Lost Highway (courtesy of the Criterion Collection)
With all three seasons of Twin Peaks having arrived on MUBI today and two sold-out 35mm screenings of Lost Highway(1997), presented by cinematographer Peter Deming, having taken place at Film at Lincoln Center last night, it’s clear that David Lynch’s 1990s output remains firmly top of mind for cinephiles at home and in theaters. With Lynch’s death (the subject of countless memorials and personal tributes) and it now having been 35 years since Twin Peaks debuted on ABC and captivated America and beyond, 2025 has provided, month-by-month, reasons to commemorate the Lynchian touch (Attn: repertory theaters: Wild at Heart turns 35 this summer and The Elephant Man 45 this fall).
Deming, who in addition to shooting Lost Highway, also shot Lynch’s… Read more
By Erik Leurs
How Dark My Love
Joe Coleman and Whitney Ward are having a big summer. The reigning king and queen of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade also are known as two of the most original figures in a New York underground scene that flourished in the 1970s and ‘80s, and they continue to thrive as artists, performers and personalities. Coleman, a visionary painter, curated the sprawling “Carnival” group show at Deitch Projects, on view through June 28, which more than lives up to Coleman’s evocation of “a profane, holy place where the private desires, fantasies and fears of a society are given uninhibited free expression.” Weegee and Red Grooms rub shoulders with Freaks star Johnny Eck and legendary sideshow banner painter Johnny Meah in a… Read more
By Steve Dollar
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Carrie Preston is back in her Emmy-winning role as 'Elsbeth Tascioni' in the second season of the CBS series Elsbeth from The Good Fight and The Good Wife, creators Michelle and Robert King. On this episode she gives us a deep dive into her work on that hit show, taking us way back to the “queen of quirk” as just a recurring role on the Goods, trying to figure out how to dip her toes into this new character, taking clues from the word “pause,” all the way till the second season of her own show, taking the job of number one on the call sheet seriously, learning what it means to give “more Tascioni,” working with her acting heroes when… Read more
By Peter Rinaldi
The Travel Companion
Anxieties surrounding flight credits, male friendship and fraught filmmaking prospects fuel the bittersweet yet always amusing narrative of The Travel Companion, the feature debut from directors Travis Wood and Alex Mallis. Co-written by the duo alongside their Chicago-based buddy Weston Auburn, the rough gist of the story is mined from a situation that Wood personally found himself in. Long designated as his best friend’s “travel companion”—a perk granted to a friend or family member of an airline employee’s choosing—Wood realized that his coveted status was on track to be upset by his pal’s serious girlfriend.
As Wood avows, however, his reaction was nowhere near as erratic or cringe-worthy as the film’s protagonist, 30-something aspiring filmmaker Simon (Tristan Turner), who is faced… Read more
By Natalia Keogan
Underland
Based on British author Robert Macfarlane’s non-fiction book of the same name, Underland, the feature debut from Rob Petit, investigates the world hidden beneath our feet. In particular, the film ventures into the depths of a cave system in Mexico once used for ancient Mayan rites; a Canadian dark matter research facility located two kilometers beneath the surface; the exhilarating, if treacherous, storm drain system beneath Las Vegas; and a haphazardly abandoned uranium mine in the American Southwest.
Composed of six chapters strung together by hypnotic narration from Sandra Hüller, Underland literally probes the human drive for discovery and, conversely, the inherent consequence of exploration. Some of these questions are existential: What if intricate, costly research yields no discernible answers? In… Read more
By Natalia Keogan
Kites
In the sprawling favela of Santo Amaro in Rio de Janeiro, Duvo (first-time actor Daniel Fernando do Prado Dorea Lima) currently sits at the top of the pecking order. Under the guise of enriching the community, Duvo and his armed militia regularly engage in illicit activity that, while lucrative, often culminates in death. When it comes to Duvo’s attention that the “help” he’s providing is anything but—in part by a cigarette-smoking guardian angel, whose untimely death was the product of police brutality—he becomes obsessed with a new, much more kid-friendly venture: he decides to finance a kite festival for the children and their families, supplying a plethora of these fine paper creations to be flown over the favela.
Kites, directed by… Read more
By Natalia Keogan
The Scout
Back in 2022, a scrappy feat of independent filmmaking came across my radar. Written and directed by Florida native Justin Zuckerman, Yelling Fire in an Empty Theater is a Mini-DV shot journey of a young woman attempting to create space for herself amid the cacophony of New York City; it harkens to mumblecore while remaining entrenched in the unique hostility that young (even would-be) creatives currently face amid price-gouging and the decimation of DIY communities.
This film was the first feature project undertaken in part by 5th Floor Pictures—the production collective co-founded by Ryan Martin Brown and Paula González-Nasser—itself an attempt to restore the communal lifeblood inherent to artistic creation, particularly a practice as costly (in every sense of the word)… Read more
By Natalia Keogan
