How the carceral system makes it almost too easy to empathize with an otherwise deeply unrelatable subject in Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's riveting meta-doc.

If you haven't watched You Can See Everything, don't read this, but if you have, I loved this.

It should not be a controversial statement to demand horror be horrifying, but because we live in a capitalist society that prioritizes comfort and sanitization over all else, that refuses to engage with material reality if it isn’t assuaging our delicate egos and imperialist sensibilities, we find discomfort immoral. It made me feel bad and therefore it is bad. The thing that made me feel bad should not do that but I want to be a part of it. I want the prestige, the money, to sit at the cool kid’s table and enjoy the infrastructure they built while I was mocking them.

I think the version that is out there of her is largely a version that people are putting together from the pieces they have. The first time I met her, I was like, “This is not how I thought she would be.”

I recently watched the superb YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING (2026) (letterboxd review here) and this is a wonderful companion piece. It's been said before and will be said again but there is really no one out here doing it like Nathan Fielder. A singular entity in the entertainment space. I think the only thing that approaches his body of work is like, Tim Heidecker/Gregg Turkington's On Cinema escapades.

You never have quite enough bullets for all the living corpses bearing down on you. If you throw that grenade at a monster now, what happens if you need it for a bigger one later? You always need more, and it’s never enough.

Some incredibly good writing about Resident Evil, movies, survival horror, and addiction.

When an informal network of amateurs questions the work of industry standard-bearers, it is rarely a matter of raw technical superiority but rather a fundamental difference in constraints. While restoration entities often operate on strict budgets and tight deadlines, preservationists can spend years cross-referencing decades of older releases.

Great piece on the labor and vision of amateur restoration film -- which, in this writer's opinion, is some of the most important work happening in historical preservation today, and it's all entirely illegal.

We were invested in liberation. So, without an understanding of what we were trying to liberate for ourselves, we were finding sympathetic and empathetic connections to other modes of liberation — specifically Black and brown liberation. There’s a reason why Zion is mostly Black and brown folks. We were inherently predisposed to seeing our own liberation connected to these other modes of liberation.

Really fascinating interview with Lilly Wachowski about movies, music, the Matrix, transness, and liberation.

I’m using this post to argue (through a canon of recent music videos) that the mid-2020s has developed a definite aesthetic sensibility. There are several elements that force it into 2020s specificity, and several tangential influences - Y2K-era J-horror, Norbert Schoerner, David LaChapelle. But everything in it is underpinned by an existing visual schema, the same one that dominated the Italian film industry from the late 1960s to late 1970s. The results of that sensibility are most readable in Italian gialli - a subgenre of surreal, stylish and bloody crime films.

Extremely well-researched and well-argued. As a consummate #hater of current trends I found this a great read on the contemporary slop aesthetics.

Free film archive of solidarity and struggle!

Audiences today are allergic to directness - they prefer stories to be about unfolding secrets, and they want convoluted Plots which involve them in a process of discovery. [...] Audiences have been trained by the last 20 years of high-budget television to analyze plot, but not to analyze theme. This stuff frequently makes me feel completely insane.

I think I'm warmer on The Odyssey than Laura is overall, but I agree wholeheartedly with this bit. What I like about Nolan is his bluntness, even when it's often the worst part of his movies. That worked for me in The Odyssey. But the way people are talking about it is, like Laura, also driving me insane.

Sinon’s story, to me, feels like a warning. Abandoning the trans community has a price. We aren’t a shame that can be buried forever. The pendulum will swing, and we have long memories.

Love this reading, even if I'm not sure I agree that it was an intentional move by Nolan. I think the beauty of any creative work is that some meanings come only through the act of creation.

Really fun technical breakdown of all the computers in Jurassic Park (1993). I love this stuff.

Michael is a bad movie. Let’s just get that out of the way now. It is a movie designed less to tell a story than to recreate moments, ones you are probably already familiar with. It is a movie designed to give you a karaoke experience in a theater setting with other like-minded Michael Jackson…