NYC Weekend Watch is our weekly round-up of repertory offerings.

BAM
A 35mm-heavy Masahiro Shinoda retrospective has begun.

Museum of Modern Art
The expertly programmed Universal Westerns continues with two by Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher in 3D.

Film at Lincoln Center
History, Italian Style continues with Vincere, The Conformist, and Love and Anarchy on 35mm.

Museum of the Moving Image
A De Palma retrospective continues with Carlito’s Way on 35mm; two Harun Farocki shorts screen on Saturday; Real American Tales continues with films by Michael Roemer, Spike Lee, and more.

Roxy Cinema
Cam and Sohrab Shahid Saless’ Far from Home screen on Friday; Pasolini’s Medea shows on Saturday; William Friedkin’s The Boys in the Band and Cruising play in a 4K restoration and on 35mm, respectively, this Sunday.

Anthology Film Archives
Allen Ginsberg Centennial features films by Robert Frank and more.

Film Forum
A print of The Third Man continues it two-week run; Peter Hutton’s No Picnic and Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest screen in restorations; Oliver! plays on Sunday morning.

IFC Center
A 4K restoration of I Shot Andy Warhol continues; Terminator 2, Jaws, The Big Lebowski, Purple Rain, and River’s Edge play late.

Nitehawk Prospect Park
The Devil Queen and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off play early on Saturday and Sunday.

Metrograph
Back to the Future, Full Contact, Empire of the Sun, and Caravaggio play on 35mm; Back to the Fox starts while Gianfranco Rosi, Ringo Lam on Fire, Maybe If You Smile, and The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters continue.

Each week we highlight the noteworthy titles that have recently hit streaming platforms in the United States. Check out this week’s selections below and past round-ups here.

André Is an Idiot (Tony Benna)

There is an unbridled honesty to André Is an Idiot that is admirable, even if all of it doesn’t really work. It’s a simple, stark subject for a documentary: accomplished advertising creative André Ricciardi neglected to get a colonoscopy at the recommended age and when he finally did get one he learned he had Stage 4 Colon Cancer. In response to this death sentence, André decided to make a film about dying. It’s a bold idea, reflective of many of his ideas for commercials and otherwise. – Dan M. (full review)

Where to Stream: Netflix

Deep Water (Renny Harlin)

Returning to shark-infested waters a quarter-century after Deep Blue Sea became a cable TV-turned-streaming mainstay, Renny Harlin’s Deep Water feels born from another era, for better or worse. With an ensemble stocked with cardboard yet earnestly crafted archetypes and thrills tightly doled out in simple, roller-coaster structure fashion, this airplane-disaster-meets-shark-thriller could be slotted into a late-night TV lineup and, perhaps outside of its too-clean digital sheen, be mistaken for a rediscovered relic from another time. This back-to-basics homage to disaster pictures of the 1970s has a modest charm, elevated by Harlin’s brisk direction, even if there is little that makes a lasting impression. – Jordan R. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Eno (Gary Hustwit)

A film of infinite possibilities thanks in part to a generative AI hook, Gary Hustwit’s Eno is partially a straightforward biopic featuring interviews and archival footage with composer Brian Eno, the experiential musician and artist whose credits include playing the synthesizer in Roxy Music to creating the start-up sound for Windows PCs. The film is assembled at random, with a set beginning and ending, inspired seemingly by a deck of “Oblique Strategies” cards that Eno and David Bowie used to create tension and contractions within their collaborations. – John F. (full review)

Where to Stream: The Criterion Collection

Finnegan’s Foursome (Edward Burns)

Edward Burns’ new film is a first for the filmmaker: a sports movie! When the golf pro patriarch (Ian McElhinney) of the Finnegan family passes away, his two sons (Burns and Brian d’Arcy James) decide to keep alive the tradition of the annual Finnegan’s Cup, including their kids (Erica Hernandez, Brian Muller) in the contest. Comedy and catharsis ensue, along with some stunning cinematography of lovely, green Ireland. As with much of Burns’ work, this is a playful, charming film that’s got its heart in the right place. – Dan M.

Where to Stream: VOD

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (Gore Verbinski)

From the moment Sam Rockwell busts into a full diner clad in what can only be described as a do-it-yourself time-travel outfit comprising steampunk gadgets covered with a filthy clear raincoat, it’s clear you’re not in for a movie made by committee. What begins as a possible hostage situation quickly turns into a quest to save all of humanity from a rogue AI that is on the brink of total human takeover––if you can believe a word coming out of Rockwell’s mouth, among them a complicated scenario involving resetting the timestream with a very specific combination of companions pulled from this very diner. If he picks the right group of people, perhaps humanity can be saved. If not, he’ll just have to try again and again and again until he gets it right. – Eric V. (full review)

Where to Stream: Hulu, Disney+

How to Make a Killing (John Patton Ford)

John Patton Ford’s sophomore feature rides the wave of its clever lead from first shot to last, cool and confident that everything will work out in his favor no matter how pitted the odds are against him. The writer-director behind Emily the Criminal introduces us to the ever-smirking Becket Redfellow (Glen Powell) in a prison cell where he laments, with a smile, that he ordered vanilla ice cream despite being brought chocolate before embarking upon a feature-length voiceover that begins with the chronicling of how someone with such a stately name (and history) ended up in such an unfortunate situation. – Luke H. (full review)

Where to Stream: HBO Max

Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) (Joel Alfonso Vargas)

An impressive directorial debut and true New York tale, Joel Alfonso Vargas’ Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) was a selection at Sundance, Berlinale, New Directors/New Films, BFI London, and more film festivals last year. Starring Juan Collado, Destiny Checo, Yohanna Florentino, and Nathaly Navarro, following its theatrical release this spring, it’s now available digitally.

Where to Stream: VOD

The Last One for the Road (Francesco Sossai)

It doesn’t take long to work out where you are in The Last One for the Road––for the backroads of Veneto, Italy, Francesco Sossai’s delightful new movie has the unmistakable specificity of a life spent there. What you instead start to wonder is the when of it all. The protagonists are a pair of rogues in their 50s––one of whom, Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla), wears a shirt the color of a tobacco stain, the other, Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano), a style of bushy mustache I’ve rarely seen onscreen since Bruno Ganz sported a similar one in The American Friend. Only after stumbling into a group of Gen Z students––the most visible dressed in the headgear of an Egyptian goddess––late at night along a Venice canal do we realize that our heroes exist in the here and now. If it wasn’t for their innate knack for catching last orders, regardless of the watering hole, you’d almost call them men out of time. – Rory O. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Pressure (Anthony Maras)

Can you make an engaging film about predicting the weather? Pressure, directed by Anthony Maras, answers this question in the affirmative. Set mere days before D-Day is set to commence, General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) needs an accurate forecast to ensure the operation will go as planned. The film’s stark opening minutes portray the vicious aftermath of Operation Tiger, a D-Day training exercise gone horribly wrong only months earlier. Hundreds of American soldiers were killed by friendly fire after some deadly miscommunication. We find Eisenhower steadfast but shaken, surrounded by British generals who believe they can do a better job leading the Allied Expeditionary Force (AEF) to victory. Damian Lewis represents this feeling in his outsized portrayal of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, commander of all D-Day land forces. – Dan M. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

Two Pianos (Arnaud Desplechin)

The past rears its not-so-ugly head in Two Pianos, Arnaud Desplechin’s latest film exploring the ways gorgeous people make an even bigger mess out of the messiness of life. Set amidst the world of classical music in Lyon, this tale of a tortured pianist’s reunion with his also-tortured first love contains the literary and melodramatic elements one normally expects from Desplechin, who––having not received a theatrical release since 2017’s Ismael’s Ghosts––has unfortunately fallen out of favor in the U.S. That’s not the case in his home country, where he’s maintained a prolific output that continues attracting some of France’s top actors. With Two Pianos he’s put together a rich, thoughtful look at how we can shape our lives around our biggest regrets. – C.J. P. (full review)

Where to Stream: VOD

The Wizard of the Kremlin (Olivier Assayas)

Following up one of his smallest-scale films, Suspended Time, Olivier Assayas’ latest is the epic political drama The Wizard of the Kremlin, based on Giuliano da Empoli. Starring Jude Law as Vladimir Putin alongside Paul Dano, Alicia Vikander, Tom Sturridge, Will Keen, and Jeffrey Wright, Savina Petkova said in her Venice review, “Audiences resisted Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice because they feared the idea of Donald Trump being a movie’s protagonist, but never in its runtime does The Wizard of Kremlin show any ambivalence towards its main character. Without daring to question Baranov as a narrator, Assayas’ film consents to be interpreted as cynical. Because what is it, if not cynical, to insist on turning a chain of events that are still unfolding into a compact story? We may be used to recognizing films that fetishize something through their form, but we seemingly need to be wary of a content-fetish too.”

Where to Stream: VOD

Yes (Nadav Lapid)

Tel Aviv native, defector, and auteur Nadav Lapid opens his fifth feature in a catastrophic state of carouse. A filmmaker known for his employment of trademark dance sequences, Lapid is back with an equally visceral but uncharacteristically clubby groove in Yes, a work whose sarcastically enthusiastic title points to the relentless ridicule and hometown mockery that defines it. – Luke H. (full review)

Where to Stream: Kino Film Collection

Also New to Streaming

Kino Film Collection

Queen Kelly

MGM+

Project Hail Mary

MUBI

God is Shy
Inspector Ike
Dorian Gray in the Mirror of the Yellow Press
Freak Orlando
Ticket of No Return

Looking for what to see in theaters? Our feature, updated weekly, highlights our top recommendations for films currently in theaters, from new releases to restorations receiving a proper theatrical run.

While we already provide extensive monthly new-release recommendations and weekly streaming recommendations, as distributors’ roll-outs can vary, this is a one-stop list to share the essential films that may be on a screen near you.

Backrooms (Kane Parsons)

The opening five minutes serve as an ideal primer for anybody unfamiliar with Parsons’ Backrooms web series, and who maybe need a little extra convincing that a 20-year-old YouTuber has some juice: a found-footage recording of a researcher lost in the endless liminal space who gets chased by some unseen force of evil. Even when seen in the extremely low resolution of period-appropriate early-1990s camcorders, there’s something immediately disquieting about the uncanny production design (courtesy of Perkins’ regular collaborator Danny Vermette), where signs appear as their mirror image, various objects of furniture have melted into the floor, and the only living souls are seagulls. It’s an uncomfortable space to be in before the echoes of footsteps begin gathering speed behind our cameraman, and as this tape ends in offscreen devastation, we flash forward approximately ten days to meet Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a failed architect and owner of the fabulously named furniture store Cap’n Clark’s Ottoman Empire. – Alistair R. (full review)

Blue Film (Elliot Tuttle)

“Provocation” has become watered-down in recent times. All it takes to provoke someone is tossing off a bunch of half-assed offensive statements or aiming your cannon at every divisive mainstream issue on a quest to push people’s buttons. Getting a reaction out of people is easy; actually making them consider things is another matter entirely. Blue Film, by that token, is provocative in the truest sense of the term. Elliott Tuttle’s film seeks to unsettle, question, and, yes, provoke you. But his masterful two-hander wants, more than anything, to extend understanding to both men at the center, asking you to see them as flawed humans with depth and complexity, even if we’d rather not. – Devan S. (full review)

Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari)

Blue Heron, Romvari’s feature debut, once again mines the director’s own history, following a Hungarian family of six as it settles in a nondescript stretch of suburbia outside Vancouver. The opening line, “I struggle now to remember much of my childhood,” belongs to the youngest child, Sasha (Eylul Guven), the film to her older stepbrother Jeremy (Edik Beddoes), a sullen, taciturn adolescent with a history of self-destructive behavior no one has learned how to deal with, much less address. Yet Romvari refuses to write him off as a troubled child. Yes, the kid is most certainly not all right, but he traverses Blue Heron as its most mysterious, elusive character, and that impenetrability is a measure of Romvari’s empathy. Rather than pathologizing his pain––a tendency his own parents succumb to––she invites us to sit with it and bask in his drawn-out silences, in the gaps between the words and imperfect memories that grown-up Sasha (Amy Zimmer), in the film’s second half, will try piecing together. – Leonardo G. (full review)

Carolina Caroline (Adam Carter Rehmeier)

How do you tell when you stop being good people pretending to be bad and realize you’re just bad people who can’t even trick themselves into thinking they’re anything but? Caroline (Samara Weaving) asks this aloud earlier than you might expect, considering the crime escapade she and new boyfriend Oliver (Kyle Gallner) enjoy commenced at her behest. She didn’t just take his advice and wonder why she’d never left the one place she’s ever known. She didn’t just reject the notion of staying because it’s safe. No, Caroline chose to meet those realities with the decision to become a full-blown outlaw because it made her feel truly alive. – Jared M. (full review)

The Currents (Milagros Mumenthaler)

A selection at TIFF, NYFF, San Sebastian, and more, Milagros Mumenthaler’s acclaimed, mysterious character study The Currents is now in theaters. Jourdain Searles said in her NYFF review, “Writer-director Milagros Mumenthaler paints an intimate portrait of a woman trying to reckon with her fractured identity, trying not to fall into the grip of madness. Mumenthaler understands that motherhood requires an element of performance that reminds the mother that her life is no longer hers alone. Though the love for her daughter is still there inside, she cowers from it, preoccupied with inspecting the current shape of her life. In therapy, Lina expresses a fear of water’s power and the strength of a current that could wash her away. It’s as if she now knows the fragility of her existence, and that the confidence that once governed her was washed away when she jumped off the bridge. Despite the eccentricity of her fears, the emotions behind them are painfully relatable to any woman who feels that the inertia of her life has taken over.”

The Death of Robin Hood (Michael Sarnoski)

How many times has the story of Robin Hood been told? How many books have been written, how many movies made about the outlaw? With The Death of Robin Hood, writer-director Michael Sarnoski goes back to the source. Rather, the supposed sources. The earliest stories of Robin Hood were ballads told by commoners across England. These tales tell of an outlaw who does not give anything stolen to the poor, instead taking pleasure in killing the rich. In the medieval ballad “Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne,” Robin beheads Gisborne and sticks his head on a spike. – Dan M. (full review)

Disclosure Day (Steven Spielberg)

Certain beliefs unite all of humanity. Take, for example, the idea that the extraordinary is possible. Or, even more, that the impossible is possible. Steven Spielberg isn’t shy about believing in extraterrestrial life, and he doesn’t think you should be either. He’s so sincere about this aloof-yet-sky-high-stakes concept that he’s returning to it again with a very simple profundity in tow: “Empathy is the core of animate existence–our evolutionary advantage.” And he intends to remind us of our capacity for such. – Luke H. (full review)

Forastera (Lucía Aleñar Iglesias)

It starts as a gag. Pepa (Núria Prims) rings to apologize to her mother and believes it is she who picks up the phone. Her teenage daughter Cata (Zoe Stein) plays along, pretending to answer as she assumes her grandmother would, until her mother finally catches on and says her name. When it happens again, however, Catalina (Marta Angelat) has died. But instead of telling the hairdresser this news, Cata once again pretends to be her grandmother to cancel the appointment and assure the woman that she’ll ring soon for a touch-up. – Jared M. (full review)

Leviticus (Adrian Chiarella)

Being queer—especially in this rapidly regressive age—means becoming acquainted with a base level of fear for most of your life. It is something you learn early on: not only when you must discover who can be trusted with your survival, but whether they might betray that trust later. Violence takes so many forms that it can lead to a sort of paranoia that folds in on itself. Adrian Chiarella’s Leviticus understands this intimately. By blending the mechanics of It Follows with the trauma of conversion therapy, he crafts a tense, thematically potent feature debut that is more than just a clear metaphor—this is a creepy horror picture in its own right. – Devan S. (full review)

The Little Sister (Hafsia Herzi)

In her mosque’s perfect world, Fatima (Nadia Melliti) is on the right path. A good family. A tight-knit group of protective and loyal friends. A boyfriend ready to propose. A devout faith in Islam. In many ways, this teen is doing better on the wife checklist than her older sisters (besides kitchen skills). And maybe she would have followed that path in Algeria or Egypt. But this is France. The opportunity to live her true self is here if she wants it. – Jared M. (full review)

I Love Boosters (Boots Riley)

A parody of dialectical materialism (you’ll understand what this means when you see the film), superficial economies, and the cult of fast fashion, I Love Boosters—the second feature from rapper, activist, and filmmaker Boots Riley—proves a spirited and hilarious comedy in its first two acts before falling back on action-comedy tropes in its finale. Perhaps there’s no way to fully sustain the gonzo energy delivered in its set-up, which initially offers a sharp critique of capitalism as biting as Riley’s debut feature Sorry to Bother You. – John F. (full review)

Jinsei (Ryuya Suzuki)

Maybe it’s harder than it looks to present the end of the world calmly, especially in only 93 minutes. That’s one of the major achievements of the new, relatively lo-fi anime film Jinsei. Over a hundred years—all through the prism of pop music and Japanese identity—one quickly learns how much millennial- and zoomer-doom mindset is just as present in the land of the rising sun. – Ethan V. (full review)

Maddie’s Secret (John Early)

You can’t accuse John Early of not committing. Through the majority of his acting career, the comedian has become a reliable avatar for a palpable, toxic, hilarious narcissism, playing characters oblivious to the world outside the bubbles they’ve so thoroughly cultivated. That was particularly evident over four seasons of Search Party, as well as last year’s Stress Positions, a Sundance favorite that exposed the absurdity of living in quarantine over a masked summer. As an agoraphobic tenant in a Brooklyn brownstone, Early took the situation’s disaster and approached it through his very specific kind of self-assured, righteous mania to such an extent that his freak-outs are still rattling around in my brain. – Jake K-S. (full review)

Obsession (Curry Barker)

Even if he hadn’t recently landed the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, you’ve likely heard the name Curry Barker. He’s the latest in the recent spate of former sketch comedians/YouTubers turning to horror-directing with an online feature under his belt. Obsession—his theatrical debut—fully lives up to both his promise and the title. For whatever familiarity lies within it, there’s a strong seed just begging to flourish into something great. – Devan S. (full review)

Pressure (Anthony Maras)

Can you make an engaging film about predicting the weather? Pressure, directed by Anthony Maras, answers this question in the affirmative. Set mere days before D-Day is set to commence, General Dwight D. Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) needs an accurate forecast to ensure the operation will go as planned. The film’s stark opening minutes portray the vicious aftermath of Operation Tiger, a D-Day training exercise gone horribly wrong only months earlier. Hundreds of American soldiers were killed by friendly fire after some deadly miscommunication. We find Eisenhower steadfast but shaken, surrounded by British generals who believe they can do a better job leading the Allied Expeditionary Force (AEF) to victory. Damian Lewis represents this feeling in his outsized portrayal of Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, commander of all D-Day land forces. – Dan M. (full review)

Promised Sky (Erige Sehiri)

With Promised Sky, French-Tunisian director Erige Sehiri offers an intimate view from the diverse perspectives of those caught in the mess of systemic prejudice, and how difficult it can be to play fair when the deck is stacked against you.  Though uneven at times, strong performances and a ripped-from-the-BBC story make for a heartbreaking reflection on the challenges of being moral in an immoral place. Promised Sky’s glimpse of the uncertainty ingrained into the lives of a vulnerable population is set in Tunisia, yet it’s unnerving how seamlessly it could take place in the United States. –Kent M. W. (full review)

Rose of Nevada (Mark Jenkin)

The films of Mark Jenkin ooze a hypnotic, seasick sensibility; to watch them is to be lulled by their restless jumps through time and space, their ability to convert his home turf of Cornwall into a suspended world where facts and visions collide in stupefying dioramas. The director is a spinner of wandering tales, never fueled by linear plots so much as ambient forces: a ticking clock, gusts of wind, the distant roaring of waves. His dramas tend to pull your gaze from people and toward the inanimate objects that litter their surroundings. It’s here––in the interstice between the fictional foreground and non-fictional background––that the actual story often lies. – Leonardo G. (full review)

With Hasan in Gaza (Kamal Aljafari)

While there are no documentaries in the world that can give true justice to the pain experienced by the Palestinian people, Kamal Aljafari’s With Hasan in Gaza is one of the most poetic and profound to arrive thus far. Rory O’Connor said in his review, “The new documentary With Hasan in Gaza––a poignant, meditative portrait of a city now fighting for its life––works as both a travelogue and time machine. In 2001, the filmmaker Kamal Aljafari journeyed to Palestine in the hopes of finding Adder Rahim, a friend he made while serving seven months in the juvenile section of Israel’s Naqab Desert prison when he was 17 years old. During filming, Aljafari met Hasan, a guide who agreed to drive him the length of the country, down its coastal strip, during which time the director documented what he saw: children playing, rows of cars and buildings, bustling city streets.”

More Films Now Playing in Theaters

• The Gas Station Attendant
• Magic Hour
• Power Ballad
• Renoir
• Tuner
• Underland

Read all reviews here. For our NYC-specific repertory round-ups, including many films that will tour the country, bookmark NYC Weekend Watch.

Comedian John Early has been waiting for his film to be seen by audiences. Premiering at TIFF last fall, Early’s directorial debut is a sublime comedy that commits to simultaneously becoming a serious drama about a woman with a returned eating disorder. Maddie’s Secret, which Early also wrote and leads, plays like a 1980s TV movie. But its hokey, stilted dialogue is an advantage. Early’s film—its successful comedic and dramatic moments—feel wholly intentional. It’s a rich text of cultural touchpoints and inspirations. It’s completely absurd yet an emotional gutpunch. Early has created a story that exists on two playing fields, both of which find their footing. 

Early has recruited some friends to fill out the project, with his comedic partner Kate Berlant, Connor O’Malley, Vanessa Bayer, and Eric Rahill in the supporting cast. Maddie’s Secret follows the eponymous Maddie as she becomes an overnight food media sensation, a content creator for GourMaybe, and a possible consultant on a hit TV show called The Boar. Early isn’t going for subtlety with his first feature; he’s fully committing to the bit. He and the rest of his cast believe in the silliness of this story just as much as the seriousness. And that’s what becomes endearing, then overwhelming, through the course of 101 minutes. 

Ahead of Friday’s theatrical release, we chatted with Early about his inspirations for Maddie’s Secret, fully committing to every scene, and his own obsession with food content. 

The Film Stage: How are you feeling towards the film now that it’s been almost a full year since it initially premiered at TIFF?

John Early: I spent months thinking that I was making this kind of high-style—like almost a fairy tale that was so far removed from my own life—and then the more I look at it, I’m like, “Jesus Christ, John.” In some sort of more poetic, mysterious way, it feels very revealing, and I was initially very scared by that. So, like, around TIFF time, I was terrified of that and now I’m a little more loving and forgiving, and I’m kind of almost impressed by it. I’m not impressed by myself, but I am impressed by just the nature of making something, the way that you can channel these unconscious feelings and not know you’re doing it. I felt very in control of what I was doing, and I wasn’t at all, actually. 

Do you think that is just subconscious, or do you think, regardless of whatever you made, there had to be a specific percent of you in it?

If you are compelled to make something––and in this case, I felt very mysteriously compelled to do this––if there’s real desire, I just think we’re always revealing ourselves, no matter what. You see something that you don’t like, you’re going to text the person that made it. You go to a play, you don’t like it, but you have to text them. It’s a text message, so you should conceivably have all the power and all the distance necessary to lie your face off and be like, “That was staggeringly beautiful. You’re a genius,” because you’re just texting, so you could just type the lie, and yet even in a text, you reveal yourself…

You give some sort of backhanded compliment.

It’s so crazy. It’s shocking when I see myself doing that. I’m like, “John, just lie,” but even if this were some weird assignment that the studio had given me to make, and my heart wasn’t in it, I’m sure I would have unavoidably revealed something about myself. 

Where do you think our collective fascination with food comes from, and how that fits into the movie? And is it revealing anything about us? 

This movie is borne out of, among many things, my own obsessive consumption of food content on my phone. One thing that was interesting to me about bulimia, symbolically, is early common connotations with the Roman Empire—like, intentionally vomiting would be common. At least mythically, the way people think about it is that kings—like the elite, the ruling class—it’s about the decadence before the fall of a civilization. Binging to the point of needing to vomit. I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if all of the food content and the excessiveness of it and indulgence or heaviness, like creaminess––there’s a richness of it. It feels like it might be some sort of collective free-for-all before the fall and collapse of civilization.

Food is a resource. We need it to survive, and it’s possible that we all feel some looming sense of ecological collapse that we’re not going to be able to provide food for everyone. I mean, we’re already not. People are already starving, but it does seem like we’re on the precipice of something. So I think it makes sense that there’s this kind of manic consumption of food content—before it’s gone or something. I don’t know. I mean, that’s crazy and maybe too high-minded, and I certainly wasn’t writing about this in the same way with the movie, but I do think that’s part of what’s going on symbolically in the movie.

It feels like there’s a gluttony. 

That’s the word! It’s gluttonous. 

And it feels like Bon Appétit got replaced by Chef’s Table and then got replaced by millions of videos on TikTok that I scroll by.

Exactly. It was like the gates hadn’t opened, the dam hadn’t been broken down yet. The Bon Appétit thing is so fascinating to me, obviously. Because there was just this brief window of time where we had this somewhat elegant form of the Bon Appétit video, because it’s a kind of doc. It’s gentle; it’s doc-style. It doesn’t have an aggressive editing format. It’s, like, not grating, and it’s just very simply watching someone who’s good at what they do. 

I really loved those videos, and then suddenly—I guess during lockdown—it all got offloaded onto the phone, and it was, like, TikTok food, Instagram food. The videos lost everything, got condensed to no time, and they became very quick-cutty, and the sound design became very pornographic, and deliberately so. It’s lots of squishing and slurping and slapping. That’s where I actually felt I knew what I was doing with this movie, because those videos made me think of Paul Verhoeven, like the sound design of Showgirls and Starship Troopers. It’s totally pornographic, but in a very conscious and very funny way. I think it’s very carnal, and I was like, “Wait, wait, wait, wait.” That’s when it went from a little genre experiment into a movie.

Photo by Arin Sang-urai, courtesy of Film at Lincoln Center.

The movie has this intentional silliness, almost a hokey nature to it. And moments later, it’ll be intensely serious and emotionally charged in a way that’s certainly not played for laughs. How do you attempt to find balance between those two tones? Or were you even trying to necessarily balance them? 

I knew that being delicate and tiptoeing and being cautious was going to be the death of this movie. I obviously chose a subject matter that would very easily, in today’s culture, invite cautiousness, but I had to really force myself not to give into that feeling. I just followed the rules of the genre on the script level, and then each line had to be approached with total, bleeding-heart commitment. Then I knew that I would have to let go of what I needed the audience to do in any given moment and let the chips fall where they may, tonally.

It was our job to commit, and then it was going to be up to the audience to decide how it made them feel. But I think what happens is that as you spend more and more time with the commitment… it’s like in the beginning you’re laughing because there are jokes, of course—there’s silliness, there’s conscious silliness and gags and stuff—but also part of why people are laughing is just the audaciousness of the premise and of our commitment to the style. Then you become accustomed to the commitment, you accept it, and that was on purpose. I wanted this not to be a sketch. I didn’t want it to be a 12-minute sketch. I wanted it to be a full-length movie, so that after a certain point you become inoculated.

And then you yield to the emotion. As the movie goes on… and this is just my experience of writing: it was more focused in the beginning of the script on balancing some of the more tragic elements with humor, and then as it went on, I was just more and more emotional as I was writing it. It was totally crazy. I’ve never had this experience before artistically. I never thought of myself as this kind of an artist, but I was a fucking wreck writing the script. I was weeping, and I just… I think it’s my age.

It’s not like I set out to make something that was more in the style of something I would have made when I was 23 or 24. I wanted to make something subversive and wild and outrageous, and bratty or something. But as you get older, I don’t know, maybe it’s that you get a little more protective of the characters you’re writing. I just felt very protective of Maddie, and I cared about her, and it was just moving me. It was such an intense emotional response. I just was like, “I have to trust this, and something is happening here. I’m gonna trust it.” Before I knew it, we were shooting these intensely emotional scenes, and I’m in a wig, and I was like, “What the hell have I done?”

What about the colors of the movie, which feel as though they’re framing Maddie’s emotions? She talks to her mom on the phone under dark blue; she prepares food in front of bright red. There’s a brightness to this world. 

If there is one big influence, it’s Marnie, the Hitchcock movie. One of the things that I just absolutely love about that movie is that it’s psychologically terrifying, and it’s full of physical and emotional and sexual violence, but on its surface, it’s these glowy feminine pastel colors. It’s these little canary yellows and Pepto Bismol pinks. It’s an early-60s movie, but it has a very 1950s look to it, and it’s just very feminine and delicate with these little pastilles, or pastels like the candy. It’s like those little mints you get that you scoop out that have germs all over them. It’s those colors. 

Even in the treatment center, I didn’t want to just totally give over to bleakness and grittiness. I didn’t want to punish the audience. I wanted there to still be a kind of respite in its fairy tale color palette. I wanted it to always be… even at its darkest, most emotional moments, I wanted you to always feel safe, like you were being pulled through a dream or a fairy tale or a sweet little story. Then the colors also just come from Los Angeles. Because Los Angeles, to me, is always depicted as being this seedy, artificial kind of place where it’s like boob jobs and smog. But it’s actually full of totally psychedelic tropical plants and busy wildlife and bright flowers. It’s like a fairy tale.

Maddie’s Secret opens in limited release beginning Friday, June 19.

Welcome to The B-Side! Here we talk about movie directors! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones that they made in between. 

Today we discuss one of the greatest film directors to ever live: Steven Spielberg! Our B-Sides are 1941, Hook, Amistad, and The Adventures of Tintin.

Our guest is dear friend and incredible writer Bilge Ebiri! As of this writing, he just published his piece The Raider of a Lost Art, an oral history about Spielberg in conjunction with the release of his new film Disclosure Day. He’s also discussed Spielberg with The Film Stage before!

We chat about Spielberg’s early start and the difficult production of 1941, his stratospheric ‘80s, the successful failure of Hook, and his underrated Amistad. There’s a celebration of Spielberg’s improbable millennium run of films, from Saving Private Ryan through Munich.

The three of us dig into why Bilge loves Hook so much, he speaks on some additional, unpublished gems from his oral history piece, we appreciate the genius of John Milius, and the impossible camera that injects so much energy into The Adventures of Tintin.

Listen below and subscribe here. Be sure to give us a follow on Bluesky at @tfsbside.bsky.social. Enjoy!

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 Venice coverage. The film opens on June 19.

The films of Mark Jenkin ooze a hypnotic, seasick sensibility; to watch them is to be lulled by their restless jumps through time and space, their ability to convert his home turf of Cornwall into a suspended world where facts and visions collide in stupefying dioramas. The director is a spinner of wandering tales, never fueled by linear plots so much as ambient forces: a ticking clock, gusts of wind, the distant roaring of waves. His dramas tend to pull your gaze from people and toward the inanimate objects that litter their surroundings. It’s here––in the interstice between the fictional foreground and non-fictional background––that the actual story often lies. 

It stands to reason that his latest, Rose of Nevada, should begin not with a face but a series of textures: an extreme close-up of a seawall, an anchor candied in rust, chains, boats, and two boots on a pier––Mike’s (Edward Rowe), among the last folks still living in a seaside Cornish ghost town. The region’s rampant depopulation has long been a staple of the filmmaker’s oeuvre, routinely focused on how its native residents have been pushed away by rising costs, unchecked tourism, and gentrification. That was the narrative catalyst behind Jenkin’s terrific 2015 short Bronco’s House, in which a young man returns to his village and struggles to find affordable lodging, and it set in motion his 2019 breakthrough feature Bait, where a fisherman clashes with the vacationing Londoners who’ve bought his childhood home and relegated him to the town’s periphery. 

That same force propels Rose of Nevada, in many ways a summation of Jenkin’s preoccupations with the disappearance of Cornwall’s traditional lifestyles and the extent to which local communities can withstand the loss. As the titular fishing boat magically appears at the old harbor, some 30 years after being lost at sea with all hands, Mike recruits a three-man team to ship it back out in hopes it’ll bring new luck to the spectrally empty hamlet. Nick (George MacKay) enlists to provide for his wife and daughter; Liam (Callum Turner) sees the gig as a change to escape his past. They’re joined by skipper Murgey (Francis Magee), a crusty sailor more than twice their age. But no sooner do they return home after the first trip that something feels amiss––the journey has yanked them back in time and the village welcomes them as if they were the original crew. 

This is nothing exactly novel. Even when ostensibly set in the present, Jenkin’s works all seem to exist in some undetermined past, and in Rose of Nevada, a few objects adorning Nick’s room––an old poster, a tape player, some cassettes––suggests a bygone era long before the boat catapults him back to the early 1990s. But nothing heightens that anachronism more than the film’s look. Jenkin shot Rose of Nevada on film with the same camera he used for Bait and its follow-up, Enys Men: a clockwork Bolex H16 with a maximum runtime of 28 seconds per take. Though a lot more polished than they were in the monochrome, hand-processed Bronco’s House and Bait, the images are similarly rife with scratches and red-light leak flashes. To call those aberrations, however, would be grossly misleading; these irregularities define Jenkin’s aesthetic, the main reason why his films feel so mysteriously alive. 

While most other filmmakers would have turned the choice to shoot on celluloid into an exercise in cinematic nostalgia, there is nothing stuffy about Jenkin’s approach. I am not sure I can translate the entrancing feeling I experienced as the Rose of Nevada kept crossing the ocean, borne back dreamily into the past, or the film’s aural and visual alchemy––how the deafening clanging of the ship’s cranes melded with the weathered images of the men at sea and people waiting for them at home. But I know my response has plenty to do with the peculiar tactility those frames exuded, the sense that what I was watching was no mere relic but a work that testified to the medium’s materiality and vitality. Seen from the vantage point of our hyper-digital 2020s, Jenkin isn’t just a stark outlier from the current media regime. He’s also among the very few working directors whose cinema feels both familiar and viscerally new.

Rose of Nevada premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.

Note: This review was originally published as part of our 2025 TIFF coverage. The film opens on June 19.

You can’t accuse John Early of not committing. Through the majority of his acting career, the comedian has become a reliable avatar for a palpable, toxic, hilarious narcissism, playing characters oblivious to the world outside the bubbles they’ve so thoroughly cultivated. That was particularly evident over four seasons of Search Party, as well as last year’s Stress Positions, a Sundance favorite that exposed the absurdity of living in quarantine over a masked summer. As an agoraphobic tenant in a Brooklyn brownstone, Early took the situation’s disaster and approached it through his very specific kind of self-assured, righteous mania to such an extent that his freak-outs are still rattling around in my brain. 

That Maddie’s Secret, his directorial debut, is Early’s biggest commitment to date isn’t just because he goes full drag as the titular heroine. But let’s start there. When he bursts onto the screen jogging around Los Angeles, Early gives the audience a few minutes to wrap their head around his transformation into a blonde aspiring chef. While this isn’t a cheap, shock-worthy gag, he knows he has to recontextualize the reality and humor of his new gender, providing an adjustment period to get on Maddie’s wavelength and see the character as more than one big cosplay. In a satire like this, the laughs start heavy, but Early’s best trick is ending this journey in an earnest, emotionally authentic place. He’s not playing a punchline so much as a humorous, painful truth. 

In recent interviews, Early has stated he’d always wanted to play an ingénue. That manifests in Maddie, a foodie working as a dishwasher at “Gourmaybe,” a culinary media company and test kitchen that produces a variety of digital cooking shows and develops up-and-coming chefs. She aspires to get to the next level with her encouraging colleague and friend Dina (longtime collaborator and reliably hilarious Kate Berlant), but struggles to get the attention of her blowhard boss, a Connor O’Malley type (Connor O’Malley) who is too smitten with another female chef. Early heightens the melodrama of these competitive relationships and simultaneously pokes fun at the kitchen politics, but Maddie can’t seem to break through.

Things change one night when Maddie makes a meal at the insistence of her husband (Eric Rahill), who records her preparing a special recipe, edits the video, and immediately watches it go viral. At first ridiculed for her freelancing, she’s quickly promoted to produce more social content. Thrust into the culinary spotlight, Maddie’s dreams start coming true––she becomes the company’s new star, gets recognized, receives special treatment, and is even courted to become an executive producer on hit prestige food show The Boar, which doesn’t even attempt to conceal its parody of the FX series. The only problem? Maddie’s traumatic history with bulimia comes rushing back, threatening to unravel everything she’s worked to accomplish. 

Early has a natural way with the camera, leaning on close-ups to capture micro expressions and further sud up all the soapiness. In both words and images, Maddie’s Secret is ripped straight from the afterschool-special playbook. Throughout every scene, characters talk to each other with dialogue that’s too precise, eloquent, and enunciated, just a touch too dramatic, sweet, or nasty that telegraphs all of its intentions. There’s also an inherent humor to watching a Lifetime-like movie contend with contemporary culture, and Early has fun mimicking the kind of uninspiring, recipe-trying brain-rot that filters through social media algorithms by couching it in warm light, smiley language, and a daffy husband behind the camera. 

Maybe the most obvious touchstone is Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls. In 2013, Early, Berlant, and Cole Escola recreated the movie’s dance rehearsal scene shot by shot––one of the first times Early committed to the bit and went full drag in order to replicate Elizabeth Berkeley’s profound (and profoundly ludicrous) intensity. The writer-director attempts to re-live that moment halfway through Maddie’s Secret, when Maddie joins Dina’s intense dance class and struggles to maintain the necessary strength and coordination in the midst of her eating disorder. It’s a pitch-perfect rendition in Early’s own image, but it’s Berlant that keeps these kinds of moments on the tracks, straddling the cavernous ravine between legitimate concern and winking histrionics. 

As Maddie descends further into her sickness and eventually attends an inpatient rehab facility, the movie tilts carefully on its axis. It’s no longer committed to full-on parody so much as the genre’s absurd flourishes, building a real drama and introducing a variety of hospital patients (including Vanessa Bayer) to further build out the reality of Maddie’s situation. It’s not an easy play, but Early manages to keep his juggling act intact. At a certain point in his depiction, you stop seeing him as an actor with a wig and spinning clubs, but just a girl who loves food and has an honest dream. This, on its own, is a crowning achievement. 

Maddie’s Secret premiered at TIFF 2025.

Rachel Rose’s directorial debut, The Last Day, is a moody two-hander set on the fourth of July. It stars Alicia Vikander as Julia and Victoria Pedretti as Taylor, two mothers experiencing the same day very differently, and takes its time to unfurl. Rose took inspiration from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, with the movie opening on Vikander’s Julia, an upper-class woman living in the wealthy northern suburbs of New York City, as she plans for her annual party. Rose spends the majority of the film’s time with Julia, though Taylor might be the more compelling character study. This imbalance becomes the sticking point of The Last Day.

Rose’s style boasts moments of significant flourish. She shoots these women in slow motion, specifically as Julia moves through the city dealing with, or avoiding, the grief of her father’s death. It’s contemplative rather than mechanical, giving the audience a moment to breathe, to sit with what we’ve seen thus far and what might be coming. As Julia deals with cakes, catering, and her teenage daughter’s schedule, she intersects with Taylor, who loses her wallet in a frantic state. It’s soon apparent that this is the normal state of Taylor’s life.

A young mother of three, Taylor is experiencing a mixture of intense exhaustion, postpartum depression, and household neglect. She’s unable to rest internally or eternally. Her meds don’t work, either. Rose is unflinching with Taylor, though—the camera will not cut from neither her pain nor darkness. It’s almost unbearable to watch at times; Taylor so dearly needs a moment of respite and comfort from anyone willing to give and willing to care. Her spiral can only go in one direction, and Rose, rightly, forces the audience to sit and watch. 

Pedretti excels in this role of a woman struggling moment to moment. She embodies this level of exhaustion. She finds a level of frazzled sadness, a well of emotion deep within her that is mesmerizing. The movie would do well to spend more time with Taylor, and by extension, with Pedretti. 

Julia’s story is more subtle: someone who’s lost because of loss, someone unable to move forward, drawn back into the past by the people she sees on the 4th. Wagner Moura pops in for a single scene as one of these people—Julia’s ex-lover, Peter. That conversation, as they stroll through Central Park picking through the decisions and repercussions of their relationship, is an exquisite piece of writing by Rose. It’s such an internal conversation, one filled with frustration, regret, and love. And Moura is fantastic in such a limited time. 

Vikander’s turn is much more restrained, managing her emotions through face twitches and slight reactions. This performance has a layered component and Vikander is up to the task. She’s giving one of her best performances of the last decade, a harkening back to the ability on display when given a meaty role. 

The Last Day‘s third act begets faltering. With additional focus on Julia, Rose moves quickly to wrap each woman’s story, and does Taylor (and Pedretti’s performance) a disservice with the speed of her resolution, somewhat lessening the impact of the end of her downward spiral. The film peters out, despite the thumping of its plot, as Rose’s moody piece becomes ham-fisted and overdone. Still, it’s a rewarding debut with two high-level, effective performances. This alone makes The Last Day worthy of anyone’s time.

The Last Day premiered at the 2026 Tribeca Festival.

Labrador: Autopsy of Silence is a meticulously crafted fixation on the nuances of silence and isolation, a documenting of the long, dark rhythms of life in the Arctic and on a cargo ship. Directed by Québécois filmmaker Rodrigue Jean, it’s one of only two Indigenous-themed features screening at Tribeca this year (the other is Elle Sofe Sara’s Árru from Norway). While this subdued thriller is accomplished and effective, it is also worth considering what might have been had the story been directed from a First Nations perspective rather than a Québécois one.

The film acknowledges a form of colonialism and code of silence that demotes its lead to a second-class citizen in the eyes of the law. Alupa is both Indigenous and queer, hiding his love affair with Alex (Alexandre Landry), the ship’s cook. Alex, meanwhile, also carries on an affair with Michelle (Gabrielle Poulin B.), the married first officer, whenever she shows up in his cabin. Alex’s body is also prone to a kind of colonization on long, cold, lonely nights at sea whenever Michelle feels like exerting her power.

When Alex fails to show up to cook breakfast, the crew investigates and finds him dead of a stab wound. HIs lover, Inuk mechanic Alupa (first-time actor Christopher Angatookalook), becomes the lead suspect, setting off a chain of procedures as the crime is investigated by maritime authorities in Basse-Côte-Nord and at the federal level via the RCMP. Every member of the crew is grilled by investigators, including Michelle and Alupa. While the script conceals exactly what happened, Alupa remains silent and maintains his innocence through an evidentiary hearing in a Quebec court where he learns there is enough evidence for him to stand trial. Returning to land to live with his sister, he contemplates his next moves while the deck is stacked against him.

Rather than taking the form of a whodunit, Labrador chooses a far more nuanced path, exploring the relationships of ship life and life on shore. Jean is interested in framing characters like Alupa in long takes. One particular example from above is haunting: Alupa learns his fate in the evidentiary hearing, remaining silent while his eyes scream for help. Christopher Angatookalook is a fascinating performer to watch: a native of Kuujjuarapik who grew up in Montreal and exudes sympathy through his tattooed face and expressive eyes. Ones hopes he is given more opportunities to perform.

A study in location, loneliness, and truth, Jean’s film is replete with negative space to mirror the maritime code of silence that suggests a close-knit family keeping secrets to pass the time and fulfill desires. Inspired by a 2012 event that spawned rumors and superstitions about the vessel, this story becomes a blank slate for Jean, cinematographer Mathieu Laverdière, and sound designer Ilya Ghafouri.

Rich in its restraint and anchored by an unforgettable performance, Labrador: Autopsy of Silence is a moving, captivating picture. We sit in silence with Alupa, a peaceful man navigating multiple identities and pressures from all sides. Christopher Angatookalook’s nuanced, restrained turn makes this injustice all the more heartbreaking.

Labrador: Autopsy of Silence premiered at the 2026 Tribeca Festival.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show can be described in hundreds of ways. Over the last five decades, it’s become more than just a cult classic; it’s a cultural touchstone for people around the country, with midnight screenings popping up without warning while packing theaters. In New York, a Broadway show on Rocky Horror continues to rumble forward, and dozens of shadow casts put on performances throughout the year. It’s an expression of and an experience of queer joy, community, tradition, and fun. 

Allison Berg’s documentary, Time Warp, travels to small-town America to see how they are encountering the famed film. Berg goes to Rock Springs, Wyoming to follow the director, choreographer, operator, and lead actor of a drag-theater company. Kenny Starling, a 25-year-old queer resident of Rock Springs, has decided to put on a show in his hard-nosed community. It’s a documentary that attempts to capture that queer joy, focusing on the limited outlets for self-expression in this town. 

Starling recruits local teenagers, a city councilman, and anyone else who is interested to participate in his production. He welcomes them and hugs them; he creates a family. Berg spends time with nearly each and every one of the residents in the shadow cast, visiting their homes, schools, and workplaces. A common thread starts to materialize: all of them just want a place to be themselves. 

Many of them, specifically the younger cast members, don’t have extensive support systems. At best, their families are unsure; at worst, their families misgender them, push them away, and refuse their way of life. But Berg sets the camera down and talks with each person in Time Warp regardless of their ideology or identity. Her voice can be heard throughout the film, prompting Rock Springs’ residents to share. 

Two moments stick out in particular. Berg finds herself capturing a local city council town hall where residents get up to speak about the Starling Company’s staging of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s a peek into Rock Springs, and many towns like it across America, and how these people deal with conflict within their communities. It’s a look at how the political right weaponizes gender expression and gender ideology to ostracize and disparage the LGBTQIA+ population. It shows the way the country has shifted over the last decade of Trump’s power without ham-handedness or talking heads. 

The second moment comes at a local bingo night, where the cast gives a sneak preview performance of the song “Sweet Transvestite” with Starling leading the way. It represents a possible shift in Rock Springs, a moment of acceptance of the queer artists experiencing joy under the harsh lights of a community center. Berg interviews some of the audience, and there’s a lack of understanding of what’s just happened, or what’s just not happened. There weren’t protestors or counter-programmers. There weren’t shouts or insults from the audience. There was cheering, singling along, and a round of applause. 

Kenny Starling is creating queer space in Rock Springs. The town is slow to change, but over the course of the year that spans this documentary, more and more people begin embracing these performers. Time Warp is a necessary celebration of that very embrace.

Time Warp premiered at the 2026 Tribeca Festival.

Perhaps I’ll need to burn my cinephile card if I suggest that the Criterion Channel’s best addition next month—best addition all year?—is a TV series. But I let out an actual exhale upon reading that they’re adding all 17 episodes of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, which simultaneously boasts ’60s surrealism, spy story, structural experiment, and a Beatles needledrop par excellence. Before somebody (maybe the long-rumored Christopher Nolan) adapts and fails to contain The Prisoner into feature-film form, watch this and become obsessed with it on its own terms (and maybe consult Reddit for the best-possible viewing order).

Onto cinema, as I tend to head. July also includes an 18-film Harry Dean Stanton retrospective spanning Monte Hellman’s Jack Nicholson-scripted Ride in the Whirlwind to John Carroll Lynch’s Lucky, the in-between comprising David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Alex Cox, John Carpenter—Jesus, what a filmography this guy had! Jonathan Demme and Terry Zwigoff are subject of four- and two-title retrospectives, respectively; Joel Potrykus, Khyentse Norbu, Onyeka Igwe, and Mexican actress Ninón Sevilla are also highlighted. For a larger scope, the BlackStar Film Festival is paid due with an extensive series of features and shorts.

New to streaming are the Marc Maron doc Are We Good?; D. A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, and Pat Powell’s three-part The Energy War; Hong Kong pictures People’s Hero and Pom Pom and Hot Hot; and Isao Fujisawa’s Bye Bye Love. For something you can more easily watch with your parents, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventurea nd Curtis Hanson’s Bad Love make appearances, while Nightclubbing: The Birth of Punk Rock in NYC and A Band Called Death offer some musical reprieve.

Criterion Editions feature Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs and Something Wild, Zwigoff’s Ghost World, the Stanton-starring The Last Temptation of Christ and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, plus Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life and Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art.

See the full list of films below and more at the Criterion Channel:

A Moving Image, Shola Amoo, 2016

Are We Good?, Steven Feinartz, 2025

Art School Confidential, Terry Zwigoff, 2006

Aventurera, Alberto Gout, 1950

Bad Influence, Curtis Hanson, 1990

A Band Called Death, Jeff Howlett and Mark Christopher Covino, 2012

Bigger Than Life, Nicholas Ray, 1956

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Stephen Herek, 1989

The Burial of Kojo, Blitz Bazawule, 2018

Buzzard, Joel Potrykus, 2014

Bye Bye Love, Isao Fujisawa, 1974

Carita de dielo, José Díaz Morales, 1947

The Changing Same, Cauleen Smith, 2001

Christine, John Carpenter, 1983

Cool Hand Luke, Stuart Rosenberg, 1967

Desert Fury, Lewis Allen, 1947

The Energy War, D. A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus, and Pat Powell, 1978

Escape from New York, John Carpenter, 1981

Evolution of a Criminal, Darius Clark Monroe, 2014

Farewell, My Lovely, Dick Richards, 1975

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Terry Gilliam, 1998*

Fire Through Dry Grass, Andrés “Jay” Molina and Alexis Neophytides, 2023

Ghost World, Terry Zwigoff, 2001

The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing, Richard Fleischer, 1955

Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction, Sophie Huber, 2012

Hema Hema: Sing Me a Song While I Wait, Khyentse Norbu, 2016

High Art, Lisa Cholodenko, 1998

Home from the Hill, Vincente Minnelli, 1960

A Kiss Before Dying, Gerd Oswald, 1956

Landfall, Cecilia Aldarondo, 2020

The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese, 1988*

Leave Her to Heaven, John M. Stahl, 1945

The Long, Hot Summer, Martin Ritt, 1958

Lucky, John Carroll Lynch, 2017*

Married to the Mob, Jonathan Demme, 1988

The Miracle on George Green, Onyeka Igwe, 2022

the names have changed, including my own and truths have been altered, Onyeka Igwe, 2019

Niagara, Henry Hathaway, 1953

Nightclubbing: The Birth of Punk Rock in NYC, Danny Garcia, 2022

No Down Payment, Martin Ritt, 1957

Penkelemes, Onyeka Igwe, 2025

The People Could Fly, Imani Dennison, 2024

People’s Hero, Derek Yee Tung-sing, 1987

Pig at the Crossing, Khyentse Norbu, 2024

Pom Pom and Hot Hot, Joe Cheung Tung-cho, 1992

Portrait in Black, Michael Gordon, 1960*

The Prisoner, 1967–1968*

Restless City, Andrew Dosunmu, 2011

S the Wolf, Sameh Alaa, 2025

The Second Game, Corneliu Porumboiu, 2014

The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme, 1991

a so-called archive, Onyeka Igwe, 2020

Some Came Running, Vincente Minnelli, 1958

Something Wild, Jonathan Demme, 1986

Specialised Technique, Onyeka Igwe, 2018

Straight Time, Ulu Grosbard, 1978

Take Me in Your Arms, Julio Bracho, 1954

Test Pattern, Shatara Michelle Ford, 2019

Travellers and Magicians, Khyentse Norbu, 2003*

Violent Saturday, Richard Fleischer, 1955

Vulcanizadora, Joel Potrykus, 2024

We Need New Names, Onyeka Igwe, 2015

Where the Lilies Bloom, William A. Graham, 1974

Written on the Wind, Douglas Sirk, 1956*

*Available in the U.S. only

There are some others making films like Mark Jenkin. His Bolex-shot, creaky-sounding cinema isn’t the greatest system shock to those who’ve attended (one might say endured) a festival’s experimental-shorts program. But nobody is making them at Mark Jenkin’s scale, nor equaling his level of ambition for duration or narrative structure; anybody with even a passing interest in movies that look like they’ve been dragged over pavement, dropped in water, and given questionable means to dry out should be grateful that his cinema exists, and moreover that there’s so much of it.

Rose of Nevada compromises none of Jenkin’s textures, but could be said to represent a scaling-up if only for starring George MacKay (of 1917, The Beast, and occasional rumors for tentpole films) and Callum Turner (recent collaborator of George Clooney and Tom Hanks who’s very rumored for a certain British-centric character). It’s especially remarkable, then, how quickly they fit into Jenkin’s rough-hewn world and glom onto an out-of-time narrative (concocted with the director’s partner and frequent onscreen collaborator Mary Woodvine). It evinces an ambition all too rare in actors handsome enough to grace magazine covers—the English in mind, one almost recalls a young Terence Stamp.

Jenkin and I spoke over Zoom about these and other matters.

The Film Stage: No earthly reason for you to remember this, but we did the Q&A when Enys Men opened in New York.

Mark Jenkin: It was the opening night, yeah. I remember it very well. We had the amazing marquee outside.

The Village East. It’s a great marquee for a filmmaker to get a photo of.

Yeah. I think I took several photos on my iPhone and then I took some 35mm stills as well, which I think was my main background picture on Instagram for a long time.

The Q&A was actually right after what we discovered is our shared birthday.

28th of March, yeah.

I was thinking about that. I don’t believe in astrology and I’m not going to force any reading of it onto you, but this film is set in 1993, which I later discovered you’ve said is a very important year for you—you were 17 and shot your first roll of film with your first camera. 1993 is also the year I was born. So it’s all coming together.

Wow. Wow.

I think it’s just a happy coincidence, but I’m happy to have it.

Well, I was at a screening in Wales in Cardiff on the preview tour in April, and a guy I know who’s a musician—I don’t think I’d seen him since the last preview tour of Enys Men—and I chatted with him just before the screening. And then during the film, I kind of popped in a couple of times just to keep an eye on, you know, how it was playing and just judge the energy in the room occasionally. And when I walked in on the scene halfway through—where they go into the supermarket, and it goes to the CCTV security camera footage—I heard this guy go “fuck!” in the audience. It turned out afterwards it was my friend Tad, who was watching it and noticed the timestamp—whatever it is; something-of-August 1993—and that was the day he was born, was the day the security camera came up.

Wow, okay.

And he’s a very quiet bloke, so shouting “Fuck!” in a full movie theater is very out-of-comment, very out-of-character for him. But yeah, maybe that’s it; maybe there are a few of those links in there. I mean, I don’t believe in any of that, but I am kind of obsessed with numbers and dates and time and all that kind of stuff. The reason it’s set in 1993 is because it was always going to be 30 years before the contemporary timeline. So when I started writing it, it was actually during the pandemic and they were going to go back to 1990. By the time I’d done the second draft, it was 2021 and they were going to go back to 1991. By the time I locked the script in 2023, it meant they went back to 1993, and it wasn’t until in a Q&A that I realized 1993 was—I was, like you say, 17—the first time I ever shot a roll of Super 8, where my film career really started. So again: I don’t believe in it, but there’s some beautiful coincidences there that you kind of can’t ignore.

For a movie that is about going back and the fallibility of fixed time as a concept, a lot of it resonated. I’m not bullshitting you when I say that I was not just into it and enveloped by it, but really grateful for it. I said to somebody after seeing it is that it has a texture and personality, a character, that you usually only get from a six-minute short in an experimental program, and that tends to be—to be so blunt—one of the only shorts that I’m actually happy to see.

[Laughs]

So to have a two-hour version of that with these wonderful actors and an enveloping narrative on top of it… well, this is the epitome of more of a comment than a question, but I’m just throwing that out.

Yeah, well, I really appreciate you saying that because I always feel the same when I’m watching short-film programs: it’s quite often something that’s formally interesting that happens, but because it’s a short film… you know, I love short films, but it’s contained within a short film. And quite often they’re the types of short films where you think, “Well, this couldn’t be a feature film, and it also clearly isn’t a short film that’s being made in a career as a stepping stone to doing a feature film.” I think that I ended up doing short films on film at a time where I was trying to get other feature films into development that were done in a more conventional way, and the fact that I was making the short films was a result of not getting these feature films into development.

But then I started getting this amazing response to the short films because of the texture and the atmosphere that was within them. But all the time thinking, “Well, that’s great, but I’m still not getting anywhere with these feature films.” And then I had that lightbulb moment when I went, “Well, what if I did a feature film like I do my short films?” Because is it the fact they’re short films that they’re popular? Or is it the formal approach to those short films that are popular? Because if it’s the latter, then this could be really interesting for doing a feature film in this way. And I haven’t really looked back since then.

There’s the Abbas Kiarostami quote about appreciating movies that let him fall asleep. Your films haven’t made me fall asleep, but I’m truly lulled into a semi-conscious, almost meditative state. I wonder how much you—the person who is putting actual, hard physical labor into making these movies—likes the idea of that response. It may sound like I’m calling your movies “boring,” but it’s the opposite: during a boring movie, I’m tapping my feet and scratching myself, like, “Please let this end.”

Yeah, yeah. I understand. Because I think sleep is the ultimate resigning yourself to it, and allowing yourself to sort of be embraced by it, which I think, you know, that’s a positive thing. I just came back from Paris because Bait has finally come out in France seven years later. I hadn’t watched it since New Directors—so, like, March 2019, April 2019’s the last time I’d seen the film. That was incredible, because I never thought I’d be able to watch my films like an audience member can watch my films. But with that gap in time, there were bits of it that I’d forgotten, and I’d forgotten where the story… goes. You know? I think it was the closest to feeling that I’d just given myself into this film and I thought, “I’m not sure where this is going.”

Fabrice from the French distributor, before the screening, I said, “Are you going to come and watch it?” because he’d only watched it a couple of days before. He said, “Yeah, I’m going to watch it because I’m quite tired, and I’m going to just let it wash over me, and if I go to sleep, I go to sleep.” And he had the confidence to say that to me, knowing that I wouldn’t be offended because he kind of knows that it is that kind of positive thing.

I mean, I can speak about that in regard to other films, I suppose. I also did a double bill of Bait and The Lighthouse in Paris, and I told the audience when I did the introduction, I said, “The first time I saw The Lighthouse, I traveled back from France to the UK to see it at the London Film Festival,” because I was told I could get a ticket. So I got an overnight boat across the channel, and then I had to get the train up to London and kind of ran across London, got to the theater just as it was starting. I had a sea bag with me and I put it down between my legs, sat down in my seat in the middle of a theater, and it started and I fell asleep. And then I woke up, and then I didn’t know where… some bits I didn’t know whether I was dreaming it, some, you know, and sometimes the dreams were more disturbing than the film and vice-versa. And I kind of felt bad about that, and then I went to Belgium the next day for a festival, and it was showing there, and I made sure I saw it properly. And I said to the audience in Paris, “I think the best way to see it was the first way I saw it. I’ll never have that kind of immersive experience again.”

Now, to say that to Rob Eggers—you know, “Oh, I fell asleep during your film and it was amazing” [Laughs]—is a difficult thing to say. As you can see, I haven’t got a straight answer for your question. But I do think if the outside world disappears when you’re watching a film, I think that’s kind of incredible if you can stop thinking about things like, you know, what you did earlier or what you’ve got to do later or who you’ve got to ring or whatever—or even little things like wondering how much of the film is left. Which is easier to do if the structure is more unconventional.

Sometimes you can watch a very conventional film and you might not be enjoying it and you go, “Oh, God, that’s the end of the first act, isn’t it?” because it’s so on-the-nose and you go “fuck,” and then it feels like two weeks later and you’re going, “Oh, Jesus, that’s the midpoint.” And it’s so formally structured that you know exactly where you are. Something that’s more free-flowing than that and a bit more abstract, I think you’re kind of forced to give into it, and the idea of the film ever ending might disappear. So yeah, I’m not… I think if I read on Letterboxd, “Oh, I fell asleep after two minutes because the film was so boring,” that’s very different to what you were saying.

I think that there’s an easy, maybe not-so-vivid, description of this film as “dreamlike.” If you wanted to dig deeper, you might say it comes from the Bolex. I’m just so enchanted with what effect the Bolex conveys. And I know that the camera has a maximum take limit of about 27 seconds, right?

Yeah, yeah.

You’re working with these two actors who are wonderful, but have also been on some very big productions. In the case of George, his breakout role was 1917, which is all about the takes being very long, right? What were some of their reactions to the limited takes? How do you think it affected them as actors in that window of time that they could actually perform?

Well, I think the truth is: George doing 1917 and George doing Rose of Nevada, I think the experience is probably more similar on those two films, even though they’re extremes, than on other films. Because the formal element is so key. It’s almost like the starting point: this is what we’re doing; this is the time; this is how you work; these are the constraints; they are unbreakable constraints and the creativity comes within those brackets, really. For 1917, it was: the camera’s going to run for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever it was. We’re going to wait—we might wait days—for the consistent cloud cover that we need. And then with Rose of Nevada, it was like, “Right, the camera’s going to run for a maximum of 27 seconds.” Most shots in a conventional film are going to get nowhere near 27 seconds, so it’s not really a massive issue until you get to a dialogue scene. And my films don’t tend to have huge dialogue scenes of dialogue flying backwards and forwards, but in the instances where it does, that’s when it becomes a real formal limitation on the way that the actors work.

That was the thing I was most wary of with George and Callum: to say, “Look, when we run a dialogue scene”—I only shoot one camera unless it’s the stunt where I might run more than one camera—but I’ll say, “George, right, there’s going to be a close-up on you. We’re going to run this three pages of dialogue. We’ll run it as a scene and we’ll rehearse it as a scene; we’ll run it through. I’ll look at you through the viewfinder during the rehearsal and we’ll run it from start to finish. When we actually shoot it, it’ll be in 27-second blocks. So we’ll run it. I’ll call action on the moment I’m running the camera, because I don’t record any sync sound either, so we don’t need to run it for a clapperboard and pre-roll or anything like that.” So it was like, “I press the shutter on action. So on action, you go, camera’ll be rolling straight away, and we’ll run until it just runs out and you’ll hear it stop. At that point, we’ll go again, you jump back a line, and then we’ll go again.”

And we’ll repeat that till we’ve got the scene. Then we’ll do it again because I want two takes. So I won’t do two takes of the first 27 seconds of the scene, then two takes. But also what I might do is—because I’m editing in my head as I go along—I might go, “Right, that first 27 seconds will be on a wide, the second 27 seconds will be on a mid, the next 27 seconds will be on a close-up, and then maybe an extreme close-up for the very last line that we capture.” Then we reset and we do that again, you know, so I have to reset each shot each time. And that’s to help them. I mean, it sounds nuts to say that I’m helping the actors in any way [Laughs] but rather than just doing the first half twice—you know, the first bit twice and then resetting and do the second bit twice, where they’ve got no real flow—I do try and give them as much flow as I can.

Plus they get a second go at it to nuance it, you know, to tweak it, to think about it. And again: that’s bracketed. There’s only a certain amount you can change the performance within the re-voicing or the voicing. But also, I know that if I want them to change the way they’re going to deliver a line that will be more of a change than the shot can handle, when I’m editing, I might think, “Actually, that line would sound better if they’re laughing as they’re saying it. That won’t work with a close-up of them.” I’ll have the pile of a bin full of cutaways of inanimate objects or other spurious action that I’m filming all the time to cut away to cover; then they can voiceover a non-sync shot.

But the joy of working with those two was that they were both up for whatever, you know? They both knew my films. They weren’t wandering in and on day one, you know, they see me walk out with a clockwork camera and no sound department, and they go, “What the fuck is this?” They go call their agent. They were both keen to work on something different. Because they’re “proper,” as we say here—they’re in it for the right reasons. First off, they’re artists; they’re actors. Callum’s a total cineaste. He’s seen everything. If he hasn’t seen it—if you mention something he hasn’t seen—by the time you see him next time, he’s watched it and he knows more about it than you know about it. And George is similar. Looking at George’s filmography, I just look at that filmography and go, “Well, one of my films isn’t going to stand out on that filmography because, you know, everything he’s done has been a challenge.” He could have gone a much more mainstream, movie-star route—certainly off the back of 1917—but he made choices based on his gut instinct rather than his head, which is the same way that I cast them.

When I met those guys, I didn’t meet anybody else; I just met those two. I met George first because I was going to cast him in the role that Callum ended up playing, because I thought George was a bit old; I’d always imagined the character of Nick to be a bit younger. But when I met George, I thought, “No, he’s Nick. He’s the lead. He’s the rabbit caught in the headlights here.” And then I met Callum and I just knew—my gut said—“Go for both of them.” Didn’t think about it too much. Just thought, “Right, yeah, I get on with them both, they both knew my work.” They both seemed to be going into it with their eyes wide open. They’ve sort of talked publicly about how challenging they found it, but in very much a positive way. I think separately they’ve both said that when they came down to Cornwall, they sort of felt like new boyfriends at the wedding who are coming along as sort of meeting [Laughs] everybody who already sort of knew each other. So I think that, you know, from top to bottom, everything was new for them.

You could come make a film in Cornwall that’s being made by a production company from outside of Cornwall who’s coming into Cornwall and you wouldn’t know anybody but them; nobody else would know anybody else. Like half my crew are related to me, and most of the others are really close friends and collaborators. But I think, again, that was part of attraction for them: “What’s this guy doing down in Cornwall? They seem to be making films down there away from everyone and the last two have kind of been quite critically acclaimed and successful at the box office in, you know, the context of the size of the film.” So they were very keen to kind of get involved.

They definitely show their worth in the film with their physical presences, with these amazingly expressive faces—or sometimes the lack of expression. But you also worked with them a second time recording the sound, dialogue, breathing, and grunts. Did you find that when you get into that post stage for this very important element, your working relationship with them changed, or a sort of approach to the material—a philosophy about the material—changed when introducing sound?

Yeah, I think I get closer to knowing what the film’s about during the edit. So by the time they get in, I’m much clearer about what we’re doing. And also the way that I work with the sound is much kind of calmer, more linear, more controlled, and paradoxically much more experimental, because I’ve got control. You know, the shoot in a lot of instances is, “Right, we’re just going to… it’s day one. Here we go. See you at the wrap party. Everybody just hold on tight—this is going to be fucking crazy.” When you get into the sound, for the first instances, it’s just me. I tend to voice most of the characters myself when I start editing so I can start cutting stuff together and getting rhythm within scenes. I’m also adding all the atmoses—I do quite a lot of the rough foley in my studio while I’m editing—and I also work on the score. Then we switch to another studio of my supervising sound editor, Ian Wilson, which is in the next town, and that’s when… I carry on working myself in my studio, but we kind of work in parallel, because when the actors come down, they come and work with him in his studio.

So I think we wrapped in towards the end of August. I had an edit by the end of September—so maybe like four weeks to put a rough working edit together—then George came down and did his dialogue. And it was good. It was just by luck that George was the person who came down first, because we worked around people’s schedules, because obviously a lot of people went off and did other jobs. George had a break in his schedule, so he said, “I’ll come down.” He just did a day-and-a-half voicing it. He voiced all of his stuff, and it’s his story, really. But he’s not the person with the most dialogue in the film. So we recorded all of his stuff, and that kind of sets the tone for the film.

When I did Bait with Edward Rowe, I got all of Ed’s dialogue in before I did anybody else’s because I wanted his tone; I wanted his voice to set the tone of the film. Just through luck, George came down first and he set that tone. And then the others came in one by one. In some ways, we worked longer with the other actors than we did with George. And then Callum was the one who we didn’t have; we didn’t have Callum for a long, long time. He was busy: he was on a movie, and then he was on a TV series and had a short break around Christmas, and he came down just before Christmas for a day and did his dialogue.

And this mad thing happened. It was basically finished: everybody’s voices were in; all of the actors’ voices were in; most of the atmoses and the foley, at least the rough foley, had been done; most of my score was in the film. The only voice it was missing was Callum’s, and I voiced Callum’s lines. So I voiced them and I pitch-shifted them down a little bit so that it didn’t sound like me anymore, but also Callum’s got a much lower voice than me, so it kind of fit it. And I thought, “Well, that’s the film finished.” It’s not finished because my voice is never going to go out on the final film, but I thought, “Somebody could watch that film today, and then Callum will come down, do his voicing, and they’ll watch the film, and you wouldn’t really be able to tell the difference between the two.” Because everything else was done. Callum came in and he was in for a day, day-and-a-half, and he did his dialogue, and then we watched the film back, and it was a totally different film. Just by dropping his voice in changed everything. It changed George’s performance. It changed the pace of the film. It was, like, insane.

And I’ve got no idea how that works. I don’t know why that would happen, you know? That’s that magic of film: you think you’re 99% done and you think you’ve got 1% left to do, and when you do that 1%, you realize, “No, we were nowhere near 90% done. That last bit, the film was not working at all, and then 1%, and it totally works. That’s just that magic of film that I don’t understand, and I’m glad I don’t understand: you bring all of these disparate things together and it creates one whole. In the same way that sometimes you can have the best script and the best director and the best cast and the best composer, and you go make the film and you watch it and it’s utter shit. And it’s like… why?! There’s no explanation what happened. It just doesn’t gel at that point and fuse into one thing.

I think that just that one bit of Callum coming in… and he didn’t do anything that he didn’t do on the shoot. It wasn’t like he came in with an idea and gone, “Oh, I’ve got this thought that’s going to change the film.” He came in and did what he had to do, but it was at that point everything that was sort of circling around each other just went [Claps] and then it was like: that was it.

I like what you’re saying about these combining into a single piece. Part of what’s fun about watching all of your movies is that I feel like I’m getting these complete experiences, but I can also tap into a very particular element and have a whole experience with just that. All of your movies have really amazing soundscapes, but I found myself thinking about it more in Rose of Nevada for some reason. Maybe it’s because of the time-travel conceit, which is reality-bending, but I was asking myself how much the soundscape that you’ve constructed—the seagulls, waves, ships hitting against the port—is going for strict realism and naturalism and an evocation of the natural world. Or is there something outside of those boundaries happening with it?

Yeah, I like abstraction—sonic abstraction—in cinema, but I think it only works if it’s really in a bed of reality. I mean, if it was all abstract, then the abstract would become reality and you would stop noticing it. Everything to do with film is rhythm. Film is just rhythm. And I’m stealing that from Kent Jones when he was introducing Late Fame at the New York Film Festival: in the Q&A he said, “Film is about rhythm,” and I went, “Oh, yeah. I’m going to have that. That’s exactly right.” And it is that thing: you lull an audience, or the audience gives into the form of the film.

So for example: if I describe to people, “This is a 16mm, post-synced, Academy-ratio film shot on a clockwork Bolex,” they might go, “That sounds great.” A lot of people would go, “That sounds weird. I don’t want to watch that.” But, like, by two minutes in it’s not weird anymore, because in the context of the film, it’s 100% normal. And that’s why I then do things with the visual form to upset that. Most of the time it’s quite straightforward, but there’s moments in the film where, you know, there might be an upside-down image—something as simple as that—or an image playing backwards or something.

There’s a shot of George in the film where he turns and he kind of glances at the camera and blinks. It’s after the storm sequence, and I love that shot because there’s something really weird about it, or otherworldly, or unrealistic and abstract and creepy. But I don’t think anybody would really know what it was because it was taken from some rushes where George is getting ready to do a take and he’s looking down the barrel—because I’m focusing the lens—and I obviously say, “Okay, action,” and he’s looking down the lens, he blinks, and he looks away. And I think it was shot at high-frame-rate, so it’s slow-motion as well, so if I play that backwards, suddenly he turns around and looks at the lens and blinks. And a backwards blink is a very weird thing, because it doesn’t look natural but it doesn’t look unnatural.

I think there’s very few times you can do something with an image where an audience can go, “Oh, I can’t make sense of that.” Because I’m looking at you now. If there was something in the background that would kind of creep me out here, I could make sense of it. Because it’s there and I can look at it, and the instant might be, “Oh, what’s that?” and then I can look at it and go, “Ah, right, okay.” Doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be creepy anymore or anything, but I can kind of recognize it and I can deconstruct it and I can understand why it might be freaking me out or why it isn’t normal. With the audio, with the sound, you can do that in a way that you never work out why it’s weird or abstract, because you never recognize it—I mean, literally never see it—and you don’t go, “Hold on, what’s that sound?”

So like in Enys Men, the big thing that I did in that film was that inside the cottage, there were always clocks—there was always a clock running—but the clock never ran the same way twice. You know, sometimes it was slightly fast, sometimes it was slightly slow, sometimes it was running backwards, sometimes it would sort of stop at different times. But you would never watch that film going, “Oh, hold on…” You’d get a sense that something wasn’t quite right on an unconscious, subconscious level, but you’d never be able to go, “Oh, I know why I’m feeling a little bit uneasy: it’s because that clock’s running 10% slower than the last time I was watching this scene.” So I love that idea of being able to play with the audience by manipulating the sound. And sometimes it will be really obvious things—you know, like taking all the sound out except for an effect.

Like in Rose of Nevada, a moment where the boat owner takes the photo—you know, the hero photo in the film as the boat comes in and the boat kind of knocks against the quayside. It’s all natural sound up until that point. As it knocks against the quayside, that’s the cue for all sound to fall away. So you go into silence, but then you hear him click the shutter of this cheap plastic camera which suddenly goes off like a bomb because it’s, like, in this silent background. I just love the endless ways that you can play with the sound. And again: it’s the best time to do that sort of experimenting because you do it largely on your own. I largely do it in the studio on my own so I can take risks, and I’m not afraid of them failing because if they fail, I’ll never show them to anybody. But also: they’re so cheap. You’re not on set with a hundred people that you’re feeding and housing, and racing against daylight or the tide. I’m just in my studio. It’s not weather-dependent. There’s always a cup of tea nearby. There’s always an armchair that I can sit in and put my feet up if I’m want a rest. So it’s the perfect playground for experimenting.

That’s why I love the workflow of having no location sound: when I go into the studio, into that environment of experimentation, I’ve just got a blank page. I don’t walk in on day one and go, “That sound we recorded there is a bit knackered and we’ve got to amend it.” I just go, “Right, well, one: I’ve got to start working because we’ve got nothing. “So it’s not a sort of, “Right, what shall I do?” It’s like, “Right, you just got to start working.” But also: everything you put into the film is there through choice. There’s no accidents. The accidents come through the experimentation, but there’s no accidental sound in there to start with.

My creative mindset is like: experiment straight away. Because, also, making realistic sound—creating believable, realistic soundscapes—is quite hard to do. So sometimes I’ll look at it and go, “I’m not going to be able to create that sound realistically, so instead of falling short on realism, why don’t I lean into surrealism or abstraction straight away?” But it does need to be surrounded by elements of realism for that still to be sort of shocking or effective or communicative.

One might say there’s no accidents in experimentation—or even if there are, it’s on a completely different matrix than accidents in planning. I mean, maybe. I know George had asked you to interview him in-character as Nick. What did you, having invented this person and directing this actor, find yourself asking Nick, the Cornish fisherman who’s been thrown out of time? What did you want to know about him?

Nothing from his point of view once he’d gone back in time. It was the backstory; it was setting up what his motivation was before he goes back in time. So kind of who he was. I’ve got this theory that I probably talked about when we chatted about Enys Men: every character that I write in a script is just me. It can’t help but be me. Even if I’m writing a 100-year-old American woman. I’ve never met a 100-year-old American woman, but if I wrote her in a script, it would just be me; it’d be that version of that character that I can write. So the important bit, the sort of alchemy, is when the actor comes and gets involved and takes on that character. Because I need them to fill that character out so that not everybody in the film is just a version of me and I need as much input from them as possible. In order to get the input from them, I’ll put very little on the page in terms of who the character is.

So I’ve got two rules: I never mention anything about backstory in the script or in the character breakdowns—unless it comes up in dialogue or unless it’s signified in some sort of action within the film—and I’ll never put any adjectives or adverbs within the script so nobody will be given any kind of motivation for action within the script, or ascribed any motivations or emotions or feelings. So… what I’d like to do—and only if the actors want to do it—I do it with all the actors, really, and certainly if I ever audition actors, which I tend not to, I would give them a rough outline of a character and then I’d interview them in character. And with George, it was more about: who are you? You know: how long have you lived in the village? How did you meet your wife?

We created a whole backstory around George’s character. I can’t quite remember what it was, but probably that him and his wife were childhood sweethearts—they met when they were at primary school, their parents knew each other before they were even born—and all this kind of stuff. But what it was great to develop with George was the idea that he was a character like a lot of Cornish men who won’t say a lot; they won’t offer an opinion on something. And it’s become more and more obvious to me now, those characters, because everybody’s expected to have an opinion. Everybody thinks they should offer an opinion on everything that’s happened, however ill-informed or totally uninformed it is. But the Cornish male archetype is somebody who will just watch: he’ll just sit back and he’ll observe and he won’t say anything. He’ll take it all in. So he’s listening the whole time and he’s very rarely saying anything.

And that came from what I’d call hot-seating with a character. It’s like: sit in the hot seat and we’re going to chat. George loves doing it and I love doing it. And there’s just one rule: there’s no wrong answers—nothing the actor is going to say is going to end up in the film—and if I feel they’re going down a wrong route with the character and I feel that it might inform something they do in the film, I might say afterwards, “George, now, when you said that you did this, this, and this.” [Laughs] If he had admitted to, like, a murder or something in the hot seat, I’d say, “Scratch that one from the record because I don’t want your performance to be sort of underscored by the fact you’re an undiscovered serial killer.” But in that moment, you can be anything; you can do anything. It’s always fun. It’s so childlike. It is dress-up and make-believe in its purest form. When you get to the film you have to stick to the script, so you’re back to the constraints, but when you’re doing a hot-seating like that, you can really expand and play and find out where that character is.

I’m writing something at the moment, and the temptation for me at the moment is to get an actor and hot-seat the actor based on this character that I’m writing. I think there’s a time when maybe I’ll do that, and normally it’s when we’re actually shooting the film. But if I’m stuck while I’m writing it, I think there’ll be a moment where I do go, “Right, I’m going to hand over part of the control to somebody else for a minute.” It could well be my partner Mary, who is… it’s quite handy that I live with an experienced actor. So I might say, “Right, here’s a rough outline of who this character is. I’m just going to ask you a couple of questions about your life and then that might feed into that character in the script.”

This is maybe a superficial comment, but: she’s awesome. Such a great screen presence, but knowing that you guys concocted the story together… I love her as an actor, and then my admiration just kind of went up knowing that. But you don’t need me to tell you that your wife is awesome.

[Laughs] No, no, but she needs me to tell her that later on that you said it. She’s in London working at the moment, but when I speak to her I’ll say, you know… [Laughs]

Please stress that I do mean it.

Yeah. I will.

Rose of Nevada enters a limited release on Friday, June 19.