The Next Picture Show

With M. Night Shyamalan’s new GLASS purporting to be the culmination of his so-called Eastrail 177 trilogy, we’re returning to the film that set it in motion, and that many rank among the divisive writer-director’s best: UNBREAKABLE. How does this brooding, stylistically bold superhero origin story look today, in a culture where both comics and their movie adaptations play a much more central role...

The remarkable new animated film SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDERVERSE has us thwipping through the beloved web-slinger’s cinematic history to see how it culminated in a Miles Morales origin story that doubles as a giddy trip through Spidey-lore. After some collective swooning over SPIDERVERSE’s unique and eye-popping style and clever conceit, we put the new film in conversation with another top-tier S...

Spider-Man, the web-slinging comics creation of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, has made the leap to movie screens many times, but arguably never as successfully as in Sam Raimi’s 2004 sequel SPIDER-MAN 2 — or, perhaps, in the new animated entry INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE. This week we’re putting two of Spidey’s cinematic high-water marks in conversation, beginning with a deep dive into why SPIDER-MAN 2 hold...

Our trip through Girl World makes its second stop with Yorgos Lanthimos’ new period piece THE FAVOURITE, to see how its portrayal of women battling for social advantage in Queen Anne’s court looks next to the more contemporary high-school machinations of 2004’s MEAN GIRLS. After sharing our reactions to THE FAVOURITE and pinpointing its most “Lanthimosian” characteristics, we pit these two films a...

Yorgos Lanthimos’ THE FAVOURITE is, in the words of star Rachel Weisz, a bit like a “high-stakes MEAN GIRLS”: It’s the story of a woman in power challenged by a fresh young outsider, only it plays out in the halls of court rather than the halls of a suburban high school. In this half of our pairing examining the power plays and back-biting of “Girl World,” we look back first at Mark Waters’s MEAN...

We return to the City of Big Shoulders circa the present day for a discussion of Steve McQueen's thrilling new WIDOWS, a Chicago-set heist movie that builds on a foundation of urban corruption in a manner reminiscent of Michael Mann's 1981 debut THIEF. After sharing our reactions to WIDOWS, we look at the two films in tandem to see how they portray their respective criminal leaders, how they incor...

Director Steve McQueen’s new thriller WIDOWS is a Chicago-set heist film that puts to good use the city’s notorious corruption, which puts it in the company of Michael Mann’s stylish 1981 feature debut THIEF. In this half of our Windy City-centric pairing, we dig into THIEF and its strangely compelling criminal protagonist Frank, played by James Caan, to see what the film says about the kind of ci...

A landmark first feature shot in the 90s but never seen until now. Where Orson Welles' THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND is the story of a movie finished years after its director let it go, Sandi Tan’s new SHIRKERS is the story of a film its director could never really let go. In this half of our discussion on lost films found, we share our reactions to Tan’s unusual film, before bringing in Welles' WIND...

Orson Welles' final film is finally finished. We’re switching things up this week to look at a pair of new films that are also old films — sort of — which together show that while making movies is always hard, some are harder than others. Orson Welles shot THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND decades ago, but the previously unfinished film is only seeing the light of day now, alongside a documentary about a...

Bradley Cooper’s debut directorial feature A STAR IS BORN is the fourth film to bear that title, and the second to translate this Hollywood tale of rising and falling fame to the music industry. And much like George Cukor’s 1954 version starring Judy Garland, it’s a fantastic showcase for its leading lady, played this time around by Lady Gaga as an aspiring songwriter to Bradley Cooper’s fading ro...

Bradley Cooper’s new A STAR IS BORN remake is a current-day spin on a Hollywood fable that’s been around since the 1930s, about a struggling male star and the young ingenue he pushes toward fame. But its music-industry setting makes it a particularly apt match for George Cukor’s 1954 musical spin on the tale, starring a career-redefining Judy Garland as the titular star to James Mason’s fading one...

Robert Redford says that his starring role in David Lowery’s new THE OLD MAN AND THE GUN will be his final film performance, and if that turns out to be the case, it is in many ways an ideal bookend to Redford’s breakout role in the classic 1969 Western BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. In this second half of our Redford pairing, we talk over the many echoes between OLD MAN and BUTCH CASSIDY, fr...

David Lowery’s new THE OLD MAN AND THE GUN draws purposely and purposefully on the legacy of Robert Redford, which makes it a perfect bookend to Redford’s star-making turn in George Roy Hill’s elegiac 1969 blockbuster BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID. In this first half of our Redford double feature, we dive into that earlier film’s legacy, considering its place in the Western tradition, its qui...

Is FAHRENHEIT 11/9, Michael Moore’s latest essay-film about the state of the nation under Trump, a natural extension of the techniques used in his 1989 debut ROGER & ME, or a worst-case-scenario evolution of Moore’s filmmaking style? We try to wrap our heads around that question as we put the two films in conversation, looking at what they tell us about the figure Moore has become, how he’s af...

With Michael Moore’s latest provocation, FAHRENHEIT 11/9, in theaters, we’re returning to the liberal gadfly’s cinematic origins: 1989’s ROGER & ME, a first-person documentary about the declining fortunes of Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan, which makes a notable return appearance in his latest film. In this half of the pairing, we consider the impact of Michael Moore, for better and worse,...

Though BLACKKKLANSMAN is, like MALCOLM X, drawn from real life, Spike Lee’s newest film takes more liberties in telling its ostensibly true story (something that’s drawn criticism from some corners). And also like MALCOLM X, it’s a film set in the past that’s commenting, often directly, on the present. Together the two films give us a lot to talk about, from their respective uses of speechmaking a...

Spike Lee’s new BLACKKKLANSMAN is an urgent call to look to the past to understand the present, an approach it shares with many of Lee’s films, though perhaps none as strongly as his 1992 epic biopic MALCOLM X. The films revisit two different chapters in 20th-century history, and star two different members of the Washington family — Denzel and his son, John David — but both are pure Lee in both th...

Jon Turteltaub’s new late-summer sharkstravaganza THE MEG isn’t shy about the debt it owes to Steven Spielberg’s JAWS, nor about its clear conception as an international co-production partially aimed at the Chinese market. We discuss whether those qualities end up being an asset or a liability in our discussion of THE MEG, before bringing in JAWS to examine how the shark movie has progressed, and...

The new Jason Statham late-summer vehicle THE MEG, like so many middling shark movies before it, can trace its lineage directly to the 1975 film that made us afraid to go into the water: Steven Spielberg’s JAWS. In this half of our sharktastic discussion, we’re diving in (cautiously) to what your NPS crew considers a perfect movie, considering what gives JAWS its hidden depths, what it told us abo...

With its latest entry FALLOUT, the MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE franchise has solidified its evolution from the spy thriller Brian De Palma made in 1996 into the setpiece-centric, Tom Cruise-endangering action series we know it as today. In this half of our franchise-spanning conversation, we look at what FALLOUT, helmed by first-time returning director Christopher McQuarrie, brings to the table in terms o...

The new MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE — FALLOUT is the latest entry in a franchise that’s become a showpiece for Tom Cruise-endangering stunts and practical effects, but the surprisingly enduring action series began as something more akin to a spy thriller built around a handful of Hitchcockian setpieces. In this half of our franchise-spanning pairing, we look back at 1996’s MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE, in which Br...

As with Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 satirical oddity PUTNEY SWOPE, there’s a lot going on in Boots Riley’s new SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, which takes a similar anything-goes approach to the intersection of race and capitalism. In the second part of our “white voice” double feature, we dig into the anti-capitalist philosophy that unites Riley’s work and keeps SORRY TO BOTHER YOU on the rails, then we look a...

Rapper-director Boots Riley has said he hadn’t seen Robert Downey Sr.’s 1969 satirical comedy PUTNEY SWOPE when he made the buzzy new SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, but the films share so much on both a surface level (white men providing the literal voices of black characters) and deeper thematic ones (concerns about capitalism, race, and what it might take to burn down an unjust system) that we had to put...

Ari Aster’s debut feature HEREDITARY carries over the themes of grief, guilt, and extrasensory perception found in Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 shocker DON’T LOOK NOW, another emotionally grueling story about parents wrestling with loss. After discussing our sometimes-visceral reactions to Aster’s film, we put these two movies in conversation with each other, talking over their use of shock tactics, the su...

Ari Aster’s breakout debut HEREDITARY draws on a fair number of horror touchpoints, but it’s linked by its themes of parental grief and psychic distress to another terrifying film about the lingering impact of a death in the family: Nicolas Roeg’s form-busting 1973 thriller DON’T LOOK NOW. In this half focused on Roeg’s film, we discuss why the film’s intensity of emotion is integral to its horror...