Movie Posters by Eric Rohman
Some nice work here from Swedish designer Eric Rohman, who designed thousands of movie posters in the early-to-mid 20th century. (via meanwhile)
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A24’s Young Anthony Bourdain Movie
Huh. A24 is coming out with an Anthony Bourdain biopic that focuses on the time period around the chef/writer’s college years, when he first started working in kitchens. Directed by Matt Johnson, who co-created Nirvana the Band the Show and directed BlackBerry. Could be good. (via rex)
The Visual Comedy of Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs
I’m gonna call it: Every Frame a Painting, my all-time favorite YouTube channel, is back. Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos stopped producing their fantastic video essays back in 2017 and while they have popped up here and there since then, they’ve mostly stuck to their retirement.
But for the past few months, the duo have been releasing video essays produced in partnership with Criterion: Night of the Living Dead: Limitations into Virtues, The Blade (1995): The Edges of Wuxia, and just yesterday, The Visual Comedy of Isle of Dogs (embedded above).
For the past three decades, Wes Anderson has left a distinctive fingerprint in American comedy, with his penchant for artificial worlds, deadpan performances, literary devices, and snappy narration. But there’s something else. These movies are funny to look at. Over the years, Anderson has experimented more and more with visual comedy. And none of this is more apparent than in Isle of Dogs.
It looks like they’re doing about one video a month. I hope they keep it up…I love their videos.
(Ok, maybe don’t read this bit until you’ve watched the Isle of Dogs video, but did you detect that Zhou’s narration seems to be synced to the mouth movements of the characters in the clips he’s talking over? Such a great little detail of visual comedy…I clapped my hands in glee like a toddler when I noticed.)
The Film That Attacks You
For his latest video essay, Evan Puschak tells us about Un Chien Andalou, the pioneering surrealist short film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The film is particularly notable for a shocking shot in the opening scene, which, if you’ve seen it, you’ve likely never forgotten. Said Buñuel of the film:
This film has no intention of attracting nor pleasing the spectator; indeed, on the contrary, it attacks him, to the degree that he belongs to a society with which surrealism is at war.
You can watch Un Chien Andalou on YouTube:
One wonders what Buñuel and Dalí would have made of YouTube…
Some Cool Movie Explosions
Listen, sometimes you just want to watch things blow up. But safely and without consequence (although Arnold Schwarzenegger did somehow become the governor of California). So, can I interest you in three minutes of movie explosions? The 80s and 90s were really a golden age for kick-ass movie explosions. (via @tvaziri.com)
I Love Boosters
Boots Riley made his directorial debut with the totally weirdo (complimentary) movie Sorry to Bother You in 2018. He’s been quiet since then, but he’s back with a new comedy, I Love Boosters. This looks great. From a review on Letterboxd:
Maximalist social commentary delivered with anime action and colourful high strangeness. Did it kind of fall off the rails towards the end? Absolutely. Was it fun as fuck and creative right to the end? You best believe it. God bless the shoplifters. I got major Everything Everywhere All At Once vibes from this…
The film debuted at SXSW in March and is opening in theaters on May 22.
Finally! The Trailer for the Coyote vs. ACME Movie.
We thought this day would never come. But we kept the faith and now we can begin to reap the rewards: there is actually a trailer for the Coyote vs. ACME movie and the movie itself is actually coming out on Aug 28.
Quick recap of the situation so far: Ian Frazier wrote a story for the New Yorker in 1990 about an imagined lawsuit brought by Wile E. Coyote against the Acme Company. Fast forward to 2022-23: James Gunn, Dave Green, Will Forte, and others make a movie based on the NYer article…and then Warner Bros. shelves the movie to take a tax write-off. Like, they are going to destroy the completed film. And now, somehow, miraculously, Warner seems to have finally done the right thing and sold the rights to the film so it can be released (which is theoretically the primary reason for their business, releasing movies).
Criterion x Every Frame a Painting: The Edges of Wuxia
Every Frame a Painting’s Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou are back with a video essay about pushing the boundaries of genre in Tsui Hark’s 1995 film The Blade.
One reason filmmakers like to work in a genre is that it gives us a pre-made box: a set of expectations, tropes, and boundaries. On the one hand, we want to play within that box, and on the other, we want to push against its edges. Tsui Hark’s The Blade is an exploration and a deconstruction of the box that is wuxia.
If you’re not familiar with wuxia, the video explains the genre; it’s basically Chinese martial arts fantasy — think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Hero. (thx, neil)
Hollywood’s World Map of California
This is a map published in 1927 by Paramount Studios showing the areas of California & Nevada that doubled as shooting locations for far-flung locales, including Siberia, Wales, the Nile, New England, the Red Sea, and the Alps.
The Testaments TV Series
I’d vaguely remembered that Hulu was adapting The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, as a sequel to the TV series of the same name, but I was surprised to find out that the show has premiered and is already three episodes in (a fourth will be available today).
The initial series lost its way after 2-3 seasons, but I still ended up watching the whole thing. I’ll probably give The Testaments a shot as well.
The Christophers
I’m so glad Steven Soderbergh unretired from filmmaking. His newest film, The Christophers, looks amazing. It stars Ian McKellen as a famous artist and Michaela Coel as his assistant — but of course there’s more to it. Reviewer David Sims calls it both a heist movie and “a meditation on the relationship between art and commerce”. I hope this one actually comes to Vermont so I can see it in the theater.
Coel and McKellen both have such great faces, don’t you think?
Ghost Elephants
Ghost Elephants is a new documentary film directed by Werner Herzog for National Geographic. Here’s the trailer.
For over a decade, Dr. Steve Boyes, conservation biologist and National Geographic Explorer, has been in search of a mysterious, elusive herd of Ghost Elephants in the highlands of Angola, deep within its forests. From acclaimed director Werner Herzog (“Grizzly Man”), GHOST ELEPHANTS follows Boyes on an epic journey as he sets out with some of the best master trackers in the world, in pursuit of an animal long believed to be a myth.
From Peter Sobczynski’s rave review of the film:
The subject of Herzog’s fascination this time around is South African naturalist Dr. Steve Boyes, and while he seems perfectly staid and affable at first sight, he has an obsession within him that has consumed his life to such an extent that if he didn’t actually exist, Herzog might have had to invent him. The focus of his fascination is a species of giant elephant residing in the highlands of Angola, known as “ghost elephants” for their apparent ability to avoid detection. Indeed, not only has Boyes never actually seen one of these creatures with his own eyes, but he is not even certain that such creatures exist—the closest he has come is a massive elephant shot near that area in Angola in 1955, now on display at the Smithsonian.
Herzog, National Geographic, elephants, quixotic quest — who says no? Ghost Elephants is available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu.
Gugusse and the Automaton
The Library of Congress recently discovered a copy of a “long-lost” film made in ~1897 by George Méliès called Gugusse and the Automaton (Gugusse et l’Automate), which “had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century” and “was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot”. It’s also one of the first science fiction films ever made.
You can watch a digitized copy of the whole film here (it’s only 45 seconds long):
And here’s the story of how the film was discovered.
Equally delighted was Bill McFarland, the donor who had driven the box of films from his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, to have the cache evaluated.
His great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee, had been a potato farmer and schoolteacher in western Pennsylvania by day, but by night he was a traveling showman. He drove his horse and buggy from town to town to dazzle the locals with a projector and some of the world’s first moving pictures.
He set up shop in a local schoolroom, church, lodge or civic auditorium and showed magic lantern slides and short films with music from a newfangled phonograph. It was shocking.
“They must have been thrilled,” McFarland said. “They must have been out of their minds to see this motion picture and to hear the Edison phonograph.”
Nine Inch Nails Releases Tron: Ares Remix Album
Last week, Nine Inch Nails released an album of remixes and unreleased session music from their Tron: Ares score called Tron Ares: Divergence. I’m listening to it now; pretty good so far.
Lumière, Le Cinema!
Lumière, Le Cinema! is a new documentary film by Thierry Frémaux about Auguste & Louis Lumière and the early days of motion pictures — and includes 100+ newly restored films. It’s playing at MoMA at the end of this month; here’s their description:
Witness the birth of cinema with Thierry Frémaux’s Lumière, Le Cinéma! (2025), about the pioneering achievements of the French entrepreneurs Auguste and Louis Lumière in the late 19th century. Journey back to the 1890s, when the Lumière Company, with their astonishing new invention, the cinematograph, made it possible for audiences to voyage around the world in moving pictures for the first time. Featuring gorgeous new restorations of more than 100 comedies, dramas, and travelogues — some famous, some forgotten, and some never before seen — and set to an evocative score of period music by Gabriel Fauré, this wondrous documentary enables contemporary viewers to imagine an entirely new language of storytelling unfolding film by glorious film.
Just watching the trailer is wild — the restored footage from short films that are 120, 130 years old is astonishing. From a review in Collider:
From riding atop trains to showing off goofy vaudevillian acts or brief moments of comical violence, each clip speaks not only to what came before, but how these short pieces behave as the DNA for every genre, every facet of what we consider filmmaking to this very day. The biggest joy of all, of course, is the ability to see these films projected large and in all their restored glory, not simply segregated to being streamed on a small screen, or to suffer through damage that makes these segments feel all that more removed from the present. It’s as if many of these clips have been rescued from an island where they have been deserted for more than a century, carefully dusted off, and allowed finally to be seen in a context that their creators could only have dreamed possible.
Vintage Art House Movie Posters by Peter Strausfeld
The excellent Poster House museum in NYC currently has an exhibition up of posters by Peter Strausfeld.
Between 1947 and 1980, Peter Strausfeld, a German refugee interned on the Isle of Man during World War II, created unique, compelling posters for London’s Academy Cinema—the city’s premier art house movie theater. Founded by Elsie Cohen in 1931, the Academy specialized in international films that eschewed classic Hollywood narratives, highlighting works by now-famous directors like Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Wajda, and Satyajit Ray. While these films now hold cult status for cinema aficionados, in the early to mid-20th century, art house remained a novel and daring form of cinema that few theaters showcased.
Throughout his longstanding relationship with the Academy, Strausfeld created over 300 bold, predominantly single-color linocut compositions with a deceptively simple hand-printed feel.
An accompanying book is available from RIT Press. More of Strausfeld’s work can be found at It’s Nice That, Orson & Welles, and Mubi. (via the new yorker)
The Track
The Track is a documentary film about a group of athletes training in post-war Bosnia to make the Olympics in luge.
The Track is a coming-of-age journey of three friends chasing their improbable Olympic dreams in post-war Bosnia. Training on a crumbling track left behind from the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, the boys are guided by their devoted coach Senad, whose fight to rebuild the neglected track mirrors his determination to create a future for his athletes in a country facing one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Europe.
Filmed over five transformative years, The Track captures an intimate and deeply human coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of a nation still recovering from the scars of war, political corruption, and rising nationalism. As the boys balance Olympic ambition with the pull of street life, heartbreak, and survival, their paths begin to diverge, revealing the stark realities young people face in modern Bosnia.
You can check the website for online and IRL showings; it’s on Amazon Prime in the US.
Seu Jorge’s Lovely Tribute to David Bowie
For his 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson enlisted Brazilian musical artist Seu Jorge to perform several of David Bowie’s songs in Portuguese. Jorge released an album of the songs about a year or so later.
A few weeks ago, to mark the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s death, Jorge released a hour-long set of him performing those songs:
Just an acoustic guitar, a microphone, and the beautiful coastline of São Paulo.
The Best Films of 2025
David Ehrlich is back with my favorite end-of-year celebration of film; here’s his look back at the best films of 2025 (YouTube). See the full list at Letterboxd. I’ve only seen five of these so it’s difficult to comment on the list as a whole, but I feel like Sinners should have been higher?
Rian Johnson Breaks Down a Scene From Wake Up Dead Man
Along with Sinners and One Battle After Another,1 Wake Up Dead Man is one of my favorite films of the year. So I enjoyed director Rian Johnson breaking down the investigative scene in the bar in this Vanity Fair video.
This is, for me, even a little more personal than the previous movies because faith and religion is at the heart of this movie. And I grew up very Christian. I grew up not Catholic. This movie is set in a Catholic church. I grew up Protestant, kind of what we would call evangelical today. I was a youth group kid and it wasn’t just that my parents took me to church. I really, my whole perspective in life was really based on a relationship with Christ. It was very important to me. I’m not anymore, I’ve kind of grown away from that later in life, but it’s still something that I have deep feelings about. So this movie, in a way, by having Father Jud and Benoit Blanc kind of talk about this and kind of butt heads about it, it was a way for me to take both of those perspectives inside me and get them talking with each other.
The practical effect with the photograph (~10:05 mark) was 💯.
- I can’t for the life of me ever remember the name of this movie and end up searching for it (“dicaprio pta movie”) every time I want to write or talk about it.↩
Muppet Versions of Xmas Movie Posters
RiotGrlErin made some great mashups of Christmas movie posters featuring Muppets. I think my favorite is Oscar the Elf but the Die Hard one is so good too. Many more in this thread.
Trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey
Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is my #1 most anticipated film of 2026 and this trailer has got me revved up! Nolan’s trailers never reveal much, but still, it looks gooood.
I am still skeptical of Matt Damon at Odysseus. Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Circe, and Hoyte van Hoytema doing the cinematography tho! And how do you fit this entire story into 2.5 hours? (Unless Nolan’s gonna go for 3.5 to 4 hours?) Opens in theaters July 17, 2026.
Forks Out: A Benoit Blanc Sesame Street Mystery
For years now, the people have wanted only one thing: for Daniel Craig’s chicken-fried detective Benoit Blanc to feature in a Muppet movie (with Craig as the only human). Earlier this year, Netflix picked up the streaming rights for Sesame Street. That partnership has borne some unexpected fruit: Forks Out: A Benoit Blanc Sesame Street Mystery.
In the video, detective Beignet Blanc arrives to investigate who ate Cookie Monster’s triple berry pie.
I have arrived to this Street of Sesame on a sunny day turned cloudy. We have a culinary culprit in our oven mitts. And to solve this confectionary conundrum, we must look right in front of our googly eyes at Cookie Monster.
The whole thing is delightful. See also Nerdist’s Rainbow Connection: A Benoit Blanc Mystery.
Disclosure Day
Over his storied career, Steven Spielberg has made only four studio films about aliens: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — the outsized influence of the first two gives the impression that he’s made many more.
Over the past 20 years, Spielberg has favored more realistic fare (Lincoln, Munich, The Fabelmans) but this summer he’s back with an alien movie, Disclosure Day, based on an original story no less. Very excited for this! In theaters on June 12, 2026.
New Animated Version of Animal Farm?
Hmm, I really don’t know about this one: an animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm as a sort of Ice Age-ish comedy adventure? One commenter on YouTube says, “This movie is 100% gonna end with a random dance party scene with the pigs and humans dancing to something like Uptown Funk” and another suggests that “this is like a bad Family Guy joke from 2007 escaped into the real world”.
From a review in IGN:
Gone are the specific allusions to the Russian Revolution and the stinging critique of Stalinism laced into Orwell’s “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” allegory. Instead, Serkis paints the terrifying rise of porcine dictator Napoleon (Seth Rogen, playing brilliantly to and against type) in a broader brush for a modern era of big business run amok. In toning down the more graphic elements of its descent into totalitarianism and simplifying the depths of its commentary, the director and performance-capture pioneer trades a dystopian tone for something a little more uplifting. It’s a fun movie with some creative visual choices and a great cast, but it’s also hard not to feel like it lost some teeth on its journey from the page to the screen.
This Variety review isn’t much more encouraging:
Serkis’ 21st-century update dilutes Orwell’s political allegory in favor of what passes for something more “audience friendly”: His approach adopts the celebrity voices, cutesy character designs and antic, mile-a-minute energy of big-studio American toons. The result isn’t nearly as polished as Illumination or DreamWorks movies, but “good enough for government work,” as the saying goes.
Born Poor
Born Poor (PBS/Frontline) is a documentary filmed across 14 years about three kids in the US as they grow into young adults while “dealing with an economy where they face more obstacles than opportunities”. Free to watch online (probably US-only, so fire up your VPN if you live elsewhere). From an accompanying article:
More than a decade ago, the Emmy-nominated documentary Poor Kids portrayed poverty in America as it’s rarely seen: through the eyes of children.
Now, those kids — Brittany, Johnny and Kaylie — are all grown up, fighting to overcome the lingering impact of childhood poverty as they navigate young adulthood.
“Once you get in the hole, it’s extremely hard to find your way out,” Brittany says.
She, Johnny and Kaylie continue to share their experiences with the American public in Born Poor, FRONTLINE’s season premiere. Filmed across 14 years, the documentary follows these three kids from three families across three chapters of their lives — from childhood through the teen years to young adulthood — and offers a powerful, personal and longitudinal look at the realities of growing up in poverty in the U.S.
“Do I ever get tired of the struggle? Absolutely,” Johnny says. “But I feel like if you get another day to breathe and wake up and make something happen, you got to get off your butt and make it happen.”
The original documentary was filmed in 2012; I couldn’t find it on PBS’s YT channel, but I think this is it:
The filmmakers updated the film in 2017:
I haven’t watched all of these so I don’t know how much the three versions overlap, but the 2025 version at the top is ~30 minutes longer than the other two.
See also the Up film series.
Shop Around Globally for Better Deals on Streaming Services
A streaming services savings tip from the Nomadico newsletter that I was not aware of:
I’m going to add Apple TV at home after watching only part of Severance on a United flight, but I’ll likely subscribe in Mexico where it’s 28% cheaper than the USA. You can play this arbitrage game with most of the streaming services — I once got HBO on sale for $5 a month. In Mexico you can get the highest tier of Netflix for the price of the middle tier stateside, a 39% monthly savings (with a better studio movie selection too). Shop around if moving around. In Turkey, for example, the highest tier of Netflix with 4K hi-def is less than US$10 per month. Try regional gift cards, signing up while in another country, or using a good VPN for the first transaction.
Anyone else tried this?
Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair
In just a few days (Dec 5), the entirety of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill duology will be released in theaters as one four-hour-long film. Here’s the trailer:
Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL: THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR unites Volume 1 and Volume 2 into a single, unrated epic—presented exactly as he intended, complete with a new, never-before-seen anime sequence.
And there will be an intermission. I haven’t seen KB in awhile and am looking forward to this.
Oh, and QT has a Kill Bill collab with Fortnite? Apparently in the original script, there was a scene where Yuki Yubari (Gogo Yubari’s twin sister) tries to get revenge on Kiddo, but it was cut because the director deemed it “too much to chew” for one shoot. Using Unreal Engine 5, Fortnite characters, and a motion-captured Uma Thurman, Tarantino has finally made the scene a reality. You can find it in the game or watch it on YouTube:
Why Is Everyone Running In Rom-Coms?
I am not generally a fan of rom-coms so I didn’t think I was going to post Evan Puschak’s newest video, but he’s so good at them. Puschak argues that rom-coms are compelling because they reflect the modern challenge of finding meaning as individuals.
In the modern day, we live in a world without a cosmic moral order, a framework of meaning to which everyone automatically subscribes. We had one for a while. But round about the year 1700, give or take a century, that framework started cracking, fragmenting, losing its authority, and the burden of finding meaning shifted onto individuals. We all became desperate seekers in a confusing and disjointed world.
It’s no coincidence that this shift roughly coincides with the emergence of the novel as a form of storytelling. In a profoundly new way, the novel concerned itself with individuals, ordinary individuals — their internal motivations, their inner lives, their ability to overcome obstacles to achieve a goal. Novels both reflected and shaped the way modern people saw their identities as narratives; as stories with a beginning, middle, and end; as quests for meaning.
And if that’s not interesting to you, turn down the sound and enjoy the kinetic pleasure of watching people — Tom Cruise, Meg Ryan, Dustin Hoffman, Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant — sprinting in a great 4-minute supercut.
Macaulay Culkin Watches Home Alone With His Kids Who Don’t Realize He’s Kevin
On tour for the 35th anniversary of Home Alone, Macaulay Culkin said his kids love the movie, but don’t know he’s Kevin. They’re only three and four years old, so this makes sense, but it’s still hilarious.
And while they will even get excited when they see the young character in montages on Disney+, where the film is available to stream, Culkin said, “They have no idea that I’m Kevin.” “They’re only three and four years old,” continued the actor, adding that he wants “to keep up that illusion as long as possible.”
But also, did you know Angels With Dirty Souls isn’t a real movie? I didn’t.
Since we’re here, how about a Home Alone oral history from 10 years ago?
Mark Radcliffe
Chris wanted to do snow dressing as part of the background of the movie. Budgetwise, we couldn’t really afford it. On the second day of shooting, we had a blizzard. From then on, we pretty much had to bring in snow machines after it started to melt and match it for the rest of the movie. I remember that whenever the snow melted, we were spraying ice, and then they had problems with ice. The next thing, they were literally laying bags of ice to try and create snow.
James Giovannetti Jr., second assistant director
We had refrigerated semitrucks of shaved ice coming to the set. There must’ve been about 15 guys dumping tons of ice in the yard every day. We may have even got water in the house, because when it started melting, it started seeping into the basement.
Jacolyn Bucksbaum
The morning when Catherine O’Hara pulls up and finally gets home, it was gorgeous, real snow. The biggest snowstorm in years, and it was Valentine’s Day. Mother Nature really helped us out with that one.
There are actually quite a few Home Alone oral histories.
And most importantly, in my opinion, please read this thread about Die Hard vs Home Alone from two people with “philosophy” in their bio which includes the line, “The damned in hell are not more powerful for the fact that the fires do not consume them; it is part and parcel of their torment.”
I wonder if they could make Home Alone again now or does the ubiquity of cell phones preclude a lot of the dramatic tension the film relies on?
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