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. ...

Bref, let us not waste time. We have all seen the numbers. A $22.6 million opening weekend for an independent horror film is not a fluke; it is an earthquake. But while the industry trades hyperventilate over the box office returns of Longlegs, I am far more interested in what Osgood Perkins and his cinematographer, Andres Arochi, actually did on the floor. When you strip away the hype, what remains is an execution so deliberate, so suffocatingly controlled, that it warrants a true post-mortem. This is not a film that succeeded purely because of a flashy ad campaign. It succeeded because the mechanics of its production and the aesthetics of its framing were built to weaponize audience anxiety. ...

Mon Dieu, the sequel. It is the lifeblood of the modern studio system, and Pixar, once the bastion of original ideas, is now fully tethered to this machine. When Inside Out 2 arrived, the skeptics were quick to sharpen their knives. As the critics noted, the film often feels less like a glimpse into a real person’s brain and more like a carefully calibrated corporate spreadsheet. Pixar’s obsession with “universal relatability” can sometimes suffocate the very artistry it claims to champion. ...

Most independent filmmakers, starved for resources, focus every dollar and every ounce of energy entirely on the visual image. Sound is an afterthought, relegated to capturing dialogue and dropping in a cheap score. David Lynch understood early on that true psychological terror is auditory. For his 1977 debut Eraserhead, Lynch partnered with sound designer Alan Splet to pioneer a radically new approach to cinematic audio. Musique Concrète and the Found Sound Rejecting traditional orchestral scoring and standard Foley work, Lynch and Splet utilized the techniques of musique concrète. Rather than composing music, they spent 63 days—working nine hours a day—recording “found” everyday noises. They recorded howling wind, electrical hums, and the metallic vibration of guy wires. ...

Commercial cinema is terrified of aimlessness. It demands a rigid three-act structure and a clear protagonist to secure funding. Richard Linklater’s 1990 debut, Slacker, completely rejected this convention, opting instead for a non-linear, “baton-passing” narrative. The Drifting Observer The camera acts as a drifting observer across Austin, Texas. It picks up a conversation, follows it for a few minutes, and then seamlessly hands the narrative off to a new character who happens to cross their path. There is no central plot, only an endless relay race of philosophical ramblings, conspiracy theories, and existential ennui. ...