A quick request!

I’m getting ready to pack my bags for Venice and Toronto and I’d love to know what you want to see from fall film festival coverage, and beyond. Do you want more standalone reviews like the one below, do you prefer awards coverage, should I try to have a doomed romance with a sad-eyed gondolier? Please tell me by filling out the survey linked here. And thanks to all who have already given me your feedback. I’m so grateful for your insights (which, yes, I have been reading…).

In recent years, we have seen some (but not enough, certainly) dire reports about the state of young Americans, particularly the Gen Zers who are entering an adult world that is at best indifferent to them and at worst outright hostile. Some are laden with college debt and are seeing once viable career paths obliterated by AI-mad corporate management, stoked on by billionaire psychopaths striving to realize their dream of a permanent underclass. Others have found themselves trapped in a cavalierly, dangerously mismanaged military. Others still have already entered the work force, just as the last vestiges of labor protections are stripped away and wages creep ever closer toward the pittances of serfdom. 

These young people are also probably more aware of this decay than any generation before them: watching through their phones as rich people loot the coffers on their way to island bunkers, as unbearable heatwaves bear down on climate-ravaged cities, as neighbors or family members are dragged from their homes or shot in the streets for trying to stop a kidnapping, as foreign genocides are either ignored or wholly endorsed by their own government. And they’ve seen some of their peers seduced by noxious ideologies built by the very people seeking to rob them blind and destroy their future. 

At the age when the middle swath of this generation is meant to be embarking upon the great projects of their lives, doors seem to be shutting left and right, a villainous oligarchy is retreating ever further behind its castle walls, and very few older people seem to meaningfully care. Gen Zers are instead instructed to appreciate what they do have; it’s worse for other folks, in other places. Or they’re urged to gamble themselves to solvency—on crypto, on sports, on any random thing that might happen in the world—even though those markets are, of course, heavily rigged. Or they are told to simply stop agitating, to forgo a latte, to gaze at the precious few of their age cohort who have made millions as influencers or inherited fortunes as scions of dynasty and simply live vicariously through them as the machines descend, claws out, to extract whatever nutrients they can. 

Hearteningly, some of those young people are seeking out progressive political change, rallying behind causes and candidates even as their universities and parents and politicians rebuff and punish them at every turn. But if instead, for some kids, a hopelessness has taken hold, I wouldn’t blame them at all. Which is why I find the new film It Ends (in theaters August 21) to be so moving, so trenchant and urgent. Its writer-director, Alexander Ullom, is in his late 20s, and has made what I think might be the best, most cogent film about his generation’s worry and malaise to date. It is at once bitterly despondent and raggedly hopeful, a movie whose allegory resonates far more than recent attempts by older and more experienced filmmakers to similarly metaphorize our fraught times.