- How I Spent Another Summer Vacation At The Drive-In (August 17, 2026)
My wife, Kerry, and I embarked on another tour of drive-in theaters across the States, and while this was a shorter drive than the last time (only four theaters visited, as opposed to six on the last one), they all offered something that made me think of the nostalgia factor of a drive-in (where it exists and where it does not) as well as how these facilities and their owners have adapted to modern audiences and the drastic steps they have taken to keep these landmarks open.
I often see articles written in local papers about their local drive-ins and how they transport people “back in time.” I get what they mean, but my only problem with this premise is that drive-ins never went away. Many have survived through the decades, and younger generations of drive-in owners keep stepping in to save them when it looks like they might close down. Over the last two decades, the owners (the ones who could afford it anyway) have adopted digital projection and now rely on social media videos to advertise and get the word out about last-minute closings due to weather. You can even order your tickets online and (sometimes) your food on an app.
Of course, modern-day drive-ins still love to show the old “Let’s All Go To the Lobby” bumper between shows, as well as the 10-minute Intermission reel you see in “Grease,” but there is one thing they all still do that multiplexes will not do anymore: double features. This is the real nostalgia of it all. Two movies for the price of one is something you can pretty much only get at a drive-in these days.
The Starlite Drive-In in Butler, PA. (Photo: Collin Souter)
Our first stop was the Starlite Drive-In in Butler, PA, which had three screens. One look at their condition and the surroundings as a whole, and you can see the story of how this drive-in tried to adapt and survive by adding more viewing options. Screen 1 is the main big screen (showing “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” and “Motor City”). Screen 2 stands further back (showing “Moana” and “Toy Story 5”). Screen 3 (showing “The Odyssey” only) also stands further back, to the left of Screen 2. Looking at the structure of these latter two screens, you can see they might have been late additions to help bring in more people. Each is built on five tree logs, with a screen made up of over a dozen white panels where you can plainly see the cracks. It’s downright charming.
We parked at screen 2, which also happens to be the smallest drive-in screen I have ever encountered. It felt intimate, like being in someone’s backyard. I have heard drive-in owners shun the idea of multi-screen drive-ins, and I never understood why, until now. At Starlite, all three screens face the same direction. From our vantage point, we could see “Moana” and “Toy Story 5” just fine on Screen 2, but we could also plainly see the bottom half of Screen 1 in the distance. While cowgirl Jessie has her emotional moment of realization under the tire swing in “Toy Story 5,” we could also watch a woman getting brutally attacked in “Motor City.”
Then there is the problem of noise bleed. While trying to get lost in Christopher Nolan’s sprawling epic, you also have to endure having to hear “How Far I’ll Go” blasting a short distance away, which could actually be funny if it lands during a scene of Odysseus on a boat sailing the high seas. Surprisingly, this is the first time I have ever encountered this problem at a multi-screen drive-in. Most people don’t sit in their cars anymore. They sit outside with their radios or their SUVs blasting the soundtracks. We learned that there is definitely a right way and a wrong way to do the multi-screen set-up. They did, however, have a great concession stand and a Ms. Pac-Man.
Shankweiler’s Drive-In Theater in Orefield, PA. (Photo: Collin Souter)
The oldest drive-in in America is Shankweiler’s Drive-In Theater in Orefield, PA. It was the second drive-in ever built (the first was in Pennsauken, NJ in 1933), and has been going strong since 1934. Well, mostly strong. The theater was dangerously close to shutting down until 2022, when it was saved by local drive-in enthusiasts, Lauren McChesney and Matt McClanahan, a married couple who have been running it with love and care ever since.
They have partnered with local food vendors to spice up their concession menu and, on this particular night (when we watched “Spider-Man” and “Hokum”), set up a separate table to support a local charity. Throughout the evening, I kept thinking about this place as a kind of sacred ground, that a film like “It Happened One Night” might have played here in its very first run, and all the different kinds of cars that have passed through these grounds over the last 92 years.
Shankweiler’s is beautiful. Its grounds are a combination of grass and gravel, with some lovely greenery surrounding the area. The opening announcements are often on-the-fly, personable and full of good humor. The staff is extremely helpful in making sure no one’s views of the screen are obstructed by people putting their hatchbacks up. Their concession stand is quite small, leaving no room for a Ms. Pac-Man, but the menu remains plentiful.
And here’s something that can only happen in an outdoor setting (for better or worse). During “Hokum,” our second feature, a fog rolled in and almost engulfed the place. It cast a beautiful light shaft from the projector during intermission and made “Hokum” look like a horror film made in the ’70s (totally appropriate for a gothic haunted-hotel tale set in Ireland). Later on, the fog gave the film a 3-D effect when the main character (Adam Scott) had to walk around in pitch-black darkness with a flashlight. Those unintended light shafts made it more immersive.
The Mahoning Drive-In Theater in Lehighton, PA. (Photo: Collin Souter)
Now, speaking of immersive experiences, I can write a whole twenty-paragraph essay on the legendary Mahoning Drive-In Theater (not far from Shankweilers, in Lehighton, PA), our third stop and the catalyst for this trip. We’ve wanted to visit this place since we first heard of it several years ago. If you want to talk about drive-ins being nostalgic, nothing beats the Mahoning, which still shows films in 35mm. They only show digital when they have to. Every night is a new night. Sometimes you get a thematically linked double feature; sometimes you get a single. Sometimes, you get a fully-loaded fan event, which we had in store for us on Saturday, August 8th: The Guzzoline Gathering, a celebration of George Miller’s triumphant “Mad Max” films, in this case, a double bill of “The Road Warrior” and “Mad Max: Fury Road.” What true cinephile can resist?
First, the drive-in itself. Where to start? Everywhere you look, something makes you want to grab your phone and take a picture. Their mailbox near the entrance looks like Johnny 5 from “Short Circuit.” They have “Willy Wonka” items everywhere, perhaps leftover from their opening night in the 2016 season, their most pivotal year for this facility, as outlined in the feature-length documentary “At The Drive-In”. Their concession area showcases a large library of VHS tapes and DVDs to peruse. You can also go record shopping as you sift through their collection of vintage albums, or you can take a look at old event posters for sale. They have specialty menu items tied to the films being shown. For this evening, they had a special stew and an ice cream float. Plus, toys and trinkets everywhere, plus a separate room for Mahoning merch.
Outside on the walls of the concession stand and projection booth is a mural dedicated to the former owner, Jeffrey D. Mattox, who passed away in 2024. As detailed in the doc, Mattox faced a challenge in 2016 when he had to decide between raising money for a digital projector or sticking with 35mm and only showing old movies. Two film enthusiasts, Virgil Cardamone and Matt McClanahan (yes, the current co-owner of Shankweiler’s), convinced him to try the latter approach: keep the 35mm projector and let them program the double features themselves. This formula worked, and the Mahoning has been making a name for itself as one of the best venues to host fan events in the country, while also keeping analog film presentation alive and well. Take one look at their calendar of events, and you’ll find something you are dying to see on the big screen in 35mm. Oh, how I envy anyone who can afford to be a regular here.
Before the films and during intermission, they have some of the usual (and unusual) drive-in fanfare, but of course, being in 35mm, you get the honest and true effect of a real old-fashioned drive-in movie experience you cannot get anywhere else. You can also enjoy the teaser trailer for “Back to the Future,” “The Terminator,” and a hilariously faded trailer for Disney’s “The Shaggy D.A.” Many of the Mahoning regulars shout out callbacks during the drive-in ads, giving it a nice “Rocky Horror”-like atmosphere. The projectionist, Robert, kindly let me add a little something to the proceedings, a 35mm trailer for the Kevin Costner “Mad Max”-On-Water epic, “Waterworld,” a trailer that had never been unsealed and played before. I have had this fairly useless item in my collection for over thirty years, and it finally got to spin away on a reel for an audience to enjoy (“a virgin print,” he told everyone).
The “Guzzoline Gathering” at Lehighton’s Mahoning Drive-In Theater. (Photo: Collin Souter)
Then, the event itself. I got to meet the organizer, Faye Dorsey, and her husband, Tank, who used to be a Lord Humungous cosplayer (the villain in “The Road Warrior”), and who has a fine collection of “Mad Max” costume and prop replicas, including a dusty motorbike, which was driven around the lot by a pair of impressive “Road Warrior” cosplayers, Scott Frost and Deirdre VonDoom. Tank also showed off his screen-used bits of debris he found in Australia when scouting the area with a metal detector where they filmed the climactic chase in “The Road Warrior,” a next-level commitment to fandom you can expect when you go to an event such as this. We also saw multi-colored Interceptors (Mad Max’s car) on the lot, as well as an assortment of other cosplayers representing both films. My phone eventually heated up as I constantly took pictures and video of everything happening around me. I had no time to play a round of Ms. Pac-Man.
“You know what you get here that you don’t get at other drive-ins?” Faye said to me. “A real community. People walk around and talk to each other, meet each other, and form friendships. You don’t get this at other drive-ins. People mostly stay near their cars and keep to themselves. Not here. Every night, it’s like this.” And the films themselves looked magnificent. You can also camp out for the night if you pay a little extra, as long as you vacate at dawn. Sometimes, they run more drive-in shenanigans on the screen into the wee hours, but not this night. I cannot wait to go back. I have finally seen and experienced another gold standard of drive-in theaters (another being the Skyline Drive-In in Shelbyville, IN; I know there are more).
Aut-O-Rama Drive-In in North Ridgeville, OH. (Photo: Collin Souter)
Finally, on the way home, we stopped at the Aut-O-Rama Drive-In in North Ridgeville, OH (home of the late, great Martin Mull). Despite its rough exterior, this two-screen establishment is very well-run, and with the nicest, cleanest bathrooms I’ve ever seen at any drive-in. The colorful concession stand has plenty to offer, including spicy fried pickles, gigantic ice-cream-and-cookie sandwiches, and a nice assortment of dips and sauces you can add to your burger, brat, or corndog. They also have an arcade area where I finally indulged in a game of Ms. Pac-Man. This place has a more modern feel than a nostalgic one. They do play some of the usual old-school drive-in bumpers between shows, but showcase few (if any) old movie posters or pictures of the Aut-O-Rama from yesteryear. You walk into the concession stand, and you feel like you’re at a multiplex.
Things to know before attending: Wear good shoes and make sure your car tires are strong. The grounds are rough and rocky and don’t provide any way to throw down a picnic blanket for the night. Most people stayed in their cars.
There is also the problem (at least on screen 2, where we endured “Super Troopers 3” before it started to rain heavily) of there being a busy highway on one side and loud freight trains going by every fifteen minutes on the other, which probably explains why people mainly stayed in their cars, so they can hear the film better. It is a testament to how well this theater is run that people put up with that sort of thing, enjoy the films anyway, and keep coming back. Whatever its flaws, it has worked for sixty years and counting, so it just goes to show that friendly service, a rock-solid food menu (and don’t you dare try sneaking in your own food), and a money-saving double bill can go a long way in the tricky business of modern-day theater management and ownership.
Make no mistake, drive-ins still struggle from year to year. So why do I keep going back to these venues every summer and keep looking for new ones to discover? I’m not in it for nostalgia. I had never set foot in a drive-in until I was twenty. Anyone can create fond memories of the drive-in experience today, just as one did in the 1930s and onward.
I keep going for many reasons, one being that they might not be here next year. You never know when you’ll come across a message on Facebook saying “we have made the unfortunate decision to close our doors for good at the end of this season.” Right now, many are dealing with heavy flooding due to all the storms that have rolled through recently. Last year, I mentioned a drive-in in Virginia called the Family Drive-In that needed a buyer. Luckily, they got one, and the name has been changed to The Historic Route 11 Drive-In Theatre.
I also keep going because I love road trips, I love movies, and I love seeing how these places find new ways to enrich the experience, whether through nostalgic trailers and decor, an inventive food menu, irresistible programming, or, best of all, all of the above. I also love sitting outside our car and occasionally looking up at the stars and seeing way more than I would ever see on a clear night in Chicago. I’m also more of a night-owl than a morning person, so being parked at a drive-in on a gorgeous spring, summer, or fall evening until 1:00 am to watch a late-night, double-feature picture show is its own reward. Find a drive-in near you and support it. Remember to hang up your speakers before leaving.
- Locarno 2026: I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming, Hearing, Bruton (August 16, 2026)
Though I have left Locarno, I haven’t finished writing about its many idiosyncratic offerings. The festival today announced its awards, including the recipient of the Golden Leopard (more on that in my final dispatch). And while I’m thrilled by many of the winners, in this dispatch I’d like to highlight a couple of films that I’m simply shocked didn’t take home a prize from the competition. One is a contemplative wartime flick set in Ukraine; the other is one of the more ambitious undertakings I’ve seen this year. Both deserved better. Along with those titles is another film that comes oh so close to brushing with something interesting only to get in its own way. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Ukrainian-Russian war has often been framed as an existential threat, one understandably requiring faithful nationalism on the part of Ukrainians and a ceaseless arms race between the two countries. Often documentaries about the conflict have either shown Ukrainian refugees fleeing their homeland or those who’ve stayed to fight for their sovereignty. That black-and-white contrast makes the earned drama of the semi-fictional LGBTQI+ narrative “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming,” which premiered in the main competition, so refreshing.
Produced by Tom Tykwer and Uwe Schott, Ukrainian writer Anna Melikova teams with her wife, director Isabelle Stever, to tell a story inspired by accounts from their Ukraine-based friends. The film concerns a trans man, Oleh (Markus Bright), and his fiancée Olya (Tania Myronyshena), whose New Year’s bliss is interrupted weeks later by real-world horrors when Russia invades Ukraine. The pair leave Kyiv, venturing to Olya’s parents home. And while her parents are initially supportive of Oleh not serving in the military, as the conflict wears on, their prejudice and nationalism get the better of them. Nevertheless, Oleh and Olya work to get the former out of their military transcription by showing that the government and Oleh’s doctor have already excused him from military service. But in a war that demands that its citizens choose sides, especially when it comes to speaking, which includes for some, their native Russian language, Oleh’s trans identity is quickly viewed by many around him as something he can choose to ignore. In one queasy scene, two transphobic women soldiers literally tell Oleh to choose whether he wants to have the excuse of being a woman so as not to serve or be a man and fight.
Bright shoulders the many slings thrown at Oleh with immeasurable sensitivity, rendering each hurt from each insult not as a single debilitating blow but as a piece-by-piece deconstruction of a once peaceful person. Stever’s lens is equally attentive to Oleh’s plight and Olya’s eventual desperation, positioning both characters in tender and sometimes claustrophobic frames. Some might find the ending, which sees the couple embracing a kind of normativity, difficult to square. But what’s on display is actually a great tragedy—one that depicts a casualty that’s rarely, if ever, captured on the nightly news. With its startling humanism and boundless empathy, “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” should shake viewers from their slumber to see how war touches every corner and every person.
It’s difficult to apply one or even a few apt descriptors to Vietnamese director Lê Bảo’s atmospherically adventurous mood piece “Hearing.” The film, which premiered in the festival’s main competition, defies strict categorization. Rather, this multi-generational survey of a family beset by decades of an agreed-upon silence moves with a stunning clarity that recalls recent splendors like “Viet and Nam” and “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell.” Like those immersive works, “Hearing” relies on an excellent combination of hypnotic sights, penetrating sounds, and soulful evocations of unhealed fissures to whisk the viewers onto a woozy journey of discovery.
Such filmic playfulness is best displayed in the picture’s technically precise and wholly enveloping opening. There, we’re dropped into a lively restaurant whose clattering of voices inspires Ninh (Nguyễn Quốc Tuấn), a mechanic, to install decibel meters that light up blue (sometimes in the film it’s also violet and indigo) whenever it gets too loud. From there we’re transported to florists located on the floor above who appear to be frozen by the noise. One neighbor is so incensed by the racket, he throws a flower pot from his balcony, which only leads to a brief lull in the hubbub. Lê spends the entirety of his film juxtaposing scenes like these, particularly in smaller villages where the rank-and-file workers of all ages go to party to booming club music, with moments of austere silence. While the latter’s quiet appearance might suggest tranquil calm, plenty of buried angst still causes disquiet among our primary cast.
Ninh, for instance, lives with his elderly mother (Ngọc Tản) because his wife (Khánh Huyền) separated from him following at least one instance of domestic violence. While his wife lives nearby, suggesting the glimpse of reunion by her mere proximity—despite his own difficulties admitting his wrongs to her—Ninh’s unbothered father (Minh Hùng) lives far from them in a small rural village. He was also abusive to Ninh’s mother, but unlike his son, he doesn’t share reservations about his past actions. These cycles of aggression and distance, mixed with varied memories whose present lens offers comfort and shame, arise in the film’s quietest moments, when the act of listening is not only possible but also an inescapable terror.
Lê adds further hints of surrealism, particularly the ghostly presence that Ninh’s decibel lights bring to a jungle filled with nervous monkeys. In these moments, there’s no clear delineation between the troubles of the urban and the rural, making for a blurred line that Lê blends to imperceptible levels as the film wears on. Lê also flashes style and confidence with incredible dexterity, seemingly pushing the audience’s patience and the boundaries of his frames, filled with hallucinogenic images whose intoxicating energy overwhelms the senses to their widest possible limits. Consequently, “Hearing” isn’t merely worth listening to; it’s also worth finding, seeing and consuming.
This is the third straight film, in the third straight year, from American director Vincent Grashaw to appear at Locarno. The first was the pugilist crime flick “Bang Bang” starring Tim Blake Nelson; the second witnessed Lou Diamond Phillips as a jaded Reservation cop mentoring a new trainee. His latest is “Bruton,” a first-person biography of a Miami dealer unfairly sent to prison, away from his devoted daughter, for an accidental death. It follows a lineage of Grashaw’s work that skirts the line between genre and message picture, relying on bruising, gritty settings to reveal the inequities of a system. Of his three attempts, “Bruton” might be his least successful.
As is often the case, the film begins with Bryan Bruton (Theo Rossi) alone in his prison cell, somewhat lamenting his fate. But unlike the other incarcerated men, one can tell that Bruton doesn’t necessarily think he’s wholly innocent, at least not in the moral conception of the word. The legal side, however, is quite the opposite. We then snap back three years; Bruton, a master at evading the cops, explains to us via voiceover his honed methodology. He switches cars often, which makes him harder to track, and when he’s pulled over, he dispenses pills and other paraphernalia into a half-filled chip bag knowing that they’ll either be overlooked or camouflaged among the contents. The cops also know him well enough to joke with him but not disrespect him. He’s even hoping to go straight, having just opened up a legitimate concrete hauling business.
Bruton risks all of that when he begins sweet-talking Elana (Dana Namerode), a young local daughter of a family he’s been supplying with drugs for years. That personal slip-up is contrasted with Bruton’s tenuous role as a family man. While he only somewhat cares for his wife Sienna (Aya Cash), he adores his daughter Crystal (played as a child by Alexandria Arnold and as a teenager by Kayden Brenna Tokarski). But when a jilted Elana falsely accuses Bruton of knocking her up and abusing her, inspiring the involvement of her enraged brothers, Bruton makes a decision to defend himself that lands him a 10-year sentence in the Lake Butler correctional facility.
“Bruton,” which was written by Grashaw, is based on a true story, which lends the film a truer-than-fiction quality. There’s a version of this film that could be a “Goodfellas” riff, especially as Bruton gives us the step-by-step of how to survive in prison, introduces us to the fast friend group he forms behind bars, and takes pleasure in explaining how he began skirting behind the rules and the abuses doled out by the guards by starting a sexual relationship with one of them: Maura Willis (Tammy Blanchard, who acutely understands the brokenness of this character). I won’t spoil the film by filling you in on all the wild happenings by Bruton, but it’s worth noting that Grashaw tries to toe the line between fun prison break flick and a serious conversation about the rotten, soul-breaking systematic trauma experienced by the incarcerated that makes recidivism all but impossible to avoid.
Rossi is game for those shaky tonal shifts, bringing his prototypical mix of charm and moxie to this juicy role. But Grashaw’s well-intentioned aims result in a mawkish final act that feels more like an overly formulated sprint to the end rather than a true reckoning. All of the groundedness he conjured through his unvarnished lens evaporates, and what we’re left with is something too willing to beg the audience for an emotional response via schmaltzy score and twee lighting to wholly feel as truthfully as Grashaw hoped.
- Locarno 2026: Nowhere To Lay My Eyes, At Night, Nobody’s Violence (August 15, 2026)
In these dispatches I often talk about themes naturally arising or not arising at all between films. Well, the throughline between these trio of titles couldn’t be clearer: They all thoroughly contemplate death and mortality. Two of the films are from veterans while a third one is a filmmaker’s feature directorial debut—though to be sure the latter has plenty of experience as a decorated shorts filmmaker too. Nevertheless, they all, to some extent, rebel against easy definitions, attempting to approach their weighty subject with the necessary rigor and complexity.
Leisurely yet profound, with “Nowhere to Lay My Eyes,” which had its world premiere in the festival’s Concorso Internazionale section, the multi-hyphenate auteur Hong Sang-soo offers one of his most existential works yet. The compact film, which netted Hong Best Director at Locarno, follows Sang-hee (Kim Min-hee, who won Best Performance at the fest), an experimental filmmaker venturing to Jeju Island with her younger brother to visit their mother (Choi Myung-gil) after a decade of geographic estrangement. While there, she meets her mother’s new husband (Kwon Hae-hyo), who also happens to be a filmmaker. Contained within the familiar set-up are scenes well-known to any Hong fan: dinner table conversations, introspective thoughts about art, and ruminative walks, which are granted newer, arresting dimensions here.
Hong spends much of this melancholic film contemplating how art reflects death and mortality. For one, there’s Sanghee’s short films, one about a flower that we see at the picture’s conclusion, which appear to take comfort in life’s impermanence. The other cinematic end of this exploration resides in Sanghee’s stepfather, who explains that he’s spent two years filming a burial ritual called a “grass tomb,” whereby families place their loved one’s body above ground for it to decompose enough to polish the bones and then have the funeral. The description of the ceremony causes one to consider our imperfect relationship with death, and how senses of loss and acceptance are equally hard to grasp.
Hong packs even more onto these themes: he contrasts the benefits of love and solitude, the ethics of documentary filmmaking with fictional dramas, and the war between Palestine and Israel (though one wonders how much of this scene is meant to be didactic or probing). Through it all, he once again conjures patient performances from his actors; Kim and Kwon are especially fantastic at instilling rich inner lives to match these philosophical figures. Here, Hong’s exacting compositions feel less spontaneous and more planned, as though he knows he needs visual precision for such weighty talks to land. And while “Nowhere to Lay My Eyes,” in its quiet command of our mortal fears, might suggest a slowing down of sorts, in reality, Hong Sang-soo is charging ahead with great intensity.
Beatrice Gibson’s assured feature debut “At Night” is a pensive picture set on a hypnotic Parisian night whose dreaminess belies the urgency of the film’s curiosity. “At Night” understands the urban beauty of low-lit streets and rumbling transportation in a way that recalls Chantal Akerman’s “News from Home,” a film by a transplanted artist similarly consumed by the rootlessness of their life. Unlike that film, the correspondence isn’t between the filmmaker and her mother, but between six women, who share long debates at bars, in grocery stores, at bus stops, and on trains.
It’s on the latter where the film, which premiered in the festival’s Cineastí del Presente sidebar, begins. A static shot sitting high above train tracks watches as the locomotive barrels ahead. On the train is a British filmmaker director named B (played by Gibson), who is sending a voicemail to her partner back home. She explains that’s she arrived in Paris to location scout and misses her greatly. B’s story is later paralleled and then contrasted with Didi (Diocouda Diaoune), a single mother and Black immigrant unafraid of getting into rich political discussions. We oscillate between these two arcs whose orbits sometimes spin toward a few other women, which culminates in an incredible café discussion about sex, lesbianism, intersectional feminism, and aging. The ten-minute scene is nearly unbroken, relying on cutting whip pans to leap between perspectives. That immersive camera movement, coupled with dizzying, tactile 16mm photography of the florescent glow emanating from windows and the warmth of halogen streetlights reminds one that Ben Rivers shot this picture.
If the visual poetry weren’t enough, Gibson also includes specks of literal poetry as well, opening the film with a quote from the recently deceased poet Alice Notley and including a recording of her poem “The Descent of “Alette”. Gibson, who previously premiered her short films “I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead” and “Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters” at Rotterdam, experimental works whose abstractions buck against conventional plotting, re-states her interest in mood and ideas over story. That isn’t to say “At Night” is meandering. It’s quite laser focused. In fact, “At Night” is so fiercely independent in its construction and voice, it’s easy to slip into its open thoughts and soulful rhythms in a bid to grasp something on the edge of undefinable.
A Locarno and Berlinale veteran, Canadian independent filmmaker Denis Côté (“Curling” and “A Skin so Soft”) returns to the former’s Concorso Internazionale with his latest work, “Nobody’s Violence,” a high-concept, slow-burn existential thriller about an atypical, hired gun. For one, Mira (Larissa Corriveau), the roving, stoic woman who moves from town to town with her tiny pup Mario, doesn’t carry a firearm or really any weapon. She also isn’t out to kill bad guys. Instead, she works for a company that sends loners like her to help with assisted suicides for those with terminal conditions. Harrowing and elusive, her narratively intriguing sojourns disappointingly soon give way to more conventional genre angst.
Before that misstep, what’s here is actually quite exciting. Côté spends much of the film’s first half avoiding giving answers. We instead follow Mira on her many jobs which moves between apprehensive clients who areeager to compassionately end it all. There’s one elderly woman who wants her hand held as she passes away and another young woman Mira meets in a car in a parking lot with six months to live. In between these jobs she finds some emotional release by playing with her dog and spending a day with the free-spirited Pierric Flanagan (Xavier Bergeron). Of course, not every experience goes smoothly: In one traumatic situation the grieving brother of the man who hired her verbally attacks her, causing her to question her profession. While one would think that soul-shaking moment would invite “Nobody’s Violence” to remain an elusive character study, Côté unfortunately moves the opposite direction.
He disavows the mysteriousness of his picture, which relied on brooding close-ups of an evocative Corriveau and dreamlike excursions shot handsomely on 16mm by Vincen Biron, for something more defined. The more answers he provides, the more magic his picture loses. “Nobody’s Violence” veers toward conventionality when Mira returns to her home base under the dogmatic eye of an unforgiving boss (Philippe Rebbot) intent on giving her further assignments rather than allowing her to mentally recalibrate. While this turn does set up a heartbreaking dilemma for her final mission, it feels like a bait-and-switch from the more morally complex questions the film gestures at in its first half, causing “Nobody’s Violence” to lose itself during its crawl back toward the familiar middle.
- Regina Taylor to Perform “Exhibit” at Atlanta Black Theatre Festival (August 15, 2026)
Audience members attending the main stage performance on closing night of the Atlanta Black Theatre Festival are in for a serious treat. At 7 pm on Saturday, September 5th, Golden Globe-winning actress, director, and playwright Regina Taylor will perform her own one-woman show, Exhibit, at the festival, aiming not only to involve theatergoers directly in its urgent subject matter but also to serve as a call to community. Taylor plays Iris, an African-American visual artist in her sixties who fears that her life’s work is on the brink of vanishing.
“Her work is being thrown out of the museums and galleries,” said Taylor. “Her books are being banned. Her name is being erased from the databases. And she’s confronted with the fear of erasure. This triggers her to think about the America that she grew up with—where we are now, where we were then—and it seems like we’re meeting at a crossroads. Are we moving forward or are we moving back? And what do we do? How do we adapt? It seems that over and over, our superpower as African-Americans has been the ability to adapt, to pass on a legacy, memory, or history to the next generation, and to light those fires.”
Regina Taylor performs her one-woman show, Exhibit. Courtesy of Theater Aspen.
In the play, Iris is approached by a young African-American curator who wants to save the artist’s legacy. She thinks that Iris’ symbolic black-on-black paintings would be a perfect fit for the museum, and could be placed alongside the works of artists like Picasso and Monet. Yet what gives Iris pause is the museum’s wish to not have the artist’s name on the pieces in her own retrospective. When Iris asks how one’s legacy is expected to survive without context, the curator points out, “Well, people know a Picasso when they see one!” Iris counters, “Until those who know are no more.”
“The play came out of living day to day in this present moment, being of a certain age and knowing what we’ve been through before to get to this moment,” noted Taylor. “Now it feels like things are being rolled back, and where’s the pushback to that? Exhibit premiered three years ago as part of the Solo Flights Festival in Aspen, and was directed by Phylicia Rashad. Since then, I’ve been dotting the country, doing the show at various venues. The piece was written so that it could be done anywhere and built to travel, though it has some accoutrements in terms of technology and video. I kind of based it on Spalding Gray’ Swimming to Cambodia, where you have a person with a script and projected images behind him that takes you from place to place.”
Regina Taylor performs her one-woman show, Exhibit. Courtesy of Curious Theatre.
Taylor will be performing Exhibit at Spelman College’s performing arts center funded by Samuel L. Jackson and LaTanya Richardson Jackson. As a direct address to the audience, the show invites each person in the theater to be Taylor’s scene partner as her character discovers new ways for telling her story. Iris’ experimentation with different forms of art inspired Taylor to create artworks of her own, some of which are on display on stage or in the lobby during a performance. Talkbacks are regularly scheduled after the show with teachers, students, or community leaders to open up a conversation about how people are addressing the times.
Taylor is also inviting artists to collaborate with her show by submitting their own artwork (spoken word, music, visual arts, etc.), which will be shared either onsite/in person or online. To submit artwork of your own, email Taylor at reginataylored@gmail.com.
“Theatre invites different communities to come together and share stories about who we are and where we came from,” reflected Taylor. “The audience then becomes the vessels of memory to carry those stories onward after the lights have gone out.”
Regina Taylor will perform Exhibit at 7 pm on Saturday, September 5th, at the Atlanta Black Theatre Festival (for tickets, click here), and will host an acting master class at 11 am on Friday, September 4th (for tickets, click here).
- HBO’s “Lanterns” Anchors Superhero Storytelling to Human Condition (August 14, 2026)
The highly anticipated “Lanterns” drops on HBO at an interesting time for the DC Universe. 2025’s “Superman” was a critical and commercial smash, a sign that maybe new head James Gunn was steering this ship in the right direction, but 2026’s “Supergirl” was a disaster, and audiences seem a bit skeptical that “Clayface” is what the franchise needs right now. Gunn is hard at work on 2027’s “Man of Tomorrow,” but the future of these films still feels a bit uncertain.
However, superhero fiction has taken a different shape on HBO with the well-liked “Peacemaker,” critical darling “The Penguin” (not technically part of Gunn’s purview, but associated in people’s minds), and now this weekend’s “Lanterns,” a project co-created by Damon Lindelof, who has proven he can shape this kind of material in a special way with the incredible “Watchmen.” The “Lost” and “The Leftovers” co-creator collaborates here with Chris Mundy and comic book writer Tom King to deliver the confident, engaging “Lanterns,” a show that, befitting its characters who can create something out of thin air, is never quite what you think it’s going to be.
Reportedly inspired by “True Detective” and “Slow Horses,” HBO’s “Lanterns” is a time-jumping mystery, a show that moves from 1996 to 2016 to 2026. The bulk of the first season takes place in that middle period, where we meet Hal Jordan (Kyle Chandler) and John Stewart (Aaron Pierre), the nation’s Green Lantern and possibly the next to hold that title, respectively. A former test pilot, Jordan was chosen by the Green Lantern Corps to be the interstellar peacekeeper that the Earth needs, but this vision of Hal isn’t your typical hero. Reportedly inspired by Sam Shepard’s work in “The Right Stuff,” Chandler gives Jordan the kind of deep cynicism that comes from being an underappreciated savior of the universe. We’ve seen this kind of character a lot recently as the cost of heroism has been refracted through shows like “Watchmen” and “The Boys,” but Chandler leans into his grounded screen presence well. Strangely enough, there are echoes of Eric Taylor from “Friday Night Lights” in this performance, as if Coach suddenly had to go from training young men to saving their lives: A blend of pride and exhaustion.
Lanterns (HBO Max)
That pride is challenged by the very existence of a Green Lantern recruit by his side. In the premiere, Jordan puts Stewart through the motions, sending his car off the cliff so John will use the ring to save himself at the last second. He’s essentially hazing Stewart, but what becomes one of the most interesting throughlines of season one is what’s underneath that behavior: A concern that Stewart isn’t an alternate; he’s a replacement. This creates a rivalry between these two very different performers that gives “Lanterns” most of its juice through their arcs toward the title Green Lantern. Jordan was chosen, but Stewart had to fight his way to this opportunity, something that’s explored in the context of race in the show’s third episode. The story around Jordan is that he was chosen because he was fearless, a word that means something different to young Black men in this country. Some of the writing in this episode can be a bit leaden (a problem that hampers more chapters here than in the superior “Penguin” and “Watchmen”), but it does speak to the show’s ambition.
That’s also reflected in the arc of the season, which can’t be spoiled here, but doesn’t play out as anyone will expect. Main arcs that one would think would last till the finale wrap up, time periods get jumped, character goals shift—it’s not as ambitious as something like “Watchmen,” but it’s not your typical season-long storytelling either, which keeps “Lanterns” remarkably unpredictable.
What is “Lanterns” about beyond its conflicted dynamic duo? In the 2016 bulk of the series, it’s a mystery about a shooting in Rushville, Nebraska that Jordan becomes convinced involves interstellar visitors. Why are they there? What are they looking for in the heartland of America? It brings Jordan and Stewart into the world of a lawwoman named Kerry (the excellent Kelly Macdonald), who becomes the grounded, small-town law counterpart to the interstellar chaos. She’s also a love interest for Jordan, even if she’s married to the town’s prince, Billy Macon (Jason Ritter), son of cowboy magnate William Macon (Garret Dillahunt), who clearly knows a thing or two about what’s going on in Rushville. He speaks elusively of his benefactor, a being that’s pulling the strings. We also meet William’s wife Zoe (Poorna Jagannathan), who’s a love interest for Stewart, and Ulrich Thomsen gets to snarl through a few appearances as the legendary Sinestro, while Nathan Fillion gets a few scenes that directly connect “Lanterns” to his turn as Guy Gardner in Gunn’s “Superman.”
Lanterns (HBO Max)
The writing on “Lanterns” ties character to plot, keeping us engaged in why Stewart and Jordan make the choices they do as much as the impact they have on the mysteries that shape them. It helps to have a cast eager to embrace character more than superpower, as Chandler and Pierre have done the detailed work often lacking from CGI-heavy MCU and DCU experiences. In many ways, “Lanterns” is an old-fashioned buddy action comedy given the remarkably different registers of Chandler and Pierre. The writers allow Chandler to be abrasively instinctual, the kind of guy who shoots first and asks questions later, while Pierre leans into a vision of Stewart informed by discipline. Jordan acts, Stewart plans. And yet there’s also tension between the two given there can be only one true Lantern. Watching these two characters figure not only each other out, but those who are pulling their strings from across the universe drives a lot of season one.
Some of that drive can be over rocky terrain. Given the complexity of “The Leftovers” and “Watchmen,” it’s a bit surprising to see Lindelof over-explain a few of his show’s themes this time around, although that could be under Gunn’s guidance given his work, as much as I like it, often displays a distrust that a wide audience can meet the writing halfway. There’s a version of “Lanterns” that’s a bit more elusive and interpretable than this one, which could happen in season two after the groundwork is laid.
Having said that, as an introductory outing, “Lanterns” is a success, incredibly watchable even through its flaws, and nearly heroic in its hits.
Seven episodes screened for review. Premieres on HBO on Sunday, August 16.
