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Take Care: Georgia Bernstein on Night Nurse
Night Nurse
I could tell by the title sequence alone—the camera gliding along a body, following the path of a telephone cord—that Night Nurse (2026) would not be like the other movies I had been seeing at Sundance. While the festival in aggregate leans toward safe picks, Night Nurse, which premiered in the NEXT competition, is anything but. The film follows a new nurse, Eleni (Cemre Paksoy), as she gets acquainted with a patient being evaluated for early onset Alzheimer’s, Douglas (Bruce McKenzie), during overnight shifts in the memory-care unit. Eleni quickly slips under Douglas’s spell and becomes his accomplice in a phone scam on other elderly people, posing as their granddaughter in trouble and in need of quick cash. Both characters experience a sexual thrill… Read more
The Emmys’ Locks, Hopefuls, and Snubs
The Testaments (2026–)
This morning, Emmy winners Liza Colón-Zayas (The Bear) and Jeff Hiller (Somebody Somewhere, nominated again this year for his guest role in Pluribus) announced the nominees for the 78th Emmy Awards, which will be handed out across three ceremonies (one for primetime categories, two for creative arts) in September. And despite a packed TV season with too many contenders to count, the two series with the most nominations were sure things, both from HBO Max: The Pitt dominated the drama categories with 25 nods, and Hacks set a record for the most comedy noms in a single year with 24. Even the limited/anthology series category was led by a returning series in Netflix’s Beef, which garnered 16 nominations. Naturally, the aforementioned shows also dominated the acting categories. The… Read more
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
