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August 7, 2026 
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Hi, movie fans!
There’s no way around it: We’re in the doldrums of summer, with no big releases for awhile. That said, our critics have singled out a few interesting movies worth checking out.
Probably the biggest talker of the month is “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” the latest from the auteur Jane Schoenbrun. In this twisty tale, Hannah Einbinder plays an auteur herself, who’s been asked to reboot a fan-favorite horror franchise, while Gillian Anderson is the final girl from the original slasher movie. Our reviewer, Alissa Wilkinson, deemed it a critic’s pick, writing that the film is “constantly teetering on the edge of heavy-handedness — the killer in the series, with a ceiling vent for a head, is pointedly called ‘Little Death’ — but Schoenbrun has a delightful handle on tone, looping between melodrama, cartoonishly bloody homage and full-on fantasia.”
Another Wilkinson pick is “Late Fame,” from Kent Jones (whom you may remember as a former director of the New York Film Festival). In his newest movie, Willem Dafoe is a postal worker who once made a splash as a poet and is rediscovered in middle age by young downtown literary types. “A loving and lovely sensibility runs through ‘Late Fame,’” Wilkinson writes, “a fond and wise understanding of why some people want to become artists without making much art and why other people quit making it altogether.”
Also a critic’s pick is “Tony,” a biopic about a young Anthony Bourdain finding his vocation during a summer spent in Provincetown. Instead of a comprehensive life story, the director, Matt Johnson, gives us “a taste of a personality that’s tart and complex and sometimes self-destructive,” writes our reviewer, Jeannette Catsoulis.
Recently, my colleague Pete Wells visited the Cape Cod area in search of people who knew Bourdain at the time. He found that “it was still possible to see the place where his first career began and his next one may have started to percolate.”
Whatever you choose to watch, enjoy the movies!
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STREAMING RECOMMENDATIONS |
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