The Next Picture Show

The new  Supergirl  isn’t an outright adaptation of the comic-book miniseries  Woman of Tomorrow , but it retains enough of its shape that it evokes that comic’s own source of inspiration,  True Grit . Either of the two film adaptations of Charles Portis’ 1968 Western novel about a young girl enlisting a reluctant, drunken hero to help her enact revenge would...

Forty-four years after his science-fiction classic about the deep connection between a 10-year-old human boy and an alien visitor stranded on earth, Steven Spielberg is once again considering humanity’s capacity to accept and understand extraterrestrial life with his latest,  Disclosure Day.  So after sharing our reactions to  Disclosure Day,  including an ending that&rsq...

Disclosure Day  is not Steven Spielberg’s first film about the confirmation of alien life, nor is it the first such Spielberg film we’ve discussed on this podcast — that would be  Close Encounters of the Third Kind , which we covered a decade ago. But Spielberg’s latest is specifically concerned with whether humanity possesses the empathy to process such a revelat...

Backrooms ’ journey to the big screen — from anonymous 4chan post to viral creepypasta to mega-popular YouTube series to A24-backed box-office smash — is as unique and unexpected as the film itself. 20-year-old Kane Parsons’ liminal horror hit feels unlike everything else currently happening in the genre, which is partly what inspired us to pair it with the similarly expect...

20-year-old Kane Parsons is now the youngest director to ever hit No. 1 at the box office thanks to his A24-backed horror film  Backrooms,  which made back its budget several times over in the first week of release and is already inviting talk of sequels. All of that offscreen context makes it a natural pairing with 1979’s series-spawning cult hit  Phantasm , but it has plenty...

The Mandalorian and Grogu  plays like a few stitched-together episodes of  The Mandalorian , which makes it a particularly apt pairing with the 1980  Lone Wolf and Cub  assemblage  Shogun Assassin  — but whether the first new Star Wars feature film since 2019 manages to distinguish itself from its television counterpart is another question. We’re joined ag...

The Mandalorian and Grogu  gives the feature-film treatment to a streaming series whose premise — an outcast warrior lives by a code of honor while traveling in the company of an adorable small companion — owes no small debt to the Japanese multimedia franchise  Lone Wolf and Cub . But rather than comb through the six installments comprising that film series for a good match,...

Kyle Balda’s new family film The Sheep Detectives  pulls off a move George Miller was dissuaded from including in his 1998 sequel  Babe: Pig in the City —  killing off its human farmer figure — but that premise-setting death aside, it’s generally a warmer and gentler take on talking animals venturing beyond their green pastures and into the big, scary human w...

The Sheep Detectives is about as short on pigs as Babe: Pig In the City is short on sheep, but Kyle Balda’s new family film still reminded us of the 1998 box-office-bomb-turned-cult-classic in its tale of talking animals venturing beyond their idyllic pastures and into a dangerous corner of the human world. George Miller’s  poorly received sequel to Babe may technically have a lower body count tha...

Despite the snowy setting, law-enforcement-officer protagonist, and pointed poking at the idea of "Minnesota Nice," Ben Wheatley's new Bob Odenkirk-starring shoot-'em-up Nowhere is in many ways the anti- Fargo. Is it fair to compare this scrappy (some might even say sloppy) genre effort to a film as revered as the Coen brothers' comedic crime classic? Maybe not, but that's what we do here at The N...

As a comedic crime thriller set in snowy Minnesota and featuring a sheriff protagonist, it would be pretty tough for the new Bob Odenkirk-starring shoot-em-up Normal to avoid comparisons to Fargo , and since we will never pass up an opportunity to discuss the Coen Brothers’ 1996 classic, that’s precisely what we will be comparing it to next week. But first we’ll spend this week discussing why Farg...

Kristoffer Borgli’s provocative new The Drama turns on the revelation of a secret past that is more of an abstraction than the one in the other half of this pairing, making the resulting relationship rift between Zendaya and Robert Pattinson’s characters both frustrating and fascinating to parse. After talking through our responses to the film’s button-pushing, and our vastly different takes on it...

Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama uses the revelation of one character’s dark secret as a provocative “twist,” but also as the basis for an exploration of whether a romantic relationship can survive such dramatic upheaval, a premise that calls to mind 2005’s A History of Violence. The central couple of David Cronenberg’s thriller, played by Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello, is much further along in the...

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Project Hail Mary is an exceptionally audience-friendly adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel of the same name, offsetting the story’s doomsday scenario with lots of jokes, a charismatic lead, and most especially the buddy dynamic between Ryan Gosling’s human protagonist and an alien engineer named Rocky. The film’s light touch has made it a hit, but it also left some...

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...