I will restrict myself to one question, because it is the question this film lives or dies on: how do you photograph a man the whole world has already memorized, at the age before he was anyone? Anthony Bourdain has been mythologized without pause in the years since his death, and the field of posthumous product is exactly as lurid as you fear. Matt Johnson’s Tony, for A24, written by Todd Bartels and Lou Howe, answers the question with a scope decision so severe it amounts to a manifesto: one summer, 1975, Provincetown. A nineteen-year-old washes dishes badly, lies about everything, and gets, in the words of Kitchen Confidential that open the film, the good ass-kicking he badly needs. The show, the fame, the voice, none of it appears. The film ends before the man begins. ...

Nicolas Winding Refn was clinically dead for twenty-five minutes in 2023, on a table, mid-surgery, with two weeks’ warning that this might be how it ended. He has said plainly that the idea for Her Private Hell came when he was dead and came back. I begin there not for the drama but because the origin explains the method, and the method is the story. A director who believed his film career was over returned to features after a decade away and spent his second chance on the least commercial materials available: silence, stillness, a fog-bound artificial city, and a horror plot conducted like opera. Whatever you conclude about the result, nothing in it is an accident of laziness. It is all wagered. ...

Strip away the pickleball and The Dink is a financing story, and a rather pure one. A comedy star and a comedy writer who play poker together have lunch. The star says he wants the kind of picture the studios stopped making; the writer says the word pickleball; they develop it together, pull in a producer through friendship rather than an agency package, finance the film independently, shoot it, finish it, screen it in Hollywood, and only then open the doors to buyers. Apple TV+ released it on July 24, and Jake Johnson’s own account of how that happened deserves to be pinned above the desk of everyone who still sends treatments into the streamer void: ...

Take one snowed-in summer camp, a reclusive final girl, an experimental filmmaker with a franchise pitch due, a bucket of fried chicken with assorted dipping sauces, and a killer who wears a box fan for a face, and you have, precisely, Jane Schoenbrun’s third feature. The title, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, does the work of a mission statement: it names the two engines of the slasher form and promises to take them seriously as subjects rather than as fuel. Schoenbrun arrives at this after We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, the low-budget debut that earned praise from Scorsese among others, and I Saw the TV Glow, and the trajectory matters, because this is what happens when a filmmaker who grew up inside genre stops quoting it and starts interrogating it under studio lights of their own design. ...

There are two kinds of first-contact film. The first kind lands the hardware: saucers over cities, armies in the streets, a planet’s worth of extras looking up. Spielberg’s Disclosure Day is this year’s grand version of it, and Wells’s Martians were doing it on the page in the nineteenth century. The second kind never shows you the visitor at all. It gives you a signal, an instrument, and a person who has to decide what the data means; Contact is its cathedral, and Clara and Ad Astra keep smaller chapels. The Outer Threat, the directing debut of the Toronto writer William Woods, belongs entirely to the second kind, and the interesting thing about it is not that a low-budget Canadian production chose the cheaper church. It is how far the film commits to the choice once made. ...

Twelve million US dollars for domestic rights. That was the cheque A24 wrote at Sundance for Olivia Wilde’s dinner-party comedy The Invite, one of the biggest sales of the festival, and the number is worth holding in your head for the length of this piece, because everything intelligent about this release flows from what the buyer and the seller decided to do with it next. They did the old thing. They did the thing the trades had been writing obituaries for since the pandemic: a platform release, New York and Los Angeles first, a slow build, and a bet that word of mouth still exists as a market force. Three weekends into wide release the film sat at twenty million domestic and fifteen point seven international from 36 markets, on its way past forty million worldwide with Italy, France and Spain still to open. The consultant David A. Gross, who watches these curves for a living, told Variety he would not be surprised by a finish above sixty million. For a talking-heads comedy in a summer owned by The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day, that is not counterprogramming. That is a heist. ...

Every financier will tell you an attachment is only as good as the paper it is signed on, and every producer has watched a name walk the moment a better offer cleared. So savor the inversion at the center of The Isolate Thief’s production story: the name actor chasing the producers. Sean Bean says the money for this small-budget Civil War Western took quite a few years to raise, two or three by his own count, because the story was unusual and the budget was not the kind that forgives unusual. His role in that period was not to wait politely. He kept calling: “Look, you think we might be getting it together?” When it finally came together, with Hideout Pictures persevering alongside the producers, the package still had its star, and the reason he gives is the only durable one in this business. Kevin Lefler’s script, in his words, was fantastic, and it was what blew him away in the first place. ...

Bref, they told me it was a film about a love triangle. They lied. It is a film about sweat, leverage, and the kinetic violence of an object moving at 130 miles per hour. Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers does not observe a tennis match; it forces you to duck. I browse the public forums and I see the audience arguing. Mon Dieu, it never stops. Half of them are swept away by what they call a “purely pleasurable film,” while the other half complain that they “don’t understand the positive reviews” at all. They argue endlessly about the characters’ morals. They argue about the plot. They miss the point entirely. The brilliance of this film is not found in its narrative; it is found in its physical execution. ...

Bref, we all know the rule: independent filmmakers should not touch science fiction. The moment you introduce a spaceship into your script, the budget multiplies by ten, the production design swallows your schedule, and the visual effects supervise you into an early grave. Yet, here is Pavlo Ostrikov’s U Are The Universe, a film about a space trucker who becomes the last man alive after Earth is destroyed in 2070. He shot it in Ukraine, relying almost entirely on a single actor and a robot companion, and brought it across the finish line for $800,000. ...