- Fantasia 2026: Permanent Damage, Godhead, Sour Minnows (July 29, 2026)
After a verrry long and fruitful week in Montreal, I’m now back in Chicago. Festivals can wear and tear on even the most sleep-deprived critic, especially at a fest like Fantasia, where the sheer volume of films on display can be downright overwhelming. Even so, I was grateful for my time there, catching up with old critic friends, meeting distant faces for the first time, and most importantly, partaking in some crucial Fantasia Fest traditions.
Every year, the audience collectively picks some pre-show ad to go gaga over. In years past, it was an old ramen commercial that the crowds performatively hoot and holler over. We’ve also sung along to the Teotaxi jingle. This year, our target of collective ritual was the commercial for Montreal’s Montréal-Trudeau International Airport; the ad comes on, the audience goes wild, and we get to work clapping along with the slick, corporate thump of the ad’s backing track. (RogerEbert.com contributor Katie Rife, shouting at full volume: “I love the airport!”) Then, of course, the universal chorus of meows that happens before any Fantasia screening, an annual tradition that sparked (allegedly) when a 2007 screening of “Simon’s Cat” went dark, leaving audiences to meow at the screen while the projector figured it out.
Good vibes all around, right? Well, today’s dispatch lets us swim in the ocean of decidedly bad vibes, with a tryptich of tales of people living or moving in filth, or otherwise realizing the world around them is coming apart at the seams and there’s nothing we can do about it.
I’ve been a fan of Canadian filmmaker Seth A. Smith since I saw his slimy, claustrophobic sci-fi thriller “Tin Can” at a previous Fantasia; his latest, “Permanent Damage,” feels like if Harmony Korine directed an episode of “Letterkenny,” and I mean that with all the love and confusion that entails. Emerging as if reborn from a garbage bag dropped in a badbug-infested landfill, escaped convict Tommy Gods (Calem MacDonald) makes a mad dash for safety, only to get caught trying to steal clothes from a dollar store. The only thing that saves him is the intervention of old Mrs. Whynot (Clare Coulter), who rolls up to him and assures the security guard that this is her son, Donnie. Of course, she’s not playacting; she’s deeply senile, but Tommy sees a chance for respite and goes with her to her run-down home.
The rowhome becomes the setting for Smith’s queasy, surreal hangout crime picture, as Tommy adopts Donnie’s old life and starts spending time with the other crazy characters who sit and while away their lives among the flotsam that collects on their front lawn. He even starts falling in love with the beautiful young Joe (Olivia Scriven), a match made in heaven if not for the fact that her uncle, LL (Stephen Dorff), is their maniacal landlord, who’s all too eager to kick out Mrs. Whynot and tear the place down as tribute to the almighty gods of gentrification. All the while, Tommy and Joe look for a way to escape their life of poverty and save their flop house from LL’s white-hot sociopathy—a scheme that might involve a magic drug whose provenance is a highly lucrative secret, and a spoiler it’s best not shared here. (At the screening, they handed out ‘brown dot’s in little baggies and instructed us to take them at a particular point in the movie; once you find out what they actually are, you grow to regret it.)
Smith’s film is steeped in the modes of pop-punk slacker films from the 1990s, with crunchy EDM tracks sitting nicely alongside Julien Ferland’s ambient drone-heavy score. There’s a thick, ill fog in the film’s atmosphere, from the sight of wrecking balls slowly demolishing people’s homes to the hypnotic expansion of insulation foam being sprayed from a gun (an image Smith returns to several times with great effect; it’s everything from subtextual whitewashing of the realities of poverty to a comical weapon in the right hands). The cast inhabits their roles with delightful strangeness, including Dorff at his most pent-up and angry and one-scene wonder Stephen McHattie as an oddball drug kingpin who spends his time in a hot tub murmuring nonsense about crypto while a furry gives him an underwater blowjob.
It doesn’t all quite hold together, and “Permanent Damage”‘s quirks start to grow a bit stale as the film goes on. But I love the way Smith cares for these working-class characters, even as they shit, piss, and stick themselves to chairs; they’re doing everything they can to cling to what little the world leaves them, and finding what little happiness they can find. Decidedly welcome anti-landlord cinema.
Another returning golden boy from the fest is Mark H. Rapaport, whose previous film “Hippo” has frequently been compared to “Dogtooth” in its tale of stunted fucked-up childhoods; now, he’s back with “Godhead,” a religious thriller that feels like another Yorgos joint, “Bugonia,” with its tale of a pair of dangerous, oddball siblings (Sarah Coffey, “Hippo” star Kimball Farley) holding a middle-aged priest (Al Warren) with his own secrets hostage in his own church. The pair have a holy mission for Father: They know that one of them is the physical manifestation of the Holy Ghost, and require him to judge which one fits the Godhead. Then, by sunrise tomorrow, he must shoot them dead with the Smith & Wesson they helpfully bring along.
Rapoport lays down the building blocks of his tight, cohesive script so elegantly, sitting with Warren’s lonely, conflicted priest for a good long while before Firstborn and Secondborn are even introduced. William Babcock’s black-and-white cinematography, boxed in true Academy ratio, keeps us confined in the staid, austere walls of the lonely country church that is our stage. We see Father raising a young boy (Luke Speakman) dropped on his doorstep as a baby, clearly with love but with disquieting protectiveness, as he keeps the boy locked in a windowless room and blares apocalyptic sounds from loudspeakers to sell the notion that the world outside his walls is naught but hellfire.
Then the twins arrive, and “Godhead” turns into a locked-room psychological thriller that feels at once like a particularly potent episode of “The Twilight Zone” and evokes some of the best works of folk horror and religious torment. The cast is uniformly excellent; Green plays Father as a man sprinting toward faith to avoid the difficult choices, both past and present, he’s had to make. Coffey and Farley, for their part, are suitably macabre, the former all wily impulse and Farley as the twitchy, childlike counterpart. The script’s twists and turns remain surprising, even as some third-act developments teeter towards the absurd in ways that let down the sizzling tension of the first two acts. Even so, this is a film playing merrily with ideas of faith, certainty, guilt, and responsibility towards our fellow creatures. It’s also one of the best films I’ve seen at the fest.
Closing off our bad vibes trilogy is “Sour Minnows,” a film which also pairs nicely with fellow Fantasia entry “Dance Freak” in that they’re depictions of flagging men slowly watching in horror as their worlds implode around them in increasingly refractive ways. It begins, as all movies should, with the sight of several humans frantically licking the concrete of a Los Angeles street; the sight is witnesed by two slacker roommates, Ricky (David Brown) and Tepper (Chase Williamson), who can barely comprehend what they’ve just seen. Ricky, for his part, blocks it from his memory.
But the two slack-jawed zennials are forever changed by this sight, and as Harrison Atkin’s feel-bad comedy continues, the walls between time and memory and sanity start to collapse in ways that challenge even “Sour Minnows”‘ most willing viewers.
Speaking honestly, it would almost be folly to try to explain the linear plot beats of “Sour Minnows,” as Ricky, in particular, disappears down Lynchian rabbit holes of recursion and lost time and the collapse of all sense of reality, Atkins dragging us along for every blackout chapter and surreal encounter. This makes the actual film itself hard to parse, the only real throughline being watching Ricky’s slack-jawed descent into dissociation, with only friend and love interest Aura (Suzanna Son) offering tidbits of coherence in the form of a “Yellow Thing” that unravels your reality and gives you a “permanent state of déjà vu.”
Of course, the impulses behind Atkins’ madness are deeply relatable: Ricky’s day job is to help train an AI therapy chatbot, while he desperately tries to get a filmmaking career off the ground (he’s got plans for two shorts and a music video, none of which are explained in great detail). All the while, the news sputters nonsense at us and content comes and goes without us even remembering we’ve watched it (as evidenced by Ricky and Tapper trying to watch the signature film of a famous actor the news tell them has died; By the time Ricky’s plugging in the laptop to watch their torrented copy, Tapper is telling him they watched it already).
Watching “Sour Minnows” feels like experiencing a nervous breakdown; as someone who’s had them before, Atkins nails the sensation of your own understanding of yourself and the world being unmoored. Have you watched that movie already? How long have we been seeing each other? Did what I just experience really happen? What did I even do yesterday? For all its confusion, Atkins’ film does capture that feeling of being trapped in your own existential collapse. And for that, it’s a strangely comforting feeling. The world makes less sense every day, but at least we’re not alone.
- Raise Your Hopeful Voice: Glen Hansard (1970-2026) (July 29, 2026)
“They love music, and they’re not faking it. We sense to a rare degree the real feelings of the two of them; there’s no overlay of technique, effect or style.” – Roger Ebert on “Once”
The world was shocked by the tragic passing of Glen Hansard on Wednesday, July 29, 2026, after an early morning motorcycle accident in Dublin. In the review quoted above, Roger nails what so many loved about the frontman of the Frames and Oscar winner for “Once”: Real feelings. You could sense the emotion in his voice every time he chose to gift it to people. “Once” was a perfect amalgamation of musician and filmmaker as writer/director John Carney used his growing filmmaking skills to spotlight the raw emotion of Hansard and his co-star Marketa Irglova. It’s a beautiful, perfect movie, one that means a great deal to me personally, and one that no one will be able to watch again in quite the same way, as it’s now going to have an undercurrent of tragedy at a life taken far too young.
Hansard was already a star in some circles, certainly in Ireland, when “Once” dropped at Sundance in early 2007. In the ‘90s, the Dublin-based musician fronted the Frames, who released six albums, and he appeared memorably in Alan Parker’s “The Commitments,” a movie that has gained cult status in the years since its release, often on lists of the best Irish films of all time. But Hansard dedicated himself to music for the 16 years between Parker and Carney’s films, segueing to a project called The Swell Season in 2006, which led into the success of “Once.”
Made for almost nothing, “Once” is really a collaboration between bandmates. Carney was the bassist for the Frames, and Hansard was initially just a creative partner on the film, sharing stories about his days as a busker to inform the narrative. It was originally intended to star Cillian Murphy, but Hansard eventually stepped into the role, collaborating completely with Irglova and Carney on the low-budget production, which shot in just over two weeks with a shoestring crew. The improvised, DIY nature of “Once” fit the material perfectly. It’s a film about the power of collaboration—how a person can bring out the best in you through art—and it’s a mirror of that theme through its own existence. It’s no wonder Michael Phillips named it the best film of 2007, a year that also included modern masterpieces like “There Will Be Blood,” “No Country for Old Men,” and “Zodiac,” along with Roger’s 2007 #1, “Juno.” It’s that powerful.
Personally, “Once” was a turning point for this specific film lover. The theater kid who thrives on creative collaboration was always going to adore Carney’s movie, but it also launched at a time when I was really trying to find my voice as a critic. Being able to speak to Carney, Hansard, and Irglova about a movie I loved was inspiring, teaching me to often embrace a writing style that emphasized how a movie made me feel as much as anything. I owe them a great deal that I can never repay.
“Once” would go on to win the Oscar for Best Original Song (despite some controversy given it had appeared on The Swell Season album before the movie) and took home the Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film before being adapted into a hit Broadway musical.
Hansard used the success of “Once” to explore his own creative interests. He did a song for “I’m Not There” for Todd Haynes, often appeared on stage with Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, and popped up on soundtracks like “The Hunger Games” and “Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.” He had sporadic acting appearances like episodes of “Parenthood,” “The Last Man on Earth,” and Joe Wright’s underrated “Cyrano,” and he recorded music consistently, releasing five solo albums and collaborations with the Frames and The Swell Season.
Collin Souter, one of our writers, was also a huge Hansard fan, and shared the following:
“I first saw Glen’s band, the Frames, in 1998 in a small bar somewhere near New Lenox, IL. I had never heard of them, but my friend told me the long-haired guitar player from ‘The Commitments’ is the lead singer. That sold me enough. When we got there, we saw this six-piece band (with a violin player, unheard of in 1998) tucked away in a corner of the place. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were all plugged into the same outlet. That lead singer no longer had his long, curly hair, but he charmed the hell out of all of us with funny stories to go along with almost every song. His performance for each tune was magnetic. His eyes were often closed for the slower songs, wide open with joy for the more upbeat ones, and always commanding every drinker’s attention. You just felt that this setting was wrong for this band. Their sound was too big for a small, rustic place like this. I became an instant fan and immediately bought their latest album, Dance the Devil, which did not disappoint.
I think the moment I knew I was a fan was when he told the story of the song “Fitzcarraldo,” which was also the name of their second album (and where you’ll also hear the first version of “Say It To Me Now,” the song that opens “Once”). He told the story of the Werner Herzog film that inspired it. “It’s the story of a man pulling a ship over a mountain. I thought that was a lovely idea, so I wrote a song about it. I think we’re all pulling stuff over mountains.”
One of my favorite Hansard moments unfolded at Shane MacGowan’s funeral, where the singer covered The Pogues’ timeless “Fairytale of New York” in a way that made the event unforgettable. It’s somehow both melancholic and joyful at the same time; it’s a celebration and a eulogy. It is so Irish. And so powerful. I’ve watched it 100 times, and it has never failed to move me, and I share it with you below as a final tribute.
Listen to music in Glen’s honor today. Heck, maybe even create some of your own.
- Season Two of “Diarra from Detroit” is Nancy Drew for Grown-Ups (July 29, 2026)
Sprinkled throughout the narrative of the sophomore season of “Diarra from Detroit” (relocated to Paramount+ after the shuttering of BET+ this year) are references to beloved stories in which a gang of friends comes together to solve a puzzle. “Scooby-Doo” gets a shoutout, so does “The Goonies.” But in the opinion of this writer, season two, which changes course from Diarra’s schoolteacher career to life as a burgeoning private eye, shares considerable DNA with Nancy Drew. There’s a hunt for an antique desk, secret societies, shifting alliances, and wisecracking friends at one’s side the whole way through.
And as an inveterate Nancy Drew fanatic, I gobbled this up like summertime TV catnip. Like most mysteries starring the Mustang-driving P.I., “Diarra from Detroit” does have one subplot too many, and more side characters than necessary. Despite its flaws, the series succeeds almost entirely on the basis of its cast’s crackerjack comedic timing and endless charm. It might be the year’s best hangout sitcom, if the definition of hangout sitcom can be expanded to include gang wars, conspiracy theories, and ticking biological clocks.
Season one ended with Diarra Brickland (Kilpatrick) successfully locating her missing Tinder date Chris (Shannon Wallace). Now she finds herself wrestling with existential questions that make hunting for a good partner seem tame in comparison. For example, was Chris’s mother Vonda (the inimitable Phylicia Rashad) involved in his kidnapping? Does she (Diarra) want to become a mother? How will she and Chris make rent until school starts in the fall? With few options left, the pair agree to find Chris’s Uncle Ron’s missing desk, last seen being hauled (read: stolen) out of Ron’s home by his nephew, Booker.
And thus begins an absolute citywide whirlwind, almost none of which I am permitted to discuss in this review. “Diarra from Detroit” is as much a dark comedy as it is a crash course in Detroit history: every episode sports a dizzying array of facts about the city during different periods, including its role in the Underground Railroad, Prohibition, its Motown heyday, even its urban design, not to mention thoughts on the city’s more remote areas. Woven throughout all this is the quest for a handcrafted desk concealing a secret, warring factions hunting for both the secret and for Diarra, and enough physical comedy to keep things light.
As good as the writing is—and it is indeed very good, with rapid-fire jokes and plenty of running gags—it is the cast that really delivers on this show. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw DomiNque Perry and Bryan Terrell Clark return as Aja and Tea, respectively; there is no Diarra without her best friends (just as there is no Nancy Drew without Bess Marvin or George Fayne). I could do with more Aja than I got this season, because when Perry, Clark, and Kilpatrick fill the frame, something wonderful happens. One sequence in particular involves Perry and Kilpatrick in disguise, while another involves the trio in a kiddie pool; both are comedy gold and made my sides hurt from laughing. Above all else, this is the friendship that would drive a viewer to return to the series, which is why there ought to have been more of it this season.
Each episode is guided by Diarra’s voiceover; she rewinds the narration to go back in time, she gives “adventure tips,” explains her choices, and overall reminds the viewer that she cannot always make the healthy, sound choice. This could be a crutch in a lesser show, but combined with the no-nonsense attitude of Diarra’s friends, this device winds up making the writing deeply attuned to the audience’s expectations. If you’re thinking it, there’s a good chance that in the next minute or two a character might be saying it. There is a surprising level of relatability in the choices these characters make, especially since this is a story where little is going well, and a lot of people are dropping dead.
Kilpatrick, for her part, brings a good deal of the pathos this season. Attired in Dominique Dawson’s eye-catching costumes (the mango minidress, gold trench coat, rust pencil skirt, velvet teal bodycon dress, and countless other looks are all exquisite), she shifts easily from withering sarcasm with cops who don’t take her seriously to tense vulnerability with her traumatized boyfriend. Still, juggling as many narrative plates as the story demands would be tough for anyone, let alone a performer half as charming as Kilpatrick, so it does all come apart a bit by the end. But no matter. It’s still compelling watching Diarra trying to talk her way out of the hairiest of situations, even when she knows that sometimes, there simply is no exit strategy.
“Diarra from Detroit” gets a bit convoluted this season, but its production design, hilarity, and charm cannot take away from a central truth: this series is pure entertainment. Its soundtrack, its sensibility, its jokes all create a greater whole, one that feels energizing and comforting all at once. Watch weekly, instead of bingeing, to see what kind of hijinks the gang is up to this time. There might be no better antidote to the end-of-summer blues.
Entire season screened for review. Streams July 29 on Paramount+.
- Movies Aren’t Therapy: “Mike Mills” on Parents, Children, and Filmmaking (July 29, 2026)
In concept, Mike Mills is a comprehensive chronicler of his own fractured family dynamics. Three of his most recent (and well-known) films—2010’s “Beginners,” 2016’s “20th Century Women,” and 2021’s “C’Mon C’Mon”—tap into Mills’ anxieties around his strained, challenging relationships to his parents and the neuroticisms that come from the impossible act of parenthood.
In “Beginners,” thirtysomething graphic designer Oliver (Ewan McGregor) thinks back on his relationship to his father (Christopher Plummer, in an Oscar-winning performance) in his late coming out of the closet while he wrestles with his own commitment issues to his girlfriend (Melanie Laurent). The 1979-set “20th Century Women” looks back on a fictionalized version of Mills’ mother (played by Annette Bening), a child of the Depression so desperate to understand her rebellious teenage son that she recruits two younger women (Greta Gerwig and Elle Fanning) to help her guide his development. And “C’Mon C’Mon” follows a radio producer (Joaquin Phoenix) learning the challenges of parenthood when a family emergency requires him to take in his precocious nephew (Woody Norman).
In his films, parents and children are constantly figuring each other out in ways that surprise, delight, and sometimes disappoint them. And no matter what progress they may make, or how much effort they put in, there’s a melancholic acceptance that some gulfs will be impossible to reconcile.
These stories graft naturally onto Mills’ own life story: He grew up in 1970s Southern California to a mother and father he had difficulty connecting to. The former died of cancer in 1999; the latter came out as gay in the last years of his life, dying in 2004.
Mills worked as a graphic designer for clients like the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, and X-Girl before starting a career in music videos for acts like Air and Yoko Ono. His first film, 2005’s “Thumbsucker,” explored somewhat similar gulfs between parents and children. But this triptych of films feels like the purest expression of his ethos: gentle, experiential works that situate incredibly universal pulls for family and understanding in the broader context of America’s cultural shifts.
The Criterion Collection recognized these connections, too, which led to the recent release of “I’ll Remind You of Everything: The Films of Mike Mills,” a 4K UHD box set which includes remastered versions of all three films, and a bevy of extras that include several short films by Mills and two of his music videos.
For RogerEbert.com, Mike Mills sat down in the lead-up to the box set’s release to look back on these works within the broader context of his career, to probe the cultural contexts and formal evolutions he’s made in the ensuing years, and to ponder whether the kids are truly all right.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Obviously, we’re talking to you in the context of a big section of your work being packaged and celebrated in a Criterion box set, a distinction that cineastes often point to as inaugurating your work in a grand Canon of sorts. How do you feel about your works being, for lack of a better term, anointed in that way?
Really lucky; it’s lovely. They do such a great job, and Kim Hendrickson, who was my editor over there, did such a thorough job studying everything. You feel so taken care of and so seen. It’s a radically therapeutic process, and I’m really happy they did it. It has the last three features, but it also has a lot of my short films and music videos, which are really important to me. To be taken seriously as a filmmaker like that is quite something. It doesn’t get better, really, right? Honestly, the Academy is sort of like your alcoholic parent, and when they award you, you’re like, “Why?” Criterion is a kind of sage by contrast. To be in the company of all the other things they make and champion… I can’t even really look at it straight.
“Thumbsucker” is notably absent here. Was it a rights thing, or is it that these films feel so much like a unit?
It’s that they feel like a unit. Kim started talking to be around “Beginners,” and then “20th Century Women” came out, and she says, “Oh, it’s like a diptych.” And then “C’Mon C’Mon came out, and we realized it’s a triptych.
I didn’t intend this at all, but those three films are really a singular project, with lots of different avenues and doors to it. Kim saw that, and I was happy with that distinction. We were thinking of calling it “Parents and Children,” because it’s really all different ways of looking at the same parent-child dynamics. “Thumbsucker” feels like my starter marriage, you know? I learned how to be a filmmaker there, and I owe so much to all those actors. But it just didn’t fit the brief.
I’m sure that same calculus had to be made when figuring out which music videos or shorts to include, as well. You used the word ‘therapeutic’ earlier; obviously, these films feel therapeutic to watch, but were they therapeutic for you to make, considering how closely they hew to your relationship to your parents and parenthood?
So that’s interesting. I do a lot of therapy, and therapy’s been really important to me, and I’ve had these intense, complicated family situations with benefited from and qualified me for therapy. [Laughs.] But it’s really important to understand that the films aren’t therapy. They’re films. If I were really doing therapy in these films, I would be screwed. I’ve taken things I’ve learned about, processed, and churned over for a long time, and figured out a way to share them. The film part is the sharing part. It’s not like a therapy process. It’s much more chaotic, internal, and multi-layered.
I’m very interested in intersubjectivity, how two people change and affect and impact each other, which is in the zone of therapy. And I’m interested in the history, politics, and power of our emotions and emotional lives. Without therapy, I would not be the same filmmaker at all. But a lot of younger filmmakers come up to me and say, “I want to do therapy in a film,” and I’m like, “Don’t do that! You’re going to make the most self-concerned movie ever.” And I’m sure a lot of people find my movies to be like that.
There’s a real magical transformation that happens when you give a story to an actor and invite their authorship, invite their soul and life history to alter it, to transform it. There’s something really weird and deep about doing that. Having Christopher Plummer play my dad, or Annette Bening play my mom—they’re no longer solely my mom and my dad. These are characters and performances. And yet they teach me shit about my mom and my dad that I didn’t know about before I met those two souls.
It feels like you’re starting from the germ of those experiences with your parents, but in the course of creation, they’re abstracted into these broader ideas that feel universal—the struggle to understand your parents and where you fit in, and how they parent you. In “Beginners,” there’s a lot there about how late is too late to start your life over again…
Never! It’s never too late.
Right, but then you move into “20th Century Women,” and even “C’Mon C’Mon,” where there is a sense of urgency in the parent characters to make sure the kids are all right, to raise them in traditions and values that will set them up for success.
I don’t think there’s a neglectful parent in that world. I became a parent as I was writing “20th Century Women,” and a lot of what Annette says is what I said. That line, “You get to see him out in the world as a person; I never will”? I dropped my kid off at preschool when they were three, and watched them waddle off into this teacher’s arms, and I was suddenly out of their mind; they didn’t know I was still watching. I thought, “Oh, that person gets to see my kid in ways I never do.” I went home and wrote that line for Annette to say about me. You can start to play with these positions.
It’s interesting to speed-run these films and see your evolution as a filmmaker in microcosm. “Beginners” feels like this rougher, more immediate thing, with more handheld, whereas there’s something a little more structured and elegant about “20th Century Women.” Then “C’Mon C’Mon” plays out in this elegaic black and white. How did you, as a filmmaker, feel you were refining or adjusting your style as you progressed? Or was it a case of fitting the style to the project?
There are a lot of layers to answer that. One is that I am getting better over time. For this set, I had to recolor them all, so I looked at them all back-to-back, just as you did. I haven’t looked at those films since I finished them, and I realized I’m a lot better at background and camera placement and nuts-and-bolts things than I was during “Beginners.” I make a living not by doing these films, but by doing a couple ads a year, which throw you into all sorts of weird situations. It’s not a bad film school at all. You get tested all the time. So by the time I got to “C’Mon,” I felt a lot better about camera movement and placement, relationship to a location. Background actors are hard to get right. That’s an underrated part of the craft.
Another part, just to be real, is money. I made “Beginners” for $3 million, for 30 days of shooting. It was lucky it looks as good as it does. I had more money for “20th,” and then “C’Mon” was in the same budget realm, if you account for inflation. It’s funny, there’s a short film in the set called “Deformers,” one of the very first things I ever did, about [skateboarder] Ed Templeton. I watched that and thought, “Holy shit, I have not changed!” I still love to do a portrait; I love people’s objects. I really love using empty space as a way to talk about the person in that space. I like natural light; I like things to not feel heavy on the cinematic sauce. For as much as I’ve evolved, I’m really very much the same person.
Speaking of that notion of portraiture and ephemera, your first two films in particular use these montages and monologues to position your characters in cultural and political contexts: magazine ads, political photos, certain types of music. What do you get out of building these character beats through external materials?
The films are all about parents and children, and the back-and-forth of when each becomes the other. Back to “Beginners,” my dad’s innermost, personal part of his erotic life, his emotional life, was also part of 20th-century American oppression against queer people. The personal being political is always something that excited me. In the interview I did with Kirsten Johnson [in the set], I talk a lot about the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which does this all the time. There’s this constant trafficking across that spectrum of how those two things co-shape each other. How the most mysterious inner part of your being is actually part of history, gender, power.
I went to a very theory-laden, materialist kind of art school, so I’ve been thinking like this since I was 18. One of my first loves was the whole Godard French New Wave world, which was a lot about how we’re a part of history—albeit in a pop, irreverent, but also very Marxist way.
Going back to your thoughts on the engine and economics of filmmaking, where you make a lot of your personal money doing a couple ads a year…
And my health insurance, so I can be a dad. I’m a union member, but I get the union minimum each time. So for a five-year film, I get, like, minimum wage.
But I’m also thinking about how you got your feet wet doing music videos, which is a really interesting school of filmmaking for people of your generation. It feels like a bit of a dying art, because it’s harder and harder for music videos to get budgets and visibility.
Yeah, but people are still doing it. I have a lot of young filmmaker friends who are still coming up through music videos. In the American late capitalist model of trying to be an independent filmmaker, you have very few options. You don’t have government-funded arts or anything like that. So unless you go right into features, or come into filmmaking late (I was in my late twenties, watching Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry use ads and videos to get in on the filmmaking life), that was the hustle I learned. That’s the only way I’m gonna be able to do this game. When I started, it was film, and a lot of lights; you couldn’t edit on your Mac, and you needed money. It’s a bit more accessible now.
I think also the channels for visibility for those videos are different now—back then, when you were making them, they were often shown on MTV…
Barely on MTV. It’s really funny; I was a bit, but not much. As a filmmaker, you don’t exist unless you have an audience of some kind, and all the energy and effort that goes into making any film thing doesn’t exist unless people are watching it and reacting. So I did that Air video for “All I Need,” which is this documentary with this couple; I made it just thinking I was being a clever conceptual artist, and it happened to really connect with the couple in it because they live in the next town, and we’re all skaters. But people watch it, and they’re emotional about it; I didn’t know I could do that. The audience taught me what I was doing, and videos are great for that. They’re often an idea contest; even when I did the Talking Heads [“Psycho Killer”] video, I competed against, I don’t know how many directors. The band sees your treatment, which is a written script. It’s like writer-director school. How good is your idea? Then, I’ll let you direct.
It’s an interesting crash course, I’m sure. It feels like we’re existing in an age where that is happening in different channels as well, like the YouTuber-to-filmmaker pipeline, where you have to be scrappy and independent and craft that way.
But look at all the young director reels or young DP reels, and we’re really in the same boat. They’re still using music videos to get their reels going and get attention.
Going back to the films, though, we’ve talked about reinventing your parents through these characters in “Beginners” and “20th Century Women,” but all of these films also have a character that feels so intensely you, where your perspective is seen. What was it like giving yourself an avenue to re-explore yourself at various stages of your life through these projects?
My parents are pretty fucking fascinating; they really are. While we were close in lots of ways when I was a child, we’re not as close as I wanted, so I have a tremendous internal emotional engine to keep wanting to commune with them. And their moment in history is really crazy, loaded, and different from mine. But an important thing to note is that things that Christopher Plummer says in “Beginners” can be things that I, as the child, feel and say, and the same with Annette as things that I wrote as a parent. They all circle each other. One thing I often do in rehearsal is that I’ll have the parent and child switch lines. They’ll do each other’s dialogue, and it’s weird how some things suddenly make total sense. Like we co-make each other in these intense personal relationships.
The more I do these films, the more I realize that the children are the parents. Parents are the children. You are the enemy. The enemy is you. It’s a co-created identity. Ewan McGregor’s played me, Joaquin kind of played me, and Lucas played me. I don’t feel super tied to any of these characters; it doesn’t feel super personal. Obviously, it is in some ways, but when I see it, I think, there’s Joaquin doing his thing.
So much of these films are about people who are thrown together by familial ties trying to figure each other out, knowing you guys are fixtures in each other’s lives but not understanding each other. There are these gulfs, as you mentioned, of history and generation and political dimensions; Dorothea in “20th Century Women,” for instance, is both a product of the Great Depression and also struggling to get on board with the counterculture moment. I still think of the scene where she and Billy Crudup sit and really try to figure out Black Flag as a band.
That is very literally actually my mom; she totally did that and had the same critique.
But no one’s the bad guy. Everyone’s just trying to figure each other out, and there are just these walls.
I should probably have some more villains in these movies. Some more conflict would probably be good.
I don’t know if you thrive in that mode, honestly; I think you love this observational space where there’s empathy for every one of your characters, even when they cause pain.
Yeah, I guess even with empathy and love, you still cause each other pain. It’s impossible to understand the other person as much as you would like, or get everything that you want. That micro-scale is sort of my zone of interest.
Honestly, the villains of your movies are just broader concepts like capitalism and climate change and heteropatriarchy.
Or biological family.
True, and not even the family members; it’s the ties themselves.
They bring us together and tear us apart. All the families are broken too in my movies, so they have a non-traditional element to them.
Even Scoot McNairy in “C’Mon,” who is ostensibly the source of that film’s conflict, gets great empathy because he’s just struggling with mental illness.
He was so good, so visceral in that movie. But “Beginners” is a queer family, and there are other people in the family, like Hal’s friends and his lover. There’s the Billy character in “20th,” and “C’Mon” has an estranged brother and sister with a mother who caused problems, and the dad is gone. It’s like the families are on a spaceship, and it’s about how to keep the spaceship flying when it’s broken. It’s interesting because when someone says, “I make my films about family,” I say, “Wait a second!” Family means lots of things. I’m really interested in constructed families, not biological families.
I asked you this question five years ago when I talked to you for “C’Mon C’Mon,” and it’s related to a question Johnny asks the kids. I’m curious if your answer has changed. When you think about the future, how do you imagine it’ll be?
I have a 14-year-old kid, and when I hang out with them and their friends, I see all their amazing gender neurodiversity explorations, their politics, their awareness, their expansive digital Internet diaspora minds. And I feel great hope. They’re really exciting and interesting, and then they’re under so many crazy pressures I didn’t have to understand. All the same, I sense a great vitality and dexterity of mind and heart that feels new and interesting. There’s a fluidity and empathy that’s very 2.0 compared to the structures that created this person. I, and all my peers in my generation, feel positive when I think about the young folks.
- Everything for Someone: San Diego Comic-Con 2026 Part 2 (July 28, 2026)
San Diego Comic-Con always has a few up-to-the-minute costumes (like someone dressed as Cyclospora lettuce), and a few looks especially popular among a wide range of people. This year, I saw Monkeys D. Luffy from “One Piece” in all shapes, sizes, and ages, easy to spot with the red vest, blue pants, and straw hat. One reason may be that the costume is easy to make and comfortable to wear.
But another reason is the series’ ability to earn the affection of its audience. In one of Impact24’s Fan Favorite panels featuring the craftspeople behind popular movies and television, “One Piece” editor Eric Litman talked about working on the reverse mountain sequence to “make sure we understood the scale and relationships of the characters” in a shot featuring “a whale the size of the Empire State Building.” With a “danger we thought was a threat but is lovable and misunderstood,” he used “lingering shots” to make it more touching than scary. How did he know it was finished? “We would not stop working on that sequence until someone in the cutting room cried.”
“Spider-Noir” editor Jennifer Barbot also used longer shots to evoke the classic noir films of the 40s, with temp scores from “The Maltese Falcon” and “Double Indemnity,” but when it came to the action sequences, she shifted to the kind of pacing modern audiences appreciate.
Co-composer Matt Bowen said the key to his music for “The Boys” was whose perspective the score evokes. For one scene, where a mother has to make a painful decision about her very sick child, he initially wrote something to get “the cry factor.” But it turned out the showrunner wanted to make clear that the mother was considering something very unethical, so it had to be rewritten from the audience’s perspective, less sympathetic, more uncomfortable. Blair James, costume designer for “Obsession,” looked out at the colorful choices of the attendees, some in costume, some just wearing t-shirts with snarky comments or showing off their favorite cultural touchstones, and said, “Everything you wear has conscious or subconscious meaning in it. Costumes help explain the story without saying it, making you see without noticing.”
While the big stars and blockbuster movies were taking over the 6000-seat Hall H, I went to the smaller events, with audiences in about one percent of that size previewing clips from two upcoming films. “Ultraduck” is animated, based on Arcana’s graphic novel about a superhero duck. And “Buddy” is a horror film about a Barney/Pee Wee Herman-like children’s television character from director and co-writer Casper Kelly (“Too Many Cooks”), featuring Keegan-Michael Key as the voice of the murderous plush unicorn-costumed host and Patton Oswalt as the voice of Strappy the backpack.
For the first time in its 29 years, The Black Panel was all-female. Dr. Lando Tosaya responded to complaints about diverse casting of traditionally white characters: “Why are we otherizing something that’s fictional?” And she pointed to the “one Black friend” cliché in mainstream culture that “uses diversity as a checkbox,” keeping those characters “in the Blackground” instead of making the relationships authentic. Research scientist-turned comic and novel author Stephanie Williams quoted Toni Morrison: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” And she responded to critics who point to work they say is “not Black enough.” She was very clear that “If I touch it, it’s Black.”
The “You’re Wrong, Leonard Maltin” session moderated by his rainbow-haired daughter, Jessie, is always a lot of fun. He has missed some of the big releases this year, but so far, his favorite of 2026 is “Tuner” with Leo Woodall and Dustin Hoffman. As always, he responded to critiques of his criticism with grace, charm, and astounding recollection of every detail of the tens of thousands of movies he has seen. Some of the films he was asked about were ones he respected more than loved, like “Blue Velvet” (he urged the audience to watch another David Lynch film, “The Straight Story”), “Taxi Driver,” and this year’s breakthrough, “Backrooms” (“like a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode that never resolved in a satisfying way”). He liked the documentary about the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” as a portrait of a filmmaker who is “a creative spirit who doesn’t limit himself, shackle himself, a dreamer like [the real-life character portrayed by Jeff Bridges in one of his films] Preston Tucker, a creative spirit but not a disciplined creative spirit.”
Every year, Comic-Con seems to take over more of the Gaslamp neighborhood, with streets near the Convention Center shut down to traffic, events at nearby hotels and public libraries, buildings, buses, and train cars being wrapped with ads for movies and television series, and some stores and restaurants being completely taken over for extensive “activations,” installations featuring sets and props. Paramount+ had the biggest one for “The Lodge.” LAIKA had a small but beautiful activation promoting its October release “Wildwood.” Attendees entered a small but immersive forest set with hints about the movie’s story: a newspaper headline about a missing child, a sweater left on a wagon.
The activation for the upcoming Christmas Carol story, “Ebenezer,” was wonderfully detailed, a humorous winter creation in a hot California summer. Very realistic-looking snow and icicles decorated a Victorian-looking storefront with a Scrooge and Marley sign, a moving animatronic crow and large clock with hands that spun around, and inside a glimpse of Bob Cratchit’s desk, with the flickering candle he’d use to warm his hands. Actors in winter Victorian costumes interacted with the crowd, and star Johnny Depp came out as a surprise, wearing full Scrooge make-up and costume to greet some lucky visitors.
Long-time Comic-Con attendees know that the funniest panel is just before it closes down, the Starship Smackdown, celebrating its 25th anniversary as a beloved tradition. Mark Altman, television writer/producer and big-time “Star Trek” nerd who has written the definitive guide to the show, presides over a panel of experts that, with some audience participation, creates a bracket of the best movie and television starships, from the iconic (Millenium Falcon, various versions of the Enterprise) to the esoteric (the Rocinante, and does the TARDIS qualify?) for very lively, hilarious and encyclopedically nerdy debate. This year’s winner was a first-time entrant, but an undeniably worthy one: the Hail Mary.
I love the way the more than 100,000 San Diego Comic-Con attendees always cheer each other on, no matter what fandom they support. As I went through the gigantic exhibition hall and saw people of all sizes, shapes, genders, races, abilities, and ages wearing snarky t-shirts, fan regalia, and full-on, homemade costumes, buying items from a few dollars to more than a mortgage payment, it was impossible not to feel how much joy the most passionate fans get from the lively arts that are most meaningful to them. As Crunchyroll’s Leslie Bland said on a panel about SteelBooks for Blu-Rays. “We don’t try to make something for everyone. We try to make everything for someone.”
