Movies Feel Culturally Relevant Again
When I last updated this list, the movie discourse was fixated on what seemed like the story of the year—a pair of runaway successes from 20-something YouTuber wunderkinds Curry Barker and Kane Parsons. A couple months later, Obsession and Backrooms are each still drawing hordes of moviegoers to theaters. (And fellow Zoomer Alex Ullom’s It Ends will soon vie to join their ranks.) But more recently, those films have been overshadowed by two giant studio properties that were expected to be big hits—just not this big. The Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day are setting records and powering Hollywood’s best box-office numbers since the pandemic. IMAX screenings are selling out at all hours of the night; resale tickets are going for astronomical sums; Tom Holland and Zendaya (Zendolland? Tomdaya?) are suddenly inescapable.
Which is all to say that movies feel more culturally relevant than they have since Barbenheimer summer—if not sometime before then. That’s great! I love excitement around movies! I appreciate the shared capacity to do bits about Zeus’s Law! As an actual individual moviegoer, though, what’s been even more thrilling has been the surprising number of strong comedies and comedy-adjacent flicks we’ve gotten this summer.
Strong Comedies and Memorable Characters
Beyond making me laugh, films like Maddie’s Secret, I Want Your Sex, and Late Fame have offered what I’ve found lacking in a lot of the splashiest releases of the year: indelible characters. Giving wildly varied performances, actors like John Early and Kate Berlant (in Maddie’s Secret); Olivia Wilde, Cooper Hoffman, and Chase Sui Wonders (in I Want Your Sex); and Willem Dafoe, Greta Lee, and Edmund Donovan (in Late Fame) imbue their characters with ample specificity, texture, and surprise. A lot of these characters have been driven mad by Internet-addled modern culture. But none of them feel like mere cogs in their movies’ machinery. Instead, these films are mostly keen to follow these oddballs wherever they lead.
Upcoming Fall Festival Lineups
If memorable performances in service of distinctive characters have felt rare this year, the recently released fall festival lineups indicate that that won’t be the case for long. Venice, TIFF, and New York Film Festival are chock-full of intriguing work from old masters and promising new voices alike. Buckle up. Movie season is coming!
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Maddie’s Secret
With its deep cast of alt-comedy superstars, I was prepared for Maddie’s Secret to be funny. I was less prepared for John Early to dish up such a tonally distinct, pitch-perfect Sirk-meets-Showgirls melodrama—at once a send-up of modern test-kitchen foodie culture and an earnest, emotional account of disordered eating. Watch Now
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Late Fame
When I saw Late Fame at last year’s New York Film Festival, it stood out for the way it captured something I’d noticed but hadn’t yet seen in a movie. In this case, it was the way modern New York literary and art culture can feel like absurd cosplay performed by the rich—with nostalgia for past art-making golden ages distracting from actual art-making. The film, written