kottke.org posts about movies
Now that Andor has been out for a while, showrunner Tony Gilroy is free to speak his mind on what the show was all about. I mean, it was pretty clear to the audience, but now he can say his piece. Andor won a Peabody Award and at the awards ceremony, Gilroy gave the following acceptance speech:
We spent six years contemplating a fascist takeover of a galaxy far, far away. Six years thinking about what happens to ordinary beings when an authoritarian, insane, unchecked regime comes into the deal, and the show is really kind of what we learned.
If you’re not willing to fight for the things that you love — your family, community, your culture, your planet, your truth, freedom — there’s an asshole ready to come in and take it away. We learned that bravery and sacrifice and resistance comes in all shapes and sizes, and we learned that courage is contagious.
There’s so much is happening, it’s a fire hose of crap that you just can’t get through. And here we are. There isn’t a new cycle that goes by right now that doesn’t contain a variety of outrages that in any other time in our history in America wouldn’t be grounds for treason.
Please do not stop. Please do not turn out the lights until we can kill this nightmare. And fuck the Empire!
Gilroy also recently appeared on Peabody’s podcast We Disrupt This Broadcast where he talks about the show’s prescience regarding the current political moment. From the transcript:
So any really specific prescient coincidence, and there probably will be some, they’re not intentional. They weren’t intentional at the time. They’re sadly what they are. And we were not looking at the newspaper when we wrote this. It doesn’t behoove me to do that. It’s incredibly, almost narcissistic how people feel that they’re always living at the edge of history in a way that’s just so unique. We feel so special.
And the sad truth is that, you know, we are just in another wheel of history. And I must admit that after 9/11 and Vietnam and Covid and Watergate and all the things I’ve grown up, I’m 68. I kind of thought, well, I’ve seen all the history I’m gonna see. I don’t feel that way anymore. I don’t feel so special anymore as a human who’s lived on the planet and lived in something called civilization. I think sadly, it’s sort of a Catherine Reel of repetitive stupidity.
See also Andor Creator Tony Gilroy Is Free to Speak About Fascism Now and An Interview With Andor’s Creator, Tony Gilroy.
The original Star Wars movie was a mashup. George Lucas and his collaborators pulled from everywhere: westerns, samurai movies, Flash Gordon, and a 1955 war film called The Dam Busters. This video shows just how closely the attack on the Death Star mirrors a scene from The Dam Busters of a group of bombers attacking a dam. The dialogue is identical in places. From the Dam Busters Wikipedia page:
Director George Lucas hired Gilbert Taylor, responsible for special effects photography on The Dam Busters, to be the director of photography for the film Star Wars. The attack on the Death Star in the climax of Star Wars is a deliberate and acknowledged homage to the climactic sequence of The Dam Busters. In the former film, rebel pilots have to fly through a trench while evading enemy fire and fire a proton torpedo at a precise distance from the target to destroy the entire base with a single explosion; if one run fails, another run must be made by a different pilot. In addition to the similarity of the scenes, some of the dialogue is nearly identical. Star Wars also ends with an Elgarian march, like The Dam Busters.
You can also watch Star Wars footage with Dam Busters audio and Dam Busters footage with Star Wars audio to see just how closely the two scenes match.
Given modern IP concerns and stakes, it’s difficult to envision this type of homage working today. Star Wars came out just 22 years after The Dam Busters, which is a beloved & acclaimed movie in Britain…it’s not obscure. Imagine a movie released in 2026 by a young Academy Award-nominated director that lifts a scene wholesale from a 2004 film like The Notebook, The Incredibles, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or Million Dollar Baby — it just wouldn’t happen without a lot of lawyerly conversation. I mean, maybe Lucas had those convos with The Dam Busters filmmakers… 🤷♂️
This scan isn’t very good (best I could find), but these are all the lightsabers used by Jedi and Sith in the various Star Wars shows and movies. I think this is from a few years ago, so I’m not sure how up to date it is.
In the SW universe, making your own saber is a Jedi and Sith rite of passage, which accounts for the diversity in design. No shortcuts allowed…Babu Frik wasn’t out there selling Ancient Laser Sword™ kits to young padawans (kyber crystal sold separately). (via dennis crowley)
Cookie Queens is a feature-length documentary film that follows four Girl Scouts as they navigate the big business & big feelings of Girl Scout Cookie season.
“Cookie Queens” is a coming-of-age story about the joys, pressures, and pain points woven into one of America’s most cherished rituals: Girl Scout Cookie season. Captivating, candid, and full of heart, the film follows four girls ages 5-12 as they navigate the annual whirlwind of selling, striving, and succeeding. For these Girl Scouts, selling cookies isn’t just about Thin Mints and sisterhood — it’s a crash course in commercialism. Behind the smiles lie real pressure: long hours, ambitious goals, and weighty expectations. With humor, warmth, and a keen eye for small moments revealing big truths, “Cookie Queens” shows how growing up is shaped by tensions between community and capitalism.
My favorite and also, when I think about it too much, least favorite trailer moment: “There’s no stopping point.” Amen, sister. Opens August 7 in theaters.
David Kaylor is re-editing Rogue One into what he calls “The Andor Cut”; the trailer seems pretty compelling and well-done. He says this is Rogue One if it was produced after Andor:
The original version is the events of Rogue One as seen through Jyn’s perspective, and this is through Cassian’s.
The remixed Rogue One will be out on May 25, available in 4K with 5.1 surround sound. Kaylor has previously produced cuts of all three original trilogy Star Wars movies, Star Wars: Episode III - The Siege of Mandalore & Revenge of the Sith (a combo of the third prequel and part of the 7th season of Clone Wars), and Star Trek: Picard: The Last Generation (a recut of Star Trek: Picard’s 3rd season).
This edit is not to be confused with Andor: The Rogue One Arc, which recuts Rogue One into an Andor-like three-episode arc, leaning heavily on Andor’s soundtrack to set the mood.
This edit is kind of an expression of that with a movie I generally really liked - moving its energy from emulating the jaunty, swashbuckling OT, to more in line with its prequel show’s feel.
Up front, I don’t actually think this elevates or changes Rogue One in any meaningful way. The movie is still the movie, still fast paced and action oriented, particularly compared to Andor’s fiercer, slower, and paranoid ethos. But I do think the elements Andor is rooted in become far more apparent foregrounded to this soundtrack. Where the movie somewhat failed to recapture the energy and excitement of traditional Star Wars (and not for lack of Giacchino effort), the places where it takes itself seriously should now feel less dissonant in a [tonal] context that seriously considers them.
I’ve watched The Rogue One Arc and am looking forward to comparing it to The Andor Cut. And I’ve been seriously contemplating yet another rewatch of the TV series.
Some nice work here from Swedish designer Eric Rohman, who designed thousands of movie posters in the early-to-mid 20th century. (via meanwhile)
Huh. A24 is coming out with an Anthony Bourdain biopic that focuses on the time period around the chef/writer’s college years, when he first started working in kitchens. Directed by Matt Johnson, who co-created Nirvana the Band the Show and directed BlackBerry. Could be good. (via rex)
I’m gonna call it: Every Frame a Painting, my all-time favorite YouTube channel, is back. Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos stopped producing their fantastic video essays back in 2017 and while they have popped up here and there since then, they’ve mostly stuck to their retirement.
But for the past few months, the duo have been releasing video essays produced in partnership with Criterion: Night of the Living Dead: Limitations into Virtues, The Blade (1995): The Edges of Wuxia, and just yesterday, The Visual Comedy of Isle of Dogs (embedded above).
For the past three decades, Wes Anderson has left a distinctive fingerprint in American comedy, with his penchant for artificial worlds, deadpan performances, literary devices, and snappy narration. But there’s something else. These movies are funny to look at. Over the years, Anderson has experimented more and more with visual comedy. And none of this is more apparent than in Isle of Dogs.
It looks like they’re doing about one video a month. I hope they keep it up…I love their videos.
(Ok, maybe don’t read this bit until you’ve watched the Isle of Dogs video, but did you detect that Zhou’s narration seems to be synced to the mouth movements of the characters in the clips he’s talking over? Such a great little detail of visual comedy…I clapped my hands in glee like a toddler when I noticed.)
For his latest video essay, Evan Puschak tells us about Un Chien Andalou, the pioneering surrealist short film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. The film is particularly notable for a shocking shot in the opening scene, which, if you’ve seen it, you’ve likely never forgotten. Said Buñuel of the film:
This film has no intention of attracting nor pleasing the spectator; indeed, on the contrary, it attacks him, to the degree that he belongs to a society with which surrealism is at war.
You can watch Un Chien Andalou on YouTube:
One wonders what Buñuel and Dalí would have made of YouTube…
Listen, sometimes you just want to watch things blow up. But safely and without consequence (although Arnold Schwarzenegger did somehow become the governor of California). So, can I interest you in three minutes of movie explosions? The 80s and 90s were really a golden age for kick-ass movie explosions. (via @tvaziri.com)
Boots Riley made his directorial debut with the totally weirdo (complimentary) movie Sorry to Bother You in 2018. He’s been quiet since then, but he’s back with a new comedy, I Love Boosters. This looks great. From a review on Letterboxd:
Maximalist social commentary delivered with anime action and colourful high strangeness. Did it kind of fall off the rails towards the end? Absolutely. Was it fun as fuck and creative right to the end? You best believe it. God bless the shoplifters. I got major Everything Everywhere All At Once vibes from this…
The film debuted at SXSW in March and is opening in theaters on May 22.
We thought this day would never come. But we kept the faith and now we can begin to reap the rewards: there is actually a trailer for the Coyote vs. ACME movie and the movie itself is actually coming out on Aug 28.
Quick recap of the situation so far: Ian Frazier wrote a story for the New Yorker in 1990 about an imagined lawsuit brought by Wile E. Coyote against the Acme Company. Fast forward to 2022-23: James Gunn, Dave Green, Will Forte, and others make a movie based on the NYer article…and then Warner Bros. shelves the movie to take a tax write-off. Like, they are going to destroy the completed film. And now, somehow, miraculously, Warner seems to have finally done the right thing and sold the rights to the film so it can be released (which is theoretically the primary reason for their business, releasing movies).
Every Frame a Painting’s Taylor Ramos & Tony Zhou are back with a video essay about pushing the boundaries of genre in Tsui Hark’s 1995 film The Blade.
One reason filmmakers like to work in a genre is that it gives us a pre-made box: a set of expectations, tropes, and boundaries. On the one hand, we want to play within that box, and on the other, we want to push against its edges. Tsui Hark’s The Blade is an exploration and a deconstruction of the box that is wuxia.
If you’re not familiar with wuxia, the video explains the genre; it’s basically Chinese martial arts fantasy — think Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Hero. (thx, neil)
This is a map published in 1927 by Paramount Studios showing the areas of California & Nevada that doubled as shooting locations for far-flung locales, including Siberia, Wales, the Nile, New England, the Red Sea, and the Alps.
I’d vaguely remembered that Hulu was adapting The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, as a sequel to the TV series of the same name, but I was surprised to find out that the show has premiered and is already three episodes in (a fourth will be available today).
The initial series lost its way after 2-3 seasons, but I still ended up watching the whole thing. I’ll probably give The Testaments a shot as well.
I’m so glad Steven Soderbergh unretired from filmmaking. His newest film, The Christophers, looks amazing. It stars Ian McKellen as a famous artist and Michaela Coel as his assistant — but of course there’s more to it. Reviewer David Sims calls it both a heist movie and “a meditation on the relationship between art and commerce”. I hope this one actually comes to Vermont so I can see it in the theater.
Coel and McKellen both have such great faces, don’t you think?
Ghost Elephants is a new documentary film directed by Werner Herzog for National Geographic. Here’s the trailer.
For over a decade, Dr. Steve Boyes, conservation biologist and National Geographic Explorer, has been in search of a mysterious, elusive herd of Ghost Elephants in the highlands of Angola, deep within its forests. From acclaimed director Werner Herzog (“Grizzly Man”), GHOST ELEPHANTS follows Boyes on an epic journey as he sets out with some of the best master trackers in the world, in pursuit of an animal long believed to be a myth.
From Peter Sobczynski’s rave review of the film:
The subject of Herzog’s fascination this time around is South African naturalist Dr. Steve Boyes, and while he seems perfectly staid and affable at first sight, he has an obsession within him that has consumed his life to such an extent that if he didn’t actually exist, Herzog might have had to invent him. The focus of his fascination is a species of giant elephant residing in the highlands of Angola, known as “ghost elephants” for their apparent ability to avoid detection. Indeed, not only has Boyes never actually seen one of these creatures with his own eyes, but he is not even certain that such creatures exist—the closest he has come is a massive elephant shot near that area in Angola in 1955, now on display at the Smithsonian.
Herzog, National Geographic, elephants, quixotic quest — who says no? Ghost Elephants is available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu.
The Library of Congress recently discovered a copy of a “long-lost” film made in ~1897 by George Méliès called Gugusse and the Automaton (Gugusse et l’Automate), which “had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century” and “was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot”. It’s also one of the first science fiction films ever made.
You can watch a digitized copy of the whole film here (it’s only 45 seconds long):
And here’s the story of how the film was discovered.
Equally delighted was Bill McFarland, the donor who had driven the box of films from his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, to have the cache evaluated.
His great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee, had been a potato farmer and schoolteacher in western Pennsylvania by day, but by night he was a traveling showman. He drove his horse and buggy from town to town to dazzle the locals with a projector and some of the world’s first moving pictures.
He set up shop in a local schoolroom, church, lodge or civic auditorium and showed magic lantern slides and short films with music from a newfangled phonograph. It was shocking.
“They must have been thrilled,” McFarland said. “They must have been out of their minds to see this motion picture and to hear the Edison phonograph.”
Last week, Nine Inch Nails released an album of remixes and unreleased session music from their Tron: Ares score called Tron Ares: Divergence. I’m listening to it now; pretty good so far.
Lumière, Le Cinema! is a new documentary film by Thierry Frémaux about Auguste & Louis Lumière and the early days of motion pictures — and includes 100+ newly restored films. It’s playing at MoMA at the end of this month; here’s their description:
Witness the birth of cinema with Thierry Frémaux’s Lumière, Le Cinéma! (2025), about the pioneering achievements of the French entrepreneurs Auguste and Louis Lumière in the late 19th century. Journey back to the 1890s, when the Lumière Company, with their astonishing new invention, the cinematograph, made it possible for audiences to voyage around the world in moving pictures for the first time. Featuring gorgeous new restorations of more than 100 comedies, dramas, and travelogues — some famous, some forgotten, and some never before seen — and set to an evocative score of period music by Gabriel Fauré, this wondrous documentary enables contemporary viewers to imagine an entirely new language of storytelling unfolding film by glorious film.
Just watching the trailer is wild — the restored footage from short films that are 120, 130 years old is astonishing. From a review in Collider:
From riding atop trains to showing off goofy vaudevillian acts or brief moments of comical violence, each clip speaks not only to what came before, but how these short pieces behave as the DNA for every genre, every facet of what we consider filmmaking to this very day. The biggest joy of all, of course, is the ability to see these films projected large and in all their restored glory, not simply segregated to being streamed on a small screen, or to suffer through damage that makes these segments feel all that more removed from the present. It’s as if many of these clips have been rescued from an island where they have been deserted for more than a century, carefully dusted off, and allowed finally to be seen in a context that their creators could only have dreamed possible.
The excellent Poster House museum in NYC currently has an exhibition up of posters by Peter Strausfeld.
Between 1947 and 1980, Peter Strausfeld, a German refugee interned on the Isle of Man during World War II, created unique, compelling posters for London’s Academy Cinema—the city’s premier art house movie theater. Founded by Elsie Cohen in 1931, the Academy specialized in international films that eschewed classic Hollywood narratives, highlighting works by now-famous directors like Federico Fellini, Akira Kurosawa, François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman, Andrzej Wajda, and Satyajit Ray. While these films now hold cult status for cinema aficionados, in the early to mid-20th century, art house remained a novel and daring form of cinema that few theaters showcased.
Throughout his longstanding relationship with the Academy, Strausfeld created over 300 bold, predominantly single-color linocut compositions with a deceptively simple hand-printed feel.
An accompanying book is available from RIT Press. More of Strausfeld’s work can be found at It’s Nice That, Orson & Welles, and Mubi. (via the new yorker)
The Track is a documentary film about a group of athletes training in post-war Bosnia to make the Olympics in luge.
The Track is a coming-of-age journey of three friends chasing their improbable Olympic dreams in post-war Bosnia. Training on a crumbling track left behind from the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics, the boys are guided by their devoted coach Senad, whose fight to rebuild the neglected track mirrors his determination to create a future for his athletes in a country facing one of the highest youth unemployment rates in Europe.
Filmed over five transformative years, The Track captures an intimate and deeply human coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of a nation still recovering from the scars of war, political corruption, and rising nationalism. As the boys balance Olympic ambition with the pull of street life, heartbreak, and survival, their paths begin to diverge, revealing the stark realities young people face in modern Bosnia.
You can check the website for online and IRL showings; it’s on Amazon Prime in the US.
For his 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Wes Anderson enlisted Brazilian musical artist Seu Jorge to perform several of David Bowie’s songs in Portuguese. Jorge released an album of the songs about a year or so later.
A few weeks ago, to mark the 10th anniversary of Bowie’s death, Jorge released a hour-long set of him performing those songs:
Just an acoustic guitar, a microphone, and the beautiful coastline of São Paulo.
David Ehrlich is back with my favorite end-of-year celebration of film; here’s his look back at the best films of 2025 (YouTube). See the full list at Letterboxd. I’ve only seen five of these so it’s difficult to comment on the list as a whole, but I feel like Sinners should have been higher?
Along with Sinners and One Battle After Another,1 Wake Up Dead Man is one of my favorite films of the year. So I enjoyed director Rian Johnson breaking down the investigative scene in the bar in this Vanity Fair video.
This is, for me, even a little more personal than the previous movies because faith and religion is at the heart of this movie. And I grew up very Christian. I grew up not Catholic. This movie is set in a Catholic church. I grew up Protestant, kind of what we would call evangelical today. I was a youth group kid and it wasn’t just that my parents took me to church. I really, my whole perspective in life was really based on a relationship with Christ. It was very important to me. I’m not anymore, I’ve kind of grown away from that later in life, but it’s still something that I have deep feelings about. So this movie, in a way, by having Father Jud and Benoit Blanc kind of talk about this and kind of butt heads about it, it was a way for me to take both of those perspectives inside me and get them talking with each other.
The practical effect with the photograph (~10:05 mark) was 💯.
RiotGrlErin made some great mashups of Christmas movie posters featuring Muppets. I think my favorite is Oscar the Elf but the Die Hard one is so good too. Many more in this thread.
Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey is my #1 most anticipated film of 2026 and this trailer has got me revved up! Nolan’s trailers never reveal much, but still, it looks gooood.
I am still skeptical of Matt Damon at Odysseus. Zendaya as Athena, Charlize Theron as Circe, and Hoyte van Hoytema doing the cinematography tho! And how do you fit this entire story into 2.5 hours? (Unless Nolan’s gonna go for 3.5 to 4 hours?) Opens in theaters July 17, 2026.
For years now, the people have wanted only one thing: for Daniel Craig’s chicken-fried detective Benoit Blanc to feature in a Muppet movie (with Craig as the only human). Earlier this year, Netflix picked up the streaming rights for Sesame Street. That partnership has borne some unexpected fruit: Forks Out: A Benoit Blanc Sesame Street Mystery.
In the video, detective Beignet Blanc arrives to investigate who ate Cookie Monster’s triple berry pie.
I have arrived to this Street of Sesame on a sunny day turned cloudy. We have a culinary culprit in our oven mitts. And to solve this confectionary conundrum, we must look right in front of our googly eyes at Cookie Monster.
The whole thing is delightful. See also Nerdist’s Rainbow Connection: A Benoit Blanc Mystery.
Over his storied career, Steven Spielberg has made only four studio films about aliens: Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ET, War of the Worlds, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull — the outsized influence of the first two gives the impression that he’s made many more.
Over the past 20 years, Spielberg has favored more realistic fare (Lincoln, Munich, The Fabelmans) but this summer he’s back with an alien movie, Disclosure Day, based on an original story no less. Very excited for this! In theaters on June 12, 2026.
Hmm, I really don’t know about this one: an animated adaptation of George Orwell’s Animal Farm as a sort of Ice Age-ish comedy adventure? One commenter on YouTube says, “This movie is 100% gonna end with a random dance party scene with the pigs and humans dancing to something like Uptown Funk” and another suggests that “this is like a bad Family Guy joke from 2007 escaped into the real world”.
From a review in IGN:
Gone are the specific allusions to the Russian Revolution and the stinging critique of Stalinism laced into Orwell’s “all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others” allegory. Instead, Serkis paints the terrifying rise of porcine dictator Napoleon (Seth Rogen, playing brilliantly to and against type) in a broader brush for a modern era of big business run amok. In toning down the more graphic elements of its descent into totalitarianism and simplifying the depths of its commentary, the director and performance-capture pioneer trades a dystopian tone for something a little more uplifting. It’s a fun movie with some creative visual choices and a great cast, but it’s also hard not to feel like it lost some teeth on its journey from the page to the screen.
This Variety review isn’t much more encouraging:
Serkis’ 21st-century update dilutes Orwell’s political allegory in favor of what passes for something more “audience friendly”: His approach adopts the celebrity voices, cutesy character designs and antic, mile-a-minute energy of big-studio American toons. The result isn’t nearly as polished as Illumination or DreamWorks movies, but “good enough for government work,” as the saying goes.
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