- “Onimusha: Way of the Sword” is a Drawn-Out Samurai Epic (August 31, 2026)
Capcom has had an incredible 2026 so far, with the releases of the fantastic “Resident Evil Requiem,” “Pragmata,” and “Monster Hunter Stories 3.” Rounding out the year is “Onimusha: Way of the Sword.”
It’s the latest mainline entry in the series after a staggering 20-year hiatus, the last one being 2006’s “Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams” all the way back on the PlayStation 2. Since then there have been a few spin-offs and remasters of older titles, but fans were itching for a new “Onimusha,” one built for the modern age.
That’s exactly what we got with “Onimusha: Way of the Sword.” It has a heartfelt story, charming characters, surprisingly manageable sandbox, and excellent combat. Although the pacing suffers a bit and feels drawn-out due to an overabundance of mini-boss battles, “Way of the Sword” is the triumphant resurgence that the series needed.
You play as Miyamoto Musashi (whose likeness is borrowed from the legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune) journey to become the strongest samurai around. After stumbling across demonic monsters called Genma and getting himself killed, he’s granted an Oni gauntlet during his brief trip to hell, gets resurrected and gains tremendous Oni-like powers.
With these newfound abilities, he vows to rid Kyoto of the infectious malice that’s driving its citizens mad. It’s a strong setup that paves the way for an emotional ending, and that’s mainly thanks to his equally compelling comrades and adversaries.
His rival, Ganryu Sasaki, was also killed and given a gauntlet. But he chooses to devour human souls instead of Genma ones like Musashi, showing the stark contrast between both their humanities. Despite being a serious samurai, Musashi also has his clumsy side, occasionally tripping over himself. Shizuka, the Oni living inside his gauntlet, is a fun companion who banters with him too. These moments add smart moments of humor to an otherwise dark tale.
As you continue through the story and purify more regions of Kyoto from the foggy malice, the area opens up, allowing Musashi to explore more of it. It’s reminiscent of Kamurocho from the “Yakuza/Like a Dragon” games. It’s a sandbox with virtually no loading screens that you can seamlessly roam around in and is unexpectedly dense and lively. It’s a welcome change of pace from needlessly bloated open-worlds like feudal Japan in “Assassin’s Creed: Shadows.”
The real-time combat is a treat, as it’s weighty and meticulous, veering on the edge of a Soulslike while having plenty of cinematic flair. When you hit enemies, different colored soul orbs fly out of them, and Musashi can use his gauntlet to absorb them to help in battle. For example, red orbs give him points to unlock new skills, while yellow orbs replenish his health aside from using healing items. There’s a delicate balance between attacking your opponent and stopping momentarily to absorb the souls.
Musashi can parry, block, and dodge attacks. While these mechanics aren’t revolutionary by themselves, it’s the way that they reward you that feels so gratifying. Parrying builds up your Blaze meter, and when full, Musashi’s sword erupts in blue flame. His regular attacks then deal extra damage and increase the chance for blue soul orbs to drop, which when absorbed, in turn builds up the Oni Armament meter, allowing you to unleash devastating Oni-fueled attacks. Every gameplay mechanic cleverly feeds into each other, resulting in combat feeling like a synergistic bloody dance.
Boss fights are exhilarating too, whether it’s the lightning beast Nue or intimidating multi-armed Rasho-Gan, they have unique attack patterns to learn in order to deflect or dodge them. Some can be frustratingly difficult sometimes, but once you have the rhythm down, the victory becomes all the sweeter. However, “Way of the Sword” relies too heavily on certain Genma mini-bosses that appear when Musashi attempts to close demonic rifts around Kyoto. It drags the story out unnecessarily and gets repetitive after a while.
Outside of the main story, though, you can tackle side quests from locals called Curious Cases. Not only do you learn more about ancient Japanese mythology and its different creatures, but you’re incentivized as they provide helpful materials to augment Musashi’s equipment. While Curious Cases basically just end with killing a group of Genma, they don’t overstay their welcome, and the rewards are still worth completing them for.
“Onimusha: Way of the Sword” is a fantastic action game that continues Capcom’s impressive stride. The scope of it all is impressively restrained. The story, characters, and world all feel grounded, but the apocalyptic stakes simultaneously make them feel grander. Thankfully, the reins were unleashed when it came to the combat, which is one of the most satisfying this year.
September is a wildly busy month for new and exciting game releases, even before “Grand Theft Auto VI” arrives in November. Be sure to make time for “Onimusha: Way of the Sword.”
Capcom provided a review copy of this title. It will be released for PS5, Windows, Nintendo Switch 2, and Xbox Series X/S on September 4, 2026.
- “The Blood of Dawnwalker” Captivates Gamers with Immersive Storytelling (August 31, 2026)
It’s funny sometimes how issues with a game can be overwhelmed by what it does well. Every gamer has a few titles that they adore that they’d admit don’t have the strongest storytelling, just addictive gameplay. There are platformers that are among my favorite of all time for which I could barely tell you what the story is at all. What’s rarer is for early technical and gameplay issues to fall away under impressive writing and world-building.
But that was exactly my experience with the surprisingly excellent “The Blood of Dawnwalker,” a new RPG from a co-creator of “The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt” and “Cyberpunk 2077,” but a title that could get lost in the wave of titles about to be released in one of the most crowded release windows in history. In September and October, before “Grand Theft Auto VI” takes all the oxygen in the gaming world, there are a dozen or so titles that I can’t wait to play. If half of them are as good as “Dawnwalker,” this will be one of the best gaming years of all time.
Fans of a little Marvel character named Blade can probably guess what the title of this game refers to already. In that world, Blade was known as a “daywalker,” but the idea here is the same: A human-vampire hybrid that can survive the sunlight that usually kills bloodsuckers. The developers at Rebel Wolves take that concept and apply it to an RPG experience that will feel very visually familiar to fans of “The Witcher.” However, the hybrid existence of the “Dawnwalker” that gives this game its title also creatively influences the way it’s played: Divided into alternating daylight and nighttime loops in which the player has different powers, experiences, and even story chapters. It’s one of the many aspects of this game that feels fresh and unusual, a new way to tell a familiar story instead of just another gimmick.
The Dawnwalker in this case is named Coen, a young man in 14th-century Europe, in a community so overrun by vampires that the townspeople are forced to bow down to their needs like cult members. When Coen’s mother becomes ill, she is unable to participate in one of the ceremonies run by the evil Brencis, ruler of Vale Sangora in the Carpathian Mountains. In retaliation, Brencis kidnaps Coen’s family and turns Coen into the Dawnwalker, a figure who becomes increasingly powerful as he amasses allies to rescue his family from the vicious King.
After the kidnapping, Coen has 30 days to save his family from Brencis, and activities take time segments that are tracked on the player’s HUD. A side mission to build an alliance might take one block; a deeper story mission might take four—after eight blocks, the clock shifts from day to night, or back again. You will not be able to do everything in Vale Sangora in the allotted blocks before Brencis kills your family, leading to a fresh new way to give players authorship in a manner that was reportedly conceived as a way to replicate playing games like Dungeons & Dragons around an actual table.
“Dawnwalker” isn’t just about choosing main and side missions on a pretty predictable track—it has embedded in it a remarkable sense of the passage of time, one of many things that gives both Vale Sanngora and the story that unfolds in it a three-dimensionality that these games often lack. You won’t be able to come back and save every NPC that asks for help. There’s not enough time. (Although, it should be noted, there are aspects of the game like character design and motion that look more than a bit visually dated, as if this is an expansion of a 2010s RPG instead of a 2026 one, but some of that could be patched out over time.)
Of course, being comparable to Blade makes Coen into kind of a badass. During the day, your sword will be your weapon of choice, and the game relies on a directional parry and strike system. If an enemy comes at you from the right, an icon will encourage you to parry right, making it easier to counter. (You can “Omniblock” in all directions, but it’s not advisable given how much harder it makes fighting back.) The physics of the combat, especially early on, feel a bit unpolished in the pre-release version, although they could be refined with patches. There were times in the review build when it felt like timing and damage weren’t reliable, but the game is more fluid in the “Vampirism” department, where Wolverine-esque claws and superpowers turn you into a killing machine. And, in both halves, the combat improves over time as the upgrades give you more toys with which to play, including even spells that Coen can cast during the day.
All of this is as fun as it sounds, a few graphics glitches aside, but what’s most remarkable about “Dawnwalker” is the storytelling. Vale Sangora is a detailed setting with fascinating characters throughout. While you’re mostly a lone warrior, the story of “Blood of Dawnwalker: requires Coen to make allies, and they are not just bland NPCs but fully considered supporting characters with arcs and backstories of their own that feel complexly written. Of course, like all good RPGs, these supporting players are influenced by your dialogue choices and actions. Who you romance, who you snub, and even who you kill can influence the endgame in a way that makes this story your own.
“The Blood of Dawnwalker” features many of the other expected elements of RPGs like crafting, skill trees, and inventory management. Like “The Witcher” games, you will spend a remarkable amount of time with your gear, either equipping, destroying, or selling it. And you will constantly be choosing perks or upgrades to your ability trees, which add another level of authorship. But make sure you have tolerance for weight management before you embark.
The final mission of “The Blood of Dawnwalker” left me a little cold, especially given how captivating some of the mid-game missions were structured, but that could be in part because of the choices I made to get there. Your final hours will be different from mine. And, without spoiling, I found the game’s epilogue surprisingly moving, a recounting of how the choices I made filled out the storytelling outline provided by the developers. I found myself honestly sad to say goodbye to Coen and Vale Sangora, and hoping the sun rises on both again in the future.
The publisher provided a review copy of this title. It is available on September 3rd for PS5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S.
- A Coat of Many Colors: How Dolly Parton Helped Me Appreciate My Mother (August 31, 2026)
Dolly Parton, who died last week at 80, was something like an American secular saint, founding nonprofit foundations to address social ills and quietly doing good deeds on behalf of private individuals who wrote to her asking for help. I never met her. But my mother, a singer-songwriter and music teacher, did, briefly.
It happened in the mid-1970s when she moved out to Nashville to try to make it in the country music business after the country great Chet Atkins mentored her and produced her first and only album, Passages, which was shelved by her label RCA Records after the first single from her album, “The Girl from Prairie Flats,” failed to appear on Billboard’s Top 40 Country Singles list.
That adventure didn’t work out for her, but she met a lot of then-superstars, including Dolly, Dolly’s ex-husband Porter Wagoner, Loretta Lynn, Kenny Rogers (who officially pivoted from rock to country in 1976, soon after Mom landed in Nashville), and the baritone-voiced Tennessee Ernie Ford, who booked her on a TV special. Bettye Pierce Zoller was her stage name.
During her Nashville period, she was simply called Bettye Pierce (Zoller, she was told euphemistically, didn’t sound “country enough”). She borrowed “Pierce” from my biological father, pianist and composer David Pierce Zoller, aka Dave Zoller, another family member I’ve written about at RogerEbert.com.
Country wasn’t Mom’s native musical idiom—growing up in Kansas City, Kansas, she’d won awards in high school for her musical theater performances. After graduating from the University of Missouri at Kansas City (where she met Dad, then a TA in a composition class), she mastered different forms of music, both solo and in partnership with Dad: show tunes, American songbook standards, jazz, rock.
Photo of “The Girl from Prairie Flats,” a country music single written by Bettye Pierce and Becky Dye and performed by Pierce. Originally released as a promotional single in 1976.
Her fascination with country came mainly from Dolly Parton’s international success starting in the early 1970s. Dolly was one of Mom’s role models, as a performer, a businessperson, and an independent woman who found a way to do things her way, even though society at large was a boy’s club, and country music only slightly less of one.
My relationship with my mother was stormy at best. I went into the details here, in a post published after her death in 2021. The short version: she had drug and alcohol problems her whole life, earned pretty substantial amounts from radio commercials and then blew it all on substances (and clothes, and vacations, and a couple of times, cars). She had a streak of malignant narcissism that later struck both my brother and myself as undiagnosed mental illness.
Visiting mom in the psychiatric ward near the end of her life, where she was detoxing from cocaine before moving into a memory care facility, I asked her if she ever wondered if she was mentally ill, and if so, whether she sought a medical diagnosis. The answers were yes and no, respectively. The yes was because Mom knew her extreme behavior wasn’t considered healthy. The no was because if she got a diagnosis, then she’d have had to face the reality that she was what she feared she was. It was a head-in-the-sand approach to the problem. In our own, hopefully less self-destructive ways, we’ve all been there.
As an adult, I was envious of anyone who had a close and emotionally healthy relationship with their mother and genuinely enjoyed being around them. Mom and I went through a ten-year period when we didn’t speak at all, following several spectacular instances of unconscionable behavior toward my first wife, her sister, and their extended family, who never showed her anything but patience and courtesy.
When she died in April of 2021—officially of dementia, but really from a cumulative lifetime of abusing her body—I was bereft. It’s an infuriating truth that sometimes the deaths of relatives we had unpleasant relationships with hit us harder than the deaths of those who didn’t burden us in that way. Psychologists call it a “complicated loss.”
I had already started listening to Dolly Parton again quite heavily in the years preceding her death, in heavy rotation with music by other performers she admired. In the weeks before Mom died, Dolly became my default.
“A Coat of Many Colors” was the one I listened to the most. It made me cry. At first, the tears were for the relationship I didn’t have with Mom but wish I had. Drawn from Dolly’s childhood, the song is about a poor country girl whose mama sews her a coat from mismatched materials because the family can’t afford to go to a store and buy her something new. She sings:
“Mama sewed the rags togetherSewin’ every piece with loveShe made my coat of many colorsThat I was so proud of
As she sewed, she told a storyFrom the Bible she had readAbout a coat of many colorsJoseph wore and then she said“Perhaps this coat will bring youGood luck and happiness”And I just couldn’t wait to wear itAnd Mama blessed it with a kiss.”
Mean kids at school make fun of the girl’s coat because it’s evidence of the family’s poverty. But to the narrator, it’s evidence of her mother’s perseverance, ingenuity, and love. She couldn’t understand it, she says,
“For I felt that I was richAnd I told ’em of the loveMy mama sewed in every stitchAnd I told ’em all the storyMama told me while she sewedAnd how my coat of many colorsWas worth more than all their clothes.”
Everybody has subcategories of movies that they gravitate towards for personal reasons. One of mine is movies in which a mother is unabashedly adored by their kids and, judging from the way the mother is presented, the movie adores her as well. Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life’ is a movie like that. So is Terence Davies’ “The Long Day Closes,” and Alan Parker’s film version of Frank McCourt’s memoir of Irish poverty “Angela’s Ashes.” Plus “Almost Famous,” “Stepmom,” “Places in the Heart,” and any adaptation of “Little Women.” You can probably think of a few more.
Well, for me, watching those movies was an exercise in blissful masochism. I had no idea what it would’ve felt like to have a relationship with my mother like the ones in those movies, where mom is a radiant force for good and doesn’t let her demons get the better of her because she doesn’t have any. Watching movies built around those types of mothers was the emotional equivalent of being able to vicariously visit, through cinema, a place I didn’t get to see when it existed and that was gone by the time I saw the film. “The Coat of Many Colors” tells that kind of story. The narrator’s mama adored her when she was a child, and as an adult she still adores her, with good reason.
Then, a couple of days after Mom died, I spoke to a friend, a younger writer, about a piece he was working on, and we got into the subject of literary voice. I felt he was in danger of embarrassing himself by conflating the point-of-view of a mostly awful movie character with the point-of-view of the movie itself. (The film was “The Wolf of Wall Street,” by Martin Scorsese, who has made a lot of movies that invoke the phrase “depiction does not equal endorsement.” I gave him a few reasons why I believed the movie was aware of the protagonist’s venality, cruelty, and toxic self-centeredness (such as the way his narration seems to skip over horrible incidents that he was directly involved with, such as a coworker’s death by suicide). “Don’t mistake the voice of the character for the voice of the artist,” he said.
And then I felt a chill, because I realized who taught me that: Mom.
Mom had an office in her house, really a tiny room that was of no other practical use. She had an upright piano in there, a small bookshelf, a small desk, and a stereo unit hooked up to one of those record players that could stack vinyl LPs and drop them one by one onto the turntable. I’d go in there sometimes and choose a record almost at random from Mom’s collection. I heard a lot of great music for the first time that way. Joni Mitchell’s Blue, The Beatles’ White Album, Ray Charles’ Genius + Jazz = Soul and Sweet and Sour Tears, Dolly’s Just Because I’m a Woman and Here You Come Again and, of course, A Coat of Many Colors (which doubled as an album title).
There were also singles in there, one-offs that Mom bought, I guess you could say, out of respect: she’d heard the song over and over on the radio, loved it every time, and wanted to compensate the artists by putting a little money in their pockets. One was Dave Loggins’ 1974 song “Please Come to Boston,” about a “ramblin’ man” who keeps shrugging off the entreaties of a woman who’s in love with him and just wants him to recognize that he’d be much happier if he’d leave the road and “settle down” with her.
Mom had me play that one a couple of times because she wanted me to appreciate how the narrator keeps trying to insist on love on his own terms (asking the woman to join him in Boston, Denver, and Los Angeles), and how the story of the song remains unresolved. Did he finally settle down, or did he keep rambling? We don’t know.
We listened to a lot of songs that way. It wasn’t a set thing. Usually I’d listen with headphones on for a couple of hours while she watched TV or exercised. But sometimes she’d come into the office, look at the record, and suddenly start smiling and tap me on the shoulder, the signal to take the headphones off so she could tell me something about the music.
I learned about unreliable and/or unstable narrators by listening to music with Mom. Some examples included “Mack the Knife,” recorded by many artists but written for Bertolt Brecht’s “The Threepenny Opera”; Steven Sondheim’s “A Little Priest,” from Sweeney Todd, one of the most joyous songs ever written about serial killing and cannibalism; Bessie Smith’s “Send Me to the ‘Lectric Chair,” sung by a woman who has zero regrets about killing her cheating husband (banned from ever being played on BBC Radio); The Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb,” in which the narrator brags about his success at breaking a strong willed woman and making her subservient, and “Brown Sugar,” about the many horrors of slavery, though told from the point-of-view of a person who seems excited by them rather than disapproving (finally pulled from their setlist in 2021); Randy Newman’s “Rednecks,” about a Southern racist calling out Northern political hypocrisy.
Listening to music with Mom is how I learned that songs specifically about songwriting are a form of “metafiction” (a word coined in 1970 by writer William Gass) and that the prefix can be joined to a noun to describe something mainly about the thing it exemplifies. The Four Tops’ “Same Old Song,” Billy Joel’s “Piano Man,” Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Writing” and “Your Song,” Barry Manilow’s “I Write the Songs,” and so on. When I went to college and studied creative writing, I took particular interest in metafiction because, thanks to Mom’s explanations, the idea intrigued me.
And then there was Dolly. Through Mom, I came to understand that much of her music was as aspirational as it was inspirational, and that she left things out so we could fill them in ourselves. “A Coat of Many Colors” doesn’t end by telling us that the narrator now enjoys a life free from want, but that a certain incident in her past gave her the mindset to appreciate gifts that come from love, not money; it’s up to us to imagine what that coat led to. “Two Doors Down” catches a woman at the end of an old life (leaving a bad relationship) and what might be the start of a new one, though the song leaves us with just a seed of hope, and we have to imagine how it will or won’t grow.
It was Mom’s thoughts on the Dolly Parton-Porter Wagoner collaboration “Jeannie’s Afraid of the Dark” that helped me understand that a song, like a poem, could suddenly turn on the audience and inflict pain (Jeannie is an only child afraid of death, and in the end, the narrators, her parents, reveal that she died.) Edgar Allan Poe wrote many poems like that.
After I finished the phone call with my writer friend, I sat for a long time and thought about all the things my mother taught me about music, narration, point of view, and different modes of storytelling across different media. She didn’t make a point of instructing me. It happened organically, through my own explorations. I understood what she told me and carried it with me throughout school and then into my career as a critic. I wouldn’t be where I am today without the lessons my Mom taught me.
Would I have preferred to have a mother who was always there for me, who was warm and empathetic, and put the needs of myself and my brother first, who managed money effectively so we weren’t always scrambling to pay bills at the last minute and begging family friends for loans, and who wasn’t constantly fighting one form of addiction or another? Sure. But that didn’t happen, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it now, so it seems pointless to fixate on it.
And I don’t need to fixate on it, because listening to Dolly Parton’s music reminded me of what is still my most treasured memory of my mother, one that only she could have given me. Lots of moms can cook, sew, and give smart advice about school and love, and generally act as a soft cushion for their kids to land on whenever they fall.
But none of them could have awakened and nourished the writer I became simply by loving the same things I loved, helping me understand them more deeply, and paying that love forward to others.
So Dolly did a good deed for me, too. She set me down the road to become who I am. And then, decades later, she helped me stop obsessing over what my mother didn’t give me and recognize the unique gifts she did bestow, simply by being herself.
Thanks for the coat, Mom. I wear it every day.
- Jane Schoenbrun’s Queer Horror Cinema of Requiem and Revelation (August 31, 2026)
Jane Schoenbrun’s films examine how desires can only fester for so long. Now, with the release of “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” the director of the 2024 A24 hit “I Saw the TV Glow” has crafted a symbolic duology that functions as a desperate plea to the queer audience the director has amassed. Both films explore the dangers of repression and use form to show how this dissociation has affected their respective protagonists. While modern horror has a penchant for jump scares delivered through harsh editing and garish sound design, Schoenbrun crafts a haunting metaphor for queer and trans identity by imbuing their cinema with elongated silences, droning scores, and fantastical visuals.
The horrors of Schoenbrun’s cinema aren’t found within the dark rooms we watch these films in, but in the lives of the film’s protagonists, whose shame has become synonymous with their existence. In “TV Glow,” we watch as Owen (Justice Smith) grows from a child infatuated with the fictional television show “The Pink Opaque” to a despondent adult who buries the show’s impact on his gender identity. In “Camp Miasma,” indie darling filmmaker Kris has been tapped to reboot a slasher franchise that transformed her identity not only as a filmmaker, but as a queer adult. But while Owen is haunted by the awakening that came with his favorite show, Kris eventually becomes fascinated by the revelations her favorite series spawns.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Mubi)
In both films, viewers are confronted with a protagonist who has been sleepwalking through existence, stuffing their desires down each time they threaten to escape their lips. The similarities between Owen and Kris stop there, as each of them ultimately faces a significantly different path. Suspended by shame, Owen is unable to give the desire to transition a name, while Kris’ desperation to belong to a perfect version of queerness stunts her relationship with sex. The only time these two can truly be themselves is when they gaze up at the screens of their favorite television show or film.
Horror has long been a genre where queer audiences have found solace, understanding themselves and their desires through a small screen in their bedroom, or the overwhelming projections in a theater. These pieces of media can be foundational to how queer viewers understand themselves, yet Schoenbrun pleads for their audience not to get stuck on these versions of what being queer or transgender can feel or look like. Instead, they propose a different reality, one where we can extricate ourselves from these pieces of media and live an authentic life outside of them. While Owen feels trapped within the confines of both “The Pink Opaque” and his adult life, Kris is dropped into her own slasher film, which she eventually breaks out of and finds peace through destroying the very thing she once loved.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Mubi)
Throughout each film’s runtime, Schoenbrun maintains that Owen and Kris, much like the director’s audience, must embrace their desires not only when consuming media, but by embracing community. Kris achieves this with the help of former “Camp Miasma” Final Girl Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), with whom she is able to achieve an orgasm, and subsequently escapes the confines of shame which she has previously been bound to. The film then shifts from a metatextual critique on the slasher genre into a film filled with fantastical visuals, as Kris and Billy cement their bond through this experience. The ending of Schoenbrun’s latest is wholly different from their second film, in which Owen is left alone, screaming in despair, unable to begin the journey Kris has been ushered to take.
Both protagonists have been warped by time, their authentic lives lost to shame and isolation, yet Schoenbrun doesn’t position their respective endings as simple conclusions. At the end of “TV Glow,” the image of text reading “There’s still time” is etched with colorful chalk onto a suburban street. While Owen’s story is imbued with sadness throughout, the director uses the final image of their sophomore feature as a gentle plea, similar to Kris’ ending in “Camp Miasma.” Struggling with one’s sexuality, gender, and desires is undoubtedly stifling, but Schoenbrun maintains that although it may be terrifying, small acts of bravery and sacrifice are needed to be made for life to truly be lived.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Mubi)
With their latest two films, Schoenbrun has created a cinema that feels like a rallying cry, one that pleads with its audience not simply to accept their sexuality or gender, but to embrace it fully, no matter how difficult the journey may be. If one film functions as a warning that showcases what happens when queer and trans people force themselves to assimilate to a heteronormative society, the other allows viewers to see what life can look like post-coming out and post-transition. When embracing a queer reality, Schoenbrun proposes that their audience can usher in a life filled with light, unlike the horror franchise and television series their protagonists are so obsessed with.
Both “I Saw the TV Glow” and “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma” coexist as seminal pieces of horror cinema which compassionately explore queer tragedy and queer joy. In each, Schoenbrun calls on dedicated viewers to see these films as a sermon that shows what life can look like for queer and trans people who succumb to shame and isolation, and those who embrace queer preservation. Searching for oneself can feel like a never-ending task, but Schoenbrun proposes that happiness can only be achieved by breaking free of the chains society wants us to assimilate into. When we do so, we take control of our desires and our lives, sparing ourselves from becoming lost to history like a low-budget genre film that collects dust on the shelves of an abandoned video store.
- Be Smart About the Way You Change: Spike Fearn and Angourie Rice on “Finding Emily” (August 28, 2026)
Bursting with old-school charm even as its provocations are distinctly modern, director Alicia MacDonald’s “Finding Emily” is a witty and sincere reminder of the enduring appeal of romantic comedies. Unlike recent stabs at the genre that feel like they coast on self-awareness and the ability to wink at their audience, MacDonald’s story has a refreshing earnestness. It believes in our primal, primordial need to be seen and loved, but explores how modern life and its many tribulations complicate those desires. Even as it moves through its classic tropes, its inquiry and curiosity never get overshadowed. It’s a gift to be invited to ask questions of and with its characters.
Thankfully, in Spike Fearn and Angourie Rice, MacDonald and writer Rachel Hirons have found more-than-worthy travelers to root us in this voyage. Fearn plays Owen, a sound engineer who, after spending a magical night with Emily (Sadie Soverall), realizes that she has given him the wrong number through which to contact him. Distraught, he seeks help from another Emily (Rice) to find her. Rice’s Emily sees Owen as a prime candidate for her theory that love serves no purpose in the modern world, merely an evolutionary carryover from when people still needed companionship and community.
One key theme that “Finding Emily” thoughtfully explores is the digital anxiety young people face when trying to pursue love. When awkward dates can go viral, texts can be screenshotted and shared out of context, and no one wants to be the cautionary tale, how does this impact the way people interact? Does it force people to be more genuine, or does it make them put up more boundaries? “I think romcoms, in many ways, can be seen as a genre that explores the ways technology impacts human connection,” Rice shared on the theme.
“Finding Emily” was released in the UK in May and as the film gets ready to jump the pond to make its US bow, RogerEbert.com spoke with Rice and Fearn about how filming in Manchester was emblematic of MacDonald’s anachronistic take on the romcom, the joy of filming their key musical scenes, and the outtakes they filmed that ended up being critical to understanding their character’s journeys.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
It’s rare for Manchester to be the setting of a romcom. From the film, it feels like it’s a place that feels modern and ancient, particularly how it oscillates between classic locations like the Northern Quarter and the more contemporary Peak District. That interplay between ancient and modern connects with the ways Alicia has taken rom-com tropes and updated them with distinctly Gen Z angst. Tell me more about what being in that city, and being surrounded by that history, helped clarify what Alicia was trying to accomplish with “Finding Emily.”
Spike Fearn: Manchester was always a place I wanted to film, and I’m happy I could live into that dream. I’m inspired by the purity of Manchester but also its sound. I think with filming for projects, you’re often not there long enough to really fall in love with it, but it was nice to film there, grow with it, and experience its seasons and changes.
I’m just happy that Manchester is shown because a lot of the northern parts of the UK are shown as gray, and that’s not really what it is. How Manchester is shown, with its vibrancy and color, is exactly how it feels. That focus guided how we thought through what Alicia was trying to do with this romcom: expand people’s horizons on what the genre can be.
Angourie Rice: Spike wrote me a poem at the end of filming that was about Manchester. It was specifically about what you’re referencing. It’s about all that is old and new within Manchester, how it holds these realities. You were also writing that poem from the vantage point of where you were filming in your apartment because you see the city, but how it’s surrounded by green.
SF: Manchester feels like it’s a city, but if you’re high enough and you look around, you see mountains and forests all around you. It feels like nature stopped just for Manchester to be there, and then it continued to build around it. That felt weighty, as if Manchester was “chosen” to be there and was there for a reason.
I remember being inspired and reflecting about how nature stopped for this beautiful place that we’re now filming. That sense of time stopping and building around a particular emotion like love was also something I was thinking through.
Spike Fearn stars as Owen and Angourie Rice as Emily in director Alicia MacDonald’s FINDING EMILY, a Focus Features release.Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2026 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
Angourie, I heard you share that the team had about a week to film when school wasn’t in session, and that all of a sudden, these empty streets were flooded with people as production went on. I imagine that puts the idea of “doing things that are cringe with sincerity” to the test when you have all these watchful eyes.
AG: When the students came back, it was as if the city came alive. It was fun because we filmed on Canal Street, and a couple of weeks earlier, Manchester Pride was on that street. It was so crowded, and coming back a couple of weeks later to film was special.
SF: One guy with a camera kept following us around when we were filming. He must have been the only paparazzi guy in Manchester. He always knew where we were.
AG: I didn’t feel embarrassed or cringe while performing. It was interesting, as you pointed out, to think about the fact that people were watching and to work not to let that factor into the performance. We added a shot of me running out of the library at the last minute.
We finished filming early, which never happens, and as I’m running out the front of the library, there’s this crowd of people gathered to watch, evidently, me run–and they set up a barricade. It felt like all the people of Manchester gathered to watch me run from the tram stop in front of the library. They were cheering me on, not knowing what I was running to, from, or for, and I was like, “I’m just filming a movie!” It all felt so magical though; that’s what Manchester is like.
People will see something, and then they’ll be like, “Wait, this is awesome. Let’s check it out.”
Both of you have standout musical moments in this film: Spike, your scene with Jack Riddiford as you rap “Wordy Rappinghood”, and Angourie, your dancing scene with Cora Kirk. Tell me more about filming those scenes of catharsis, particularly how you communicated that sense of liberation in these very contained environments: the car for you, Spike, and the cramped living room for you, Angourie.
SF: For the scene with Jack in the car and me, Alicia was like, “What should the song be?” My
dad always showed me music growing up, and my mom showed me that song by Tom Tom Club. That’s always stuck in my head as the musical influence my mom has had on me, and I thought it would be fitting for these two brothers to listen to something that their mom showed them.
I remember on the day we were doing it, Jack and I realized that we both don’t speak French and there’s obviously a key French part of the song. On the day, Jack said, “Instead of trying to do the French part, what if we just said ‘French French French French French French.’” It was just so enjoyable to film, and we couldn’t hear them say “cut” because we were having such a good time.
The significance of that dance scene, Angourie, was that production played the song out loud while you dance “Off Wiv Ya Headz,” which often doesn’t happen for productions.
AG: Yeah, we filmed that sequence several times. I felt like it was just as fun as the boy’s scene in the car. Alicia and our DP, Rachel Clark, wanted to film the scene as one shot. Obviously they cut into it, but those scenes were filmed through as one take. Alicia also wanted to do a 360-degree perspective of the room so everyone was out of the room–normally very rare on a film set–and it was just Cora, me, Rachel filming us with a handheld camera, and Alicia hiding under the kitchen bench. I love those moments where you get to dance with the camera operator as well.
It felt exactly how it looked; we were coming to the end of filming, so it was emotional to be there, dancing, and letting all of these emotions out. We had an incredible movement coach called Polly Bennett, who gave both Spike and me a framework for how we’d move our bodies. It was less “do this” and more “Here’s roughly how I want you to move. Do something different during this beat; here’s the shape of how you’ll be moving in space.” She gave us guide rails to freestyle. She was also there when you were doing all of the music stuff on stage as well, Spike.
SF: She worked so well with the background actors, which in my scene was important. She did warm-ups with them and helped me feel confident I wouldn’t be embarrassed and could lead that scene with all those people.
Actor Angourie Rice, director Alicia MacDonald and actor Amber Grappy on the set of their film, FINDING EMILY, a Focus Features release.Credit: Matt Squire / © 2026 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
Speaking of filming and endings, a scene that stood out to me was the moment of revelation between your characters, when Owen realizes Emily has been using him. That confession moment is a rom-com staple; these characters have to feel betrayed by each other before they can love each other. What’s interesting, though, is that we don’t hear their confrontation. James Blake’s “Atmosphere” is what the audience hears while the dialogue is inaudible. Talk to me about how that affects your line deliveries as actors, when you know that what you’re saying might not be heard by people, especially for a critical moment like that.
AG: I didn’t know the song, but there was no dialogue scripted. So everything was figured out and improvised on the day.
SF: There was a different song before the James Blake one. It might have been “Love Will Tell Us Apart.” It’s funny you mention that scene because my dad likes that moment too. Everybody picks up on it. It’s such a smart scene, because I remember when we were filming, I really wanted to talk. Thinking about this from Owne’s perspective, I want to say my piece right over what’s happened. We did do a take like that, but then Alicia was like, “That’s a different movie.”
AG: I think it’s good though that we did that take because whether or not it ends up in the film, what we do informs, at least for me, the next take. I was thinking, “What is Emily afraid of? Is she afraid he’s going to yell?” So when you did yell for that take, it was scary because her fears were realized. But then when we did the silent, more muted version, that felt worse than the yelling. What happened is much worse than what she feared. She feels like she deserves to be yelled at, but he doesn’t, and that aches.
SF: Speaking on things that were filmed but didn’t end up in the film yet still informed the character, the last thing we filmed is not actually in the movie. It’s Angourie and Cora walking home from a night out. I had wrapped filming earlier in the day and had gone out with some of the cast to the pub for celebration drinks. I decided to go down to where they were filming, and I had my hood on, and I wanted to get in the back of the shot in a shopping cart.
Scenes like that, whether it makes it in the final film or not, are one of the many ways that sets “Finding Emily” apart from films of a similar ilk. It has such delightful quirks, like that scene where you, Angourie, and the character played by Emily Ash listen to Spike’s heartbeat.
SF: I think that’s what’s so great about the film: there are these quirky small parts where others can shine apart from the main ensemble. It’s what drew me into the story, and because there are so many parts and each person has a funny bit to do, it keeps you engaged. I’m happy you mentioned that heartbeat scene because I love that so much. I couldn’t stop laughing during that moment.
Minnie Driver stars as Dean Whittaker and Prasanna Puwanarajah as Professor Westlake in director Alicia MacDonald’s FINDING EMILY, a Focus Features release.Credit: Courtesy of Focus Features / © 2026 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
Angourie, I read that you read Essays in Love by Alain de Botton to prepare for the role, and even attended a Carl Jung lecture. Can you talk about building the philosophical spine for the character of Emily Rain, what stood out to you from these readings, and how you might have layered them into your performance?
I think what I really took from that book is that, and I think Emily goes through this too, is that you can intellectualize love from every single side, and you can figure out how to talk about it and really break it down into its elemental building blocks. At the end of the day, when you’re standing in front of somebody who makes you feel like your heart is going to explode, none of that intellectualizing is going to help. You are still going to feel how you feel and express it in some way. That’s not to say don’t research. You can try to gamify all these things, but there’s something about meeting someone face-to-face and the embodied connection that stands out powerfully.
I’ve been thinking about the role of technology in this film, and how it’s changed what’s possible but made what’s permissible murkier. If “Finding Emily” took place in a different time, I feel like Owen would leave things be, but it’s because he exists in a world where it’s possible to send emails that almost enables his fantasy in a way. Tell me more about this undercurrent of digital anxiety and the ways it manifests in how young people navigate relationships.
AG: I think romcoms, in many ways, can be seen as a genre that explores the ways technology impacts human connection. If you’ve seen “Sleepless in Seattle,” that’s a ‘90s romcom where the character falls in love with somebody over the radio and, using her journalism skills, finds him. So that idea of technology enabling your search manifested there, and I also think about the film “Dangerous Liaisons.” That’s a film based on a book from the 1700s that similarly has this plot of enticement and the use of letter writing to find and locate someone.
I think it’s interesting to think about how, for broncos, the context and details change, but the feelings are the same. For these characters, the feeling of being embarrassed, even if it’s three hundred people who you’ve accidentally sent an email to, or if it’s just that you’ve accidentally said the wrong thing to one person, that feeling of embarrassment stays the same no matter where you are or what time period you’re in.
SF: I think we live in a time where people are scared to see phones in their movies, mainly because people might go to the cinema to get away from life where screens dominate. I empathize with that, but at the same time, this is the time we’re living in. In. I think Alicia, in pursuit of authenticity, cleverly incorporated technology without drawing too much attention to it, focusing on how it has infiltrated every part of our human experience, including love. Love and its pursuits change with the times, but you can still be smart about the way you change.
