- “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” Finds More Comedic Highs in Confident 18th Season (August 10, 2026)
Almost exactly 13 years ago, when I was still a freelancer for this site, I wrote a piece about how FX’s hit “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” owed a great debt to “Seinfeld” in its comedic embrace of characters that could politely be called misanthropic. The quartet of characters at the center of one of the most beloved comedies of all time—Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer—fits snugly into the structure of “Sunny” and their leads: Dennis, Mac, Dee, and Charlie.
At the time, I marveled at “Sunny” having a legacy that lasted nine seasons. Next week, they launch their 18th season. At the time I wrote, “The most important element to both shows was merely to stay true to their characters, which “Sunny” has done consistently for almost a decade.” Now that it’s closer to a quarter-century, the legacy of “Sunny” feels even more impressive.
What’s most striking about “Sunny” in 2026 remains that confidence—for all eight episodes of their 18th outing, it feels like the writers and performers are prioritizing what makes them laugh over anything else, which they’ve really been doing for a generation now. The worst thing that can happen to a comedy is desperation, something that often seeps into the writing late in a run when a desire to please a fan base or focus groups overrides innate comedic sensibilities. The “Sunny” team long ago gave up on getting the right amount of critical acclaim for their efforts, and they know that their fan base remains constant because they share a sense of humor with Glenn Howerton, Rob Mac, Charlie Day, and Kaitlin Olson.
The 18th season of “Sunny” does much of the same thing as the last dozen or so seasons, intertwining commentary on the state of things with the idiocy of the show’s beloved characters. It’s almost hard to believe that the show took this long to get to how the Paddy’s Pub team would respond to the rise of non-alcoholic beers, but “The War on Alcohol” is arguably the season standout (an episode at a Renaissance Faire featuring Nick Kroll and the McPoyles is close). It’s a wonderful example of how these idiots literally fight to live in the past, not just in terms of wanting an ABV in their beer but in the way they look at the modern workplace. A bit between Charlie and Mac about how all factories are built around molten lava, and men who eat lunch out of paper bags on steel beams, is a reminder that so much of the stupidity in this world is based on outdated thinking that’s been warped by pop culture.
Nostalgia works its way through a lot of the 18th season of “Sunny,” including an extended (and slightly unsuccessful compared to the rest of the season) spoof of “Gilligan’s Island,” along with a superior, hysterical riff on “Back to School,” with Danny DeVito in the Rodney Dangerfield part. There’s also an episode built around Jamiroquai, which I’m guessing no one under 30 has even heard of. The characters on “Sunny” were always a little bit stuck in the past, but it’s amplified in self-aware ways as the cast enters their fifties. They’re no longer the youthful idiots as much as they’re approaching grumpy old men territory, yelling at clouds as the world enters its virtual insanity era.
At this point, there’s a comforting consistency to “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” In a time when so many shows slowly fade into the pop culture background, here’s one that’s been funny for two decades and counting. There was a natural concern when the show crested double digits that it would start to lose its edge, but there have been only a few episodes in the last few seasons that didn’t work. The 18th season has way more hits than misses, which isn’t true for most comedies that have run a third as long. While there may have been some natural worry about fading quality at one point, there’s no reason to believe this show doesn’t have a few more years in it. Let’s push last call on this one as long as possible.
Entire season screened for review. The 18th season premieres on FX on August 17.
- A Comedy Legacy: Broken Lizard on “Super Troopers 3” (August 10, 2026)
There’s a sequence in director Jay Chandrasekhar’s “Super Troopers 3” that acts as a synecdoche for the film’s charms as a whole. State trooper MacIntyre “Mac” Womack (Steve Lemme) discovers a conspiracy at a maple syrup factory, and his assailants, played by Jon Rudnitsky and Chace Crawford, encase him in a vat of maple syrup until it solidifies, like Han Solo in carbonite. It acts in many ways as an image for the type of humor that the members of Broken Lizard (Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske, and Lemme) have kept preserved throughout the years. For better or worse, “Super Troopers 3” is more of the same, and those who were already accustomed to the troupe’s sensibilities will find plenty to love.
That isn’t to say that this is a film that replays the hits, the way many sequels that come out many years later tend to do. This time, Farva (Kevin Heffernan) has fallen for Thorny’s (Chandrasekhar) sister Sarita (Hannah Simone), and to Thorny’s dismay, his sister reciprocates Farva’s feelings and the two plan an extravagant Indian wedding. While Thorny recruits his other super troopers to crash the wedding, they are also swept up into a new drug conspiracy that has unexpected ties to the nuptial plans.
For the members of Broken Lizard, who have been on the road sharing the film, they cherish how opportunities like this are a way for them to remain connected amidst the busyness of their lives. “We’re like a band in many ways; every time we have a new movie, we tour again, go out, and you get more fans. Someone’s dad comes, they’ve introduced their son to the films, and your audience keeps getting larger and expanding,” they shared. While they stopped by in Chicago as part of the film’s tour, RogerEbert.com spoke with the group about the gift of time when working on this project, their memories of working with the great Donald Sutherland, and how they modified the film’s approach to cop humor when considering this political moment.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
From L to R: Steve Lemme, Andrew Dismukes, Iqbal Theba, and Kevin Heffernan in SUPER TROOPERS 3. Photo by Patrick Harbron, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2026 Searchlight Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
There were seven years between “Super Troopers” and “Super Troopers 2,” and then six years before we got“Super Troopers 3.” I’m curious what the gift of time affords you when you were developing this story?
Broken Lizard: If we had our druthers, we’d make them more quickly, but we’re making other movies in between. I think if we only made “Super Troopers” movies, and didn’t show that we had more to offer, we could dry that creativity quite quickly. That’s how “Police Academy” had eleven movies. They just kept doing it, and then they were not allowed to do anything else. Time helped us write a lot of drafts and helped us learn to love it. If we were in post on another project, we’d say “let’s just work on another draft.” Those drafts are really what made those movies.
I think what drew us to the wedding angle was that we haven’t seen them in that world; this was our attempt to mature them a bit. You know the characters, and now we’re going to show you another side of them or get behind the curtain a little bit more with them, which I think is a fun thing for fans of the franchise. It’s not as though the first two were so beloved because of their revolutionary crime plots. The guys were beloved; it was fun to see them deck around, so why not go ahead and take them off the road a little bit more? And it’s still the same dynamic. It’s still humorous.
I think we’re lucky as well because we caught the culture the right way. If it came out on Netflix, it might not have had the same because there would be no advertising. You never know. It could have just disappeared on Hulu if it just came and probably would have found an audience, but it’s not quite the same. Everything has felt a bit like a summer camp with being able to tour this film. You spend a year shooting, six months in the edit room, and then you can go out to see fans. It’s nice to hear that the humor is landing. When you make a movie, you write a joke where you don’t get to hear the laugh one year later.
I know that “Super Troopers 2” was crowdfunded, so were you able to connect with those fans who helped with that campaign?
We have, and there’s been such genuine gratitude to meet the folks who made the movie. I’d say for all of us, we’re grateful we’ve been able to connect and spend such intentional time. When we were writing the other installments or other films, when we were young, we didn’t have families; we all lived together. We would spend all of our time together. So there was this kind of great organic blend of just what was goofing off and what was writing. Now our writing sessions are much more structured; it’s like “Okay, we can do two hours on this one day, and it’s a lot of pressure.” So the tour has been a gift because times on the road are probably the only times when we can just laugh with each other, have a good time, and be fully relaxed.
We’re like a band in many ways; every time we have a new movie, we tour again, go out, and you get more fans. Someone’s dad comes, they’ve introduced their son to the films, and your audience keeps getting larger and expanding.
From L to R: Erik Stolhanske, Paul Soter, Steve Lemme, Jay Chandrasekhar, Iqbal Theba, Nat Faxon, Andrew Dismukes, Kevin Heffernan (on the floor) in SUPER TROOPERS 3. Photo by Patrick Harbron, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2026 Searchlight Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
On the note of growing, I think your audience might say that what they’ve loved about your works is that you’ve found a way to make immaturity endearing. As artists and creatives, how do you feel you’ve grown with your audience? Do you feel pressure to change your humor as your audience ages or give them what they might have enjoyed when they were young?
The maturity over the years has in many ways manifested in the storytelling and craft. Whereas the sense of humor, in the best possible way, hasn’t really matured. We think that’s actually what people like about it.
This question is specifically for you, Jay, as the director: how has your approach to action shifted throughout your filmmaking career? It’s interesting to compare the stunt driving and fights in this film to the earlier installments.
Jay Chandrasekhar: Having worked on “The Dukes of Hazzard,” I got a real close knowledge of what real stunts look like. The great stunt coordinators are artists, and the okay ones are just crashing cars around. As a director, I’m thinking, “How much time can I give someone to do their job and be great at it?” We didn’t have a lot of time on this film, but Robert Alonzo, the supervising stunt coordinator, was such an artist that he was able to pull off a lot of these stunt elements in a way that was just perfect for our movie. Robert’s doing MCU movies … I was watching “Knight and Day” the other day, and he’s one of the stuntmen in the airplane fight, so him working on ours is a gift.
I thought Farva crashing out from his lobster allergy was also a great moment.
When we watch our stunts in the older films, we did a lot of our own stunts because we had limited knowledge and budget. If someone’s going to jump over the counter and tackle a guy, one of us is going to do it. So on one hand, you see us more, but on the other, the extent of the stunts is limited to what any one of us is able to do at a given moment. The lobster fight in particular was a blast to shoot because I think they tailored it to make it very effective for what we–as people who are not action stars–can do.
Kevin, in that fight though, you’re put through the wringer. Your stunt double, Heath Hensley, didn’t step in for you?
Kevin Heffernan: (Laughs) There were some. He’s been in a bunch of movies with me, and we did “Tacoma FD” together. He’s got a good look like mine, a good mustache. And he’s also super nice. Those guys, when they’re your stunt double, they’re super protective of you, and so he was very nice in that way.
Paul Soter: What’s interesting, though, was that even though we did our own stunts, it still felt like there were new things to learn. For driving scenes, I had never done “array” driving where the car is stationary, but it’s the background that’s changing. I showed up being like, “Oh man, we’ve come too far away from getting our hands dirty and the gritty.” But then you put us in that thing, and we’re passing around a cheese basket for our scene. I’m like, “This is pretty nice.” We had a grand old time. Sitting in that immobile vehicle eating cheese and crackers.
I loved the reference to Donald Sutherland in “Animal House” here. I know you collaborated with him on “Beer Fest,” and in light of his passing, I’d love to hear of any special memories of collaborating with him or discuss his influence on you all as an artist.
He didn’t really know that we were a comedy group. He just inspired a movie. So he was very kind to Jay, but he thought Kevin was the sole writer, and so he would frequently ask Kevin, “What does this mean? Why would I say this?” He would push us to understand the interiority of the characters. But he was super method. Super method. He drank all those beers, and when somebody offered for him to go to the bathroom, he said, “I’m in a hospital bed. I wouldn’t get up and go to the bathroom. Bring me a catheter.”
Kevin Heffernan and Steve Lemme in SUPER TROOPERS 3. Photo by Patrick Harbron, Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures. © 2026 Searchlight Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
Especially in an age where police misconduct is more visible and a frequent topic of conversation, I’m curious how that impacted your approach to the humor, especially the image of cops being “crass and silly” when they’ve caused genuine harm and destruction to communities at large.
The question that guided us was “Who is the victim?” There’s a character in this movie who is nicknamed the “douche driver.” We make Andrew Dismukes, who plays Trooper Coy Burns, a real dick and make him the but of the joke, less so the civilian. I think it meant we had to work harder as well in a good way, to show fewer scenes of characters being pulled over and those types of shenanigans because that’s when the optics can be picked apart. I think that’s why the focus of this film shifted to wedding, love, and friendship.
When you’re shooting a movie, you can’t hit topical elements because you’re working a year out. We couldn’t have predicted the increase in self-driving cars, for example, but under the hood, we’re looking at timeless ideas: old versus now, how friendships evolve, etc. It is something we think about in terms of what might age well, though. The first movie is a thing that people watch and watch over years and years and years. So I think we’re always thinking, okay, let’s try to make sure that something we do doesn’t suddenly come across as dated in five years so that it will still have a timeless feel.
A line in the film that has stuck with me is “Is it possible that we’re no longer the cool guy in our own story?” How has making movies or filmmaking helped you all through these questions of legacy?
Making this third one is very humbling in that now we are kind of veterans. When we made that first one, we didn’t necessarily know what we were doing, and it was a bit more renegade. In those days we’d bring guys in like Brian Cox, and now we’re bringing in folks like Andrew Dismukes. Dismukes is an awesome guy that we’ve become friends with, and he grew up watching our movies and looks up to us in a little bit of a comic world. It really kind of flips the script a little bit now when you start doing these things, and you realize that there is a bit of a legacy, that you have a legacy in the comedy and filmmaking world, which is nice.
It’s good to put that reflection in the movie, because it humbles us. We can fall into the temptation of thinking “Nothing has changed, we’re all still young and cool.” Then someone recently told us, “You guys are the age that Brian Cox was in the first movie.” It gave us heart palpitations for a second, but then we thought, “This is an opportunity to bake this into the story. Let’s not run away from it.”
“Super Troopers 3” is in theaters now via Searchlight Pictures.
- Mediocre “Alley Cats” is for Hardcore Ricky Gervais Fans Only (August 7, 2026)
Rarely has an animated show felt more like an extension of its creator’s personality than Netflix’s “Alley Cats,” a Ricky Gervais production from top to fuzzy bottom. It’s a disheartening reminder of how far the once-creative star of “The Office” and “Extras” has fallen, becoming almost a parody of himself with his “edgy” humor and boasting about defeating a cancel culture that Netflix clearly never believed existed if one looks at its roster of stand-up specials.
All six of the short (15 minutes or so) episodes of “Alley Cats” follow a nearly identical format as Gervais’ Gus and his cat buddies sit on a couch, riff for a few minutes, wander around town for a loose plot, and end up with piano-accompanied thoughts about life and death in a way that’s aggressively manipulative. Gervais even has the nerve to use the opening piano riffs of Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” more than once, leaning into a show that’s surprisingly sentimental.
More than ever, Gervais as a writer exists only in extremes: He’s either trying to offend with lame attempts at graphic humor or leaning into the kind of manipulative storytelling he honed on “After Life.” He’s made a show with an extended conversation about a cat being fingered by local kids and yet another reminder that Gervais can’t believe in a God that gives children (or kittens) fatal diseases. It’s the only show on TV that addresses both cats watching their owners erotically asphyxiate and what happens after we die.
Alley Cats. (L to R) David Earl as Puke, Diane Morgan as Olive, Jo Hartley as Kitten, Ricky Gervais as Gus, Tom Basden as Ponce, Andrew Brooke as Fang, in Alley Cats. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026
That description probably makes “Alley Cats” sound more entertaining than it is, even with its undeniable points for originality. The short length of each episode (and the overall season, which can be watched in less time than it takes to see most feature films) allows for “Alley Cats” to be more forgettable than atrocious, and the writers do find a joke here or there that connects. The voice work is relatively strong (including former Gervais collaborators like David Earl, Kerry Godliman, and Tony Way), and the animation has charming simplicity that fits its subject matter: A show about homeless, raunchy cats shouldn’t look too pretty.
What’s ultimately disheartening about “Alley Cats” is how little impact it makes either on the legacy of Ricky Gervais or the current state of streaming animated comedy. Gervais used to be such an important voice in TV comedy (and, for a brief window, was also an interesting filmmaker), but like so many once-edgy artists, he seems content to repeat himself and fall into all the routines his detractors expect. And the saddest truth is that there’s nothing about “Alley Cats” that’s particularly interesting outside of how it reflects the current state of its creator’s career and sense of humor.
Alley Cats. (L to R) David Earl as Puke, Jo Hartley as Kitten, Diane Morgan as Olive, Ricky Gervais as Gus, Andrew Brooke as Fang, Tom Basden as Ponce, in Alley Cats. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026
Ricky Gervais thrives on attention, whether it’s in being a provocateur on an awards show stage or repeatedly espousing his atheism on podcasts. The problem is that comedy requires interest in something other than yourself, and Gervais has never met anyone funnier or smarter than himself. That ego seeps through so much of “Alley Cats,” a show that should be a casual, funny hang but can’t get out of the shadow of its own creator’s worst instincts.
The tagline for “Alley Cats” is “Nine Lives, Zero Fucks.” Ricky Gervais has certainly had the former as he’s maintained popularity for nearly three decades now. And he’s made the latter his entire personality. As a huge fan of his work with Stephen Merchant, I believe there’s always a chance that this undeniably smart TV creator could find that magic again, but it’s only going to happen if he’s able to leave the predictable comedic alleys that his fans know by heart.
Whole season screened for review. Now on Netflix.
- A Man of Letters: Kent Jones on “Late Fame” (August 7, 2026)
Ed Saxberger (Willem Dafoe) is “a man of letters,” declares a young man who accosts him on the street one day, eagerly explaining he’s stumbled across a poetry collection Saxberger wrote long ago and believes it to be an overlooked masterpiece. Setting aside the relative merits of Way Past Go, which nobody’s mentioned to Saxberger in decades, the young man has a point: Saxberger now works at the post office, sorting other people’s mail. But the tantalizing possibility that his once-lofty literary ambitions have belatedly earned him a following—not only this slightly snobbish student of the arts (Edmund Donovan) but a society of self-described “enthusiasts”—is enough to awaken strong emotions in Saxberger, causing him to reassess his own merits.
“Late Fame,” opening in theaters this week, is the second narrative feature directed by Kent Jones, a former critic and programmer who also led the New York Film Festival from 2013 to 2019. Featuring a contemplative lead performance from Dafoe—much as Jones’ last feature, “Diane,” foregrounded a revelatory turn from character actress Mary Kay Place—this smart and sensitive follow-up co-stars Greta Lee as Gloria, a middle-aged theater actress who aspires to the fading archetype of screen divas Sally Bowles and Marlene Dietrich but hasn’t yet broken through, instead settling into a far less lucrative role as tragedienne-in-residence for this “Enthusiasm Society.”
With the rich chemistry between Dafoe and Lee providing his drama with a gravitational core, Jones—working with a carefully nuanced script by Samy Burch (“May December”), who adapted a novella by Austrian writer Arthur Schnitzler, shifting the setting from 19th-century Vienna to contemporary SoHo—turns “Late Fame” into a delicate, layered examination of the artist’s life, personal fulfillment, and ghosts of our cultural past that continue to possess and compel us in the present.
Ahead of the film’s release, Jones spoke with RogerEbert.com about the appeal of working within someone else’s sensibility, his own memories of the soul of SoHo, moving away from the auteur theory of criticism that originally drove his engagement with cinema, and much more.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
You took decades to complete the screenplay for “Diane,” your feature debut. How did you arrive at “Late Fame,” which was written by Samy Burch—herself adapting a novella by Arthur Schnitzler that was written over a century ago—as your next project?
Pam Koffler, [an American film producer] from Killer Films, called me one day and asked if I ever read scripts by other people—and because it was her asking, I didn’t stop to think about it. After I had read the novella, I went ahead and read Samy’s script. We should all be so lucky to get scripts by a writer like Samy, because she writes with a real movie sense. She has a sense of surprise. There’s nothing expected; inevitably, in a lot of scripts you read, there’s the moment you can sense coming early on, and once it arrives everything interesting about that build-up suddenly falls away to make way for something less interesting.
There are so many well-trodden paths in movies, some of which are unfortunately rewarded in the reception of the work or treated as if they’re a given. There was nothing like that in Samy’s script. I met with her and liked it even more after I met her, because I liked her. She and I got along really well; now we’re pretty close friends. I’ve reflected recently on how much I liked the idea of working with someone else’s sensibility that’s also at a remove from someone else’s sensibility—which is Arthur Schnitzler. I’m still thinking about that. I really enjoyed that process, but I can’t imagine it happening all the time. We really did connect; Samy also wrote the liner notes for the new Blu-ray of “Diane” that The Film Desk put out.
Kent Jones on the set of “Late Fame.” (Magnolia Pictures)
Where did your sensibility come into play, given the palimpsest quality that emerges from Samy not only adapting Schnitzler but also translating it, across generations and geographies? It’s a quintessentially New York film, and the Saxberger character would have arrived in SoHo around the same time you did; as a critic-turned-filmmaker, as well as the former director for the New York Film Festival, I imagine the story’s dialogues around cultural cachet, artistic currency, and the evolution of the city’s literary scene could have struck a chord for you personally.
Upon my first read, I knew that I liked “Late Fame.” I probably thought about these ideas; as we got into working together, these were the qualities of it that I moved toward—or at least that I didn’t move away from. The idea of going out, finding someone, and saying to them, “I read your work from 40 years ago, I think you’re a genius, and you never got your proper recognition” is so familiar to me from a particular strand of criticism.
When I was young, I came out of the auteurist school of thinking—which was all retrospective, and even when it wasn’t, it was. I mean that, if somebody was writing about Ingmar Bergman, they would write, “But Howard Hawks is better, because he was less pretentious about it.” And people actually wrote such things, if you can believe it. That vision of retrospective criticism had started in France, because all of these films had flooded into France after the war, but that was what had attracted me to criticism; the first piece I had published in Film Comment, for instance, was about Olivier Assayas; long before Assayas was recognized in this country, I’d seen “Paris Awakens” and didn’t understand why nobody here knew who he was. He’d been programmed in a few series, but I was very taken with him and became—like many others—invested in really promoting certain filmmakers.
I recently learned that the critic Tony Rayns had died and was recalling that crazy, buzzing energy between him, Pierre Rissient, Peggy Chiao, Bérénice Reynaud, Max Tessier—all these critics focused on European and Asian cinema, some of them on Iranian cinema too. There was a lot of competition between them, but they were all very passionate in that sense. I felt that same passion for Monte Hellman very personally, because the first time I interviewed him was before “Two-Lane Blacktop” was restored and reclaimed by history, and I felt he’d been almost forgotten; that feeling was very familiar to me.
The more we got into “Late Fame,” the more I wanted to deal with poetry on a real level. Samy told me poetry was not her area of expertise, and she’d had a poem in the script that was very good but too close to Schnitzler, we thought. I knew something of the New York School of Poets, [who’d lived and worked in downtown Manhattan in the 1950s and ’60s,] through my friend Pete [Gizzi,] to whom “Late Fame” is dedicated. I’d read a lot of that poetry, and I wanted this film to reflect that, but there’s also the sense of the memory of New York of an earlier moment in time, and the ghost of it, in the story.
In the first draft, it was the West Village where he wandered, but he was supposed to be an older character at that point, and then, when we started working with Willem, I realized that Willem and I both came to New York around the same time, and we both had that sense. He was a founding member of The Wooster Group, named for Wooster Street in SoHo, along with Richard Foreman. Anthology Film Archives was there, and SoHo was a very different place at the time. Then, suddenly, that was all gone, which was crazy—but the ghost of it is still there.
Physically, it just isn’t that different, you know? I find SoHo very haunting, its arcades and those little buildings, all its cobblestones. That became more of a presence for me in the story, as it all developed.
Late Fame (Magnolia Pictures)
What brought you first to New York?
I just moved to New York because I wanted to move to New York. I did a year at McGill, I took a year off, then I went to NYU because I had this romantic dream of coming down and studying with Nicholas Ray—which of course never would have happened, and he was dead by the time I got there anyway—but that was the reason I came to New York.
How did memories of your experiences around that time inform the quasi-vérité way that you chose to film the literary salons, the spaces where The Enthusiasm Society elects to meet and the way those gatherings unfold?
Those kinds of mythic places that people recall, or that they try to emulate—like Gertrude Stein’s salon in Paris, or the Algonquin Round Table, or the Cedar Bar—I tend to think they happened spontaneously. It was interesting, because I had a friend who lived in an apartment on the Upper West Side, and she started inviting people over to her place on Sundays. And there was a conductor, some musicians, some theater people. I was there, too. At a certain point, after a few weeks, she said, “Everybody, I’d like to make an announcement. It’s always been a dream of mine to have a salon. And I’ve realized that’s what we’re doing now, and I just want to say, ‘Keep coming!’” It all fell apart, almost on contact, the minute that she named it.
What I wanted to do was to have people gathering in a place that felt out of time. It’s not really a kind of place that exists in New York anymore. The bar itself, all the interiors for the film, were shot in New Jersey, and so that café is very much a Jersey place—but it feels like a New York place from 30 years ago or even more. It was the same with the performance space at the end. It’s almost like Bushwick, but not really; it’s different, more surreal. I wanted to create a space that would be ideal for those kinds of gatherings, the kinds of places people wanted to be at, but never really were, and had these ideas of earlier moments when people were. I knew people who had been to the Cedar Bar. Alfred Leslie was a friend of mine, and he knew a lot of people who had been part of the New York poetry scene.
“Late Fame” asks these questions about whether art can reflect authenticity, and that’s this element of Saxberger’s poetry that the younger generation responds to, or at least that they interpret or infer in writing that’s from—as you’re saying—a place and a scene that came before their time. When Saxberger is reading his poetry aloud, there’s a slight edge that led me to think about Dafoe potentially harkening back to his own time as a member of an experimental theatre company. Greta Lee, in a much showier role, is constantly performing for this group of young admirers. Tell me about working with the layers of performance you wanted from these characters.
I had a few conversations with Willem around this, but we were of like minds, basically, and needed to iron out certain scenes and lines of dialogue. When we were shooting, Willem was the guy who just wanted to keep going, to move ahead, because the moment is everything for him. Every actor is different, and sometimes there would be little adjustments I’d ask him to make here and there, but there was never conscious thought about that. It’s more like Ed is confronted with this situation, and he’s lured into it—in a way that we all would be; who wouldn’t respond to that? And there’s a part of him that recognizes the fragility, the borderline craziness, of the situation, and there’s another part of him where the state and the feeling of being young come back to him very suddenly, like muscle memory. When he’s reading the poem, that’s quite different, because he’s not expecting to read it, but then [Gloria] can’t keep it together to read it for him; when he reads the poem, he’s confronted with it in the moment, returning to this piece he wrote as a younger man about a woman that he was in love with. And he just gives it a good reading, I think.
With Gloria, it’s a little bit different. Greta is playing a character who’s playing a character, quite often, under every circumstance, in every different circumstance, with the sole exception of an awkward moment when he goes to her apartment. She’s someone who’s traveled the toughest road of all the characters, because she is someone who came to New York probably a little bit late and who’s singing a song in this environment, something that would have been the lingua franca of New York 30 years earlier but not so much anymore. She’s giving it her all—but the edginess that you’re talking about is definitely there. It’s present, it’s part of my sensibility, and it’s also just part of the story. I wouldn’t want her to be singing Rodgers and Hammerstein, so it had to be Brecht and Weill.
Late Fame (Magnolia Pictures)
Her performance of “Surabaya Johnny,” in this downtown cabaret, is one of the scenes that leaps to mind first when I think about “Late Fame.”
That was one of the rare instances where I did have a film reference in mind. I’m not an extravagant Fassbinder aficionado, but the way he filmed those musical numbers in “Lola” or “The Marriage of Maria Braun” has such a bare-bones quality. That’s how I wanted it to look and feel: anti-romantic like Fassbinder.
You spoke earlier about coming out of this auteur-theory school of criticism, embarking on your own path as a filmmaker. “Late Fame” is engaged with all these ideas about what it means to be discovered, to be celebrated, to consider oneself esteemed in the arts. Did the process change your own thinking about what constitutes a successful artistic life?
I would say, on the one hand, you have to just keep going—to keep making films, as many as possible—but also never waste your time on bullshit, because there’s a lot of it. It’s always hard to make independent films—that’s the nature of it, that’s what it is, those are the circumstances. There are a lot of people who think about getting into movies, but they think about it inside out; they want to have made something, rather than to be involved in the actual making, which is a completely different experience.
The auteurist part of criticism was a tool for me when I was young; it was getting me into other people’s work and into seeing it along a certain wavelength. I still think of it as valid; it is true in a way that’s what a movie is. But then, on the other hand, what it isn’t is people deciding on a theme and elucidating it over 40 movies. It’s not the theme; it’s the practice, and there are the preoccupations, but that’s for other people to figure out. What it’s really about is not wasting your time on bullshit, because there’s a lot of it out there. Some of it comes with a smile, but there’s no time, and especially not for that.
“Late Fame” is in select theaters August 7, via Magnolia Pictures.
- Book Excerpt: The Otherworld: The Mythic Dimensions of Christophe Gans by Scout Tafoya (August 6, 2026)
In this excerpt from his book The Otherworld: The Mythic Dimensions of Christophe Gans, author and RogerEbert.com contributor Scout Tafoya gets into the French director’s parallels to the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky and the video games that inspired his work.
First person POV camera was de rigueur in Japanese games by the time Team Silent’s “Silent Hill” was released in 1999 for PlayStation. Its visual language is distinctly Tarkovskian, with its floating ‘camera’, fogbound abandoned buildings, and creatures suffering from what appears to be radioactive fallout (pale white forms with the skin conditions of the first crews sent to fight the fires at Chernobyl). The idea of a shapeshifting landscape as exploration of a fractured conscience/consciousness is the throughline of the “Silent Hill” games. In “Solaris,” a phantom alien planet (possibly a lifeform) starts playing havoc with a crew of orbiting astronaut’s sense of reality. When Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) is sent to take stock, the planet begins changing his perception of the world and introduces him to the invincible ghost of his deceased wife (played by Sergei Bondarchuk’s daughter Natalya). Like the protagonist James Sunderland in “Silent Hill 2,” he’s ‘searching’ for his wife and finds her ghost. In “Solaris” the ghost is a projection beamed up from the planet of the title. Not a ghost, but a psychic apparition, which is practically speaking, the same thing (though the orthodox Christian Tarkovsky surely knew which one he believed). So the hero of “Solaris” must decide if what he’s seeing is his mind’s work, a planet’s work, or god’s; a million miles and years from home, where religion is only represented in the natural world he chooses to leave behind. In saying goodbye to the earth’s corporeal suggestion (people, grass, birds, family, art) for the last time on his way into orbit around Solaris, he’s rejecting ‘god’ for science (Tarkovsky himself grappling with it in being a filmmaker constantly filming art and the creation of art as an antidote to war and austerity – the long drive back to the city in “Solaris” his best impression of a world without god), only to discover they can’t describe each other. And film thus is the only way to question god’s absence. What would Tarkovsky have made of a video game like “Silent Hill,” about the search for god in an artifact of pure scientific construction? As “Stalker” has it: “Don’t hope for flying saucers, that would be too interesting.”
On the 21st of May 2020 Team Silent designer Masahiro Ito took to Twitter to answer a question that’s plagued many a fan. “”Solaris” is one of novels which inspired the story of SH2.” Seems the loneliness of the COVID pandemic and the closeness we came to apocalypse finally convinced him to open up. For a moment the whole world was in The Zone. “Silent Hill” the game is an even stranger reckoning with the idea of god. If a movie is the obvious representation of a camera’s viewpoint (canted however the story or project deems fit), a video game like “Silent Hill” suggests that even the camera’s viewpoint is “god’s” viewpoint. A camera left in a field will collect data of the thing that passes before its gaze, including the time that elapses. Time and space in a video game are manmade. A digital time piece is never far from the menu options in a game, to tell you the speed at which you completed it, but also as a way to nudge the player towards the sum total of the work. Never mind a completion of the narrative but a proper showcase for all the work that went into making a sky a sky, and a man a man beneath it. When you have effectively mapped a whole world (a ‘zone’ of bottled incident and an internal clock) why wouldn’t you encourage your ‘user’ to explore it all? And then the game’s interaction with a user creates its own dialectic. God has made the game, but it’s now god with the controller in her hand. So who is in charge?
Tarkovsky died before Chernobyl, missing the fulfillment of his prophecy. The Soviets never got close to succeeding in their mission to impose state atheism on its people, you can’t do it when people already know what belief can mean. For the record a state without religion is the only sane option. People are religious, but a government is not and shouldn’t be, tautologically and morally speaking. People look to the state as the characters do in “Solaris”. To provide answers and get them out of tarrying in the real world. A state cannot be possessive of anything, let alone belief, so the lies are insurmountable before the starting gun has gone off. Further down the line Tarkovsky missed his aesthetic upholstery and theological yearning becoming the centerpiece vassal for a new hierarchy of artistic expression. Between “Crime & Punishment” and “Silent Hill” lay “Stalker” and “Solaris”, and a representation of the moral condition of being alive in a post-theist industrial present (the future, we can safely say, has arrived) is copied and copied and copied. The games have been remade and turned into films which spawned sequels. A manmade god being reproduced by man and vice versa all the way down.
To play “Silent Hill,” about a man’s search for meaning in a zone of his own (split into components: the ‘Fog World’ and the ‘Otherworld’, hell and purgatory; heaven out of reach and beside the point), created by designers as a reflection of an aesthetic philosophy born of an existential condition, is to enter a cinematic dialectic. “Stalker’s” script tells one story, the camera another, and the scenery yet another. All of them wrap around the intangible of Tarkovksy’s terror at God’s silence, per Bergman. “Silent Hill” the game can only be a reassuring riff on Tarkovsky because the world is demonstrably a creation, and creating a world for your users is itself an act of faith. The town of Silent Hill is ‘built’ for each of its protagonist’s individual journeys.
In “Return to Silent Hill,” Gans adaptation of Silent Hill 2, the journey through the radioactive fallout and the warped territory in James’ (played in the film by Jeremy Irvine) recollection, marries “Stalker’s” existential searching (the act of looking replacing decisive action; a country’s ruin as a fantastical dimension where hope can infect one like cancer cells or a drug, depending on one’s outlook), Mirror’s floating continuity of sense memory stitched together through his father’s poetry, and “Solaris’” deranged heartache syndrome at the corridor of experience, guilt, and bargaining. Gans works hard to earn close-ups like those of the gaunt heroes and fulsome wives and mothers in Tarkovsky, whose heroes don’t have control, but are at the Otherworld’s mercy. In Solaris a widower is powerless to stop inviting his wife’s ghost into his bedroom. In “Mirror” a dying man looks back at an active past in which he cannot participate. In “Stalker” a man is addicted to the toxicity of “The Zone”, the colorized netherworld brought about by extraterrestrial intelligence attached to the monochrome real of ‘modern’ Russia. All three films predict Chernobyl (an obvious model for Silent Hill’s noxious barometer); worlds undone by regret and mad science. The personal and political entwined like lovers in reverie. Like James and Mary. The fallout and its ashen skies are always a few hours away.
Perhaps it’s because the Japanese spent the 20th century tallying the cost of material absolutes and demented moral abdication (in World War 2 alone: kamikaze pilots [“The craziest thing about World War 2” -My 9 year old nephew, unprompted], cannibalism and mass suicides in the South Pacific, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Rape of Nanking, Kuril Island, Unit 731), Team Silent needed a model for a psychic intangible like Stalker outside of their own. By 1999 a huge part of Japanese culture had been adduced through American example, as carried over by their conquerors in the years after the Emperor surrendered. American gangster movies, westerns and war movies, jazz, comic books – as when Yasujiro Ozu saw “Fantasia” and declared the US the victor in the war well ahead of schedule, the certainty in a conflict must have spoken to a people who’d had the iron jaw of nationalism wedged open by the crowbar of capitalism. America demanded to be treated like they were at the top of the food chain. And while you can make a good first-person shooter out of that attitude, there’s little philosophical breathing room.
