Featured
La Clef Revival Occupies the Cinema
Photograph by Chiara Marinai
I first heard about the reopening of the community-run cinema La Clef shortly after arriving in Paris this January. A friend, an American lecturer at the Sorbonne, took me there and proudly pointed at the two-story building with a signature key (clef) on its facade. “Do you know they used to illegally squat in the cinema for more than two years?” she asked. Founded in 1973 in Paris’s Latin Quarter, La Clef became known for championing independent and political films underrepresented in the commercial mainstream. After its owners announced plans to sell the building and closed the venue in 2018, a collective of cinephiles, filmmakers, and activists occupied the cinema for more than two years, organizing daily pay-what-you-can screenings while fighting to… Read more
No Picnic Feasts at Film Forum
No Picnic (1986)
In 1985, downtown cinephile Phil Hartman used profits from the Great Jones Cafe, a beloved Cajun-inspired NoHo bar he cofounded two years earlier, to direct his first—and, to date, only completed—feature film, No Picnic. A noirish shaggy-dog punk comedy photographed by experimental filmmaker Peter Hutton on lustrous black-and-white 16mm, No Picnic is an episodic and ethnographic ramble around the Lower East Side (including the part of the neighborhood that had been rebranded “the East Village” by realtors in the 1960s). The film was completed in 1987, with support from Wim Wenders’s New York–based production company, Gray City Films, and with money Hartman received from a new business venture, Two Boots Pizza. (Hartman shot another film with Hutton in 1995 called Eerie, with Felicity Huffman and… Read more
Lost in the Funhouse
Illustration by Clay Hickson
Say you’ve built a career as a reliable sitcom mainstay and are forced to pivot when sitcoms go out of fashion in the 2010s. Along with every other actor angling to lead a prestige limited series, you work on a more naturalistic delivery and study your character’s motivations. But by 2026, the playing field shifts again. If you’re willing to sign away the rights to your likeness to the network, they can use artificial intelligence tools to insert you into any show. What do you do then? How do you stay indispensable to the industry? That is, more or less, the arc of Valerie Cherish’s television career. Valerie is the protagonist of the HBO show The Comeback (2005–26), played by former Friends (1994–2004) star Lisa… Read more
Do You Love Me Reassembles Lebanon’s Cultural Memory
Do You Love Me (2026)
Lana Daher’s debut feature, Do You Love Me (2026), is a kaleidoscopic exploration of Lebanon’s cultural memory. The Beirut-based multidisciplinary artist drew from 70 years of found footage and archival material to assemble this visceral 76-minute portrait of Lebanese history, which premiered at Venice Days and is now playing at Metrograph in New York. Daher stitches together clips from her country’s independent cinema, newsreels, and home movies, causing the past and the present to collide and recontextualize each other anew. As Daher cuts between time periods, she toggles between scenes from action movies and newsreel footage of violence on the streets of Beirut, blurring the distinction between what is real and what is staged. Everyday civilians and intellectuals opine on the Lebanese Civil War… Read more
Take Care: Georgia Bernstein on Night Nurse
Night Nurse
I could tell by the title sequence alone—the camera gliding along a body, following the path of a telephone cord—that Night Nurse (2026) would not be like the other movies I had been seeing at Sundance. While the festival in aggregate leans toward safe picks, Night Nurse, which premiered in the NEXT competition, is anything but. The film follows a new nurse, Eleni (Cemre Paksoy), as she gets acquainted with a patient being evaluated for early onset Alzheimer’s, Douglas (Bruce McKenzie), during overnight shifts in the memory-care unit. Eleni quickly slips under Douglas’s spell and becomes his accomplice in a phone scam on other elderly people, posing as their granddaughter in trouble and in need of quick cash. Both characters experience a sexual thrill… Read more
The Emmys’ Locks, Hopefuls, and Snubs
The Testaments (2026–)
This morning, Emmy winners Liza Colón-Zayas (The Bear) and Jeff Hiller (Somebody Somewhere, nominated again this year for his guest role in Pluribus) announced the nominees for the 78th Emmy Awards, which will be handed out across three ceremonies (one for primetime categories, two for creative arts) in September. And despite a packed TV season with too many contenders to count, the two series with the most nominations were sure things, both from HBO Max: The Pitt dominated the drama categories with 25 nods, and Hacks set a record for the most comedy noms in a single year with 24. Even the limited/anthology series category was led by a returning series in Netflix’s Beef, which garnered 16 nominations. Naturally, the aforementioned shows also dominated the acting categories. The… Read more
