US

There are two kinds of access documentary. The first kind extracts: it wins its way into the room and leaves with the confession, the slip, the bombshell the trailer has promised, and its grammar is the ambush, the hard question, the camera held a beat too long on a face that has just lied. The second kind supplies. It gives the subject the room, the time and the silence, and then it films what the subject does with them. You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s 174-minute documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, belongs with unusual purity to the second kind, and the reviews, which are rapturous to a degree I distrust on principle, agree on this one point even where they disagree on everything else: nobody in this film is cornered. Holmes and her partner Billy Evans, by The Wolfman Cometh’s account, regularly volunteer information Fielder was not seeking. Enough rope, patiently supplied. ...

Every family that has ever made a film together has had the same argument at the same table, and Family Movie is the first one I know of to sell tickets to it. Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick direct, with Dan Beers writing the concept they sparked to; their children Sosie and Travis Bacon act; and the conceit is a low-budget horror film about a family making a low-budget horror film, which is either the laziest idea in the world or the most honest, depending on whether you have ever had to cast your own cousin because the day rate was zero. It premiered at SXSW on a Friday the 13th, in the Narrative Spotlight, with Gersh selling and no distributor yet attached at the time Deadline wrote it up. Deadline loved it. AwardsWatch gave it a D+. I find both verdicts defensible and the gap between them more interesting than either, because the gap is exactly where micro-budget meta films live. ...

Jason Blum has a rule for cheap horror that every producer in this tier can recite with a drink in hand: you may have a big cast, many locations, or heavy practical effects, and you may choose two. Nicholas Pineda, making his first feature, Infirmary, could afford one. He chose the building. Everything else in this production, the form, the cast size, the story, even the title, is downstream of that single pick, and the result, a found-footage night shift in a psych ward shot entirely inside a real abandoned hospital in Los Angeles, premiered at FrightFest in the UK and is now streaming on Shudder. I have not read a cleaner demonstration of the one-rule constraint this year, so let me walk it in the order the decisions were actually made, because the order is the lesson. ...

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. ...

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. ...

The arithmetic of The Wrong Girls is the kind that should be taught before anyone is allowed to say the word “passion project”: fourteen years from conception to camera, then twenty-nine days of photography. Fourteen years of what, exactly? Dylan Meyer, making her feature debut after a screenwriting career (An American Pickle, Moxie), describes the cycle without decoration: we had the money, we lost the money, we had the money, we lost the money. Her producer and best friend Maggie McLean remembers being broke at twenty-four in a back house, talking the movie into existence, and then spending a decade on the phone saying keep going. At the lowest point they were scouting New Jersey street corners, prepared to fake Los Angeles one restricted camera angle at a time, for a film whose entire reason to exist is Los Angeles. That is what a long raise actually looks like from inside: not a montage, but years of almost. ...

Follow the causal chain, because it is a clean one and it ends somewhere instructive. Eli Roth makes Borderlands for a studio at a budget north of one hundred million US dollars; the studio interferes; the film grosses thirty-three million worldwide. Roth responds the way a certain kind of veteran responds, and honestly the way I respect: he builds a smaller house where nobody can tell him what to do. The banner is called The Horror Section, and its first picture, Ice Cream Man, a Pied Piper slasher in which a stranger’s sweets turn a suburban town’s children into killers, was made as an economical indie for around five million US dollars, released through Iconic Events. From one hundred million and no control to five million and total control: that is the entire argument for independence, executed by a man with the name recognition to pull it off in one move. ...

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. ...

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: ...