Welcome back to Projections, the only movie newsletter where mumbling is a prized trait.

I’m en route to the Telluride Film Festival, my happiest place, for the eighth time. On The Big Picture this week, we talked about the films we can’t wait to see this fall, and hopefully I’m about to knock a few of those titles off the list.

Festival season is about two things: anticipation and discovery. They’re often in opposition to one another. The former is easy—map out the release calendar, survey the festival announcements, coordinate the puzzle pieces. Discovery is an altogether different thing. You have to take chances and open your mind to lesser-known titles and filmmakers. Give yourself a chance to be swept away. At a festival like Telluride, there is a limited window to conquer your anticipation; for me, too often, discovery is discarded during my quest to check boxes. I’m fortunate that this year I’ve had a chance to see many of the expected movies, so I intend to spin the wheel on a few films I don’t know much about.

It’s a feeling that reminds me of living on the Lower East Side in New York in the 2000s. I lived on the Lower East Side, Orchard St. to be exact, less than 500 steps from Sunshine Cinema, a lovely five-screen theater run by Landmark that opened in 2001. I routinely popped into Sunshine just to check out whatever was playing whenever I could. It was there (and at the still extant IFC Center) that I saw many movies that were considered a part of the “mumblecore” movement, which effectively lasted throughout the duration of Sunshine’s existence. A largely NYC-based strain of independent films that featured naturalistic acting, improvised dialogue, the emotional troubles of youthful creatives, and micro-budgeted production values, mumblecore became a bit of a dirty word among its progenitors—it’s a reductive classification, but it was convenient for the press and categorical film fans. There was something both raw and flimsy about many of the films, with craft frequently overwhelmed by a get-it-done slackness. It was written about frequently and then it seemed to evaporate quickly. But there have been major reverberations. The very loose confederation of directors and actors who comprised the generation making these movies has gone on to various degrees of success and notoriety. Some have soared to the pinnacle of Hollywood moviemaking; others have stepped away from film; most have continued making work that is modestly scaled with personal integrity. Sunshine Cinema was closed and demolished in 2018, but what played there lives on.

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Welcome back to Projections, the only newsletter that wants you to feed the only addiction that will enrich your artistic soul: the procurement of plastic.

I am writing to you from a place of gentle frenzy. The weeks leading up to fall film festival season are harried for me, packed with pre-recordings, last-minute screenings, whispery late-breaking news about imminent surprises (I’m sitting on a fat one from a personal favorite that I can’t wait for the world to find out about), and much more in preparation for the fall.

I love the fall. As a kid, I loved going back to school—despite a July birthday, never been much of a summer guy (too pale). I love turning leaves, Halloween, and appropriate sweater weather. (I wear them year-round.) I love pumpkin-related accoutrements, cuisine, and decoration. I love striding hither and yon down a tree-lined street with my family, holding an overpriced coffee with no particular place to go. It’s a simple version of freedom. And I love fall movie season, of course. The festivals, the prestige pictures, the all-night horror marathons, the awards prognostication. I’m in for all of it. After two decades working in the world of pop culture, I’ve still got a childlike enthusiasm for the big game of What’s Next? I’ll be telling you all about it for the next several months.

But I also like fall because it’s that much closer to Christmas, the season of giving. And so today I am giving you a list of things I want and you should, too. After last week’s Physical Media Corner, in which I patted myself (and all of you) on the back for demanding and receiving a 4K release of Zach Cregger’s Barbarian, I thought we should make the whole newsletter out of the black box. That’s right, it’s time for my top 10 most-desired 4Ks.

I’m asking now because something exciting is happening: the market for Blu-ray 4Ks is so gassed and riled amongst collectors and increasingly curious novices that many titles that felt caught in the limbo of corporate disinterest are finally starting to emerge. Last week’s news that two beloved Robin Williams features, Dead Poets Society and Mrs. Doubtfire, would receive new 4Ks had brand-aware collectors excited simply because Disney controls the rights to these movies. Which means, after this and Barbarian, there is clearly still someone at the wheel in Burbank making calls on home video distribution for catalog. Even more exciting, Mrs. Doubtfire is a Fox title and, while an enduring family film, isn’t hitting an anniversary of any kind that would augur this announcement. It’s just ... good business for Disney. Heady times in this little corner of the world. Add that to a list of long-desired and varied films like The Devils, A.I., Wag the Dog, Nadja, and Something’s Gotta Give receiving new editions while films like Marie Antoinette, The Shout, and James Gray’s Little Odessa (with a special feature that includes yours truly) receive the gorgeous Criterion Collection treatment, it’s hard not to feel like anything is possible.

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Welcome back to Projections, the only movie newsletter that thrives in August, the time of year when your other faves are recharging in far-off beach locales.

Historically, August has been a reset for me and, seemingly, all of Hollywood. This time of year is the great inhalation before a lot of hot air is blown through the town. Executives are slowly returning to their posts, stars are gearing up for whirlwind fall festival tours and grueling six-month awards campaigns, and cinephiles are arranging their overwhelming Oct-Nov-Dec screening schedules. I like to spend the month, when not vacationing with my family, prescreening festival titles and hyper-managing the next several months of The Big Picture. This month has been a little different. We’re not taking any episodes off for the show—in fact, we’re going harder than ever.

Last week, the fantastic actor Patrick Fischler joined me for a special discussion about his long and varied career, including working on mega-hits like Speed, Mad Men, and Lost, what he learned from David Lynch, and the best part he’s had that very few people have seen.

Then, Jane Schoenbrun, Gillian Anderson, and Hannah Einbinder swung by to talk about their movie Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, Eywa, and the majesty of desire. I think I did a pretty good job of holding it together.

This week, actor Will Poulter came through to talk about his new film Union County and his unique and unpredictable career. Will brought a (desperately needed) grace and suavity to the discussion. The film is quite powerful and worth your time, and the chat’s good too.

And then later this week, Matt Johnson returns for the third time this year to go deep on Tony, his remarkable new Anthony Bourdain quasi-biopic.

I mention all of this not just to self-promote, but to underline that movies aren’t taking the month off either. Here’s another sign:

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Welcome back to Projections, your weekly movie newsletter that just keeps coming and coming and coming and cannot be killed, even if you maim it, behead it, drown it, burn it with fire, detonate it, or throw it off a roof.

I’m back from vacation and thinking about horror again. Upon my return, I popped in the 4K of Obsession for my first revisit of the movie since I saw it at a screening four months ago. It knocked me out the first time, knowing little more than the fact that it was riding some post-festival hype out of Toronto last September. It went on to become the indie movie story of the year. A second watch, with an awareness of the story’s trajectory and the incoming horror beats, drained some of the initial fun but I remained impressed by the abrasive sound design, the smirky-cruel conception of the world, and of course Inde Navarette’s performance as Nikki.

Nikki, Nikki, Nikki. Navarette screaming, “I can be Nikki!” at Michael Johnston’s Bear as he begs her to be the woman his wish imprisoned is still a genuinely agonizing and remarkable moment in a film made by relative novices. Does director Curry Barker know just how deeply that moment resonates? The movie’s all-time phenomenon status is still somewhat inexplicable, but there is an undeniable power in it. Quibble with its gender politics, its portrayal of agency and beta maledom, even its underlit visual palette. But it has a ferocious energy, and that doesn’t come easy.

I’m still thinking about Freaky Nikki. She’s what’s called a Final Girl. Sort of. An evolution, at least. Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase before. It was coined in 1987 by Carol J. Clover, an academic and film scholar whose book Men, Women, and Chainsaws is a seminal text that intersects feminist theory with horror analysis. Clover’s identification of the trope spoke to a specific legacy of slasher and rape-revenge films from the ’70s and ’80s that centered a pure final survivor in a horror film, one whose moral superiority, bravery in the face of ultraviolence, and, most importantly, gender, determined her centrality in these grisly stories. Think Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode in Halloween or, later, Neve Campbell’s Sidney Prescott in Scream. Chaste, sober, frequently brunette, unflinching in the face of a faceless killer. These women are understood as lodestars for a society that expects a certain moral relativism in their culture—the presence of brutality leavened by a virginal hero’s journey rewarded with survival. In stories written and directed almost exclusively by men.

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Welcome back to Projections, your friendly neighborhood movie newsletter, and face it, Tiger, you just hit the jackpot.

It’s Spider-Man week at the movies, with Brand New Day, the fourth film starring Tom Holland as Peter Parker, hitting theaters imminently. We’re breaking down the movie and Spidey’s history on the big screen on The Big Picture this week. Needless to say, the movie is going to be a massive sensation.

I’m just a few days from a much needed vacation, and I wanted to put a pin in this moment in movies. So, inspired by my pal and fellow Mets Corner-sitter Zach Lowe, I’m borrowing his famed “10 Things I Like and Don’t Like” column structure to talk through some lingering thoughts.

1. It’ll Never Be 2002 Again, But Movies Are Backish.

In 2002, 1.57 billion movie tickets were sold. That was the year, coincidentally, of Sam Raimi’s first Spider-Man film, which kicked off two decades of superhero storytelling, and was retrofitted in a post-9/11 world to represent something more meaningful about America’s ability to endure in the face of tragedy. Tobey Maguire’s Spidey, racing across New York City with the American flag billowing behind him, became emblematic of a new phase of propagandistic, emotionally persuasive storytelling and served as the dam-burster of the IP era.

That same year, we got a quartet of mega Part Twos: Harry Potter and The Chamber of Secrets; The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers; Men in Black II; and Star Wars: Episode II — Attack of the Clones. But that wasn’t all it was. Steven Spielberg had not one but two movies cross $350 million in Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can. Best Picture winner Chicago grossed $300 million. There was a Bond movie, a Bond parody (Austin Powers in Goldmember), and an attempt at a nu-metal Bond update (xXx). And smaller movies were exploding almost every week: 8 Mile, The Ring, Signs, the first Ice Age film, Lilo & Stitch, My Big Fat Greek Wedding ($368 million!!!), Panic Room, and many, many, many more that crossed $100 million. You think Obsession-mania was crazy? If I were doing The Big Picture in 2002, I’d show up to every recording like this.

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Welcome back to Projections, the only newsletter that tells you what you most want is what you most can’t have and that the most you can’t have is what you already had and lost.

PROGRAMMING REMINDER: I’m opening up a subscriber-only chat on Friday, July 24, at 9:30 a.m. PT/12:30 p.m. ET. Let’s talk Odyssey, fall festivals, physical media, and how to beat the crippling heat that drains the life from my body this time of year.

Today I’m exploring the eruptive wellspring of feeling I got watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and how ecstatic it made me for the short-term future of movie culture. Is this a sugar high or the real thing, baby?

There was a mischievous irony in the Avengers: Doomsday trailer being released the morning after The Odyssey triumphed to a $265 million opening weekend. The evidence of what large-scale movie storytelling can be vs. the reality of what it has been. By which I mean, practically made, technology-forward, format-minded spectacle positioned against digitally rendered, nostalgia-farming serialization. Call it a tale of two Cyclopses.

Despite my posture toward superhero storytelling over the past five years, I’m looking forward to seeing Avengers: Doomsday. I’ve still got an adolescent instinct to want to see what happens to the characters I cared about as a teenager—I worked in a comic book distribution center when I was 15, and largely had a good time with the MCU, particularly as a novel realization of youthful dreams from those days. Ah, those dreams. Now that the Knicks have won a title, Spider-Man has become the surest thing in movies, and Paul Thomas Anderson has won a bushel of Oscars, well, it’s time to put away childish things. Let’s be grown-ups. That’s what the movies have been telling us anyway. Nolan’s The Odyssey may be the most adult blockbuster ever made—sure, there are monsters and witches and epic battles. But his telling of Homer’s poem is a massive sociological recrimination against war, indecency, and the erosion of human connection. It’s a cri de coeur disguised as a swords-and-sandals epic in a time of relentless bickering, trolling, and war-mongering. It’s also a thematic and textual mirror match with his previous film, Oppenheimer.

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Welcome back to Projections, a newsletter for Disney Adults, adults who dislike Disney, and everyone in between. (Except fascists. Fuck those guys.)

Speaking of, it’s been 10 years since Disney released a movie for adults. On September 2, 2016, Derek Cianfrance’s adaptation of The Light Between Oceans was released under the Touchstone Pictures label, a pseudonymous studio that Disney operated in various forms from 1984 until then. Touchstone is a fascinating story of a major conglomerate trying to keep up with the times—after several botched “grown-up” PG-rated releases in the early 1980s (among them Tron and Carroll Ballard’s fascinating Never Cry Wolf), Disney decided to launch a sub-brand to distinguish the child-focused fare it had been defined by from a more mature strain of movie storytelling.

The first film under the Touchstone banner was Ron Howard’s Splash, a fizzy spin on a mermaid’s tale that launched Tom Hanks as a film star and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It was an auspicious debut for the shingle. Eventually, Touchstone became synonymous with polished, accessible but lightly sophisticated Movies for Adults, and its library includes such personal favorites as The Color of Money, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Dick Tracy, Sister Act, Ed Wood, Rushmore, The Insider, Unbreakable, and The Prestige. It’s also the home of Michael Bay’s Armageddon and Coyote Ugly. So, multitudes. The Coens and Tim Burton and Spike Lee and John Woo made movies for the studio. It wasn’t consistently a prestige factory but it signified something considered; professional entertainments that represent a mainstream moviegoing moment I tend to over-celebrate.

Touchstone slowly began to fade from view after the release of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl under the Walt Disney Pictures flagship, which was rated PG-13 and ostensibly more aligned with Touchstone’s identity but stuck to the Disney imprimatur, presumably for amusement park ride reasons. After an agreement with DreamWorks to produce films with Touchstone lapsed in 2016, it was quietly closed for good a decade ago.

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Welcome back to Projections, the home base for movie lovers with bad backs and increasingly blurry vision.

I’m Canada-bound, headed north for The Big Picture’s first ever live show across the border. I expect to be greeted warmly and with the seriousness afforded a man of letters. (Read: podcast host.)

And with that in mind, I have been thinking about my generation’s place in the movies. Later this week, Olivia Wilde’s The Invite expands to theaters around the country, and with that will come a confrontation with Millennialism. What is that? Well, it’s a developing way of life embodied in the sociosexual anxieties, creature comforts, and vague air of discontent that animates the couple at the center of the movie, portrayed by notable Millennials 42-year-old Wilde and 44-year-old Seth Rogen.

By the time Martin Scorsese was 44 years old (the age I turn in less than three weeks), he’d directed 10 feature films, including Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, and Raging Bull. Steven Spielberg had made 15 by then, including Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and three Indiana Jones films. Jane Campion had won her first of two Oscars by that age, as had Quentin Tarantino. The year he turned 44, John Ford made Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, and Drums Along the Mohawk. If it seems like an arbitrary cutoff for examination, I can’t argue with that, but it’s a time in which life itself seems to settle in. I’ve got a kid going to Kindergarten, a mortgage, a Bluray collection, and all the requisite joys and stressors that come with those things. But professionally speaking, I feel I have a real handle on who I am, what I want to do, and how to get there. It’s the first time in my life that I feel that way. You can see that confidence in the work of many film directors as well.

And even though it is a relatively modest and intimate chamber piece comedy, The Invite arrives at such a ripe moment, in which the cohort of creative people born between 1981 and 1996 are (finally) ascendant in cultural, political, and financial status. Ryan Coogler is a Millennial. Sam Altman is a Millennial. Zohran Mamdani is a Millennial. Wilde pays off this moment with her best work in front of and behind the camera—it’s easily one of my favorite films of the year so far, which I will discuss at length on The Big Picture later this week. Part of what makes it special—in addition to a buzzing script, a visual refinement that frames her actors in exasperated portraiture, and a sense of pace that mimics the manic-active mind of her character in particular—is its representation of so many local concerns.

Millennials are notably a step behind their forebears in terms of the benchmarks in life progress—home ownership, professional happiness, mental and physical balance. I haven’t seen these particular ideas communicated quite so lucidly and explicitly in a movie as The Invite. They’re bourgeois problems no doubt, but throughout film history, you can see them across generations—from the high-energy gender clashes of the 1940s screwball comedies to the sexual and social awakenings highlighted in New Hollywood farces like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Shampoo, The Graduate, and Carnal Knowledge. The meta-horndog comedies of the 2000s, from American Pie to The 40-Year-Old Virgin to The Hangover, prescribed a dick-first era of curdling masculinity for the first generation raised on D.A.R.E. and the AIDS crisis. (Judd Apatow turned 40 the year Knocked Up was released.) Movie comedies are uniquely good at showing us who we are at a given time in history. And the people making those movies are typically in the window that Millennials find themselves, roughly 35-45.

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Welcome back to Projections, the only generative platform for relentlessly recommending plastic and improving at that task every single second, no data center required.

Programming reminder: I’ll be doing a subscriber-only chat tomorrow, (Thursday, July 2) at 9 a.m. PT/12 p.m. ET.

In this edition I want to tangle with something that has fascinated me for about 10 years: movie brand loyalty. Last week’s pile-on of Supergirl drove many disquisitions on the era of fandom—that catchall word we use to describe nerdy people eagerly dorking out over minutiae. I say this with love, as a man with many obsessive sidelines that help me shamble through life, one accrued distraction at a time.

Fandom can be ugly or needy or immature. It’s easy to pick on fans; they’re so sincere and, well, a little pathetic if seen from the wrong angle. But being a fan is also definitional for many people. Loving Marvel can be, if you really want, a personality. You can make friends who primarily care about Marvel’s stories. Find a mate who orients their free time around it, too. Design your lifestyle around the wide array of experiences—movies, games, attractions, merchandise, and, of course, comic books—the brand has to offer. You can wear a Captain America T-shirt, Thor’s helmet, Spidey’s tights, Hulk hands, and Iron Man’s boots to work, if your boss is cool. (During a recent trip to Disneyland, I strongly considered buying a replica of Thanos’s Infinity Gauntlet before realizing there was no joke on the other end of the purchase. I simply would have been a 43-year-old man with the Infinity Gauntlet.)

And so while fandom is under fire these days, and often identified as the root cause of a degraded movie culture—I might add an “anonymous, online” prefix to “fandom” if making this declaration—it is at least a viable path toward genuine community. That it is diminished and frequently maligned right now is neither here nor there, because it is rooted in a rich history of stories, the most connective force in human existence. Religion, history, literature, anthropology, science, friendship, bullshitting at your kids’ soccer game—it’s all stories. Marvel (or Star Wars or Harry Potter or Agatha Christie mysteries or Mass Effect or Pokémon or Bridgerton) is not inherently evil or destructive or lame. They’re just stories. Sometimes their prominence in our wider culture can blot out the rest of the world and make space for alternatives more sparse. But they’re actually something worth celebrating—this exact idea is at the very heart of The Ringer, where I have worked for more than 10 years. (Did you know we turned 10 in June?) I take stories very seriously.

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Welcome back to Projections, the landing area for a grounded comic book reader recovering from four decades of arrested development. In today’s newsletter, we will look at the era of movies that effectively defined my adult life and arguably set the movie business back about a decade.

But first, I wanted to thank Nick Catucci over at Embedded for featuring yours truly in the My Internet column. Please enjoy the fruits of my addled internet usage.

Embedded

My Internet: Sean Fennessey

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci…

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2 months ago · 67 likes · Nick Catucci

So I saw Supergirl. It will come as little surprise to engaged contemporary movie lovers that it isn’t any good. We’re discussing the movie at length on The Big Picture this week and doing an autopsy of this moment in comic book movies. But I’d like to take a long view of the subgenre here.

If we use 2000’s X-Men as the launch point and 2002’s Spider-Man as the realization of a long-held dream for multiple generations, that gives us roughly 25 years of movies to look at. A lot transpired over that time—multiple presidential administrations, foreign wars, a global pandemic, vast technological shifts. When it all started, there was no social media, no smartphones, no such thing as the “fandom” space. They survived and thrived through it all. In turn, these movies have covered the industry, the art form, and the discourse in a sticky, weblike film that, long after it’s dried up, we can’t seem to clean off.

Supergirl is the first time I was certain about it being over. Before I become too dramatic with overstatement: I don’t believe movies based on comic books are dead, going away, a pox on society, or a net negative culturally. But I do think that their dominance has had a harmful effect on the subcultural world I cherish and that a recession would do the stories themselves and the movies at large a service.

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Welcome back to Projections, an emotional outpost of the NBA champion New York Knicks.

I am having an incredibly unfamiliar feeling. I believe normal people call it … joy. After the Knicks’ historic victory on Saturday night closed out a whirlwind of a month for me, I’m trying to take stock.

• Last week, I watched my daughter kill it at a dance recital. No stage fright, big smiling energy.

• Today she graduates from preschool and gets ready to begin kindergarten, a huge moment for any parent. So proud of her.

• I went to the Cannes Film Festival, a lifelong dream, with my pal Amanda and we had a blast.

• I spent an afternoon with Steven Spielberg talking about 2001: A Space Odyssey, an experience only made better by his exuberant buy-in during the discussion.

• I have witnessed the first major sustained boom at the box office since before the pandemic. That it’s powered in part by my favorite genre, horror, makes it all the more sweet.

• And of course I got to witness the extraordinary run to the title for the Knicks, which was done in unprecedented fashion against a genuinely terrifying and hateable opponent in a series of astonishing and inspiring comebacks.

This really is satisfaction. I’m so confused. I was lucky to go on The Zach Lowe Show to do some series analysis and talk about my earned-over-decades Knicks feelings in-depth. It was a wonderful discussion with a few heater monologues from Zach. Check it out:

And at the risk of crossing the beams too aggressively here, I see some strong parallels between the Knicks and the movies right now.

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Welcome back to Projections, the only newsletter brave enough to forge ahead while the New York Knicks endure a travesty of a mockery of a sham of officiating in the NBA Finals. But we’re not here to address those scurrilous acts. (Kidding … sort of.)

PROGRAMMING NOTE: I’ll be holding a Subscriber-only chat on Thursday, June 11, at 1 p.m. PT/4 p.m. ET. We can talk about physical media, Disclosure Day hype, the big question in today’s newsletter, Jalen Brunson’s usage rate, or anything else you want to hit.

On to today’s topic …

Last week, it was announced that Martin Scorsese had used and would promote the use of AI technology developed by the startup Black Forest Labs for pre-production storyboard work on his forthcoming film adaptation of What Happens at Night, which will star Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence.

The news sent a collective shiver down the spine of a devout cohort of working artists and cinephiles who receive any AI-related story with some combination of suspicion and rage. Particularly in the case of Scorsese, a man who looms large as the high priest of handmade film artistry, it came as a shock. I’ve tried to resist overreacting to news like this. In early 2025, The Brutalist came under fire for its alleged uses of artificial intelligence to sharpen Adrien Brody’s Hungarian speech and blueprint illustrations that would represent the work of the fictionalized architect Laszlo Toth. I recall saying on The Big Picture at the time that if the use of any artificial intelligence in a film is a dealbreaker, it will be virtually impossible to enjoy feature films going forward. I would not call this my endorsement of the technology, nor would I say I have hard-and-fast rules on it in any direction. It’s hard to be definitive about moving goalposts. Broadly, I’d prefer that it were never invented and remained but a dark dream in James Cameron’s soul. I like when humans make stuff. It’s one of the best things about being alive, stumbling upon something that some beautiful weirdos made together.

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Welcome back to Projections, a newsletter about movies that suddenly feels prescient given that popular cinema has re-emerged in the consciousness in a way that not even I could have pretended to see coming when I started thinking about doing this.

Today I am tangling with that feeling of rebirth, and the origins of movie love for young people. Let’s go back to the beginning.

You may have heard that Steven Spielberg joined Bill Simmons and me on The Rewatchables this week to discuss Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

For a lifelong movie lover, Spielberg allegiant, and inveterate analyzer, this was Valhalla. I was so indescribably happy, and you can tell because my beet-red face is getting memed. Part of what made our discussion so special is that 2001 arrived at a time in Spielberg’s life when it could be transformative, as his moviemaking mind was as open as it could possibly be. When he saw it, he was 21, still a student at Long Beach State, on the precipice of getting his first professional assignment to make his short film, Amblin’. And to hear him talk about the movie—not just from a technical perspective, but an emotional, almost religious way—is to hear true awe collide with scholarship. Spielberg eventually went on to create some of the most astonishing science fiction films ever made, and in his hopeful, wondrous way, responded to Kubrick’s darkened vision over the years. They later became friends and collaborators and hearing him recount their relationship in detail is an experience I will cherish forever.

The timing of this episode and Spielberg’s return to sci-fi later this month with Disclosure Day is eerie, given the way 2001 impacted young people and their relationship to moviegoing and what is happening right now. 2001 is not typically lumped in with Bonnie and Clyde (which was released eight months earlier) or Easy Rider (which arrived 14 months after), the two films that ushered in the transition to the New Hollywood. Both are iterative reimaginings of classic movie stories—the crime drama and the biker picture. 2001 shattered conventions of what a movie could be. Non-narrative, visually audacious, and glacially paced. It’s difficult to write about these movies without slipping into bromides about “culture changing”—but it did. And while Arthur Penn applied jump-cut editing techniques culled from the French New Wave and Dennis Hopper applied a shambolic, there-as-it-happens mischief in their respective films, Kubrick was after something far more existential and grand. It cracked open the heads of many of the filmmakers who would follow in its wake. (Completely useless but meaningful-to-me fact: Stanley Kubrick was born on July 26, 1928. I was born on July 26, 1982.)

Spielberg described the ways in which he sought answers for how Kubrick achieved his vision—the models and effects work he applied with Douglas Trumbull (a genius and an underrated figure in Hollywood history), the color and lighting choices, how he filmed zero gravity, the rotating Discovery centrifuge, the front projection that illuminated the leopard’s eyes. The movie is unlike anything before it, but also a deconstructible blueprint for a new cinematic language. Commercially it had a dual effect—for young people who liked to get high and vibe out, it was a magical three hours in the dark. For high-minded teetotalers (of which Spielberg was one), it was a feast for the soul. And for many who split the difference, it radicalized what an afternoon at the movies could feel like. 2001 famously did not open strong at the box office—it was only in its second week when younger audiences caught on to the trippy nature of the film and it became a phenomenon, going on to be the second-highest grossing film of 1968 and cementing Kubrick as the architect of a new kind of cinema. Part of the reason he is not often associated with the New Hollywood is he started before it, withstood its rise and fall, and kept on making his own thing until the end of his life. He worked in the studio system for decades but never seemed to play by anyone’s rules.

I bring this up because we are at some sort of turning point right now, too. I don’t believe it is on the order of 2001, but the success of Backrooms and Obsession, two horror films made by 20-something phenoms, augurs something exciting. A door is cracked open again. Moon-Watcher has learned to swing the bone. Curry Barker and Kane Parsons are not the first YouTube-native filmmakers, and they’re certainly not the first 20-something directors to blaze a trail into the business. On The Big Picture this week, Amanda smartly noted that Spielberg himself, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Ryan Coogler all made movies in their mid-20s.

But it’s quite rare these days, and, as I wrote last week, their digital roots signal new ways of thinking about talent and possibilities.

What excites me the most, though, is who is going to the movies. 86 percent of the audience for Backrooms in its opening weekend is under 35 and 43 percent are between 18 and 24. This defies a lot of settled social wisdom about how young people won’t let go of their screens, fail to interact with the real world, and want to be super-served content in the most convenient way possible. Going to the movies isn’t easy—it costs money and time, it necessitates strategy and planning. But it’s fun. The same way seeing 2001 while blitted out of your mind (or just simply and soberly enjoying its majesty) was in 1968. The aftermath of these movies will be fascinating. Spielberg went and built one of the most staggering bodies of work in the history of the medium. Fans of these two horror films (and Iron Lung and Talk to Me and I Saw the TV Glow and a dozen other films touching these worlds) are going to be able to iterate them on a variety of platforms and connect them to gaming and short-form vertical video and memes and forms of media that do not yet exist.

Hearing Parsons tell me last week that he was blown away by what the users on his Discord server are doing to recreate and build upon the worlds he’s devising—for free, and with their own ingenuity—was an intellectual breakthrough for me. That the way we once played with action figures and Barbies quietly in our bedrooms has now evolved into a publicly observed free-for-all of creativity, a waterfall of “OK, but what if we did this?” is a rare not-terryfing vision of the future.

All of this has me thinking back on the way I transformed into a movie freak, and reminding me that online movie fandom is far from a new thing. In 1994, my family got our first personal computer, a Gateway 2000 desktop. We had very few accoutrements. A copy of Microsoft Encarta was one. Solitaire, of course. A word processor. An AOL CD-ROM that guaranteed “1000 Hours Free!” Eventually, I received an early edition of You Don’t Know Jack, an irreverent trivia game that formed roughly 17 percent of my personality.

One of the first things I did when our dial-up modem was connected was try to download as many things related to Quentin Tarantino as I possibly could. Images and posters from his films, snippets of songs featured on soundtracks, and most especially the then-massive QuickTime video files of the trailers for his films Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (and True Romance and Natural Born Killers). I would tie up the phone line in my mom’s house for hours trying to obtain these two-minute videos.

I watched the above piece of media thousands of times. I didn’t own the movie. I certainly couldn’t stream it. Hell, I wasn’t even supposed to have seen it. (Even then, at 12, I had my ways.) There were not many Tarantino-related artifacts online in ’94, at least not that I could find. Interviews transcribed on GeoCities sites. A BBC documentary that was circulated in chunks. Copies of screenplays that would pop up on message boards and disappear. The level of lore that was discussed was surprising to 12-year-old me—hearing that Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction and Mr. Blonde, a.k.a. Vic Vega, from Reservoir Dogs were brothers, and could one day meet on screen melted my mind. These were my backrooms. The place where you see an image or hear a snatch of dialogue and the spindle in your mind begins unraveling string everywhere. The monolith and its mammoth imperceptibility did this for Spielberg. Kane Parsons’s visualization of a world beyond our own that draws us in, absorbs our frailties, and reprocesses them in terrifying ways, is like this, too. They’re individual creations that are peeled off and take on a life of their own. I didn’t grow up to make Close Encounters, not close. But the kid who was nervously bouncing his knee while seated before a computer waiting waiting waiting for that trailer to download is sitting before one 30 years later, still chewing on what dragged me to the feeling in the first place, still unpacking, still thinking through. I’ll be a Star Child yet.

Physical Media Corner

Speaking of wunderkinds-turned-masters, today is the day when Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another arrives on 4K SteelBook from Warner Bros. Home Entertainment. My favorite movie of 2025 took its sweet time getting to this format and packaging, but it is worth it.

I’ve watched the film eight times in seven ways.

1. September 7, 2025: On 35mm (I think?) at the Directors Guild of America, the very first public screening of the film. It was there where Steven Spielberg first compared the movie to Dr. Strangelove, threading a needle perfectly from Kubrick to himself to Paul, three generations of American filmmakers sorting through fear, desire, and confusion in this life.

2. September 8, 2025: The next day, at the film’s Los Angeles premiere in digital IMAX at the Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

3. September 24, 2025: In 70mm IMAX at the AMC CityWalk, the first publicly sold screening in Los Angeles. I sat in the fourth row all the way to the right and simply couldn’t see all of the screen!

4. September 26, 2025: In VistaVision at the Vista Theater on my 16th wedding anniversary lol. The reel ran out and had to be reset twice. Eventually, the projectionist pivoted to digital and saved the screening. VistaVision is finicky.

5. October 22, 2025: Again in VistaVision with several friends at The Vista. It didn’t break this time.

6. February 3, 2026: In VistaVision on the Warner Bros. lot before I moderated a discussion of the film with PTA, Leonardo DiCaprio, and producer Sara Murphy. Apparently there are only six operational VistaVision projectors in the world and only two in California, and I’ve seen it on both. This one featured a highly memorable post-event conversation I’ll keep to myself.

7. March 15, 2026: Streamed on HBO Max. I watched the film immediately after getting home from recording our post–Academy Awards Big Picture episode in which we discussed One Battle winning Best Picture.

8. June 2, 2026: At home on 4K in my garage.

I list these out to enumerate the various ways we can see something we love, the ways it can change in different environments at different times, and to mark the first year of a relationship with a work of art that impacted me deeply. PTA’s film has been picked over ever since it was first released, but it stands clearly as a major work of middle-aged reflection, watching your descendants grapple with the mess you inherited and somehow made a little worse. The movie is completely legible to me, narratively and emotionally, but it also has phases of mystery and ecstasy. When the Gringo Coyote sits Ghetto Pat down to explain their new identities and how the transponders work, I can feel myself going somewhere else, as the mechanics of a movie shift me out of one feeling and into another seamlessly. It’s a specific but ephemeral quality. Eight times down, it still happens.

On the disc, there is a pristine 4K transfer that captures Michael Bauman’s sun-glazed photography. I paused on the sequence in which Tony Goldwyn’s Christmas Adventurer sits with Colonel Lockjaw and when he says they “live by the Golden Rule,” he is illuminated by a piss-golden light. The whole room is a stomach-churning shade of yellow. It’s a beautiful example of lighting and production design underlining a character’s insidious nature.

The special features are modest but unique and essential for fans of the film. There are camera and lighting tests that spotlight the cast and the late producer and assistant director Adam Somner, to whom the film is dedicated. The camera really seems to love Teyana Taylor, especially, whose ease staring down the barrel is evident given her years of experience as a pop star. Chase Infiniti’s screen test opposite DiCaprio is included, which operates like a two-handed stage play. It also features a brief verite sequence that shows the way the Vista Theater prepared to show the film on opening night, including loading the enormous VistaVision reels, conversations with the masses lined up to see it, and post-screening reactions. And then the coup de grace is Learning, Studying … Always Perfecting: The Making of One Battle After Another, a 52-minute documentary that I believe is the first officially commissioned piece like this on a PTA movie since the essential and often heartbreaking That Moment: Magnolia Diary. The energy in this one is dramatically sunnier, a collection of B-roll, behind the scenes observations, and scenes framed differently than what we see in the film. There is a marvelous brief moment in the doc where the baby girl who plays little Willa is seen gently cooing and relaxing to the strains of “Loving You” by Minnie Riperton, who, of course is PTA’s late mother-in-law.

This disc has been in high demand for months and is hard to find right now, but even if you can’t get it, I suspect WB will print up more soon. OBAA is one of the movies of our time. I’m happy to finally slot it on the shelf.

Until next week, when things change forever again, I’ll see you at the movies.

Welcome back to Projections, the only movie newsletter that boldly explores the liminal state in all forms—but especially if the media is physical.

Today I’m digging into two remarkable May movie release stories that are inextricably linked—Obsession and Backrooms. Where they come from, and where they’re taking us.

Thanks to everyone who signed up to read extended thoughts on my first Cannes Film Festival. While not the best slate I could have hoped for, the experience was unforgettable and I’m already plotting how to avoid missing crucial titles and effectively navigate the hype train in 2027. I also look forward to seeing how attending the festival unlocks the rest of my moviewatching year.

OK, let’s get into it.

I’ve been listening to Jimi Hendrix a lot lately. I don’t know what put him into my mind, but he’s back in there. Hendrix is a landmark artist for teenagers discovering a transformational moment in rock ’n’ roll, when the genre firmly entered a psychedelic mode and altered its constitution. You grow out of him as a young person, and then, when you get much older, you grow back in. Hendrix represents a before-and-after—the language of guitar rock, with its rockabilly-blues origins and standard verse-chorus-verse structures disintegrated in Hendrix’s trail. He was the logical extension and conclusion of Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Buddy Holly, Dick Dale, Link Wray, Pete Townshend, Dave Davies, Eric Clapton, and many more. No one has really surpassed him as a cultural figure holding a guitar since. Hendrix is both mythic and institutional history now. With his brief catalog having been pored over by musicians, scholars, and fans for half a century, he’s more like Marilyn Monroe or JFK, a ’60s icon who doubles as foundational wallpaper. But I keep coming back, trying to recapture the feeling of hearing his songs for the first time—the mournful restraint of “Little Wing,” the full-throated blues thunder of “If 6 Was 9,” the chaotic proto-Led Zeppelin frenzy of “Manic Depression.” I can’t shake that feeling I first had. Ecstasy. Like walls coming down.

I have an addictive relationship to music, especially micro moments of catharsis. I can listen to 10-second snatches of a song hundreds of times in a row to conjure that ineffable emotional connection. Hendrix’s song “Are You Experienced?” is one of those examples in my life. It opens with a drum-bass-guitar recording played in reverse, which sounds like a wire brush being rubbed along the fretboard, before exploding into a gong-like pronouncement of rock exultation—BRONG!—as an A-flat octave chimes and Hendrix lazily croons, “If you can just …. get your …. mind together …” It’s one of the sonic signatures of 1960s popular music. Welcome to the new age, it seems to harken, what’s past was merely prologue. Hendrix was 24 years old when he wrote and recorded the song.

I’ve been thinking about Hendrix, and many of the artists I’ve spent my life celebrating and contextualizing, who all did such form-breaking work early in their lives. Movies and music are alike in this way—they require a tremendous amount of technical knowledge and practice, but some of the most memorable and transformative outcomes are made by relative novices. Not knowing too much is a skill unto itself. I bring this up because the two filmmakers whose work is resonating so profoundly this month are also at the very beginning of something, and how they are using the tools at their disposal to distort and redefine the form is becoming a fascination of mine.

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They had us in the first half! After a nine-day sojourn to Cannes for my first (and the festival’s 79th) edition, I experienced what so many attendees have felt over the years—inconsistency followed by exultation. After a perfunctory and disappointing week one, the Croisette sprang to life over the weekend. Premieres with verve, oddity, and audacity just barely reset the tone for what seemed like a truly dreary competition lineup for the first time in years.

I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I think the grade-inflated recent spate of Oscar-accepted titles like The Zone of Interest, Parasite, and Drive My Car that will also go down as all-time festival classics had prepped me for something spiritual here in France. I guess I just assumed I’d be confronted with a masterpiece in real time, an experience I’ve had very rarely in my life at festivals. (Uncut Gems at Telluride was a particularly memorable evening.) Alas, I didn’t see anything that had me levitating out of my chair. Several good films, some urgent, others delicate and worthy of deeper examination. But near as I could tell, there was no Drive, The Tree of Life, or Melancholia (all of which premiered in competition in 2011.) And while I did miss a few films in the early days of the festival—still kicking myself about not seeing La Gradiva, Iron Boy, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma—none of those seemed to cross the barrier to the truly sublime.

Still, there are movies that made an impact, that have now entered the thunderdome of discussion for the next 10 months. You can hear Amanda and I break down our experience in full, from black-tie premieres to parties to navigating the madness to Oscars odds and jury prizes.

But there’s more to know. These are the ones to track, to namedrop at a cocktail party, to add to your watchlist.

La bola negra (The Black Ball)

Dir. Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi

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Welcome back to Projections, where I am coming to you from an elegant apartment in Cannes decorated with Helmut Newton nude portraits. Europe! The sun is shining high, cinema is coursing through my veins, and I am sleeping like a homeless cat, whenever and wherever I can.

Today’s column will be a bit more brief as time management is the name of the game at film festivals, but I’ll be back with more thoughts on Friday. Today, this trip is stirring some thoughts about purpose.

I don’t know if you’ve heard, but it’s been an … uneven festival thus far. Riding high off a run of launches in recent years — Triangle of Sadness, The Substance, Anora, The Secret Agent — the legendary festival has taken on a greater import to U.S. film culture than it has had since the 1990s. So when I finally booked the trip to visit La Croisette it was with some industrial intent — can I make my movie year more manageable and my work more informed by seeing the heights of world cinema at their birthing stage? How foolish to attempt strategy in the face of art. There’s still plenty of festival left here, about five full days of programming before the prizes are handed out. But what I’ve seen so far has been a mixed bag to say the least. Which has underlined the silliness of my intention. Just being here, absorbing the design, pageantry, and artifice of the experience has been revealing in ways a single movie never could have been.

Last night, I saw Ron Howard’s documentary of Richard Avedon, the hallowed fashion photographer and portrait master. In recounting his own origin story, Avedon explained how he developed his photographic style during his initial trip to Paris as a man in his 20s seeking purpose. The active, high-toned, hyper-elegant compositions he conjured with models in the city are now seen as form-setting, but at the time, he carefully choreographed each image to redefine glamour and style in one fell swoop. Looking back on it, he marveled at the sheer invention – he just made it all up and somehow it became the standard.

As I watched the sequence, it reminded me of a moment Amanda Dobbins and I had the night before, walking up the red carpet staircase to enter the Lumiere Theatre for the gala premiere of James Gray’s Paper Tiger. It was our first Palais premiere, and what we saw was not Adam Driver and Miles Teller in focus on the carpet, but rather everything else. The raft of aged European photographers working their life through premieres. The hordes of security and admissions ushers swarming in red coats and black suits, directing human traffic like some faux-friendly secret police. The ceaseless traffic, by car and by foot all around the venue, a tangle of flesh fighting for space. The signage and brand integrations looming over the proceedings, a faceless reminder of how this glamour is funded and justified. The now familiar if still rancid stench of overcranked perfume battling body odor and cigarette smoke. It’s a grim carnival and also the most fun a movie freak can have. And just like Avedon’s models, it’s all made up. The bits and pieces you see from across the pond, endlessly scrolling through photos or fast reactions on social media, the crackpot theories about competition programming or standing ovation runtimes — it’s all carefully engineered.

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Welcome back to Projections, the only serious cinema newsletter on Earth where a grown man will excitedly celebrate a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 4K box set.

Today, I am preparing for my first visit to the Cannes International Film Festival, so I’ll share with you my most anticipated movies, my moviegoing strategy, and where my naivete may lead me in the next two weeks. Plus: Physical Media Corner, a new movie rec, and more.

But before we get into it, I wanted to say thank you to everyone who has jumped on board with this endeavor, especially paid subscribers. I’m going to write a little more frequently during Cannes and will experiment with format, column styles, some historical movie deep dives, and interviews. I’m also working on setting a consistent time for paid subscriber chats every week. Last Friday, we launched the first Physical Media chat so I could see what everyone has been picking up lately. In the aftermath of the High Council meeting, it was nice to see and be seen. Come join us next time. I’ll send an email.

The Cannes-ticipation Index

Before I start rattling off titles, it might be useful to understand the festival landscape in 2026. If you’ve been listening to The Big Picture this decade, you know the outsized importance Cannes now holds in the Oscar race, with the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, signalling the beginning of an 10-month frenzy to anoint Best Picture contenders. It’s all way too early, but also whets our appetite while we’re enduring summer blockbuster doldrums. Last year, two Cannes titles cracked BP—The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value—and four of the five International Feature nominees premiered in competition. But the festival is obviously significantly more than just a bellwether in a horse race.

The fall festivals—Venice, Telluride, Toronto, New York—still occupy a similar role in the season, rolling out hundreds of new movies. But as the Oscars and U.S. movie consumption experiences an increasingly international growth, it’s Cannes that feels like the most vital moment on the calendar right now, with a highly curated competition. That’s one of many reasons I wanted to go this year.

That is in part because of its legacy as the most visible launch pad for international cinema, with winners that include hallowed filmmaker figures like Lean, Welles, Clouzot, Buñuel, Visconti, Fellini, Wenders, Altman, Coppola, Kurosawa, Lynch, Tarantino, Kiarostami, and Campion. A Palme win is a moment of certification in a rare club. Not every victory has aged gracefully but there are far fewer misses on the list than Best Picture at the Academy Awards. And the bleed-through has begun—two of the past seven Palme winners went on to win Best Picture. Cannes titles have appeared in the race in seven of the past eight years.

And this takeover seems to be operating with an inverse proportion to Hollywood’s relationship to the festival—there are zero major U.S. studio titles at Cannes this year. Not even an out-of-competition premiere for a summer blockbuster like Toy Story 5. And none from A24, either. (Perhaps an aftereffect of the unfortunate premiere of Eddington last year. Good reminder not to always trust the early word out of festivals.) It’s a fascinating choice that certainly wounds the U.S. film press’s coverage, but doesn’t mean much for the quality of the films.

The competition at the festival is always one marked by ebbs and flows across the two weeks—every year, you will hear critics grouse about the lineup in the lead-up, during the proceedings, and after its conclusion. But you will also hear impassioned (often retroactive) defenses of the slate. As with anything film culture, it’s a present tense doom in persistent conflict with the nostalgic afterglow. I’m eager to go through the same cycle myself. But from where I sit, this is a damned exciting selection of movies. Let’s talk about ’em.

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Welcome back to the zoetrope, where the wheel keeps turning in the world of moving images. Today in Projections we’re talking about Greta Gerwig’s Narnia adaptation moving to 2027 and what it means for Netflix’s commitment to putting movies in theaters … some Academy Awards rule changes … my beloved Anne Hathaway and her one-of-a-kind career… a little gem you should check out … and, of course, Physical Media Corner.

But first, thank you to GQ and writer Frazier Tharpe for talking with me about this newsletter, my history in music journalism and why I’m washed now, my experience with Steven Spielberg earlier this year, and more. I was an editor and writer at GQ between 2009 and 2012, so this was an honor to be featured. You can read the whole interview here.

OK, on to the movies.

Netflix’s Theatrical Window Has Opened. Quick, Everyone Jump Through It.

Last Friday afternoon, from a news dump grew a beautiful rose. After a production delay, Netflix announced that Greta Gerwig’s Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew would move off of its Thanksgiving release date to February 12, 2027. And, more importantly, the streaming service confirmed the movie would receive Netflix’s first-ever first-run theatrical release with a 45-day window. I cannot overstate the importance of this for movie fans.

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This weekend, I took my daughter to a local video store, Vidéothèque, to rent a few movies. Even in 2026, it’s a tradition I am attempting to instill, that movies can be discovered not just on a screen at home or in a theater, but in a third place, where you can run your hands along the racks lining the aisles and pull something that you’ve never heard of off a shelf. It’s always a lot of fun—this weekend, we grabbed The Boxtrolls (we watched it right away and she is obsessed), Hotel Transylvania 2 (sure), and 1995’s live-action Casper (cannot wait to ghost-pill this spooky-curious little kid). One neat feature of Vidéothèque is a classic table-top arcade cabinet. My daughter has grown interested in this for obvious reasons—flashing lights, cute characters—and so this time we brought quarters to play. She chose Ms. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong. It was challenging—timing and joystick issues, general dexterity, etc. She’s not yet 5. But she raised a vital question: “How do I win?” I don’t think I’ve ever won Ms. Pac-Man or Donkey Kong, and I’m not quite sure what it would mean if I did. You get added to an all-time scoreboard? In my experience at the arcade, it’s a zero-sum game. You either win or you die. Video games are helpfully instructive about life in that way.

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