The Next Picture Show

In its adaptation of a true story of malfeasance and misappropriation in a Long Island high school, Cory Finley’s new HBO film BAD EDUCATION sets up a clash between shady educator and meddlesome student that put us in mind of Alexander Payne’s 1999 political satire ELECTION. In this half of our pairing, we debate the level of sympathy we’re able to extend to Hugh Jackman’s corrupt superintendent i...

Cory Finley’s new BAD EDUCATION is based on a real-life incident, whereas Alexander Payne’s 1999 high school satire ELECTION is based on a Tom Perrotta novel (itself inspired by the 1992 presidential election), but they both use their high school settings to make their way toward similar conclusions about the corruptibility of adulthood. In this half of our pairing looking at morality, ethics, and...

Where the unsettling illness metaphor at the center of Todd Haynes’ 1995 film SAFE tendrils out in a manner that defies easy resolution, Carlo Mirabella-Davis’ newly released debut SWALLOW tracks a similarly metaphorical affliction toward a more finite ending point. But within those two very different arcs, the two films explore complementary ideas about isolation, gender roles and archetypes, and...

We continue our shelter-in-place film series with a pair of films featuring magazine-perfect housewife archetypes struck by mysterious illnesses that are inextricably linked to their oppressive environments: Todd Haynes’ 1995 feature SAFE and Carlo Mirabella-Davis’ debut film SWALLOW. In this half we dig into the many shifting metaphors at play in SAFE, how they reflect both the film’s era and our...

Steven Soderbergh’s viral thriller CONTAGION may have come out in 2011, but it’s never felt more timely than in the midst of the world’s current coronavirus crisis, which makes it a natural stand-in for the “current film” half of our pairing with Elia Kazan’s 1950 plague noir PANIC IN THE STREETS. Watched today, Soderbergh’s film, a kaleidoscopic treatment of an illness called MEV-1 with a startli...

The 2020 coronavirus outbreak has affected virtually everything about our modern world, including the movies we watch, how we watch them, and how we podcast about them. It’s a sobering but fascinating lens through which to view past films that have wrestled with outbreaks, from Elia Kazan’s 1950 noir PANIC IN THE STREETS up through Steven Soderbergh’s 2011 pandemic procedural CONTAGION. We tackle...

Leigh Whannell’s new take on H.G. Wells’ 1897 novel THE INVISIBLE MAN is a Blumhouse film, so of course there has to be a twist — and in this case, it’s one that makes this version of INVISIBLE MAN less like the many adaptations that preceded it, and more like George Cukor’s 1944 film GASLIGHT, which is similarly focused on a man’s malicious manipulation of a woman at the expense of her own credib...

Leigh Whannell’s new take on THE INVISIBLE MAN comes with a modern twist, one based in a dynamic — a husband pushing his wife toward mental illness for personal gain — that was entrenched in the pop-cultural lexicon thanks in large part to George Cukor’s 1944 film GASLIGHT, starring Ingrid Bergman as a woman whose husband mounts a disinformation campaign against her for insidious purposes. In this...

Like the landmark 1991 film THELMA & LOUISE, the latest DC comics movie entry, BIRDS OF PREY (AND THE FANTABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN) uses a recognizable form to take its female protagonists to some unfamiliar places. The newer film hasn’t received that same sort of critical acclaim as its predecessor, but some on our panel — which this week once again includes Angelica Jade Bast...

The new BIRDS OF PREY: AND THE FANTABULOUS EMANCIPATION OF ONE HARLEY QUINN is part of an inconsistent and fitfully realized tradition of female-empowerment stories told within a high-gloss genre framework, a tradition that reached one of its too-rare high points with THELMA & LOUISE, a Ridley Scott-directed, Callie Khourie-scripted take on a buddy road movie/chase film that ruffled plenty of...

With PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE, Céline Sciamma became the first woman director to win the Queer Palm at Cannes, an embarrassingly belated milestone reminiscent of Jane Campion becoming the first woman director to win the Palme d’Or in 1993 with THE PIANO. And while these two films have much more in common than their directors’ gender, as we discover when we put them in conversation this week, bot...

Céline Sciamma’s 2019 Cannes sensation PORTRAIT OF A LADY ON FIRE is a lush, romantic film set on an isolated island and concerned with irrepressible desires in deeply repressive times, a description that neatly applies to another Cannes breakout from 1993: Jane Campion’s THE PIANO. But the love affair at the heart of Campion’s film plays with a much trickier power imbalance, which we get into as...

We return to the trenches of the first World War to consider Sam Mendes’ 1917 within the greater history of World War I films generally, and as a companion to Peter Weir’s GALLIPOLI specifically. Following some debate over whether 1917’s continuous shot gimmick makes it more or less emotionally affecting, and an attempt to parse the film’s attitudes about war, we look at these two films in tandem...

Inspired by this year’s surprise Oscar favorite 1917, we’re digging down into the trenches and slogging through the mud and blood of World War I, with two films centering on young soldiers delivering crucial messages that decide the fates of thousands of other young men. First up this week is Peter Weir’s 1981 film GALLIPOLI, which stars a shockingly young Mel Gibson as one half of a pair of Austr...

We return to Orchard House and Concord via Greta Gerwig’s new LITTLE WOMEN, which takes a much less traditional approach to Louisa May Alcott’s famed novel than Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version, while still hitting on enough nostalgic touchpoints to feel like a faithful adaptation. In this second half of our March family double feature, we dig into how we processed Gerwig’s approach as an intellec...

In the first half of the 20th century, a steady stream of adaptations made it seem like every generation would have a version of Louisa May Alcott’s novel LITTLE WOMEN to call their own. Then the film adaptations just… stopped, until 1994’s Gillian Armstrong-directed version starring Winona Ryder as Jo became a hit, and set the stage for the latest cinematic iteration of the March sisters, courtes...

Though Josh and Benny Safdie are avowed admirers of John Cassavetes, the aggressive intensity of their new gambling drama UNCUT GEMS stands in stark contrast to Cassavetes’ more enigmatic, melancholic take on a similar sort of degenerate in 1976’s THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE. Nonetheless, the two films do share a lot beyond protagonists trying to rebound from some bad bets with bad people. Aft...

Inspired by the Safdie brothers’ new thriller UNCUT GEMS, we’re traveling back to 1976, and the other side of the country, to look at another film about a gambling man at the end of his rope, made by one of the Safdies’ favorite filmmakers: John Cassavetes’ idiosyncratic take on the gangster genre, THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE. In this half of our pairing about bad bets with bad people, we dig...

Rian Johnson’s new KNIVES OUT is much broader and goofier than the writer-director’s first foray into a murder-mystery genre, 2005’s BRICK, but as with his feature debut, Johnson acknowledges the audience’s expectations for the genre and then subverts them in order to create an outsized world for his characters to play in. After digging into why that approach works to such crowd-pleasing effect in...

Rian Johnson’s new KNIVES OUT is much more of a romp than 2005’s BRICK, but it hearkens back to Johnson’s debut feature in the way it upends the conventions of mystery stories and gives the audience much more up-front information about the plot-inducing murder than is typical for the genre. In this half of our Johnson mystery pairing we go back to the beginning to consider what BRICK looks like fr...

Released 40 years after Robert Benton’s Best Picture-winning KRAMER VS. KRAMER, Noah Baumbach’s latest, MARRIAGE STORY, depicts a process that hasn’t grown any easier in the intervening time, but has certainly become less novel. After discussing whether Baumbach’s portrayal of modern divorce might actually be a stealth feel-good movie, and which three of its many great scenes make the film, we get...

Noah Baumbach’s acclaimed new family drama MARRIAGE STORY has invited comparisons to Robert Benton’s acclaimed 1979 family drama KRAMER VS. KRAMER over the films’ shared preoccupation with the end of love and the challenges of finding happiness while also doing right by the next generation. We’ll dig into the nuances of that comparison via this pairing, beginning with a discussion of how KRAMER VS...

Our brief, incomplete history of cinema’s attempts to make comedy out of Adolf Hitler brings us to the present day and writer-director Taika Waititi’s discussion-generating “anti-hate satire” JOJO RABBIT, which doesn’t share much in the way of thematic material with our last film, Mel Brooks’ THE PRODUCERS, but does exhibit a similar eagerness to paint the führer as an object of ridicule. We discu...

Take Waititi’s new “anti-hate satire” JOJO RABBIT extends a cinematic tradition of casting Adolf Hitler as a buffoon that goes back to Charlie Chaplin, though Mel Brooks’ 1967 debut feature THE PRODUCERS is ultimately more concerned with the question of how to contextualize the very idea of laughing at Hitler. In this half of our pairing, we debate the extent to which Brooks’ rock-solid premise —...

Bong Joon-ho’s new PARASITE feels weirdly similar to his 2006 film THE HOST, even though there’s no monster in sight — unless you count entitlement, inequality, and greed as monsters, which given how they shape PARASITE’s story, maybe you should. But it also features the return of Song Kang-ho as a father figure, albeit a more capable and traditional one, and a story shaped by Bong’s obsessions wi...