The Drama Club: August 2026
This month in The Drama Club: liminal spaces done wrong and maybe done right, Sofia Coppola was right all along, the novel nobody was allowed to film, DC puts down the skyline, and why speed isn't the same thing as desperation. Let's go →
Each month, I recommend two movies: one you can watch at home and one you should head out to the theater for. At the end of this section, you’ll find a list of some releases coming this month.
Last month, I watched Backrooms and rolled my eyes a lot. Liminal spaces, never ending hallways, strange rooms that maybe mean more than they let on, these are all things that deeply speak to me and the way I see the world. The first 20 minutes of the film had me in a vicegrip but then, as it continued to meander through the liminality, it lost me. I don’t need a psychological horror film to beat me over the head with its thesis, which is exactly what happens in the third act of Backrooms. In general, I believe art should assume its audience is smart. Backrooms, for some strange reason, did not. This month, another film seems to be seeking similar answers through a different type of never ending space. It Ends comes to theaters in LA and New York on August 21, everywhere the 28th, and follows a group of friends on a drive that leads them onto a never-ending, two lane road. The film premiered at SXSW last year and I have a hunch it’s a modern retelling of one of my favorite plays, Sartre’s No Exit. The most commonly used tagline for No Exit is “hell is other people,” which is an apt catch-all for a lot of what is happening in the realm of alt-horror films right now. As it happens, It Ends and Backrooms share a producer. Sometimes, we miss on our first shot. Let’s see if the team can land the plane on the second.
Sometimes being misunderstood is okay. Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette turns twenty this year and just landed on Netflix at the top of the month. I saw it in a theater in Santa Monica. I remember the walk out better than the walk in. The lobby was full of dissatisfied voices. People shrugging into their jackets, telling each other it was boring, that nothing happened. They were complaining? About what? The film was exactly what I had imagined. A portrait of an uncertain teenage girl thrust into the bacchanal of French aristocracy at the height of its opulence, through Coppola's lens of girlhood, silent defiance, and pastel romanticism. Gang of Four over pink script. Converse buried in the shoe pile. Cake that would hurt to eat. A girl at a window who has everything and cannot name what's wrong. It had reportedly been booed at Cannes months earlier, and that got reported like a verdict. Then came the think pieces, unsurprisingly written mostly by straight men. The complaint was consistent: the film was weakened by its romanticism. It refused to make Marie a villain. Instead of bread lines, we were fed macarons. All champagne and no starving country outside the gate. And, the biggest gripe, it ends before the guillotine. And that? That’s the tell. They wanted the head. Thankfully, my girl Sofia never gives it to them. The final shot is the wrecked bedchamber after the mob has come through. Chandelier down. Light coming in wrong. No blood, no lesson, no comeuppance. Just a room where a girl used to live. Meanwhile I was in my bedroom with the soundtrack in my headphones, thinking about one thing: what it means to be deeply unhappy while the entire world arranges itself to serve you. Everyone says they want that. Then you get it and it turns out to be a quiet kind of drowning. Aphex Twin at the end of the party, after the candles have gone out and nobody has anything left to say. Nobody wanted to hear that in 2006. It sounded like a complaint from someone with no right to complain. Now the world is on fire and everyone I know is some flavor of clinically depressed, and with three taps on a phone we can summon a driver, dinner, a stranger, a mattress by Thursday. The palace fits in our pocket. Every appetite gets answered within the hour. We are all the girl at the window now. Abundance without meaning, service without care. Marie Antoinette got its reappraisal, of course. It's on the lists, it's taught. The people in the lobby came around or went quiet. Being right later isn't the point. Coppola didn't make it for that room in Santa Monica and she didn't make it for the twenty-year victory lap either. She made it for the one person in the theater who already knew what it felt like to be handed everything and feel nothing, and who needed to see it in pink to believe it was real. We still want the head. We want the reckoning, the villain named, the story shut with a satisfying sound. What we get is the room after and nobody to blame in any way that helps. So sometimes being misunderstood is okay. Sometimes it just means you got there first, and everyone else is still in the lobby, shrugging.
More August Movies To Be Ready For:
Super Troopers 3 (August 7)
Tony (August 7)
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (August 7)
Union Country (August 14)
The Dog Stars (August 28)
Each month, I recommend two pieces of music: something new and something I have recently returned to. At the end of this section, you’ll find a list of some releases coming this month.
The best band name in recent memory belongs to Man/Woman/Chainsaw, a London-based band who are releasing their debut album Cannonball this Friday, August 7. Earlier this year, seeing the band’s name prompted a click from me on the Stereogum article for the album’s single “Nosedive.” Upon clicking play, I was immediately in the world of Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs and the soundscape of the Isaac Wood era Black Country, New Road. “Nosedive” is orchestral, baroque, thematic and immediately attention grabbing. It’s the kind of song a band can play at every show for the rest of their lives, with its ever-building final stretch the kind of anthemic release that is sure to bring a crowd into a roar. By the time the song ended, I knew it would be one of my favorite songs of the year. Now, three months later, it still remains in heavy rotation. The immediate next song on the record, “Get Up and Dance,” is nothing like the title would have you believe. The song is a dirge, a siren song beckoning you to the dance floor as a last rite. It contains the similar baroque instrumentation of “Nosedive” but trades euphoria for anxious collapse. Back to back, the pair of songs showcase what a band named Man/Woman/Chainsaw should be capable of: making you feel alive and then reminding you how being alive can be completely insane.
Last month, while laying on the couch with my legs entwined with my crush, I was introduced to Parallel Dance Ensemble. I had never heard of the band and he liked that, a little win in our never ending game of proving we each have great taste. The band has one album, 2011’s Possessions and Obsessions, an almost comically apt album title for an afternoon spent with someone you have a crush on. The record is a sparse nine tracks, never once outstaying its welcome. Inside those nine tracks are disco-funk jams that feel like walking into a bar in a country you’re visiting and feeling like a local in. It’s not overwhelming, never once pulling attention in a way that feels grandiose. In fact, the vocal delivery of New Zealand rapper Coco Solid is so effortless, so chic, that it feels like she barely cares that you're listening. That's the whole trick. Most rapping over disco is a pitch, while this is a shrug, which is what makes it cool. Beneath her is perfect disco instrumentation by Robin Hannibal, the Danish producer many will know as one of the original members of Rhye, one of the 2010s' most underrated bands. The Rhye connection will become tremendously clear as you two-step to opulent instrumentation that feels like a warm hug on a dance floor. The hug of Parallel Dance Ensemble is hinged on bass that walks instead of stomps, strings that show up and get out of the way, building on parts that shouldn't cohere but magically do. That’s why this album is now what I listen to while I run errands, cook dinner, talk on the phone with friends and everything in between. It simply works at every volume. Songs like “Juices” and “Wildchild” should be added to every playlist you have for your dinner parties, and this album must be thrown into rotation this month as we vibe under the summer sky.
More August Albums To Be Ready For:
Overmono – Pure Devotion (August 7)
Ravyn Lenae – Blue Island (August 7)
Jungle – Sunshine (August 14)
Phoebe Bridgers – Lost Weekend (August 14)
Sam Smith – Hazel Eyes (August 21)
Each month, I recommend two pieces of television, which means less and less these days but for our purposes, television means anything you can stream that isn’t structured as a film. At the end of this section, you’ll find a list of some releases coming this month.
I am surprising myself with how excited I am for Lanterns. I have never been invested in DC Comics. Nothing in the DC Cinematic Universe has gotten me remotely interested in becoming a fan. I have watched skylines collapse for fifteen years and felt nothing. So why do I care about this one? Reason one: Damon Lindelof. The Leftovers is my favorite television show of all time and his version of Watchmen is the kind of comic book adaptation everything else should aspire to. He co-created Lanterns with Tom King and Ozark's Chris Mundy, who runs the show. The Tom King part is reason two. King wrote Mister Miracle, about a god who can escape anything except his own depression, set mostly in a Los Angeles apartment. He wrote The Vision, in which an android builds a family in the Virginia suburbs and it ends the way you fear it will. He writes superheroes as people who are tired. That is the guy DC handed this to? LFG. Kyle Chandler (reason three) and Aaron Pierre star as the show’s Lanterns, Hal Jordan and John Stewart. I won't pretend to know the lore behind how the seemingly endless network of Lanterns works. All I know is they patrol the galaxy and wear rings that give them their powers. So, then, here is the actual pitch: Lanterns takes place in a small town in Nebraska, where two intergalactic cops are investigating a single murder. It’s as if True Detective had a power ring. Maybe taking away the ability to level a skyline in the third act will finally force DC to focus on characters and stories that mean something. If that doesn't work, nothing DC does will. Lanterns premieres August 16 on HBO.
Okay, did everyone know there was an adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude happening on Netflix? If so, why did no one tell me? The first eight episodes came out in December 2024 to fantastic reviews. The second and final eight arrive this month. Seven of them land on August 5. Then Netflix will make us wait three weeks for the finale, which is a nearly two-hour film directed by Laura Mora, arriving August 26. For those who may not have read the source material, (please do, immediately) One Hundred Years of Solitude follows one family over multiple generations inside a fictional Colombian town founded by the family patriarch. It is, without hyperbole, one of the greatest pieces of literature ever created. Here is what I didn't know. This is the book’s first screen adaptation. Ever. García Márquez spent his life refusing to sell the rights, because he didn't believe a feature film had the room for it and didn't believe it should exist in any language but Spanish. He died in 2014 and the book stayed unfilmed for another five years. It took his sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo, deciding the golden age of television had finally built a container big enough for this project to become real. They signed on as executive producers, decided the series was to be shot entirely in Colombia, entirely in Spanish, with three different versions of Macondo built for three different eras. Learning that reframed the whole thing for me. Adaptations happen constantly. This one needed permission from a dead man's family, and got it once. Hence, the risk is enormous. People know this book by heart. I know the opening sentence, the one with the firing squad and the ice, and so do you, and so does everyone who has ever finished it. Getting this wrong wouldn't be a bad review, it would be a desecration. As I write this I haven't seen a single frame. By the time the finale drops on the 26th I will have seen all of it. Watch it or don't. But for the love of God, get the book.
More August TV To Be Ready For:
Sterling Point - Amazon Prime (August 5)
The Shards - Hulu (August 5)
Ted Lasso - Apple TV (August 5)
Normal - HBO (August 14)
Bobby’s Triple Threat - HBO Max (August 25)
Each month, I dig into one cultural topic that feels unavoidable. Sometimes it’s a moment, sometimes it’s a movement, and sometimes it’s just a question I can’t stop thinking about.
Can I queen out for a second? I usually get to write about pop moments after they've already been decided. This one is still happening, so I'm taking it.
This is the fourth time this year I have written about this musician and, honestly, I don't care. In March, she was just another pop girl with an album coming out. In my Coachella recap, she was my favorite set of the weekend. Last month, her album was my favorite of the year so far.
And on Friday she made her Lollapalooza debut at 2:45pm on the Bud Light stage, the same one the Smashing Pumpkins would headline that night. That timeslot is how a festival tells you to expect a polite crowd. Instead over 50,000 people showed up.
Ladies and gentlemen, Slayyyter.
On Friday before her set, she released "brand new chanel$," a sister song to "BEAT UP CHANEL$," one of my favorite tracks of last year. "BEAT UP CHANEL$" came out August 1, 2025. "brand new chanel$" arrived almost exactly a year later and directly inverts it, right down to the cover art, which shows her upper body against the lower body of the original. God is in the details, people!
Driving through Joshua Tree with the windows rolled down and the summer heat beating against my face, the song spilled out of my speakers. The acoustic guitar plucking and harmonizing in the first 15 seconds immediately took me back to the 2000s. Tiësto's remix of Cary Brothers' "Ride" came back to me like a forgotten memory that wakes you from a dream. When the beat kicked in and the thump of the drum built, Jacques Lu Cont's Thin White Duke remix of The Killers' "Mr. Brightside" fell into view and I felt that pang in my stomach we used to feel when a new song could teach you something. I was a teenager again. The song was scrolling through my memories. As the chorus came crashing down, I shook my head. By taking the trance inspirations from the early 2000s and forcing them up against the bombastic arena pop of 2026, she had created a song it felt like I had known for decades. By the third time through, I knew all the words.
I told everyone in the group chat to listen immediately.
Then I waited.
I listened a few more times.
Then I went back.
Nobody was queening out. The objection came fast and it came polite.
Another one already?
Because "brand new chanel$" isn’t a loose single. It’s the first release from WOR$T MAN IN AMERICA, a sister album to WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA, which came out in March. That’s only four months. And yet, here we are. A new album is coming.
I understand the flinch. Charli xcx released Brat in 2024, then a full remix album of it, then a Wuthering Heights soundtrack in February, then Music, Fashion, Film just over a week ago. Even Lorde, notorious for going dark between albums, dropped 49 demos from Virgin in June to mark the album's first year. Somewhere in the last three years we started reading speed as desperation.
But we’re measuring the wrong thing. WOR$T MAN IN AMERICA isn’t more Slayyyter for more’s sake. It’s the same story from the other side, which is exactly what these two songs are doing. "BEAT UP CHANEL$" is the wreckage. "brand new chanel$" is the morning after. One cover is her lower body, the other is her upper body. Same wound, opposite ends.
That isn't output. That's an argument.
On the closing track of Music, Fashion, Film, Charli hands the microphone to David Cronenberg, who spends two minutes telling us nobody lasts forever. It plays like a eulogy for the Brat era.
It also works as an instruction: don't disappear.
