Last night, I attended the first preview of Dear Evan Hansen at the John W. Engeman Theater in Northport — and Long Island theatergoers should take note: this production is not a simple community-theater reproduction of the Broadway hit. From the moment the house lights dimmed, it was clear this was an entirely reimagined staging, built from the ground up with a distinct visual and emotional vocabulary. I wore the iconic polo; I was not emotionally prepared for how the script by Steven Levenson and the memorable songs of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul would be interpreted.

The year 2026 has become a defining one for indie horror. First, audiences were reeled-in to Gen Z’s own interpretation of the consequences of wish-making in Obsession. Then, we saw a popular internet phenomenon come to life in Backrooms. And now, straight from this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Too Many Cooks creator Casper Kelly officially unleashes his feature-length directorial debut: Buddy, which can be considered to be the most bizarre film of the year, and that it is actually a compliment. What makes it actually work is its overall sense of imagination to take the rising concept of “mascot horror” and inject in real world-building from scratch with a dose of meta-commentary on the dark realities of what happened on the sets of various 80s and 90s children’s TV shows.

“Meep! Meep! Meep! Meep! Meep!” out of “Meep! Meep! Meep! Meep! Meep!” Stars! May we all be grateful to Ketchup Entertainment for saving the life of what is probably the best Looney Tunes feature film in a really, really long time. Take that, Warner Bros. and their attempt to use a tax write-off to bury this laugh-out-loud funny legal comedy with a ton of looney antics for everyone to enjoy.

To the world we dream about and the one we live in now. That quote hits even harder now than it did a decade ago. And never has a 21st century musical masterpiece like Hadestown shined beyond the stage with this cinematic ProShot recording of a performance filmed in London’s West End, being released a week after Christopher Nolan unleashed his own take on another epic story in Ancient Greek history.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is a festival of scale and intimacy — a crowd-pleasing blockbuster that also feels unmistakably Nolan: rigorous in structure, audacious in spectacle, and quietly human at its center. If any film is going to be remembered as the movie that owned summer 2026, this is it.

Well, I finally saw it. And it definitely was not what I, or many of us, were expecting this latest from the GOAT of filmmaking himself to be. Disclosure Day, Steven Spielberg’s new original science fiction thriller, takes some of the themes and concepts previously explored in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and brings them into the 21st century for a story about the relentless pursuit of the truth, while also making an earnest plea for the necessity of empathy.

I saw Nxt Generation Theatrics’ production of Jagged Little Pill today, and as an independent filmmaker, I left genuinely impressed. This nonprofit company—run by young artists aged 16–25—chooses to pare the piece down: instead of the usual spectacle that often surrounds this musical, the production places the story and the characters front and center. That choice pays off. The emotional core of Diablo Cody’s book, paired with Alanis Morissette’s raw, confessional songs from her iconic Grammy Award-winning album, feels immediate and urgent. Without the distraction of excess theatrics, you can actually hear and feel the pain, confusion, and occasional hope that drives the narrative.

The “City of Stars” was shining brighter than ever this past Saturday, April 11 as this was the perfect way to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Damien Chazelle’s 2016 Academy Award–winning modern musical classic La La Land. What made this screening singular was not simply the film itself, but the living, breathing soundtrack that accompanied every frame: composer Justin Hurwitz conducted a full orchestra and jazz band as they performed the score and songs — many co-written with Benj Pasek and Justin Paul — live in sync with the picture. The result was equal parts concert and cinematic resurrection, a rare event that reframed familiar images and sounds with the immediacy of live performance.