NEON
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Fix Your Heart or Die: Adrian Chiarella on Leviticus
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 […]
by Alexander Mooney on Jun 22, 2026 -
Personal Effects: Boots Riley and His Collaborators on Crafting I Love Boosters
Boots Riley has directed two movies and one TV show over the past decade, but he’s been telling stories through music for more than 30 years. “I usually think about my songs the same way I think about movies,” said Riley, whose Oakland-based hip hop group The Coup started 35 years ago. “Music was a way for me to cheaply make movies.” Now, music fuels his movies in other ways, though he’s still on the lookout for inventive ways to stretch his budget. Riley officially transitioned into filmmaking around 2015, when his time at the Sundance Labs laid the groundwork […]
by Eric Kohn on May 19, 2026 -
“The Wicked Are Punished”: Damian McCarthy on Hokum
Damian McCarthy knows how to scare an audience. At the Hokum premiere at SXSW, screams and giggles filled the theater as festivalgoers jumped in their seats and covered their eyes watching McCarthy’s tightly wound trap spring out at them—sometimes literally—on the screen. The Irish writer-director describes his films as “classic ghost stories,” campfire tales designed to have you searching for faces in the shadows all the way home. They’re elemental, they’re impeccably crafted, and they’re a lot of fun. Hokum is McCarthy’s third feature, and the first time he has worked with a major actor—Adam Scott, who stars as an […]
by Katie Rife on Apr 30, 2026 -
Let’s Play: Genki Kawamura and Jirô Nagae on a New Kind of Video Game Cinema
At first glance, film producer and novelist Genki Kawamura would not appear an obvious fit to helm a big-screen adaptation of an indie video game. Best known for producing major titles such as Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Monster and Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name, Kawamura made his directorial debut in 2022 with A Hundred Flowers, a muted and focused dementia drama. “There was one sequence in that film that was well-received in how it showed how the world looks from that perspective,” reflects Kawamura. “I was hoping to expand on that, so I searched for some kind of elevated horror project to do […]
by Blake Simons on Apr 9, 2026 -
Steven Soderbergh on Making The Christophers With Michaela Coel and Ian McKellen
Twisty as a Hitchcock movie but not a thriller, Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers is a two-hander for two great actors. Michaela Coel plays Lori Butler, a serious painter with a side gig as an art forger. Ian McKellen plays Julian Sklar, an art world star in the 1960s and ’70s who hasn’t made any work of note in decades. Julian’s children, who hate him, concoct a scheme in which Lori is smuggled into Julian’s dilapidated five-story house as a temporary assistant. She is tasked with finding “The Christophers,” a series of portraits that Julian began in his prime but never finished. If […]
by Amy Taubin on Apr 7, 2026 -
“Absolutely Not a Genre Film”: Julia Ducournau in Conversation with Robert Eggers on Alpha
“To me it’s not really a shift,” French writer-director Julia Ducournau tells filmmaker Robert Eggers on the topic of Alpha, her third feature. “Though I completely understand why it might feel like one.” Indeed, fans of Ducournau’s previous films—her collegiate cannibal breakout Raw (2016) and Palme d’Or-winning body horror Titane (2021)—will undeniably view Alpha as a major departure. Though physical transformation is still integral to the narrative, Ducournau describes her most recent film as “a very grounded family drama.” Family is a major fascination for the filmmaker—from inheriting a taste for human flesh to birthing a man-machine hybrid—but never has […]
by Natalia Keogan on Mar 23, 2026 -
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie’s Matt Johnson Shares His Secret to a Good Life
Matt Johnson is the center of attention wherever he goes. He’s especially popular in his hometown of Toronto, where his advocacy for young Canadian filmmakers and warm, self-referential humor have made him one of the city’s most favored sons. Mayor Olivia Chow was in attendance when Johnson and his co-star/co-writer Jay McCarrol brought their film Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie back to Toronto for a TIFF Midnight Madness screening that Jonson calls “one of the foundational moments of my adult life.” After years of attending the festival, he “wanted so badly to share that same kind of joy […]
by Katie Rife on Feb 13, 2026 -
“This Film is a Celebration and Examination of My Fears and Anxieties about Fully Committing to Somebody”: Director Michael Shanks on NEON Body Horror Film, Together
Australian filmmaker Michael Shanks met his life partner of 17 years at what he calls the Aussie equivalent of spring break. “It probably sounds more glamorous than it actually is,” Shanks laughs. “A week after high school, you just go and get drunk with people in a park or something.” For the couple, it was love at first sight, a union that settled into a committed long-term relationship of nearly two decades. “We’ve been together for so long that when we started to live together, I was confronting the idea of sharing a life,” Shanks remembers. “We have all the […]
by Tomris Laffly on Aug 1, 2025 -
“The Boys in the Basement Were Very Active On This One”: Screenwriter David Koepp on Writing Steven Soderbergh’s Ghost POV Thriller Presence
Updating the themes of The Conversation and Blow Out for the pandemic era, 2022’s Kimi, Steven Soderbergh’s thriller about the panoptic world of voice assistants, marked the director’s first realized collaboration with veteran screenwriter David Koepp, whose filmography is noteworthy for his many scripts written for legendary auteur directors, including Brian DePalma (Carlito’s Way, Snake Eyes, Mission Impossible), Steven Spielberg (Jurassic Park, The Paper), and David Fincher (Panic Room). And that’s in addition to his direction of his own scripts, including Stir of Echoes and Ghost Town. Now, with another fleet, multi-layered thriller, Presence, Koepp continues his collaboration with Soderbergh, […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 22, 2025 -
“Let’s Talk about Glitch Feminism, and What is a Cyber Doula?”: Jazmin Jones on Her Expansive Sundance-Premiering Doc, Seeking Mavis Beacon
Originally published January 20, 2024, timed to the film’s premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, this interview with Seeking Mavis Beacon director Jazmin Jones is now reposted in conjunction with the film’s theatrical release from NEON. — Editor Exuberantly maximalist in approach, Jazmin Jones’s blast of a debut feature, Seeking Mavis Beacon, is a rapid-fire blend of neo-noir road movie, desktop essay film and meta critique of the “searching for” documentary subgenre. The picture follows Jones and cyber doula friend Olivia McKayla Ross — self-described “e-girl detectives” — on their years-long journey to locate Renee L’Espérance, the Haitian-born model […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 31, 2024
