Out on Film news
Friday, July 24 — Happy Friday, everyone! We’ve got some exciting local news to announce this week. Out On Film, Atlanta’s very own LGBTQ+ film festival – has announced its second-ever executive director. Cindy L. Abel – previously the first-ever executive director of the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Georgia Equality – will take on the position. Check out the full story here.
Without further ado … Action.
🎗️ Atlanta-born deaf actress Kaylee Hottle, known for her role in the “Godzilla vs. Kong” franchise, died in a car accident on Monday at the age of 18.
🎭 A locally produced play called “Queerly Departed” is fundraising before its world premiere at the SheATL Summer Theatre Festival this August.
🍿 Visionary Justice StoryLab is hosting a short film showcase called “Resisting Narratives of Erasure” on Aug. 20, celebrating original work from emerging Southeastern filmmakers.
🎉 Soul Cinema Sundays is hosting a screening of “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party” at the Plaza Theatre on Aug. 9.
🛑 A federal judge granted a temporary restraining order earlier this week, hitting pause on Paramount Skydance’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. The move comes after a group of 12 state attorneys general sued to block the merger.
💁♂️ And finally, in the tenth anniversary re-release poster for “La La Land,” the studio adjusted the position of Ryan Gosling’s wrist to make it a little straighter. I agree with Jason P. Frank – put Ryan Gosling’s gay little wrist back!
🇮🇹 Movies like the Robert Pattinson vehicle “Primetime,” Martin McDonagh’s “Wild Horse Nine,” and Danny Boyle’s film “Ink” about Rupert Murdoch will play at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Click here for the full lineup.
🤦♀️ Despite frightful reviews for his AI series about the American Revolution, “Black Swan” director Darren Aronofsky is still raising money for his AI studio (sigh).
This week’s newsletter includes an interview with Nicolas Winding Refn (huge news for me), a closer look at the new PBS series “Eons: Life and Death on Pangea,” and a review of the new Apple TV film “The Dink.” Plus, what’s playing at theaters this week, a new edition of Spotlight, and some reading recommendations for your lunch break.
Thanks for reading!
Sammie
🎨 Soak up the sun with Midsummer at ArtsXchange for a two-day festival of art, community, and family. Enjoy an evening art auction and dancing on July 31, then return Aug. 1 for free workshops, live entertainment, vendors, food, crafts, and games for all ages. More details. SPONSOR MESSAGE
Nicolas Winding Refn talks leaning into genre and unreality in ‘Her Private Hell’
🚀 In the lead-up to the release of his new film “Her Private Hell” – his first film since 2016’s “The Neon Demon” – filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn has spoken extensively about a near-death experience that he says left him dead for 25 minutes during heart surgery.
That experience left him reeling, he said, and filled him with a desire to return to the world of filmmaking, and make a movie like he’d never made before.
“Her Private Hell” is that movie. In a lot of ways, it shares DNA with Refn’s previous films like “The Neon Demon,” “Only God Forgives,” and “Drive” – Refn has never been one for traditional structures of storytelling. But in “Her Private Hell,” he takes that as far as he can, endeavoring to create a swirling kaleidoscope of genre and form – combining melodrama with horror, opera with film, and classic with modern sensibilities.
🔥 I spoke with Refn about the making of the film, which hits theaters this weekend. Check out our conversation here.
Dinosaur Summer. It’s here.
SPONSORED BY THE FERNBANK MUSEUM
🦖 The world’s most famous predator is back – and science is rewriting its story.
At Fernbank’s T. rex: The Ultimate Predator, discover how new research is changing what we know about the “tyrant lizard king,” from feathered ancestors to lightning-fast growth spurts. Explore life-sized models, hands-on interactives, and come face-to-jaws with a full-scale adult T. rex during Dinosaur Summer, now through Sept. 7.
➞ See the king of dinosaurs up close at Fernbank this summer.
‘Eons: Life and Death on Pangea’ combines storytelling and science
🌎 For Michelle (MB) Barboza-Ramirez and Gabriel-Philip Santos, science has always been a form of storytelling.
It was never a foregone conclusion that Santos and Barboza-Ramirez would both become scientists and hosts for “Eons.” Santos – a paleontologist, educator, and storyteller – started out his professional journey as a pre-med student, while Barboza-Ramirez – a naturalist and geoscience educator – was a business major and a self-proclaimed science hater.
The duo are now two of the four hosts of “Eons: Life and Death on Pangea,” a new six-episode series from PBS Digital Studios and Complexly that debuts on July 29. The series explores The Great Dying, a mass extinction event that wiped out more than 80 percent of Earth’s species hundreds of millions of years ago.
‘The Dink’ feels like an afterthought of a comedy
WEEKLY FILM REVIEW
🥒 I have a patchy relationship with Josh Greenbaum-directed narrative comedies. In 2021, he directed the Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo vehicle “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar,” an undersung hero of the absurdist comedy oeuvre. A couple of years later, we got the CGI dog comedy “Strays” – a far less successful outing, to say the least.
“The Dink,” Greenbaum’s newest film with a screenplay from Sean Clements, falls somewhere in the middle. The film follows Dusty Boyd (Jake Johnson), a former teenage tennis phenom who left the sport after a wrist injury (and a humiliating loss to Andy Roddick). Despite his fall from grace, there’s nothing Dusty loves more than tennis – and nothing he despises more than pickleball. Unfortunately for Dusty, pickleball is about to become an inevitability.
If I could speak on my own behalf, there’s no one who has more goodwill from me in Hollywood than Jake Johnson. I’ll give just about anything he does a chance, and in that regard, “The Dink” is … fine? It’s an inoffensive, forgettable comedy that only halfway plays to Johnson and the rest of the cast’s strengths. It’s not goofy or funny enough to be memorable, and often feels like a bit of an afterthought.
🎾 Read my full review here.
At the Movies!
If you’re looking for a movie to see in theaters this weekend, here’s what you’ve got to look forward to!
Movies releasing this weekend:
🎖️ “Her Private Hell”
🏍️ “Motor City” (pictured)
🇱🇧 “Do You Love Me”
🥀 “Hadestown: The Musical”
🇮🇹 “Brunello: The Gracious Visionary”
📖 “Reading Lolita in Tehran”
Special Events:
🧚 “FernGully: The Last Rainforest” @ The Plaza (Friday-Thursday)
🚕 “The Fifth Element” @ The Plaza (Sunday-Monday)
🪪 “Superbad” @ Springs Cinema & Taphouse (Sunday-Monday)
🎨 Soak up the sun with Midsummer at ArtsXchange for a two-day festival of art, community, and family. Enjoy an evening art auction and dancing on July 31, then return Aug. 1 for free workshops, live entertainment, vendors, food, crafts, and games for all ages. More details. SPONSOR MESSAGE
Spotlight: Robert Pattinson’s sniveling little year
There are a couple of actors this year who are already having quite the 2026 – and will continue to do so. My queen Anne Hathaway is one of them, of course. But today, I want to talk about another actor who has been with me since my fresh-faced preteen years – Robert Pattinson.
Pattinson already had “The Drama” earlier this year, and “The Odyssey” just this past weekend. Later this year, he’ll appear as the main villain in “Dune: Part Three,” opposite Denzel Washington in the Netflix thriller “Here Comes the Flood,” and as “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen in “Primetime.”
I don’t know much about “Here Comes the Flood,” and I’m sure “Primetime” will fall a little bit outside of the trend I’m about to note. But one of the most delightful things about watching Pattinson’s onscreen presence over the past several years has been witnessing him come into his own as a different type of leading man and supporting player – one who excels at playing sniveling, pathetic little losers.
If you’ve been watching closely, you’ll know that this has always been Pattinson’s bag. Back in his “Twilight” days, his Edward Cullen reads as a giant creep (watch the scene of him smelling Bella again, watch the “spider-monkey” scene again). And yet! Millions of teenage girls still fell head over heels. If that’s not a specific type of power, I don’t know what is.
And that power continues! It’s not so much that he’s playing against his looks – he is, of course, extremely handsome, but he’s also always had a certain haunted, sickly Victorian child type of je ne sais quoi. In his best roles, he capitalizes on that odd quality – and he seems to really love weaponizing it to play the biggest losers on the planet.
His role in “The Drama” is the best example of this particular penchant of his from this year. He plays Charlie like an idea of a man – barely held together with loose strings of anxiety and paranoia. He’s never had an original thought in his life, and he’s constantly agonizing over the way the rest of the world sees him. That anxiety, like in all the best Pattinson performances, bleeds over into his physicality and his voice, creating a picture of misery that not many other actors come close to. And I hope he never stops.
Lights, Camera, Action!
🎬 If you know me, you know that I – like the rest of the internet – love to fight over a list! I’m a sucker for that type of clickbait! Vulture just put out a list of the 100 most powerful directors in Hollywood, and I immediately had some thoughts (the fact that David O. Russell is on here at all … okay). Read the full list and form your own opinion here!
🎥 I, like everyone else I know, really loved “The Odyssey.” That being said, Mohamed Sleiman Labat’s piece for The Guardian about the production’s decision to shoot in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara made me think a lot about the responsibility that filmmakers have when they shoot overseas – especially when they choose to shoot in a place where indigenous people have to fight to tell their own stories. Read the full piece here.
📱 This next one isn’t necessarily explicitly film-related, but the commodification of assimilation of beauty standards has certainly played a role in the types of faces we see on film over the past several years. For The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino writes about the ways in which the prevalence of plastic surgery has eroded our sense of reality and intimacy.
🖊️ Today’s Scene was edited by Julie E. Bloemeke.
