Epilogue: August 2026
The dog days are over.
Well, not quite, but hopefully soon: absurdly high temperatures made the siren’s song of an air-conditioned theater even more alluring than usual in August, especially for anyone who still hadn’t seen the actual sirens in The Odyssey. A kind of in-between time for movies, with the biggest blockbusters arriving at the end of July and the first awards hopefuls not due until September, the eighth month on the calendar rarely gets much love. But even a good-not-great movie is a worthwhile way to spend some time on a hot summer day, as several of these offerings proved.
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma
A cerebral, sapphic deconstruction of the slasher genre by a filmmaker who clearly wore out their VHS copy of every Friday the 13th movie as an impressionable youth, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is both too clever for its own good and not as clever as it thinks it is. The self-reflexive, inside-joke quality of writer/director Jane Schoenbrun’s first two features, the similarly long-winded We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow, is taken to grating new heights in what’s at once their boldest, most self-indulgent work to date. About an up-and-coming filmmaker (Hannah Einbinder, an obvious stand-in for Schoenbrun) who’s been hired to reboot the fictional Camp Miasma franchise, it follows her as she pitches the project to its original final girl: Billy Presley (Gillian Anderson), a Norma Desmond-esque recluse who now lives in the abandoned sleepaway camp where her original claim to fame was filmed.
Camp Miasma is so impressed by itself that it leaves little room for the audience to be, with Einbinder literally saying “I feel like there’s about to be a jump scare” at one point and the fictional slasher being named Little Death, a reference to a French euphemism for orgasms. Identifying and satirizing the problematic cliches of slasher movies is fairly low-hanging fruit at this point, though Schoenbrun does eventually zero in on something worth investigating: the tension that arises from loving — and, in our heroine’s case, being turned on by — dated media from your childhood that, unlike you, never adapted to the times. There’s a lot to unpack in the psychosexual sendup that follows, but less to enjoy; Camp Miasma is, if nothing else, proof that a rich text isn’t the same thing as a good movie.
The End of Oak Street
“It Follows director David Robert Mitchell made a dinosaur movie” was all it took to pique my interest; anyone whose viewing habits are less omnivorous can rest assured that The End of Oak Street mostly capitalizes on its zany premise: an entire suburban neighborhood is transported to a prehistoric jungle overrun by dinosaurs. After the uniformly terrible Jurassic World movies, this throwback starring Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor as a married couple protecting their kids from pterosaurs, allosaurus, et. al is a breath of fresh — and, presumably, humid — air for its first hour or so, at which point its tonal mishmash becomes more eyebrow-raising than endearing. That it was produced by Super 8 director J.J. Abrams partially explains why this feels like something Steven Spielberg would have directed in the ‘80s, as does the fact that it’s literally set in 1982. Only intermittently aware that it’s actually a comedy, however, Oak Street would have been considerably more entertaining had it leaned further into its inherent silliness. A notable exception: McGregor’s character seeing one of his new prehistoric neighbors for the first time and asking, entirely appropriately, “Is that a fucking dinosaur?”
Franz
In his biography The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kafka, Ernest Pawel describes his subject as “not a man who wrote, but one to whom writing was the only form of being, the only means of defying death in life.” Based on her biopic about one of the 20th century’s most important writers, Agnieszka Holland would appear to agree. Kafka (Idan Weiss), whose work is only known to us because his friend and executor Max Brod defied his wishes to destroy it, proclaims in an early scene that “all words have a unique, unmistakable worth.” Here and elsewhere he’s portrayed as highly sensitive, easily overstimulated, and most likely autistic — a concept that didn’t exist during his lifetime but has been retroactively applied to him.
He’s also forever at the beck and call of his domineering father, who’s straight out of the biopic factory: the elder Kafka wants his son to get more involved in the family business, dismisses his lifelong passion as “scribbling,” and, in one flashback, teaches him to swim by tossing him in a lake. Holland, a luminary of Polish cinema, clearly reveres the author of The Metamorphosis, The Trial, and The Castle (who doesn’t?), but by resorting to such cliches she fails to capture what made him so nonpareil. Interspersed throughout are testimonials from his friends and family speaking about him to the camera as though in a documentary — a particularly un-Kafkaesque affectation. Kafka likely would have died of embarrassment at the thought of someone making a movie about him, doubly so one like this.
Buddy
If you thought Too Many Cooks overstayed its welcome at 11 minutes, you probably won’t find yourself singing along to Buddy. If you grew up convinced that Barney and the Teletubbies were evil, however, Casper Kelley’s feature theatrical debut may be the demented horror-comedy of your dreams. An orange unicorn who exists solely on the set of a children’s show from the ‘90s (complete with boxy aspect ratio and VHS-grade visuals), the eponymous villain voiced by Keegan Michael Key is friendly enough if the children play along. Once they break the fourth wall, alas, it’s time to roll credits.
Perhaps surprisingly for anyone who knows him from his extensive Adult Swim output, Kelley is much more unsettling when he moves beyond gimmicks and stays grounded. Here that comes in the form of Grace (Cristin Milioti), whom we meet on the other side of the TV — a shift marked by the screen expanding and the picture quality improving. Grace’s story — which begins when she looks at an empty chair during dinner with her husband and two children, lets out a blood-curdling scream, and hires a psychic — is genuinely unnerving, especially when she links the two halves of Buddy’s narrative by saying something far more frightening than Buddy ever does: “I feel like we have a third child.”
Coyote vs. Acme
Are we secretly in the middle of a Looney Tunes renaissance? Following last year’s The Day the Earth Blew Up, this animated/live-action hybrid directed by Dave Green is finally in theaters despite Warner Bros.’ cynical attempt to shelve it for a tax write-off. The premise is brilliant: after repeatedly failing to catch the Road Runner with Acme products, Wile E. Coyote sues the corporation upon hearing a personal-injury attorney’s (Will Forte) TV pitch: “Have you ever pulled the ripcord of your parachute and only a bunch of silverware comes out?” Wile E. maintains his long tradition of not speaking throughout the ensuing trial, instead communicating via “a limited number of signs” and consistently hilarious facial expressions — his devious smile inspires many a belly laugh, as do cameos by Bugs, Daffy, and all the rest.
For as funny as it is, though, Coyote vs. Acme’s greatest achievement is the way it cleverly — and, at times, even sweetly — turns his monomaniacal quest into a missive on the importance of not only chasing your dream but having one in the first place. It directly invokes Sisyphus in doing so and brings to mind one of Samuel Beckett’s more optimistic passages: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” We all need a reason to get out of bed in the morning, after all, and is an elusive bird any less noble a pursuit than a white whale?
It came so close to never happening.
A veritable onslaught of new movies.
Things could get spicy on the Lido.
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By Michael Nordine, © 2025
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