Hello Party people!

I hope this message finds you well. Me, I’m abuzz with anticipation! I leave for Venice, Italy, Europe next Thursday, kicking off a whirlwind tour of cinema’s glittering new merchandise. It’s really all I can think about right now, imagining myself sailing out of the Pala Grande on the Lido, or twirling out of the Princess of Wales theater in Toronto, eager to give you all the Good News about some freshly minted masterpiece. 

Of course, there is also some anxiety there, too. What if it’s a letdown? Kind of like Cannes was? And, uh, Sundance certainly was too? The industry mood has been not so great of late, at least where film festivals and so-called prestige movies are concerned. Box office wise? Sure, that’s been a party, an obsessive hail Mary odyssey toward the backrooms of a brand new day. But in terms of the, y’know, real movies, it’s been troublingly quiet and underwhelming. It is my great hope that the festivals of Italy, Canada, and Colorado, USA (which kinda has the best-seeming lineup of the three?) turn that all around. 

But I’ve got well over a week to wait before those hopes are either dashed or realized. In the meantime, I must give you recommendations, as is my sacred duty. The trouble is, this week has been a real bare-bones affair. I was going to go see the new Jason Statham screwball farce Mutiny yesterday afternoon, but a great big storm came whipping its way across New York City (there was even a tornado in Rockaway; I’m told everyone is okay, unless you count beach cabanas as people) and I figured I’d better stay home instead of risking injury to see a nearly 60-year-old man do more of the same thing he’s been doing for 20 years. 

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So, that was off the potential recommendations list. I already wrote about my favorite new release of the week, the excellent horror-drama It Ends, and I didn’t want to repeat myself. I’ve heard Spa Weekend is awful (shocking coming from the guys who wrote Bad Moms). I did not want to see The Magic Faraway Tree because of an upsetting incident in my childhood involving a magic faraway tree. And I’ve never seen an Insidious movie before, so I didn’t want to start with Insidious: Out of the Further.

Though, I am curious where the Further is and how you get out of it. I guess it’s like an inversion of that old expression, “out of the farther pan and into the further”? Maybe I should have taken a chance on that one to find out, but now it’s too late. (Though, a friend did tell me an interesting tidbit about how the actor Lin Shaye, who is in the Insidious movies and was memorably grotesque in There’s Something About Mary years ago. Apparently she is really famous in Peru because they love horror movies down there and Shaye was big in the genre back in the 1980s. Isn’t that fun? Everyone’s got a fandom somewhere.)

On the TV side of things, oh boy is there nothing new to report. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia returned this week for its 92nd second, and it’s still pretty funny, but I don’t have much to say about it beyond that. Hopefully you know if you like or don’t like that show by now. A new season of Outer Banks started on Netflix, but I feel like we’ve all moved past that and are now basking in the cool northern teen waters of Sterling Point instead. (Though, Outer Banks can’t possibly be about teens anymore, right? It’s now about shirtless 30-year-olds?) Really, the only exciting new thing on streaming is that Mother Mary has dropped on HBO Max. I don’t love the movie, but it certainly has its merits, and is necessary viewing if you’re looking to collect the complete 2026 Anne Hathaway box set. 

This is all a long way of saying that I don’t have anything brand-spanking-new to recommend for you today. Instead, what if I clued you in on what I watched this week during my fully civilian hours? Like, sitting on the couch post-6PM, with my partner, dinner on the table. (Sadly that means coffee table; New York livin’, baby!) To that end, here is a sampling of my off-the-clock entertainment diet this week.