Once a month, I share the best of what I’ve been reading, watching, and exploring. Enjoy!
Books
Making Movies by Sidney Lumet. I wrote my first feature film and I’m planning to direct it, so I picked up this book for research. It reads more like a memoir than a manual. Lumet directed films like 12 Angry Men and Dog Day Afternoon, and he shares it all in this book—how you talk an actor off a ledge, why a lens choice is an emotional decision, what a studio note actually means. If you love films, it’s the closest you’ll get to standing on a set.
Films
The Odyssey (2026). [Theaters] I saw this in IMAX 70mm and sat there with my jaw open for most of it. Nolan shot the whole thing on IMAX film cameras, a first, and you can feel it in every frame. A few of the characters and storylines needed more room to breathe. Still—go see it on the biggest screen you can find.
Blue Heron (2025). I almost bailed thirty minutes in—it moves slowly. I’m so glad I stayed. It’s a film about a family falling apart in the late ’90s, seen through the eyes of the youngest kid. Stunning, haunting, emotional time travel. Hard to believe this is the first feature Sophy Romvari directed.
Hard Eight (1996). Another great feature debut—this time by Paul Thomas Anderson, same director as One Battle After Another. An aging gambler picks up a broke stranger outside a diner, teaches him the trade, and for a while the two of them do fine. Then a cocktail waitress turns up and it all starts to come apart. Philip Baker Hall plays the gambler, and he does more with a coffee cup than most actors manage with a monologue.
I Want Your Sex (2026). [Theaters] A young man takes a job assisting a famous artist and gets recruited as her muse, which goes about as well as that sounds. Olivia Wilde crushes every scene she’s in.
Get Shorty (1995). A Miami loan shark flies to LA to collect a debt and discovers the movie business runs on the exact same threats, just better catered. Travolta has never been cooler, and Gene Hackman has never been more of a mess. Thirty years later, it’s still great.
Shows
Silo Season 3 (Apple TV+). The premise: ten thousand people in an underground silo, no memory of how they got there, and one rule—never say you want to go outside. Season two was a bit of a drag. This season picks up strong—it splits between Juliette in the silo and an origin story set centuries earlier, and the flashback thread is really well done.
Poetry
Graveyards by Ellowen. I’ve loved her poetry for a while now, and this one might be my favorite. A stunning love letter to a place most people walk past.
Related
Bold
