scary Movie 3 through 5 (2003, 2006,… Read more
“We’re Magnifying Stupid”: Jeff Tremaine on Jackass: Best and Last
In Jackass: Best and Last (2026), some of the cast get unexpectedly wistful about the possibility that this will be the final chapter of the brilliantly sophomoric series. The man who has been behind the camera and orchestrating the madness from the… Read more
Slow Burn: Dispatch from Cannes
All of a Sudden
The wearied refrain—Cannes 2026 was a ho-hum edition, no masterpieces to see here, take the earlier flight home—obscured the quiet revolution taking place in film after film. This was a year of stories that build: All of a Sudden, The… Read more
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Point of No Return: Digital Nostalgia in Backrooms
Like the internet lore for which it is named, Backrooms (2026) encapsulates a paradox of embodiment and time. Kane Parsons’s feature film—an adaptation of his cult YouTube series of the same title—has its origins in a photograph of a former furniture store undergoing renovations in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, taken in 2003 and uploaded to 4chan in 2019. This unlikely source became the starting point for a diffuse, Lovecraftian latticework of anonymous mythmaking and creepypasta, whose locus eventually migrated to Reddit, where it split into separate communities of originalists and revisionists. Their prolific output is a striking example of hypermodern digital creativity predicated on […]
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With The Bride!, Maggie Gyllenhaal Clumsily Exhumes 200 Years of Zombie Girls
Whether Doctor Frankenstein likes it or not, the zombie story has always belonged to women. Ever since teenaged political radical Mary Shelley (daughter of feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft) poured her maternal anguish into the party game ghost story that eventually became Frankenstein, this cultural lodestar has come heavy with feminine, not to mention feminist, valences. Perhaps it’s no wonder, then, that when Elsa Lanchester rose from the dead in 1935, screaming her way off the slab and quickly back into the grave again in James Whale’s Bride of Frankenstein, she herself birthed countless generations of rictus rebel daughters in under […]
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Review: The New Nikon ZR Shoots RED RAW Footage on a Budget
One year after camera giants Nikon and RED Digital Cinema merged, their first collaboration comes with the release of the Nikon ZR full-frame digital cinema camera. The ZR differentiates itself from its mirrorless competitors—whether Panasonic’s LUMIX line, Sony’s FX line or Blackmagic cinema cameras—with its unique ability to record 12-bit REDCODE RAW (R3D NE), internally at up to 6K and 60 frames per second. And it’s available at the enviable price point of only $2,199. (By comparison, Sony’s full-frame FX3 costs nearly twice as much.) Surveying the camera body, its large 4-inch screen immediately stands out. The addition of an […]
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True Story: I Used My Jeopardy! Winnings to Finance My First Feature
“What is MAGIC TOWN?” For me, the clues that prompted this response took my whole life to uncover. Film, trivia, and magic have always been triple passions of mine. At 12 years old, my first paying job was as a magician, putting together an act with my best friend and playing at birthday parties. The money wasn’t great, but we were passionate. In 1997, we attended our first Abbott’s Magic “Get Together” in Colon, Michigan (indeed, pronounced exactly how you think). In a tradition dating back to the 1930s, magicians had been gathering in this tiny village every summer to […]
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How Phone-Camera Vérité Defeated Action-Flick Propaganda in the War to Define Minneapolis
As both a resident of Minneapolis and a film and TV critic, it’s been surreal to see my home city become, over the past few weeks, the kind of place you might see in an especially on-the-nose dystopian satire. As thousands of armed, masked ICE agents roam the streets, in SUVs or on foot, everyday Minnesotans have stepped forward to protect their communities. In the aftermath of horrible disasters, survivors often describe the events they witnessed as being like “something out of a movie.” Here, as the ICE occupation stretches week after week, with no meaningful de-escalation and no clear […]
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More 2026 Sundance Quick Takes
As Sundance 2026 wraps and the curtain drops on Park City, the Sundance 2026 awards have been announced. Films fortunate enough to be so honored by Sundance juries gain valuable visibility, boosting their chances at finding greater audiences. Several of the films mentioned in my first round of coverage won awards. However, many of the premieres at Sundance you will likely hear very little about. As director Eugene Hernandez commented at the awards ceremony, out of 16,000 submissions, 150 films were selected for this year’s Sundance. How many festival attendees, no less reviewers, are able to see more than 20-30 […]
