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Let John Early Cook
John Early (photograph by Eve Alpert)
On the first beautiful day in New York after a dreary spring of torrential rain and pervasive wind chill, my task was to infiltrate a tight-knit friend group. Over a round of ice-cold soft drinks at Chinatown’s Bar Oliver, the team that conceived the visual world of Maddie’s Secret (2025)—part critique of and part ode to 20th-century TV movies—giddily elaborates on the nature of their collaboration. “There is a history between all of us that was not built on film sets,” says John Early, the film’s writer, director, and star, of his relationships with cinematographer Max Lakner and production designer Gordon Landenberger, who sit across from him in a cozy corner booth. Early got in touch with Lakner after seeing his work on… Read more
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, 2013)—after a compensation dispute with the Weinsteins in 2001, a grievance which became the subject of the new film. Scary Movie (2026) is very much in the tradition of a Wayans spoof: a horror-comedy legacy sequel lampooning its own form as it serves up an incisive critique of the entertainment industry. It retains the offensive humor cherished by the franchise’s core fanbase and reviled by its critics, pissing and farting on genre conventions all the way to the bank. The film’s laughs are… 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 start, director Jeff Tremaine, has been feeling a bit emotional about it, too. “I really felt it in the edit bay when we started opening up the old footage and looking back on how long we’ve been doing this,” Tremaine told me last Thursday. “Seeing all these guys as babies, that hit me a little bit. We thought that we would get one episode on TV—if we did—and it would just get shut down. We weren’t built to run long-distance, but… Read more
Fix Your Heart or Die: Adrian Chiarella on Leviticus
Leviticus (2026)
Leviticus (2026), Adrian Chiarella’s debut feature, begins with an archetypal horror image: a “little death” that begets a big one. In this cold open, a lesbian lifeguard succumbs to the lubricious persuasions of an invisible lover in a poolside shower, a moment of illicit pleasure that ends in her murder. The sinister seducer, which appears to its victims as the person they desire most, is the spawn of a hex cast upon gay teens by their local church as a form of conversion therapy. This conceptual hook, already a clever spin on the horror genre’s predilection for teenage sex and death, is premised upon the pious dictum so often used to keep queer youth in line: your desires will kill… 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 Dreamed Adventure, and La Gradiva are accumulative works, beautifully wrought and devastating in different ways, but not in the white-knuckle, nerve-racking manner of last year’s Sirat or It Was Just an Accident. Again and again, I had the sense of these movies having a bodily impact on me—not a wham-bam blow, but a more incremental emotional effect, as if the filmmakers were instilling a sense of dramatic muscle memory within me as I watched. That’s how All of a Sudden,… Read more
Live From Cine Gear Expo 2026
Cine Gear Expo
If NAB Show seems to inspire a mini–existential crisis in me each year, as I am forced to reckon with cinema’s diminishing relevance amidst other growth arenas in video, Cine Gear Expo invites more optimistic vibes with its film focus and Hollywood backlot setting. Cine Gear acts as a two-day gathering of Los Angeles cinematographers, gaffers, and lighting technicians to check out the latest gear and see what everyone has been up to over a beer and maybe a hot dog, if one is lucky enough to get invited to an offsite barbecue. I made plans to meet up with Alec Moeller (New Faces class of 2022), who—while very knowledgeable about vintage lenses—didn’t strike me as the gearhead type. He confirmed as much… Read more
