The Next Picture Show

Already the biggest blockbuster of the year so far, Project Hail Mary has proven itself about as audience-friendly as a story about looming worldwide ecological collapse can be. That makes it an interesting point of contrast with 1972’s Silent Running, which approaches many of the same basic narrative beats — a man in space on a solo mission that threatens his sanity, who finds his most human conn...

The Bride! is already a certified box-office flop, but does Maggie Gyllenhaal’s ambitious but deeply flawed sophomore feature as a writer-director have potential for a second life as a cult film? We consider that possibility as we run through the highs and lows, both intentional and unintentional, of a movie that, if nothing else, offers a lot to talk about. It also offers the opportunity to revis...

The obvious point of comparison for The Bride! is apparent in the title, but Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new revivification of The Bride of Frankenstein finds its animating spirit in a different film, with her protagonist couple spending a good portion of the movie on the run from the law in the 1930s in scenes that openly evoke Bonnie and Clyde. Whether The Bride! manages to rise anywhere close to the le...

With the 98th Academy Awards around the corner, we are breaking format this week to register the Next Picture Show's recommendations to the Academy of who should take home Oscar gold. Join us as three critics with competing tastes attempt to find consensus for this podcast's official endorsement for a single winner in all the major categories. Please share your thoughts about this year's Oscar nom...

Emerald Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights is full of stylistic provocations — skin walls, bed eggs, and light BDSM among them — but whether they are in service of, or distractions from, a bigger idea about the source material is up for debate this week. The divided reactions to Fennell’s contemporized take on an oft-adapted classic are reminiscent of the love-it-or-hate it response that greeted Baz...

With its bold stylization, pop soundtrack, and provocative sensibility, Emerald Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights appeals to a contemporary audience so openly it can’t help but call to mind Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation of another literary classic about doomed lovers, William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet. Fennell citing it as a reference point for her film prompted us to revisit what made Lurhmann’...

Sam Raimi's new survival thriller Send Help is more overtly comedic and cartoonishly violent than the other film in this week's pairing of dueling castaway duos, but those qualities are both rooted in complimentary ideas about class, gender, and power. They're also both rooted in a baseline cynicism toward humanity that informs a lot of Raimi's work, as well as our discussion of Send Help, for whi...

What happens when two people on opposite sides of a power imbalance end up stranded together on a deserted island? Before that was the premise of Sam Raimi’s new comedic thriller Send Help , it was the setup for Lina Wertmüller’s 1974 romantic farce Swept Away , only with the genders reversed and the sexual and political provocation turned way up. So this week we’re joined by critic, friend of the...

Even without Al Pacino's name in its cast list, the new Dead Man's Wire would invite comparisons to Dog Day Afternoon in its dramatization of a real-life 1970s hostage situation turned public spectacle. Whether it benefits from comparisons to Sidney Lumet's 1975 crime classic is another question, one we take up in our discussion of Gus Van Sant's first new feature in eight years. After that, we br...

In adapting the true story about a '70s hostage crisis that played out on television and in the public eye, Gus Van Sant's new Dead Man's Wire is just asking to be compared to 1975's Dog Day Afternoon —  and who are we to resist an invitation to talk about yet another Sidney Lumet classic? So this week we revisit a film we have all previously seen and admired, but still has the ability to surprise...

We’re kicking off the new year with our old tradition of looking back on the film year that was, as Scott, Keith, and Tasha gather to talk through their top films of 2025. After touching on some of last year’s broader filmgoing trends and blitzing through the bottom half of their top 10 lists, they talk through their respective top fives, which include several Next Picture Show selections from the...

Due to the confluence of holiday and flu seasons, our Best of 2025 episode is delayed a week, so in its place we're sharing a recent episode of The Lobby, our Patreon-exclusive series focusing on movies we don't cover on the main feed. If you'd like to become a Patreon supporter and get ad-free versions of the show, as well as more bonus content like this, you can head over to patreon.com/nextpict...

Whether he’s playing billiards or table tennis, a successful hustler requires no small amount of charisma, something Timothée Chalamet’s ping-pong pro undeniably has in Marty Supreme , though it’s of a decidedly different flavor than that of Paul Newman in The Hustler . Whether that charisma translates to a character we want to root for as he makes a mess of his own life, as well as those of the p...

The new Marty Supreme follows a table-tennis phenom with the talent necessary to beat the best players in the world, if only he can keep his self-destructive tendencies from getting in the way. Swap out “table tennis” for “pool” in that description and you more or less have Robert Rossen’s 1961 drama The Hustler, which we revisit this week not only to bask in the incomparable onscreen charisma of...

David Freyne’s new Eternity shoves a thematically rich afterlife scenario into a romcom-shaped container, resulting in an above-average example of the genre that nonetheless feels like it’s only scratching the surface of its narrative potential. That leaves us with a lot of logistical questions to mull in our discussion of the film — several of which Tasha addressed in her pair of conversations wi...

The new fantasy romcom Eternity turns on a scenario familiar from any number of films that imagine life after death as a bureaucratic process, but its focus on characters forced to make big, symbolic choices for big, symbolic reasons is particularly reminiscent of After Life, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s 1998 movie in which the recently departed are given one week to select a memory to take with them into...

Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams uses gorgeous imagery of the natural world, combined with an omniscient narrator quoting from the Denis Johnson novella the film adapts, to speak for a taciturn protagonist who struggles to understand, much less articulate, his place in the world. That approach has earned it the Terrence Malick comparisons that informed this pairing, but Train Dreams uses its own disti...

Clint Bentley’s new Train Dreams uses the vast canvas of the natural world to frame a relatively tiny story of a single human life, a juxtaposition of story and visuals that’s reminiscent of the work of Terrence Malick, in particular 1978’s Days of Heaven . Set, like Train Dreams , in the midst of America’s Industrial Revolution, Days of Heaven takes an elliptical approach to a fairly straightforw...

Don’t be alarmed by the title of this week’s movie selection, this is not our final episode — in fact, it’s our 500th, a milestone none of us expected to hit when we started this podcast a decade ago. So in honor of all our past pairings, we’re devoting this one-off episode to a film we’ve never managed to find an excuse to cover on this show, despite naming ourselves after it: THE LAST PICTURE SH...

From its nearly three-hour runtime to its deployment of some of the most deranged CGI you’ve ever seen committed to screen, Radu Jude’s DRACULA often feels like an extended act of trolling, but is it art? The answer to that question is inextricable from the film’s presentation of AI-derived art as grotesque, inhuman, and unsatisfying, and it makes DRACULA arguably more entertaining to discuss than...

Radu Jude’s DRACULA is, technically speaking, yet another movie about one of the most depicted antagonists in all of cinema, but in actuality it’s about a different beast that has fascinated filmmakers for nearly as long: filmmaking. Within the grand tradition of “movies about moviemaking,” DRACULA’s surreal humor, combined with its focus on a struggling filmmaker fantasizing about the film he mig...

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE is built on an undeniably hooky premise — a nuclear missile originating from an unknown source is heading right for us — but is that premise enough to support a successful movie? We’re joined once again by critic and author Jason Bailey to unpack that question, particularly as it applies to the film’s triptych structure and nervy ending gambit. That ending comes back into play...

Kathryn Bigelow’s new A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE games out a scenario that filmmakers have been grappling with since the mid-20th century, in particular the year 1964, which saw the release of two very different classics of the nuclear-catastrophe genre: DR. STRANGELOVE, followed a few months later by the other half of this week’s pairing, FAIL SAFE. If the bleak realism of Sidney Lumet’s nuclear thrille...

Paul Thomas Anderson’s ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER is a very different film in form and function than the other half of this pairing, RUNNING ON EMPTY, but it’s built on the same foundational questions as Sidney Lumet’s 1988 family drama: what does it mean to lead a revolutionary life, and how does one generation’s fight get handed off to the next? After talking through how ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER e...

Paul Thomas Anderson himself cited 1988’s RUNNING ON EMPTY as a direct influence on the new ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER, and it’s not difficult to see the rhymes between these two films about former revolutionaries trying to protect their kids from the consequences of their parents’ past. We’ll get into those rhymes more next week, but first we devote some time to Sidney Lumet’s 1988 film, which is l...