- Chicago International Film Festival 2026 Preview (October 14, 2026)
As is often the case with CIFF, the team here at RogerEbert.com has seen and covered many of the films playing at the event. An increasingly impressive programming team does a stellar job of scouting events like Cannes for highlights, along with scheduling many of the same films that drew attention at Venice, Toronto, Telluride, and New York. We will be covering over a dozen films out of CIFF for the first time, along with running full reviews of “Club Kid,” “Rose,” “Clarissa,” “Behemoth!,” and more, but we thought the best way to preview this year’s event was to give you a portal to all of our coverage of CIFF 2026 films. Just looking at the list below reveals how completely the programmers of CIFF have brought home the best of the best of fest season 2026. Pick your faves. And go see a movie.
“14th”
“All of a Sudden”
“Being Heumann”
“The Beloved”
“Ben’Imana”
“Bitter Christmas”
“Bunker”
“Burgundy”
“Clarissa”
“Club Kid”
“The Debut”
“The Diary of a Chambermaid”
“The Dreamed Adventure”
“Edward Said: Between Worlds”
“Elephants in the Fog”
“Elsinore”
“Everytime”
“Fatherland”
“Gentle Monster”
“I Play Rocky”
“I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning”
“I’ll Be Gone in June”
“Ink”
“Iron Boy”
“Josephine”
“La Gradiva”
“The Liberation”
“The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd”
“A Long Winter”
“Look Back”
“The Man I Love”
“Marie Madeleine”
“Minotaur”
“Mum, I’m Alien Pregnant”
“Musk”
“Nagi Notes”
“Once Upon a Time in Harlem”
“The Only Living Pickpocket in New York”
“Paper Tiger”
“Possible Love”
“Rose”
“The Spiral”
“Tangles”
“Tender Loving Care”
“Victorian Psycho”
“Wild Horse Nine”
- “The Lowdown” Darkens and Deepens in a Terrific Second Season (October 14, 2026)
One would hope that, after the push-and-pull of trying to do the right thing, Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) would have learned a thing or two.
The prickly protagonist of “The Lowdown” strutted down Tulsa’s streets during the Season One finale after earning citywide praise for his tribute to the late Dale Washberg. His essay helped guide Dale’s brother Donald (Kyle MacLachlan) toward a path lit by moral clarity; Lee even held it together through his ex-wife Samantha’s (Kaniehtiio Horn) wedding to Johnny the amiable dentist (Rafael Casal) and a searing conversation with his daughter Francis (Ryan Kiera Armstrong).
So it comes as a shock, albeit a welcome one, that creator Sterlin Harjo wastes no time in the Season Two opener cutting our hero down to size. Lee proposes marriage to the most recent woman in his bed, struggles to take pride in his achievements, and, at a journalism awards banquet, makes a mushroom-gummy-and-whisky-soaked hash of accepting a prize for the Washberg essay.
But this banquet sets the stage for the entire season: Francis witnesses her father’s mess and is disgusted, launching one of two deeply moving father-child arcs. Journalists in attendance take umbrage with Lee looking down on how their publications survive—not everyone can be a truth-storian in, to quote the paddlefish caviar smugglers from season one, “‘Saturday Night Fever’ pants.”
FX’s The Lowdown — “Rupidoop” Season 2, Episode 1 — Pictured: Betty Gilpin as Ginger. CR: Shane Brown/FX
At this banquet, Lee meets Ginger Rafferty (Betty Gilpin, to whom this season belongs), a lone figure in a cool blue gown. She looks like a femme fatale right out of “Chinatown,” but in fact she’s a public defender, worried she’s being followed, even more worried that one of her clients has gone missing inside a prison. Ginger’s quest for the truth draws Lee to her, and though she can see through his swashbuckling façade like a freshly washed window, she too begins to lean on him, while declining his romantic interest, as ports in a corrupt Oklahoma storm are few and far between.
It is nothing short of a pleasure to watch Gilpin and Hawke team up. Ginger justifiably calls Lee out for his judgment errors and idiocy, but the sincerity in his eyes helps her, and us, know he’s by her side for the right reasons. In season one, Lee played the funny man, charming his way into writing assignments, walking out of editors’ offices with spare revolvers. Now Hawke and Gilpin take turns, easily switching between straight man and foil. And the latter is the rare, true theatrical clown: at multiple moments throughout this season, Gilpin elicits laughter from the viewer despite tears running down her face.
Though Gilpin is certainly part of this season’s powerhouse, she’s not alone. Tommy Lee Jones, so restrained you can practically hear him breathe, adds considerable complexity as Lee Raybon Senior. Nary a happy word has left Lee Jr.’s mouth about his dad, from whom he’s been estranged for years, and the patriarch’s reappearance in his life upsets Francis, who has always been told that her grandfather was dead. This fiction, combined with Lee’s slovenly awards speech, strains her relationship with her father. She demands to get to know Lee Senior on her own terms, as does the latter; such opposition to lifelong resentment and a closely-held lie just about sends Lee Jr. over the edge.
Lee accuses his father of abandonment, tells him not to leave the bookstore or contact Francis, then storms out to resume his investigation. In his absence, Lee Senior befriends bookstore employee Deidra (Siena East), record store owner Abel Bell (Josh Fadem, who thankfully gets a bit more to do this season), and, of course, Francis.
This creates extraordinary emotional layers in the storytelling. Two fathers consider the impact their penchant for adventurous neglect has had on their respective offspring; Lee Junior slowly begins to assess how much of his rage was ever designed to protect Francis and how much is about his own pain. And though he promised to be better than his father, isn’t Lee—who once told Francis that he wanted to show up for her not by being present at parent-teacher conferences but by being someone worth admiring—just a chip off the old block?
Jones is perfectly cast. (Chalk up yet more victories for casting director Angelique Midthunder.) From Lee’s stories, the viewer would expect a caustic, abusive father, but instead we get a contemplative man who speaks only when he has something to say, who doesn’t repent the past but focuses on what he can make of the future. Every time Hawke blusters and rages, Jones seems to lower his affect further. This creates an undercurrent of humor and tension, and a power vacuum across which both characters eye each other with suspicion.
FX’s The Lowdown — “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound” Season 2, Episode 2 — Pictured: Tommy Lee Jones as Frog. CR: Shane Brown/FX
But Gilpin and Jones aren’t the only casting wins here. Armstrong continues to do a crackerjack job holding her own against actors many decades her senior; it’s a hoot watching her go toe-to-toe with Hawke, especially. Casal steals every scene he’s in, and Horn remains as arresting as ever, though I wish she had a bigger role. Martha Plimpton is terrifying as a tough-as-nails county sheriff—never has a blonde Karen wig made an actress look more sinister—who shares an uneasy alliance with a venal judge (John Hawkes, always welcome). Paul Schneider devastates the audience as a heartbroken prison guard; his role reflects this season’s many reflections on how ill-equipped men are to handle loneliness.
Perhaps my favorite supporting role, however, comes courtesy of Austin Amelio, who recently starred with Hawke in the excellent film “The Weight.” I cannot reveal too much, but Amelio pairs his character’s wiry menace with a surprising fount of physical comedy.
As in season one, season two’s central mystery walks side by side with character development, riotous humor, references to a writer’s life, and even nods to “Reservation Dogs,” including some familiar faces. All of this makes for great TV on its own. But Harjo and his writers seem to realize that the megaphone in their hands is an opportunity. They take the time to explain why their characters are the way they are, because that often also explains the rotten state of the systems (prisons, academia, museums) people have built.
“The Lowdown” suggests that seeking the truth and fighting evil isn’t simple, but when you build community—friends, colleagues, neighbors, sources; hell, even lovers—taking on the bad guys can feel less like going to war and more like building the world you want to live in. Great TV is one thing. This show is in a league all its own.
Whole season screened for review. Airs Wednesdays on FX and Hulu.
- The Revolution Is My Boyfriend: On the Queercore Provocations of Bruce LaBruce (October 14, 2026)
If you like your arthouse pornography with a heaping ladle of leftist agitprop (or “agitporn,” as he’d call it), Bruce LaBruce is a name that should be on your lips. As our very own Scout Tafoya once put it, Bruce is “one of the most fearless filmmakers alive,” a man who’s spent the last thirty years making more than a dozen motion pictures both in and out of the adult filmmaking scene, pushing boundaries and wearing his politics (and his libido) on his sleeve along the way. And in Chicago, I was delighted to sample a goodly portion of them along with dozens of the city’s most discerning perverts at Lincoln Park’s Facets Chicago, formerly Facets Cinematheque, for a weekend-long retrospective called “The Revolution Is My Boyfriend: The Films of Bruce LaBruce.“
Curated by Optical Noise cofounder Raphael Jose Martinez, the retrospective was the result of five years of hard work, negotiation, and a lot of scheduling and rescheduling. For years at Facets, Martinez has delighted in building “discomfort, context, and conversation” with his Optical Noise screening series, which delights in the transgressive and out-of-the-way. This series feels like his Holy Grail of sorts, as Bruce himself came down from his native home of Canada to Chicago for three Q&As (and a host of other screenings and conversations around the city) over three days, with ten of his films screening at Facets.
I was lucky enough to attend the plurality of the festival, seeing many of Bruce’s movies for what would, for me, be the first time. I’d heard of Bruce’s many cinematic provocations—he started out in gay pornography on both sides of the camera, and helped build the queercore movement in Canada via the J.D.s zine he co-created with G.B. Jones; his politics are unabashedly leftist, anarchist, anti-colonial, and punk, and you’ll see that in ways both subtle and uproariously unsubtle in his films.
But apart from his incredible “Saint-Narcisse” in 2021 and his adorable gay zombie flick “Otto, or Up With Dead People,” so much of his work was new to me. And I’d be watching it with an audience comprised largely of fellow Chicago punks and queers; I saw sweater-clad theater gays sat next to feathered-haired polyamorous queerdos sporting combat boots and cut-off shirts. In the lobby sat tables hosted by a local leather and fetish group, and a collective of butch dyke pornographers selling their latest physical porn zine. The tattoo-to-person ratio would blow the mind of the average cinemagoer.
They chose their audience well: To watch a Bruce LaBruce movie, let alone multiple in the same day, is to expose yourself to so many other people’s exposures. No taboo is left untouched, from incest to group sex to fisting to force-femming. In Bruce’s first feature, “No Skin Off My Ass,” a hairdresser (LaBruce) falls in love with a skinhead (Klaus von Brücker, LaBruce’s partner at the time); we see everything from unsimulated sex to an improvised nipple piercing with a safety pin. 2024’s “The Visitor” explores all manner of kinks in up-close detail, from incest within an entire family to suspension play to race play. Even his most “palatable” and sexless movie, 2013’s “Gerontophilia,” uses the auspices of indie rom-com cinema to explore a young man’s granddaddy fetish with an old queen (Walter Borden) he meets at a nursing home.
And don’t get me started on “Hustler White,” LaBruce’s incredible (and funny; all of his films are funny!) exploration of LA’s gay hustler scene in the early 1990s, which offers Black gangbangs right alongside mummy fetishes and a scene where a one-legged gigolo makes… creative use of his stump. “Otto” features a zombie going balls-deep in a wound he created in his latest victim. Boundaries are pushed, even for we experienced degenerates; I won’t lie and say I didn’t look away from the screen at certain points, most notably a scene in 2018’s “The Misandrists” in which a male revolutionary is given compulsory gender-reassignment surgery, complete with graphic real vaginoplasty footage.
His prodding is not just penile, but political; nary will you see a Bruce LaBruce film that doesn’t position such sexual liberation as part of a broader liberatory politic that seeks to free everyone from the prisons of heteronormativity, capitalism, and patriarchy. As his career has progressed, those messages have pushed further to the forefront, right down to works like “The Raspberry Reich” and “The Visitor” flashing text like “Make (Revolutionary) Love Not (Imperialist) War” subliminally over scenes of people getting railed. Multiple films talk about the Baader-Meinhof Group, and his 2004 opus “The Raspberry Reich” takes direct inspiration from them in its group of horny revolutionaries. His editing style is frenetic, almost schizophrenic, with “Enter the Void”-like strobing effects that take on the rhythms of hypno porn before that was popular. It feels like indoctrination, in the best and most liberating way.
But suffused through each of Bruce’s movies, one after the other after the other, amid all the exposed cocks and unabashed cumshots and deliberate vulgarity, there’s an underlying sweetness and care for his characters that sets him apart from the average pornographer. There are no villains in Bruce LaBruce movies, only temporarily unturned allies in the fight against unjust systems. He has empathy for every character, even (or especially) as they make choices that render them selfish, or unlikable, or short-sighted. “Hustler White,” my favorite of his, is maybe the sweetest of his pictures, treating the work of hustlers like central figure Montgomery Ward (real-life sex worker Tony Ward) with all the romance of a Preston Sturges picture. The happiest endings—and I mean that in all the ways that entails—often include most of our onscreen characters having coupled, or throupled, or otherwise sat in a big old orgiastic pile of revolutionary love. These are not just bodies to be gazed at or lusted after, but people, whose sex and identities and flesh are intertwined with their selfhood and politics.
LaBruce may believe in all of these punk aesthetics and shouted political subtexts, but he also understands the comedy and absurdity beneath such bohemian certitude. “Raspberry Reich”‘s Gudrun (frequent LaBruce collaborator Susanne Sachsse, who also joined him on Saturday) is a hilariously controlling madwoman, humiliating her numerous male subservients in ways both radical and raucous, right down to insisting that they all have sex with each other, despite some of them being straight. This is the kind of film that will film someone jerking off for about fifteen minutes in front of a wall mural of Che Guevara (a move that, LaBruce told us in the Q&A, led to a million-dollar lawsuit from Alberto Korda, who shot that famous photo).
And all the while, it’s easy to see why cinephiles love his work: Not only is it stylistically daring, especially considering the budgets and resources he’s had to work with (both in Canada’s indie scene and in Germany, where he’s produced many of his most recent works), it’s also steeped in homages to classic cinema. “No Skin Off My Ass” is such an ode to Robert Altman’s “That Cold Day in the Park” that it simply lifts footage of the opening sequence for its own. His followup, the slept-on “Super 8 1/2,” is his self-reflexive response to that film’s cult success, and the expectations that came from being a gay pornographer suddenly thrust into the limelight in ways that blew up his relationships. “The Misandrists” feels like a play on “The Beguiled” (specifically Sofia Coppola’s version), and “The Visitor” is an overt take on Pasolini’s “Teorema,” where a stranger arrives at the home of a bourgeois family to destroy them through seduction. There are films where you’ll hear Fellini and Cahiers du cinema name-dropped within minutes of an unsimulated cumshot, often from Bruce himself.
In a world where queer rights are actively under attack from the current administration, and what queer culture is allowed to exist feeling neatly confined to homonormative models that fit cleanly into consumer capitalism, watching a Bruce LaBruce film feels like a splash of water to the face. Or, well, any number of other fluids, if you’re one of his stars. And walking out of that three-day experience, finding community with arthouse punks celebrating (and mingling with) one of that movement’s central figures, is one I’ll never forget.
- Jason Voorhees Gets Stuck in the Mud of Atrocious “Crystal Lake” (October 13, 2026)
It’s hard to say whether the tumultuous production is to blame, but something went very wrong as seemingly talented people made Peacock’s “Crystal Lake,” a disastrous reboot in almost every way. The director of the wildly influential original film, Sean S. Cunningham, had been talking about bringing the franchise to TV for over 20 years, but it really came back to life in 2022 when A24 and the incredible Bryan Fuller (“Hannibal”) announced production on a new series.
The excitement in the horror world was palpable. Jason Voorhees, through the lens of the man who redefined Hannibal Lecter, with one of the craziest things ever to appear on network TV? It couldn’t get here fast enough. And then the strike brought production crashing down in 2023. When it ended, Fuller and even the once-also-involved Kevin Williamson (“Scream”) were gone. Did their departure make this a disaster, or did they leave because it had already become one?
Brad Caleb Kane, a writer on “Tokyo Vice” and “IT: Welcome to Derry,” took over his first Creator credit, and the plot of “Crystal Lake” jumped to the early ‘70s, announcing that Jason wouldn’t even be the lead: That would be Pamela Voorhees, the true villain of the first film. How Pamela went crazy enough after the death of her son to murder a bunch of camp counselors sounds like a promising set-up, but to say that “Crystal Lake” is barely that show would be an understatement. It’s never long enough, jumping around in tone and character motivation so wildly that it resembles that old writing class or theater game where one person keeps the story going after someone else starts it.
As a season, it’s one of the most muddled and inconsistent outings in a long time, constantly hampered by a lack of direction and motivation until a final sequence of episodes turns it into something else entirely, yet again. Characters disappear, subplots shift meaning, and it all eventually rewrites the canon of Jason’s origin story in a way that’s about as ridiculous as “Jason X.”
CRYSTAL LAKE — Pictured: William Catlett as Levon — (Photo by: Jocelyn Prescod/PEACOCK)
It starts with familiar, promising beats. Linda Cardellini, so good on “DTF St. Louis” that she just won an Emmy, plays Pamela Voorhees, a cook at Camp Crystal Lake in the early ‘70s. She’s protective of her deformed son Jason (Callum Vinson), who is mocked and bullied by the other kids at camp. In one of the show’s early interesting choices, Jason dies in the first episode, left to drown by counselors who weren’t doing their job. But instead of leaning into the guilt that would turn Pamela into a movie icon, Kane and company start getting weird before the end of the first episode, when a couple of tough guys from out of town show up looking for Pam.
It turns out that Pam and Jason were on the run from someone, hiding out in Crystal Lake, and if I gave you a hundred guesses, I don’t think you’d guess how this subplot entirely reshapes the legacy of Jason and Pamela in a way that’s truly antithetical to the entire allure of the “Friday the 13th” series. We don’t need conspiracies; we need an unkillable monster in the woods.
“Crystal Lake” also makes the mistake of trying to be more than just a prequel or homage to the first film, perhaps thinking that a show in this series can’t lose sight of Jason himself. Without spoiling, the show picks up again a year after Jason’s drowning, but they never found the boy’s body, and there are signs that he may still be alive. And maybe bigger? And homicidal? Again, the new origin story tries to explain some of this, but it just makes for a show that often feels downright incoherent through its midsection, unsure of who its heroes and villains should be.
For example, no one sat down and decided who Pamela truly is in this version of this universe. Without spoiling, she becomes the Pam from the first movie for a bit, but then the show almost forgets her. She also becomes the mother of a potentially new troubled child, but the show discards that too for an ending that clearly feels like the product of rewrites, though it does include a fun, villainous performance from Hamish Linklater. The “Widow’s Bay” nominee is one of the few performance spotlights.
Cardellini gets lost in a constantly rewritten character while poor William Catlett (so good in “Color Book”) gets the thankless role as town sheriff, a love interest for Pamela but more of a plot device to move things from one death to the next. Shows like “Widow’s Bay” and “Below” have reminded us of the need to fill out programs like this with interesting ensembles, but the creators of “Crystal Lake” fundamentally fail to do so, spending so much time with counselors and even a group of local hippies/victims that have about as much personality as the hapless souls in “Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan.”
CRYSTAL LAKE — Pictured: Linda Cardellini as Pam Voorhees — (Photo by: Peacock)
If you’re coming to “Crystal Lake” for the bloody stuff, this camp kitchen serves up a bunch of it. The showrunners clearly prioritized practical effects in what horror nuts used to call “Quality Kills,” and they give viewers a bit of it almost every episode. Faces are sliced off, body parts are shed, and the red stuff flows. At least “Crystal Lake” comes to life a bit during its intense-violence scenes, even if many of them lack any emotional heft or permanence.
One could easily argue that no death in the “Friday the 13th” legacy has ever had true emotional heft or permanence, and that “Crystal Lake”’s disposability is a feature, not a bug, but the show needed to be more escapist fun to pull that off. It’s not funny or inventive enough to be a true slasher, partly because a season of hour-long episodes demands something deeper than a 90-minute gorefest. All that being said, “Crystal Lake” finally gets someplace tonally consistent in its final run; even if it gets there thanks to some silly plotting (and aesthetic/directorial choices in the penultimate episode that literally had me shaking my head, but I won’t spoil here), the finale does produce some captivating showdowns.
That said, I was struck by how little the six episodes between the premiere and the finale actually mattered. You could literally watch the first and last episodes and miss little of the story. Again, perhaps the creators of “Crystal Lake” thought they needed to intentionally keep Jason Voorhees in the B-movie muck, but then they needed to lean into the POV murders and unforgettable soundtrack instead of even pretending to profile grief, culture clashes, and government conspiracies. The result is a show that’s never serious enough and never fun enough. Jason Voorhees deserved better.
Whole season screened for review. It premieres on October 15, 2026.
- There is Always a Different Story to Discover: Lucas Museum of Narrative Art Curator Ryan Linkof (October 13, 2026)
The newLucas Museum of Narrative Art is a dazzling collection of art that tells stories, featuring iconic images like Norman Rockwell’s painting of a runaway boy sharing a soda with a sympathetic cop at a diner. It hangs next to an updated display featuring Anthony Freda’s modern reimagining of the scene: a young Black boy and a cop in riot gear in the same setting. Seven percent of the collection is “Star Wars”-related, with some original miniatures and life-sized dioramas featuring Luke Skywalker, C-3PO, and R2-D2.
There are gorgeous rooms filled with paintings by illustrators like N.C. Wyeth, Rockwell, Frank Frazetta, and Maxfield Parrish, and rooms with art arranged by subject, from sports to work to children to romance. Also on display: Banksy’s girl with a balloon, the Adrian costume for the Cowardly Lion from “The Wizard of Oz”, and comic and cartoon art from Charles Schulz to Jack Kirby, Alex Raymond, MAD Magazine, and Winsor McCay. A second-floor exhibit explains how narrative art—art that tells stories—goes back to the very first art: 36,00 year old cave paintings. The building itself is a marvel by architect Ma Yansong, who said that while some people think it looks like a spaceship, he saw it more as a cloud.
At the event we attended, founders George Lucas and his wife, Mellody Hobson, spoke movingly about their passion for paying tribute to artists often overlooked or marginalized as “representational” or “commercial.” Lucas said, “People ask me if this is fine art. I tell them this is finer art.”
I got a special kick out of the two movie theaters, named for similarly unsung figures from the earliest days of filmmaking. One is named for Robert Flaherty, who made the first feature-length documentary, “Nanook of the North.” The other is named for Slavko Vorkapich, a key figure in developing cinematic language, like calendar pages falling off to show the passage of time.
In an interview with RogerEbert.com, Lucas Museum curator Ryan Linkof discussed highlights from the collection, from Frida Kahlo to dogs playing poker.
Many people would consider this a dream job. How did you get here?
I joined the project in July 2018, shortly after construction started in Expo Park. I have been in Los Angeles for over twenty years, initially to attend USC for graduate school, and I have worked as a curator at Los Angeles museums since 2011. In my previous roles, I developed exhibitions on film, photography, and popular culture, so when this opportunity arose to work for a museum that combined those elements, I jumped at the chance to join the team in its early stages.
What in your background has been unexpectedly useful in pulling all of this together?
My academic and curatorial experience is rooted in exploring the intersection of art, popular culture, and film, so helping shape a museum that treats visual storytelling so expansively builds on that experience. My work at LACMA and the Academy Museum taught me how to think across different kinds of collections—not just paintings or objects, but film, design, popular culture, and the stories they tell. That has been especially useful here because the museum is not organized around one medium. It focuses on how images tell stories, whether they appear in paintings, comics, murals, photographs, or film.
What is “narrative art?” How has the museum’s emphasis on storytelling through images been reflected in the way the collection is displayed and explained?
Narrative art illustrates stories. While this may sound like a new term, it’s actually one of the oldest forms of art—humans have always used images to tell stories. An exhibition on our ground floor explores this deeper history, tracing 30,000 years of image-making from prehistoric cave painting through Renaissance frescoes and beyond. The remaining galleries highlight our unique collections, which are rich in illustration, including art made for book covers, comic books, children’s literature, news and editorial photography, and cinema.
These are the kinds of visual culture we consume every day, and they therefore help to shape how we understand the world. In the galleries, we wanted to reflect that by showing how certain kinds of stories move across time and media, from historic works to comics, illustration, film, and popular culture. The display encourages visitors to make their own connections: notice recurring themes, recognize familiar visual language, and see how artists keep returning to the same stories, told through different means.
Is there an artifact you think viewers will be especially excited about?
I think visitors will be especially excited to see the Frida Kahlo work on display. It is the kind of object people may already come in curious about, but seeing it in this larger narrative context gives it a different kind of resonance. Other pieces throughout the museum connect to popular culture in an immediate way, so visitors may have the wonderful experience of recognizing something they love.
One piece that has received a significant response since we opened is A Pat Hand by Cassius Coolidge, a 1894 painting created as a whiskey advertisement that launched the “Dogs Playing Poker” series, which became a ubiquitous fixture of American popular culture in the 20th century.
What items have been the biggest challenge to preserve and present to prevent deterioration?
Some of the biggest preservation challenges are paper works, especially comics, posters, and other printed materials not always made with long-term preservation in mind. They can be extremely sensitive to light, humidity, and handling, so we have to be very thoughtful about how long they are on view and how we protect them. Interestingly, these are often the objects that feel most familiar to visitors: things that may have once been held, read, or collected casually, but require very careful stewardship in a museum context.
There have been many innovations and changes of perspective in the way museum collections are displayed over the past 20 years. What do you think is most useful on wall cards? Who designed it? Its significance in the story? Materials used?
I think the best wall text gives visitors a foothold without getting in the way of their own experience. Our object labels are intentionally concise—identifying who made it, when it was made, and what it is made of—providing essential information without telling people how they are supposed to feel about it. The museum founders wanted to create that kind of unmediated encounter with works of art.
At the same time, the curatorial team has spent years researching this collection and working with our digital team; we created a digital guide that includes gallery-level descriptions and detailed information about nearly every object on display, often including original source materials and documentary content about artists. We feel this balance gives people the option to learn more, while still letting visitors form their own subjective relationship to the works of art as the primary experience.
Are there any parts of the collection that are interactive or participatory? Anything visitors can touch or sit in or be photographed with?
I think visitors will naturally want to photograph parts of the experience, especially the Star Wars material in the Cinema Gallery, because those works are so tied to people’s memories and imaginations. The broader idea is that participation doesn’t just mean pressing a button or touching an object. It can also mean seeing yourself in a story, bringing your own associations to an image, or moving through the galleries in a way that feels personal and self-directed.
What were George and Mellody’s priorities for the building, its style, its symbolism, and the display spaces?
George and Mellody wanted the building to make a statement, while also feeling open and welcoming. The building, the park setting, and the galleries all work together to invite people in. The priority was to create a place where visitors from many backgrounds could feel comfortable, curious, and inspired, while also helping people connect with the art.
What kinds of events will the museum host? Classes? Lectures? Screenings?
The museum will be a place for people to return to, not just a place they visit once. While we aren’t ready to announce every detail yet, we’re developing the programming around the same ideas that shape the collection: storytelling, access, and connection. The goal is to make the museum feel active and dynamic, a place where there is always another story to discover.
What kinds of materials do you have available for scholars? What is in the archive?
We have many resources for scholars and visitors who are interested in learning more about the collections and artists on view. Our film program includes documentaries about narrative art and artists, including some of the key artists in the exhibitions. In addition to holding copies of the museum’s two-volume collections book—produced with Taschen—the library has extensive holdings related to our collections as well as the broader fields of art history, anthropology, and storytelling.
We also have special collections materials related to different aspects of our collections. The digital guide is also a helpful resource for people looking to dig deeper into our holdings.
You must have a favorite item or two in the collection. What are the ones that are most meaningful to you? What about in the illustration collection?
I have a fondness for the fantasy painters, especially Frank Frazetta, Boris Vallejo, and Julie Bell. I grew up with that material and many of the characters they depicted: Conan the Barbarian, Vampirella, John Carter of Mars. Their work is incredibly skillful and is the kind of painting that is almost never taken seriously by art historians or art museums. It is art that you will really only see at the Lucas Museum.
Is there a can’t miss dish on the restaurant menu? Something special in the gift shop?
The menu at the restaurant is truly exceptional. It offers elevated American classics, so it is refined but also deeply satisfying. I am a fan of the Chinese Chicken Salad and the Pigs in a Blanket. The unique merchandise in our store is a major reason to come to the museum! The letterman’s jacket is an instant icon and the dishware with works from the collection is a personal favorite. People can also buy a copy of the collection book, created in partnership with Taschen.
How can people outside LA stay connected to the museum?
People outside Los Angeles can stay connected through the museum’s digital channels, including social media and email updates where we share information about our collection, exhibitions, and programs. We want people everywhere to feel invited into the conversation and to keep discovering the artists, objects, and stories that make the museum unique.
