Anatomy of the Craft

What happens when a documentarian makes his first fiction feature about television? You get a film in which every charge the critics file reads, from another angle, like a description of the method. Lance Oppenheim is thirty, formed entirely in nonfiction, the HBO series Ren Faire behind him and an Elizabeth Holmes film co-directed with Nathan Fielder ahead, and Primetime, his first scripted picture, released by A24 from a screenplay by the equally first-time Ajon Singh, takes as its subject Chris Hansen and the Dateline NBC machine of To Catch a Predator. Robert Pattinson plays Hansen. The reviews are split down a line so clean you could light it: everyone admires the surface, and everyone files the same complaint about what is under it. ...

Let me count this one’s debts before its assets, because with Paul Greengrass the two are always drawn from the same account. The debts, filed almost identically by every notice I have read: the middle of The Uprising goes muddled once factions and locations start arriving at speed; several characters function as representations of a class rather than people; and the screenplay keeps reaching past the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt toward folklore, a mythology layer the marketing itself connects to the Robin Hood legend, which sits badly beside the grounded drama around it. Seat42F’s reviewer puts the complaint in one clean sentence, that the film doesn’t need the additional mythology, and Brian Orndorf is blunter still, finding the director dramatically constipated, the pace throttled. The audience wing of the prosecution is on the record too; one r/movies thread opens, with the weariness of a man who paid for his ticket, just watched The Uprising, and honestly, what a slog. ...

Follow the budgets and you can read Adam Wingard’s whole career like a bank statement. Mumblegore features made for around $75,000. Then You’re Next and The Guest, million-dollar festival darlings that turned into commercial hits. Then a decade in the land of intellectual property, a Blair Witch, a Death Note, and two Godzilla-and-Kong machines carrying budgets upward of $150 million for Warner Bros. And then, in May 2024, the trade announcement that reverses the whole curve: Wingard walks away from directing Godzilla x Kong: Supernova to make Onslaught, an original action-horror picture with his oldest writing partner, Simon Barrett, for A24 and Aaron Ryder’s company, at $15 million. From one hundred fifty to fifteen: a director buying back his own name at ninety percent off. ...

Blumhouse dropped The Last Kiss onto digital platforms as a surprise for the Halloween season, which is the modern genre economy’s way of saying: here is a small one, find it if you can. Tant pis for the surprise strategy, because what the director’s press reveals is a film made with considerably more design intention than the release pattern suggests. Yoko Okumura, directing and co-writing from a script by Krystal and Alon Zivs that the company brought to her, has the hook every teen slasher prays for: a girl whose kisses show her how the kissed will die. Mckenna Grace leads; the kills are, in Okumura’s word, predictive. A slasher where the heroine sees the murder before the murderer commits it is a mystery engine and a horror engine bolted together, and the interesting part is how deliberately the machine around it was built. ...

Christopher Smith may be the most useful case study in British genre cinema, precisely because he refuses to become a brand. SciFiNow’s FrightFest notice makes the point with his own filmography: the tube-tunnel debut Creep, the office-outing splatter comedy Severance, the looping seabound puzzle Triangle, the plague procession of Black Death, hauntings, possessions, a Christmas film, and now Spider Island, an eco-horror comedy that premiered at FrightFest on the 30th of August. Two decades inside genre without repeating an idea is a career strategy with a real cost, since every film must find its audience from scratch, and a real reward, which is that nobody can predict him. The new one returns him to the Severance register: a protected Pacific island, a greenwashed luxury hotel called the Pearlhaven, thirty imported influencers, and a population of pack-hunting spiders whose cave habitat has been plugged with smuggled concrete and who have relocated, sensibly, into the hotel’s air conditioning. ...

The most honest thing in Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s Hot Spot is its real estate. Variety’s reviewer, no admirer of the film’s plotting, still surrendered to what the production design is doing: Anna Anosowicz builds humanity’s last compound out of existing midcentury brutalist architecture and far older ruins, Greek stones included, dressed with what the review calls superficially futuristic window-dressing. The future, in other words, is not built here; it is scavenged. Not a brave new world but a thriftily recycled one, hanging onto past glories by a thread, and that single design decision tells you more about a civilization run by a rationing AI than any title card could. It is also, en passant, the oldest trick of resourceful production: when you cannot afford to build the future, photograph the past strangely enough and the audience will do the rest. Smoczyńska is working with the biggest budget of her career, and she spends it like a director who remembers not having one. ...

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. ...

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. ...