The hottest Film Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways

The Film That Should Be Nominated

Animation Obsessive • 21976 implied HN points • 09 Mar 26

🎭️ Culture Film

Nobody is a low-budget Chinese 2D film that mixes traditional ink-wash aesthetics with cinematic realism to tell a funny, emotional story about ordinary ‘nobodies,’ and it connected deeply with Chinese audiences.
Major Chinese animated hits like Nezha 2 and Nobody were absent from the Oscars shortlist, highlighting how submission and qualification choices — not just quality or popularity — shape awards visibility.
Nobody’s success shows that small, culturally rooted, story-first animation can compete with big-budget spectacles, and the global animation scene is alive with diverse projects and teases from studios worldwide.

Popular Art

Animation Obsessive • 717 implied HN points • 13 Mar 26

🎭️ Culture Film

China’s recent breakout animated hits grew out of the indie Flash and festival scene, which mixed art-house ideas with broadly appealing storytelling.
A 2022 film made by art-house animators tried to cross into the commercial market but flopped despite praise, underscoring how risky and difficult crossover projects can be and how investors and regulators often hesitate.
Some producers believe there is a real market for well-made, emotionally honest, locally rooted animated films that can reach both parents and children, and they hope more creators will attempt that blend of art and mass appeal.

Links for March

By Reason Alone • 50 implied HN points • 26 Mar 26

🎭️ Culture Film

Transformer and GPT breakthroughs have reshaped how people build language models and sparked lively debates about agents, AGI timelines, and whether markets expect transformative AI. Economists and researchers still disagree about when AI will be transformative and what that would do to interest rates and the wider economy.
Classic free-market arguments remain influential but often skip important institutional and empirical details, so policies like tax changes or minimum wages can have very different effects depending on context. Careful evidence and nuanced models are needed rather than broad claims.
This month’s curation mixes culture, research, and community: podcasts, albums, papers, grants, and meetups all feed into conversations about science policy and funding. In Ireland there’s a clear push toward building research capacity and a metascience unit to improve how science is funded and evaluated.

The Saturday Selection, Vol. 96

Why is this interesting? • 241 implied HN points • 14 Mar 26

🎭️ Culture Film

Surprising cultural trends and odd solutions keep cropping up — from Istanbul’s booming hair-transplant industry to a celebrity Oreo being used against New Zealand possums, and festivals like SXSW acting as soft-power showcases.
There’s a growing worry that instrumentalisation and AI are draining intrinsic value from life and art, turning feelings, faith, and creativity into mere means to an end.
Media and sports are shifting toward realism and management: movie dads are portrayed more honestly and with nuance, while the modern NBA is dominated by injury management and strategic rest.

Takamoto and Disney and the War

Animation Obsessive • 19733 implied HN points • 02 Mar 26

🎨 Art & Illustration Film

He endured Japanese American internment as a young man and used his drawing talent to get a start at Walt Disney after the war.
At Disney he became a meticulous cleanup and quality-control artist who refined key characters and kept films visually consistent, shaping looks like Lady and Aurora.
He later moved to Hanna-Barbera, where he designed iconic TV characters (most famously Scooby-Doo) and left a lasting legacy in animation.

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Tuesday night dinner

What Do We Do Now That We're Here? • 2408 implied HN points • 29 Oct 24

🎭️ Culture Film

Finding moments of presence in everyday life can create special experiences, like enjoying dinner while listening to film scores. It's important to appreciate these small, joyful moments before they become memories.
Film scores can evoke strong emotions and help connect with deeper feelings. They can change a regular evening into something meaningful simply through music.
Building community and connection is crucial for emotional support. It helps both parents and lonely individuals find joy and purpose together.

There Are Many Different Ways to Commodify Black Culture

Freddie deBoer • 7085 implied HN points • 14 Mar 26

🎭️ Culture Film

White liberal praise can be performative and act as a kind of gaze that commodifies Black culture, turning art into a status symbol rather than letting it simply be art.
Awards-season pressure and conversation often make recognition feel like an obligation, which rubs off on how people judge Black films and pushes critics to read political profundity into works that may just be straightforward entertainments.
Focusing on symbolic wins like Oscars distracts from real, material efforts to address Black poverty and inequality; sometimes letting a movie be a movie and prioritizing concrete policy would do more good.

The Weekend Press: Bad Therapy, Coming to a Screen Near You

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 259 implied HN points • 21 Mar 26

🎭️ Culture Film

Popular TV and reality shows are glamorizing bad therapy by showing therapists who break boundaries and people using “therapy-speak” to excuse harmful behavior, which can mislead viewers about what real therapy looks like.
A recent legal win for an artist who mocked police after a flawed raid is being seen as a strong defense of free speech and a check on official misconduct.
The newsletter highlights cultural reinvention and leisure—profiles of people who reinvent their careers, movie and music picks, and simple weekend recommendations to read, listen, or get outside.

Ryan Gosling’s New Film Will Have You Crying Over a Rock

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 343 implied HN points • 20 Mar 26

🎭️ Culture Film

This year’s awards season and the Oscars were chaotic and controversial, with surprising wins, no-shows, and public political gestures.
Ryan Gosling’s Project Hail Mary is a moving, human-centered sci-fi that hits hard emotionally despite its space setting and mostly single-character focus.
Red-carpet interviews and awards coverage have become influencer-driven spectacles chasing viral moments, often at the expense of real conversation.

Dangerous Light

Animation Obsessive • 23859 implied HN points • 13 Feb 26

🎨 Art & Illustration Film

Classic cel-animation light came from photographic tricks like backlit/bi-pack exposures, holdout mattes and lens effects, not just simple on-screen glows.
The analog look depends on film behavior — aggressive inverse-square falloff, color shifts, halation, bloom and grain — which standard Gaussian glows don’t reproduce.
To recreate that “dangerous” light digitally you must layer custom glows and then push them through film emulation and texture, intentionally reintroducing the imperfections that digital pipelines usually remove.

The Same Stories

Animation Obsessive • 2063 implied HN points • 06 Mar 26

🎨 Art & Illustration Film

After wartime exile he returned to Italy and quickly made a name designing striking, expressive stage sets and costumes that mixed old‑world grotesques with modernist shapes.
He moved freely between theater, illustration, ceramics and animation, treating each medium as a different vehicle to tell the same stories.
His stop‑motion films with Giulio Gianini won wide acclaim and a major 1980 exhibition collected his work, with the show’s catalog remaining a valuable resource on his designs.

How the Little Guy Moved

Animation Obsessive • 19105 implied HN points • 09 Feb 26

🎨 Art & Illustration Film

Early game creators borrowed traditional animation tricks like rotoscoping to make tiny, low-resolution characters move in believable, fluid ways even on very limited hardware.
Creators used highly inventive, hands-on workflows — filming live motion, tracing frames, Xeroxing silhouettes and digitizing them — to convert real movement into economical pixel animation.
Good animation decisions, not just better hardware, made the work memorable and durable, so lively motion stayed effective and influential as games moved to newer platforms.

In the New Toy Story Movie, Toys Lose Their Jobs to AI

The Honest Broker • 9741 implied HN points • 23 Feb 26

🎭️ Culture Film

The tech backlash has gone mainstream and is shaping public debate in 2026, with even tech companies joining the pushback.
Toy Story 5 shows toys worried about being replaced by an AI device, highlighting anxieties about screen addiction and technology taking roles and relationships away from people.
There’s striking irony in a studio that helped launch digital film now making an anti-tech movie, which suggests cultural attitudes toward technology are shifting.

Hollywood Franchise Reboots Are Full of Overpowering, Stultifying Reverence

Freddie deBoer • 5785 implied HN points • 02 Mar 26

🎭️ Culture Film

Many modern franchise reboots treat their own past like sacred scripture, stuffing films with reverent callbacks and sentimental moments that make new entries feel self-serious and stale.
This kind of reverence kills surprise and risk, so studios default to safe repetition, rigid canon, and fan-service instead of bold storytelling or real invention.
Original hits often worked because they were irreverent and playful, so revivals should treat old material as clay to reshape and update, not as relics to be worshipped.

A captivating, enigmatic, period family saga; a stunning, hand-drawn, surrealist animated masterpiece; and more

Read Max • 579 implied HN points • 17 Mar 26

🎭️ Culture Film

Two book picks stand out: a mysterious, beautiful family saga set between Denmark and Russia around the Russian Revolution, and a beloved classic that turns out to be a real page-turner.
A set of essays explores the A.I. economy, the shadow of Tolkien in tech culture, and stylistic tics of large language models like contrastive corrections.
There’s a recommendation for a surreal, hand-drawn post‑apocalyptic animated masterpiece with influences from Jodorowsky, Tarkovsky, Moebius, and classic JRPGs, plus a short list of four music tracks worth checking out.

‘One Battle After Another’ Is Irredeemable

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 1377 implied HN points • 13 Mar 26

🎭️ Culture Film

The movie is presented as another sign that Hollywood has fallen into moral, artistic, and creative ruin.
The industry’s diversity and inclusion mandates are depicted as politicized rules that undermine artistic freedom and provoke deep resentment among filmmakers.
A top auteur is imagined retaliating by staging a big prank or satirical stunt to expose and mock the petty politicking in modern Hollywood.

What I Learned from Binge-Watching Cowboy Movies

The Honest Broker • 17587 implied HN points • 07 Feb 26

🎭️ Culture Film

Classic westerns offered clear moral authority and simple hero-versus-villain stories that gave audiences a comforting sense of right and wrong.
Social and cultural upheavals made the genre darker and more ambiguous, spawning antihero and nihilistic westerns that eroded that moral certainty.
The western still matters today as a flexible mythic space to debate authority, virtue, and the trade-offs between freedom and order, and it can swing between deconstruction and revival.

Fifty People Control the Culture

The Honest Broker • 40294 implied HN points • 11 Jan 26

🎭️ Culture Film

About fifty people—CEOs and executives at major tech and media companies—effectively control the culture today, concentrating power in movies, music, books, and online media.
Most of these leaders are technocrats who care more about profits and share prices than art, which pushes out risky or meaningful creativity.
Independent platforms like Substack, Patreon, and Bandcamp give creators more control and deserve support, because strengthening the indie counterculture is the only realistic way to restore diversity and innovation.

Miyazaki's Sherlock

Animation Obsessive • 32560 implied HN points • 12 Jan 26

🎭️ Culture Film

Miyazaki took the Sherlock Hound job during a career lull and treated it as serious creative work. He reshaped the premise into richly realized, three-dimensional worlds full of flying machines, emotional characters, and old-fashioned slapstick energy.
Sherlock Hound was an Italian–Japanese co-production that ran into constant creative clashes and funding problems. Italians wanted a flatter, more commercial style while Miyazaki pushed for cinematic quality, and production stalled after a funding delay leading to his departure.
Even though the series was partly shelved, the episodes Miyazaki and his team made are high-quality and influential. The project became a training ground for young talent who later worked at Studio Ghibli and helped Miyazaki grow as a filmmaker.

'A Film for All Times'

Animation Obsessive • 14710 implied HN points • 02 Feb 26

🎭️ Culture Film

Small, incidental gestures and tiny, “unnecessary” movements make puppet characters feel alive and give scenes real emotional weight.
A simple script can become timeless when a thoughtful director, expressive design, and devoted animators collaborate and pour genuine feeling into every moment.
The animation world remains vibrant but unsettled, with restorations, festivals, and new projects alongside losses and political and economic pressures shaping what gets made and seen.

Why Continue After Five Years?

Animation Obsessive • 6458 implied HN points • 15 Feb 26

🎨 Art & Illustration Film

They’re celebrating a five‑year anniversary for their animation newsletter, marking a big milestone in the project’s life.
The project began as a Twitter account about animation and evolved into a full publication run by co-runners.
The newsletter uses a paid subscription model with a seven‑day free trial and gated archives for paid readers.

Oscar-Winning Storyboards

Animation Obsessive • 1614 implied HN points • 27 Feb 26

🎨 Art & Illustration Film

The newsletter issue focuses on storyboarding, using case studies from Oscar-winning animated work across different years.
The timing is tied to the Oscars, suggesting the awards season makes the topic especially relevant right now.
The full article is behind a paywall and requires a subscription, but a 7-day free trial is offered and existing paid readers can sign in.

Oscars 2026 - Thoughts & Predictions

Obvious Bicycle • 328 implied HN points • 15 Mar 26

🎭️ Culture Film

One Battle After Another is the predicted Best Picture winner despite Sinners’ record nominations and recent wins, while Marty Supreme is widely regarded by many as the best film but is unlikely to take the top prize.
Best Actor looks like the night’s wild card — Timothée Chalamet and Michael B. Jordan are the main frontrunners and a DiCaprio upset is possible, with Chalamet slightly favored in most predictions.
Technical and craft awards are expected to be split mainly between Sinners and One Battle After Another, with Marty Supreme strong in editing and score, and there’s a broader sense that the Academy is playing it safe by concentrating nominations and wins among a small group of films.

HALLOWEEN HORRORS (cont.)

THREE SEVEN MAFIA • 579 implied HN points • 23 Oct 24

🎭️ Culture Film

Rob Zombie's version of 'Halloween' presents a more human and demonic Michael Myers, giving depth to his character as he deals with abuse and violence.
The portrayal of Dr. Loomis is twisted, showing him as a con man looking to profit from Michael's killings, which reflects modern culture's obsession with crime and entertainment.
The film 'Lifeforce' offers a unique blend of sci-fi and horror with its storyline about energy vampires, featuring impressive special effects and an adventurous feel despite being a commercial flop.

I'm Recommending 12 New YouTube Videos

The Honest Broker • 7846 implied HN points • 01 Feb 26

🎭️ Culture Film

YouTube supports and pays independent creators, making it a strong alternative to centralized platforms like Netflix.
A curated list of a dozen new videos highlights varied topics—from the long Harvard study on living well to a documentary about poet Weldon Kees and an exploration of AI’s effects on music.
Readers are urged to support indie voices financially or by sharing and suggesting videos to help sustain independent creators.

Satoshi Kon's Impossibly Real Tokyo

Animation Obsessive • 21617 implied HN points • 15 Dec 25

🎨 Art & Illustration Film

Satoshi Kon paired exaggerated, cartoony character animation with extremely realistic, photo-based backgrounds. This deliberate contrast heightens emotional impact and makes the characters' performances pop.
The backgrounds were created from heavy photo reference, detailed storyboards, and digital layering techniques like repeated white-on-white snow painting and "harmony processing." Limiting camera moves and reusing angles let the team spend more time adding dense, lived-in detail to each shot.
Contemporary animators are pushing craft and storytelling with mixed techniques — for example, Alina Popescu's music video Other I uses reference-driven animation, strong composition, and layered effects to tell a compact, powerful story. Meanwhile the industry is being reshaped by major news such as prominent passings, shifting box-office patterns, and debates around AI and censorship.

Hating Stranger Things During the Death Rattle of Criticism

Freddie deBoer • 29764 implied HN points • 05 Dec 25

🎭️ Culture Film

Honest negative criticism is disappearing because critics and outlets avoid upsetting fanbases, turning cultural commentary into timid PR instead of meaningful evaluation.
Stranger Things is held up as an example of that decay: it's criticized for lazy nostalgia, contrived plotting, too many characters, weak visuals, and pandering that flattens people and moral consequences.
Fandom-driven reference culture and fear of backlash prioritize viral, comforting content over authenticity and nuance, tokenize representation, and discourage critics from calling out bad art.

It’s Not His Fault He Used the N-Word

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 2165 implied HN points • 24 Feb 26

🎭️ Culture Film

A man with Tourette’s involuntarily shouted the N-word during the BAFTAs and the moment was captured on camera, visibly upsetting the presenters.
The outburst divided people into two camps: those prioritizing anti-racism and those warning against ableism toward someone with a neurological condition.
Many argue the proper response should be compassion and understanding of his involuntary symptoms rather than public disgust and punishment.

Closing Out 2025

Animation Obsessive • 17222 implied HN points • 19 Dec 25

🎨 Art & Illustration Film

Focusing on human-made craft in animation offers a meaningful alternative to generic, AI-driven content and keeps attention on artistic skill.
Highlighting artists who work with materials like oil, sand, paper, wool, or metal pins shows how creative techniques and perseverance matter even when industry and politics make things harder.
Celebrating concrete wins, growing an audience, and sharing work freely during hard times helps sustain the creative community, while planned breaks and continued effort keep the project viable for the future.

The Weekend Press: Oscars Weekend!

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 292 implied HN points • 14 Mar 26

🎭️ Culture Film

It’s Oscars weekend, and critics are sharply divided about the Best Picture frontrunners while the newsletter offers specific film and performance picks to watch.
A new documentary about the manosphere is widely criticized as shallow and unilluminating, suggesting the online misogyny scene resists easy explanations.
Andrew Yang’s warnings about large-scale AI-driven job loss and the need for policies like a basic income are gaining credibility and raising concerns about economic and political upheaval.

When Yuri Norstein Appeared

Animation Obsessive • 1435 implied HN points • 20 Feb 26

🎨 Art & Illustration Film

A new Blu-ray release has made Yuri Norstein’s films far more accessible in the U.S., collecting famous shorts and rarer restorations including his debut.
Norstein’s debut, The 25th – The First Day (1968), is unlike his later poetic character films: it has no plot or familiar characters and works as a music-driven "revolutionary étude" timed to Shostakovich.
Although it looks like propaganda, the film was criticized and partially censored in the Soviet era and can be read as a layered, personal meditation on a past epoch rather than a straightforward celebration of the October Revolution.

How the Star of 'Wicked' Just Sabotaged Her Own Movie

The Take (by Jon Miltimore) • 356 implied HN points • 22 Oct 24

🎭️ Culture Film

Cynthia Erivo reacted strongly to a fan's edited poster of 'Wicked', claiming it was offensive and degraded her. Many thought her response was an overreaction and not necessary.
This kind of response from Hollywood actors is becoming more common. Some stars seem to let their egos get too big, which can harm their own films.
There's a growing trend where people in entertainment see themselves as victims of oppression. This makes it hard to enjoy their work when they focus on perceived grievances instead of celebrating their art.

Things Worth Remembering: The Iranian Movie to Watch This Weekend

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 709 implied HN points • 06 Mar 26

🎭️ Culture Film

People have a natural tendency called apophenia to see patterns and make stories out of random events, a trait that once helped survival but now often fuels conspiracy and confirmation bias.
Reading past art as prophetic is risky because coincidence can be mistaken for meaning, yet people do it to validate their beliefs and feel on the right side of history.
The Iranian film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night is visually striking and, in the context of Iran’s unrest, contains moments that feel eerily prophetic, echoing the courage of women who have risked everything to defy the government.

Hollywood Is Turning into a Content Farm for Silicon Valley

The Honest Broker • 17221 implied HN points • 10 Dec 25

💼 Business Film

Big tech is buying up Hollywood and turning studios into content factories geared for streaming and tiny screens, with AI poised to replace many creative roles.
Streamers prioritize subscriptions and franchises over theatrical releases, which is hollowing out movie theaters and the communal big-screen experience.
Independent filmmakers are the main hope to preserve cinematic art and big-screen culture, but it’s uncertain they can withstand tech money and AI-driven content production.

All Kidding Aside, I Find the Creative Arc of Stranger Things to Be Quite Sad

Freddie deBoer • 8663 implied HN points • 13 Jan 26

🎭️ Culture Film

The show started as a tight, self-contained story but gradually retconned and overcomplicated itself, which weakened its original themes and emotional clarity.
Internet fandom and the pressure to keep expanding a franchise drove creators to add more characters, lore, and big reveals, often at the expense of coherent plotting and character development.
Industry and production trends — long gaps between seasons, low episode counts, and visuals composed for social-media clipability — eroded the show’s momentum and cinematic atmosphere.

HALLOWEEN HORRORS (cont.)

THREE SEVEN MAFIA • 759 implied HN points • 15 Oct 24

🎭️ Culture Film

Phantasm II is a sequel that captures the essence of the 1980s horror trend. It's a fun film with great action where the characters fight against a powerful evil entity.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is a dark and brutal film that portrays the reality of serial murder without glamorizing it. It's a raw look at a killer's life and actions.
Prince of Darkness blends horror and science fiction in a unique way. It explores deep themes while maintaining a creepy atmosphere, making it a standout John Carpenter film.

Inherent Vice is PT Anderson's Best Film

Freddie deBoer • 4826 implied HN points • 29 Jan 26

🎭️ Culture Film

Inherent Vice is Paul Thomas Anderson’s best film because its loose, comedic, and shaggy style hides a deep, humane sadness and a standout Joaquin Phoenix performance.
When great directors let go of solemn gravitas and embrace messy, undignified comedy they can reach truer, more compassionate work, as seen in Inherent Vice and Raising Arizona.
The film uses noir’s foggy, unresolved plotting to show emotional truths about loss, the end of the 1960s counterculture, and people who keep trying to care even when the world won’t reciprocate.

Things Worth Remembering: James Van Der Beek Was the Best of Us

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 2198 implied HN points • 15 Feb 26

🎭️ Culture Film

He wanted to teach his kids how easy it can be to laugh, to love, to cry, to learn, and to find joy in both the plans and the detours alike.
He became a defining teen idol through Dawson’s Creek and left a strong nostalgic imprint on the generation that grew up watching him.
His death at 48 after battling cancer prompted people to remember both his on-screen work and the heartfelt life lessons he shared.

‘Marty Supreme’ Is a Gift to Jews

Common Sense with Bari Weiss • 180 implied HN points • 13 Mar 26

🎭️ Culture Film

Marty Mauser is presented as an amoral, gifted, and reckless Jewish antihero who insists on being his own man.
Breaking free from narrow, often flattering stereotypes about Jews in pop culture matters, even if the new portrayals are unsettling.
The film is framed as defiant because it resists turning Jews into one-dimensional villains and instead engages provocatively with Jewish history and identity.

Marty Supreme

Life Since the Baby Boom • 3688 implied HN points • 30 Jan 26

🎭️ Culture Film

The film lacks a moral center and a convincing motive for its protagonist, so you never really root for Marty or understand why his quest matters.
The director prioritizes flashy technique and hyper-kinetic editing over character and story, making the movie feel showy and exhausting rather than meaningful.
Loud, anachronistic choices like the 80s-style synth score clash with the 1950s setting and distract from the film, so it can feel more grating than immersive.