Featured
Lost in the Funhouse
Illustration by Clay Hickson
Say you’ve built a career as a reliable sitcom mainstay and are forced to pivot when sitcoms go out of fashion in the 2010s. Along with every other actor angling to lead a prestige limited series, you work on a more naturalistic delivery and study your character’s motivations. But by 2026, the playing field shifts again. If you’re willing to sign away the rights to your likeness to the network, they can use artificial intelligence tools to insert you into any show. What do you do then? How do you stay indispensable to the industry? That is, more or less, the arc of Valerie Cherish’s television career. Valerie is the protagonist of the HBO show The Comeback (2005–26), played by former Friends (1994–2004) star Lisa… Read more
Do You Love Me Reassembles Lebanon’s Cultural Memory
Do You Love Me (2026)
Lana Daher’s debut feature, Do You Love Me (2026), is a kaleidoscopic exploration of Lebanon’s cultural memory. The Beirut-based multidisciplinary artist drew from 70 years of found footage and archival material to assemble this visceral 76-minute portrait of Lebanese history, which premiered at Venice Days and is now playing at Metrograph in New York. Daher stitches together clips from her country’s independent cinema, newsreels, and home movies, causing the past and the present to collide and recontextualize each other anew. As Daher cuts between time periods, she toggles between scenes from action movies and newsreel footage of violence on the streets of Beirut, blurring the distinction between what is real and what is staged. Everyday civilians and intellectuals opine on the Lebanese Civil War… Read more
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
