‘I Saw the TV Glow’ Review: Jane Schoenbrun’s Eerie Ode to Adolescent Television Obsessions

Christopher Nolan recently moderated a panel for The Curse, the Showtime series that stars Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone.

Guy Lodge Film Critic In “Porcelain War,” a resilient Ukrainian couple divide their time between two seemingly antithetical pursuits: When enterprising Slava Leontyev isn’t training fellow civilian soldiers in the ongoing fight against Russia’s invasion, he and his partner Anya Stasenko are skilled ceramic artists, casting and painting dainty porcelain figurines inspired by local nature and folklore. If the title already suggests something pointed in that disparity, this emotive debut by Leontyev and American co-director Brendan Bellomo leaves nothing to chance in ensuring we get it: Porcelain, we are told, is “fragile but everlasting, and can be restored after hundreds of years.” Lest the point still be lost on us, the couple’s combined voiceover later offers a blunter paraphrase: “Ukraine is like porcelain — easy to break, but impossible to destroy.” The metaphor is clear enough, then; whether it’s quite complex enough to sustain a feature-length documentary is another question.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Amid the surfeit of films about women’s rights and men’s abuses of power that have emerged in the wake of the #MeToo reckoning, we haven’t yet seen one quite like “Black Box Diaries.” A tightly wound, heart-on-sleeve procedural documentary, Shiori Ito‘s directorial debut identifies a world of systemic iniquities through the prism of a single, long labored-over case of sexual assault — crucially, the director’s own. That raw first-person perspective, untempered by the interests of another filmmaker and given narrative rigor by Ito’s substantial journalistic skills, makes “Black Box Diaries” not just a damning analysis of patriarchal power structures in contemporary Japan, but a vivid evocation of the day-to-day psychological swings and breaks that come with living as a survivor.

The Armed have announced a 2024 UK and European tour which is set to begin this summer.The band will kick off their tour with a performance at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound Festival on May 30. From there, Tony Wolski and co.

EXCLUSIVE: The Ford Foundation is coming through for documentary filmmakers in a big way.  

Guy Lodge Film Critic “Look Into My Eyes” opens with an unexpectedly sobering, even provocative encounter for a documentary about New York City psychics and their clientele: not a fanciful palm reading or a conjuring of a lost loved one, but an attempt to reckon with long-festering professional trauma. A middle-aged female doctor, sharply dressed, talks directly to camera — or rather, to the mystic sitting silently behind it — about the time, as a junior doctor on the emergency ward, she attended to a 10-year-old girl who was shot upon leaving church, and died of her wounds in hospital.

Elemental director Peter Sohn received an Oscar nomination on Tuesday morning for Best Animated Feature. Even with a story that’s very personal to him, Sohn’s first thoughts go towards his entire crew. “I think about all the work and passion and love that they put into the film, and it fills me up in a way that is very emotional.”

Siddhant Adlakha Modeled on a late-’80s/early-’90s American family sitcom — which soon transitions to a midnight splatterfest — the tongue-in-cheek Dutch production “Krazy House” has all the transgressive stylings of a 15 year-old’s Reddit post on an atheism forum in 2010. Directors Steffen Haars and Flip van der Kuil offer ideas of subversion that feel both long-outdated in concept and completely dull in execution, to the point that merely describing the film feels irresponsible, lest its premise accidentally lure curious viewers to the cinema.

Benedict Fitzgerald, best known as the screenwriter of The Passion of the Christ, died at home in Marsala, Sicily after a long illness on January 17, 2024. He was 74 and no cause of death was given by his family.

Caroline Brew editor Benedict Fitzgerald, co-screenwriter of “The Passion of the Christ,” died Jan. 17 in Marsala, Sicily, after a long illness, his cousin Nancy Ritter told Variety. He was 74.

Guy Lodge Film Critic As teenagers go — and let us allow for some hormonal leeway here — 17-year-old Sam is what most would call a good one: smart, thoughtful, grounded, self-sufficient but not averse to advice, the kind of kid that parents can’t help bragging about, as their friends wish their own nightmare offspring were a little more like her. But such a reputation has its downside, as elders take the teen’s compliance and good humor for granted, and expect undue allowances for their own irresponsibilities.

Guy Lodge Film Critic Adding to cinema’s long list of hellish bachelor parties to which nobody in their right mind should accept an invitation, “It’s What’s Inside” gathers a large crowd of mostly estranged friends in a remote mansion where either no one can hear you scream, or no one much cares if they do. It’s an age-old setup for a body-countdown horror movie, and it’s to the credit of Greg Jardin‘s highly strung, busily plotted debut feature that it doesn’t unfold exactly as you’d expect.

Guy Lodge Film Critic If zombies weren’t so fixated on eating our brains, perhaps they’d be poignant to have around: semi-living, semi-breathing semblances of people we’ve loved, there to be seen and held and talked to, not truly present but not absent either. Whether that’s preferable to the void of death is the question underpinning “Handling the Undead” for much of its running time, even as the threat of the undead reverting to their usual habits gives this soft, sorrowful bereavement drama a core of cold-blooded horror.

Guy Lodge Film Critic The opening minutes of “A New Kind of Wilderness” promise some kind of documentary advertorial for off-the-grid living. Over idyllic shots of her hippy-hunky husband Nik and their three cherubic children camping, foraging for food and literally hugging trees in verdant Norwegian woodland, photographer Maria Vatne’s voiceover soothingly espouses the liberating virtues of “getting out of the rat race” and “being free and full of love.” It all looks wonderful, like “Swiss Family Robinson” updated for the era of Instagram cottagecore, and a cynic might say that it hardly seems sustainable.

Guy Lodge Film Critic There’s a very young, very online contingent of Generation Z that propagates repeated cycles of so-called “age gap discourse”: heated, often condemnatory debate over the rights or wrongs of people dating, or merely socializing, outside their immediate age group. The discussion often takes quaintly prudish forms, permitting no adult age at which such differences cease to matter, but if it circulates most heatedly among the young, it’s been handed down to them via age-old social rules and biases — ones to which Nathan Silver‘s delightful “Between the Temples” gives a cheerfully flippant middle finger.

Emily Longeretta SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers from the first four episodes of “The Traitors,” now streaming on Peacock. Ever since both the BBC and Peacock adapted the Dutch series “De Verraders” into “The Traitors,” it’s been a hit. Both produced by Studio Lambert, the U.K. version premiered on the BBC in November 2022, with the U.S.

Neon is opening Origin on 130 screens and plans to expand the Ava DuVernay film, which premiered in Venice and had a excellent qualifying run in December.

In the space of just two movies, Jane Schoenbrun has established a completely unique aesthetic; from the opening credits alone, a riot of black light and neon pastels, it’s obvious that I Saw the TV Glow comes from the same mind that created the trippy 2021 cult hit We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. Anyone puzzled by the latter is advised to stay clear, since the follow-up is more vertiginously dizzying and twice as impressionistic, causing lots of head-scratching at its Sundance premiere. For those ready and willing to embrace its commitment to mood over logic, I Saw the TV Glow is a must-see, pairing the otherworldly ambience of Kyle Edward Ball’s Skinamarink with the morbid surrealism of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. (If you know, you know.)

William Earl administrator Writer-director Jane Schoenbrun’s new film, “I Saw the TV Glow,” is set for a buzzy Sundance premiere, shrouded in secrecy, and could be A24’s biggest horror release of 2024. Yet the heart of the film is delicate and intimate, centered around what the trans community refers to as “the egg crack moment.” Schoenbrun, who is trans and non-binary, defines the term as “when you stop pretending you’re not trans, trying to desperately find every reason why you’re not, and admit for the first time that you are.

Steeped in what its audience might deem mature mythology, “The Pink Opaque,” a fantasy show aimed at teen audiences, comes on at 10:30 PM on the Young Adult Network every Saturday. Unfortunately for Owen (first played by Ian Foreman), a meek mixed-race middle school boy growing up in the 1990s, that’s past his strict bedtime.