Featured
“I Hope They Boo”: Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim Take Cannes
"Tim & Eric Made It 2 Cannes"
Laurel and Hardy, Martin and Lewis, Nichols and May… Tim and Eric. A double-act for the ages, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim first teamed up as students at Temple University in Philadelphia, and secured comedy-legend status with their chaotic-good surrealist sketch show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! (2007–2010), produced for Adult Swim. Like public-access TV beamed through a cracked funhouse mirror—this nineties kid recalls how much those first viewings felt like some kind of illicit initiation rite—Tim and Eric managed to remake internet culture, and maybe even American humor, in its own, gleefully psychoactive image. In the intervening 15-odd years, Heidecker and Wareheim have embarked on diverse solo ventures. Together with Gregg Turkington, Heidecker has forged another gonzo comedy universe in the… Read more
Hacks and The Comeback Beat the Odds
The Comeback
The Comeback always seems to coincide with a new existential crisis facing television. In 2005, the HBO comedy series—created by Michael Patrick King and Lisa Kudrow, and starring the then recent Friends actress as a former sitcom star desperate to return to the spotlight—was a cutting satire about reality TV, which threatened to cheapen the medium with its low costs and tabloid-friendly drama. The show’s initial limited run garnered a cult following, and HBO revived it in 2014 when reality TV had achieved a certain level of legitimacy—but the industry was on the cusp of an overhaul with the impending streaming wars, churning out so much “prestige” TV that the adjective soon meant nothing. Twelve years (and a pandemic, two major strikes, and a… Read more
Taiwan International Doc Fest: The Island a Stage
Archive: Li Guang-hui (1979/2024)
In 1998, the Taiwan International Documentary Festival held its first edition, a decade after martial law was lifted in the island nation. It was a particularly exciting moment for documentary in Taiwan: independent video activism was on the rise, and new models of community media pointed to alternative structures for production and distribution. And yet, apart from Yamagata (founded in 1989), there were not many festivals of politically engaged nonfiction that specifically championed regional Asian cinema; the inaugural TIDF featured both an Asian Visions Competition and a Taiwan Competition strand. In its 15th edition this May, TIDF continued to explore the breadth of political nonfiction Asian cinema, across a program featuring both new and recently restored films. One of the most… Read more
John Travolta on Propeller One-Way Night Coach
Propeller One-Way Night Coach
When I was asked for my favorite discoveries at Cannes this year, “the Travolta” was high on the list. Propeller One-Way Night Coach (2026), John Travolta’s feature directorial debut, premiered on the frantic first Friday night, when no one knew exactly what to expect. Before the screening, and following a highlights reel of the star’s career, Thierry Frémaux bestowed an honorary Palme d’Or on Travolta, who was touchingly grateful. But what, we in the packed theater wondered, would his film about a boy’s first airplane flight in 1962 look like? The answer was an absolutely charming portrait of experience, with a loving attention to detail and sense memory that arrives on screen in living color as if intact from Travolta’s own childhood. Propeller One-Way… Read more
If Youth Knew: Chie Hayakawa on Renoir
Renoir
Chie Hayakawa’s Renoir (2026) focuses on Fuki (Yui Suzuki), a preteenage girl whose perspective on life is darkened and complicated over the course of her father’s terminal illness. The film is set in 1987, a year or so into Japan’s “bubble period,” when financial and real-estate speculation radically reshaped the country’s economy a generation after its “miraculous” postwar recovery. This boom time becomes the backdrop for Fuki gaining awareness of the people around her and the consequences of her actions; a chance encounter with a reproduction of Auguste Renoir’s 1880 oil portrait of the eight-year-old Irène Cahen d’Anvers provides her with a clue into her own taste, and how she wants to carry herself moving through the world. Renoir takes things from Fuki’s perspective,… Read more
The Day YouTube Wept: Marcus Batto’s Found-Footage Memorial to Michael Jackson
There’ll Likely Be Michael Jackson Vigils Throughout the Night
A day in the life of the internet is impossible to reconstruct as a feature film. The pace of the scroll is too quick; any given snapshot is too algorithmically myopic to be comprehensive. There’s too much that evades notice, and still more that evades preservation. With the slow obsolescence of search engines—lost first to advertisements, then to optimization, and now to artificial intelligence—our digital past gets blurrier still. With There’ll Likely Be Michael Jackson Vigils Throughout the Night, Marcus Batto attempts the impossible, reconstructing June 25, 2009, the day of Jackson’s death, exclusively through the found footage available online. Batto, 31 years old, is an artist, archivist, programmer, and something of a YouTube ethnographer. “Growing up,” he says, “I wanted to… Read more
