New today on the site! A Hope for a Minotaur: On attending the 2026 Cannes Film Festival on a 3 Days pass - @jadiestills.bsky.social

re-upping this thread on the wonder of jurassic park because the great sam neill has left us an incomparable actor who truly understood the magic of cinema thanks, sam, for sharing that magic with all of us

"I can’t tell you how many times I popped in that VHS and let myself access Donnie’s world. Dozens upon hundreds. And much like my own submission to the uncanny, I never aimed to crack its code, but just let it wash over me. I crawled right up inside of it and wore it like a stupid man suit."

None of Us Will See Heaven: The Weight of Family and the Sacrifice for a Better Life in ROAD TO PERDITION

“I’ve never seen a more rapid wholesale dismissal of a supposedly foundational jump in technology in my lifetime.”

This is a wonderful piece that dissects and gets at much of what I found convincing and compelling about Disclosure Day — not top-tier Spielberg, necessary, but somehow also an essential Spielberg text.

i wrote about disclosure day, steven spielberg, and human compassion as sci-fi for @brightwalldarkroom.com

Love this piece by @lindseyromain.bsky.social on DISCLOSURE DAY for @brightwalldarkroom.com Read: www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2026/07/10/s...

One of the best pieces of criticism I have read this year!

One of the best pieces of writing about film this year. Masterful.

This is so good! "Modern audiences seem to evaluate stories based on whether they accurately model reality instead of what they illuminate about it."

literally screaming and fist-pumping for this piece. this is exactly what I wanted to say about the movie but @lindseyromain.bsky.social did it way better than I ever could.

This is a quite *excellent* analysis and, I think, goes a long way in explaining why the film harvested such divided opinions... #FilmSky

"Modern audiences seem to evaluate stories based on whether they accurately model reality instead of what they illuminate about it. Optimism is asked to justify its existence. And if the audience recoils at the idea that humanity might...choose compassion, maybe Spielberg was never the naive one."

See, @lindseyromain.bsky.social just crushing it as usual

"In DISCLOSURE DAY, empathy itself is the speculative leap. The genre function is inverted: science fiction stops speculating about aliens & starts speculating about us. Aliens are ordinary. Human compassion is extraordinary. The sci-fi is us.

New today on the site! Our brand new Summer Blockbusters issue begins: The Speculative Empathy and Radical Hope of DISCLOSURE DAY - @lindseyromain.bsky.social

My favourite film. Perfection. Thoroughly debilitating.

"The Remains of the Day is a prolonged and aching rumination on what could have been—what might have been—at another time, or at least in another Britain. If you can name another film that personifies so astutely those feelings of regret and melancholy, guilt and repentance, I’ll eat my top hat."

New today on the site! @rcbedsaul.bsky.social on Lucrecia Martel and her latest film, NUESTRA TIERRA

"Taken as a body of work, Linklater's BEFORE trilogy asks us to consider the tension between its fantasy and naturalism, and the extent of our own ability to exert similar control over a lonely world that ushers us through life without concern for whether we’ve found any meaning in it."

"Like so many good Westerns, Howard Hawks's RIO BRAVO feels like a novel I want to forever have a bookmark in: ready to pick up and enjoy, with a few passages left for next time."

"Maybe nothing much at all has happened. Or maybe everything has changed in a blink. Either way, I am probably a wreck. I also haven’t eased off on the nostalgia quite yet. NOBODY'S FOOL brims with things I'd forgotten the world had not that long ago."

"If anything unites Gene Kelly's classic musicals, it’s a belief that no past experience could be horrific enough to prevent you from letting loose that whole-human-race encompassing smile and falling in love with life all over again."

"Nicholas Ray's JOHNNY GUITAR is so rigorously, comprehensively excessive, its excesses eclipse any baseline against which excess is typically judged."

possession in this game as in specifically in the sense of

"I'm Johnny Knoxville and this is Mexico-England!"

"In spite of the Total Request Live and low-cut bootleg pants of it all, JOSIE AND THE PUSSYCATS captures—and then eviscerates—the bizarre contours of early-2020s culture with more clarity than any piece of contemporary media."

Happy 4th of July, I wrote about the two Michael Mann movies that bookend American history for @brightwalldarkroom.com

A great piece on two excellent movies

9 years ago now, but still holds up pretty well as a list of 100 “quintessential” American films

The parallels between Cora and Bergman drawn in this essay are really interesting

Today would be the perfect day for this double feature. America as a land of broken promises, but potential. Mohicans is on Prime, Insider is rentable. Watch on the biggest, loudest screen you got.

This July 4th, see Jaws through the eyes of the poet Elizabeth Cantwell.

“The evil thing you thought you could ignore out of existence is rearing itself up and taking things from you—things you loved, things you were promised—and you are angry at it, and you are angry at America for blinding you to it.”

"LOSING GROUND is an heirloom for Black women, proof that we’ve always craved three-dimensional characters and sophisticated storytelling to relate to."

"On paper, RED ROOMS is the ideal horror movie for a person like me, which is to say, a coward. It would be a misnomer to say Pascal Plante’s film has no violence though—it is violence, a bloodless film rich with blood."

Migration, Modernity, and Loss in The Apu Trilogy

"’Godzilla’ is my personal shorthand for a feeling, the fear you feel when you show someone a flawed movie that you love, the pressure when you’re watching your best friend’s favorite movie with them for the first time, the conviction that your taste in media reveals an essential part of yourself."

"Every time I pick up one of Carrie Fisher's books, or turn on POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE, I remember that there are other people like me in this world, living weirdly, just trying to figure it out."

"On-screen, Clara Bow's remarkable strength of personality was enough to win her everything she desired. In life, it wasn’t enough to ensure happiness or agency."

Better a Pig: How PORCO ROSSO Dismantles the Aesthetics of Fascism

"This is the real gamble at the heart of Robert Altman's CALIFORNIA SPLIT: the risk you take when you put your care and trust into another person."

🚨👽New pod is here!👽🚨 Chad & Elizabeth sit down with @frankfalisi.bsky.social to discuss all things DISCLOSURE DAY We get into: empathy, aliens, camera movements, CGI animals, post-Fabelmans Spielberg, not overthinking it, are we alone in the universe, does the ending work, and much, much more…

Honored that the Times' Reggie Ugwu was a big enough fan of our show to have written about us twice over the years. I still haven't absorbed that these 18 years of conversation are over. Thanks to anyone out there who had us in their ears. ♥️

“I’ve often said this & I don’t think I’m exaggerating too much: America may be the only country that hates art. Money is the only thing that’s considered a healthy habit. Art is considered neurotic, or it just shows that you have problems, whereas having money is somehow seen as totally healthy.”

I loved talking to Chad and Frank about the latest Spielberg. The reason there are so many podcasts is maybe just that it’s super fun to have conversations with people about subjects you love?

A brand new episode of the pod is here!