Happy Friday, dear letter-openers. 

Today begins the very last weekend of summer 2026, which hardly feels possible. It seems like just yesterday, or at least just a few weeks ago, that June was busting out all over. And now we are tilting away from the sun, toward the cold of night. (Unless, of course, you live in the Southern Hemisphere; if that is the case, greetings alpacas!) It is true that, before things get really bad, we will get to enjoy a little of autumn, its crispness and back-to-school bustle. But that won’t last terribly long, will it? Because nothing seems to these days. 

This morning, I was trying to remember what I did in July. Like, for the entire month. I know I visited my parents over the 4th, and I know I saw The Odyssey at some point, but beyond that? How the hell did I spend my time? It will forever remain a mystery. Maybe I should start keeping a diary or an appointment book or something, so I can look back at it on days such as this, when I am desperate to recall how I spent my life just a few weeks ago. 

Oh well. Better to look forward, isn’t it? And boy oh boy, there is a lot on the horizon. Soon enough, Aaron Sorkin will be righteously lecturing us about Facebook once again, the sand twunk of the cosmos will be back astride his giant worm, and Rachel Zegler’s face will be filling Times Square as she belts out “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” to the masses. And I’m sure there’s some interesting TV on its way, too. 

But what about this weekend? How should you enjoy these last wild and precious hours before the dread dark descends? Well, you should probably get outside and commune with the world, but if that all sounds like too much, you could watch a few things. 

Resident Evil

Just a year after his smash success Weapons, writer-director Zach Cregger brings us a new spookfest, with a twist. Well, I mean, the twist is that this time Cregger has adapted some IP, specifically the vidja game series Resident Evil, a zombie horror-action that has been transporting players to Raccoon City and pitting them against the Umbrella Corporation for 30 years now. Of course, many film adaptations of the games have preceded Cregger’s: if you’re ever driving in a particularly leafy enclave of Los Angeles and see a great mansion behind enormous iron gates and the mailbox outside reads, “Jovovich-Anderson,” know that that’s the house Resident Evil built. 

Those Milla Jovovich films were kinda trashy “biopunk” thrillers, whereas Cregger has endeavored to make something more suspenseful—and, sure, artful. He really succeeds for the first half of the film, which finds a specialized courier (Austin Abrams) trying to transport some kind of human organ to a hospital in Raccoon City, unaware that there’s been a viral outbreak that turns people (and animals) into ghouls. He discovers this while driving on a snowy road, a sequence that Cregger fills with frightening tension, leavened by humor. It’s a pretty great stretch of film, as we follow the courier out of his car, across a snowy field, into a farm house, and then back out again. Scary, gory things happen, but Cregger doesn’t show us too much. He keeps the bigger story implied by these small events at an evocative distance.