The Drama Club: October 2026
This month in The Drama Club: a devout hitman, a friendly six-foot rabbit, the glitchiest heartbreak album of the decade, Marvel's best TV trilogy, and the marathon boom. 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.
In the last two decades, the film industry has taken a handful of steps toward better representation of Muslim life. Few people have pushed harder for it than Bassam Tariq, the Pakistani-born filmmaker whose work spans documentaries like These Birds Walk and narrative films like Mogul Mowgli. This month, his second narrative feature, Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother, expands to theaters nationwide. It stars two-time Academy Award winner Mahershala Ali as Latif, a devout Muslim hitman who, after his wife dies, sets out across Houston to protect his children while holding on to his faith and his own life. See? Probably not the kind of Muslim representation you were expecting. It's also the reunion we were promised years ago. Tariq and Ali were supposed to make Marvel's Blade together, until that project stalled out and eventually died. Instead of giving up, they took everything they'd built and made something of their own. Ali even put his Blade sword training to use here. And on top of all that, the score is by Son Lux, who made one of the most quietly devastating scores of the decade with Everything Everywhere All at Once and remain criminally underrated. How many beautiful things have to come together before you get excited? For me, this one is a must-see.
Do you remember the first time you saw Donnie Darko? I do. I was 15, sitting next to my best friend with my jaw on the floor. When the credits rolled, I turned to him and announced that it was my new favorite movie from the 1980s. He laughed and told me Donnie Darko came out in 2001. I couldn't believe it. The world Richard Kelly built, through both its visual language and his genuinely hysterical script, is still one of one. Every time I watch Donnie Darko, I return to the film's big questions while also simply letting myself spend time with Frank, its now iconic six-foot-tall rabbit. To me, Frank speaks to the difficulty of feeling misunderstood, both by other people and by yourself. At 15, I thought Frank was one of the scariest movie characters I had ever seen. Now I think he might be the kindest. Yes, he's a giant rabbit with a skull face and terrible timing, but he never actually comes to hurt Donnie. He comes to warn him. He shows up for the kid nobody else knows what to do with and says: pay attention, something big is coming, you matter. That's not a monster, that's a friend in a very bad costume. I think that's why I've never been able to let this movie go. Every person who has ever felt too strange, too sad, too much for the room they were in has their own Frank: the weird inner voice everyone else seems afraid of, which turns out to be the part of you that sees the clearest. Donnie spends the whole film terrified of what's inside him, and in the end it's exactly what saves everyone he loves. I saw myself in that kid at 15, and somehow I still see myself in him now. Twenty-five years after its release, Donnie Darko still feels like a secret handshake for anyone who has ever felt slightly out of time. Happy anniversary, Frank. You were never the scary part.
More October Movies To Be Ready For:
Verity (October 2)
Rolling Loud (October 2)
Other Mommy (October 9)
The Social Reckoning (October 9)
Whalefall (October 16)
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.
Today, Victoria Monét releases her new album, Frequency of Love. I fell head over heels for Victoria in the depths of the pandemic, when her Jaguar EP was the only thing that made my apartment feel like a party. Her output since has been deeply impressive. In 2023, "On My Mama" became inescapable, playing at every party and every corner store I walked into, as if it were following me. Earlier this year, Victoria started dropping singles from the new record, and of those, "Reach Out" is the one to start with. You'll recognize Kaytranada's fingerprints the second it begins, bouncing just underneath that silky voice. And that hook? It's exactly what you want from an R&B dance track: a warm hug with a groove hidden in its pocket. The other singles walk the same line between sexy and groovy, a balance Victoria has spent her whole career mastering. Most importantly, her songwriting has never been sharper. Remember, this is the woman who co-wrote "thank u, next" for Ariana Grande and "Do It" for Chloe x Halle. Her pen is undeniable, and the hooks on Frequency of Love are on fire. That's her superpower, and it's on full display here.
On a humid evening in August 2016, my roommate and I stood in our living room as Bon Iver’s "22 (OVER S∞∞N)" seeped out of our speakers for the first time. It was as though we'd found a dystopian tape with a message of hope tucked inside. More importantly, it sounded both exactly like and nothing like Bon Iver. The emotional candor we expected was there, but the acoustic guitars and soft drums were gone, replaced by something glitchy, warped, and beautifully anxious. When it ended, we looked at each other and immediately played it again. We were, simply, astounded. (We were also, I should mention, standing. Nobody sat down. That's how you know.) Six weeks later, Bon Iver released 22, A Million. That was ten years ago this week. I was in a tremendously different time in my life, but this record has followed me through the entire decade like a very sad, very loyal dog. It sits comfortably in my top ten albums of all time, its weirdly hopeful words and distorted soundscapes adding up to a listening experience unlike anything before or since. From the crunching stomp of "10 d E A T h b R E a s T ⊠ ⊠" to the screams of "666 ʇ" to the unexpected explosion near the end of "8 (circle)," it gives you the emotional world you expect from Bon Iver through a lens nobody saw coming. It's not an electronic album. It's not a pop album. It is still, at its core, a Bon Iver album. And that's what makes it so dangerous. Because it still sounds like Bon Iver, it gets under your skin the way Bon Iver always has. But the glitches, the warped voices, the moments where a song seems to short-circuit mid-thought, do something his earlier records were never capable of. They sound like memory itself: fractured, out of order, flooding in all at once. When Vernon sings "when we leave this room, it's gone" on "33 'GOD,'" I see my entire love life flash before my eyes. Every room I've left. Every person I left in it. Every version of me that didn't quite make it out the door. It happens every single time, ten years in, and I still can't believe a record is allowed to do that to a person. I've tried skipping it. I swear I have. But still, I never skip it. That's the power of 22, A Million. It doesn't just make you feel something. It hands you back everything you've ever felt, all at once, through the static, and then asks if you'd like to hear it again. Ten years later, I'm still standing in my living room hitting play.
More October Albums To Be Ready For:
Wishy – Nature's Pill (October 2)
HAAi – DIGITiSE (October 9)
Remi Wolf – Mud (October 9)
Troye Sivan – She’s The Best (October 9)
The Avalanches – No Bad Memories (October 16)
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.
It is genuinely shocking that some of the best must-see event television of the last five years has come not just from Marvel, but from one very specific corner of it: the world of Wanda Maximoff. From WandaVision to Agatha All Along, these two shows kept me so keenly on my toes that I spent every week refreshing Disney+ like it was 2004 and I was waiting on a new episode of Desperate Housewives. What makes them work is that neither one behaves like a superhero show. WandaVision smuggled a story about grief inside a loving tour of classic sitcoms, one decade at a time. Agatha All Along turned a camp villain into a witchy road trip with genuine show tunes and an ending that wrecked me. Both took enormous swings, trusted the audience to keep up, and treated their weirdest ideas as their best ones. They taught us that Marvel at its most unhinged is in fact Marvel at its most human. Now the trilogy comes to a close with VisionQuest, arriving October 14. Paul Bettany returns as the Vision we last saw flying off into the sky at the end of WandaVision: rebooted, memories restored, and very much unsure who he is anymore. And James Spader is back as Ultron. If the first two shows proved anything, it's that whatever we think this one is about, we're wrong. But I suspect somewhere in there, the themes of love and loss and feeling completely unknowable will emerge. That's what this entire trilogy has been about, and if VisionQuest sticks the landing, it'll be Marvel's most rewarding story in recent memory.
Let’s talk about Rage. Frankly, it’s the type of show you think you understand, until suddenly you're in an entirely different world. Before you even realize what’s happening, you're hooked. Created by Félix Sabroso, the Spanish series starts out as what looks like a tidy anthology. Each episode follows one woman pushed to her breaking point, from a snobby artist who discovers her husband's affair to a department store manager terrified of being replaced by someone younger to a disgraced vegan celebrity chef to a forgotten actress to a caretaker facing eviction. You think you’re simply settling in for a clever little revenge story. Then, a character from one episode wanders into another and a small act of vengeance sets off a much bigger one. By the end, you realize you've been watching a single, gloriously unhinged domino chain the whole time. It's dark, it's very funny, and it's anchored by a murderers' row of Spanish actresses, including Carmen Machi, Candela Peña, and Cecilia Roth, all of whom seem to be having the time of their lives being furious. Season two arrives this month on HBO with a nearly all-new cast, led by Maribel Verdú and the absolute legend Carmen Maura. It's the perfect excuse to catch up now. At only eight episodes, you'll finish it in a weekend and you'll want to scream in the best way.
More October TV To Be Ready For:
Abbott Elementary - ABC (October 7)
Carrie - Amazon Prime (October 7)
Small Prophets - Apple TV (October 7)
Crystal Lake - Peacock (October 15)
A Couple of Lies - Netflix (October 30)
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.
Tomorrow morning at 7am, someone will fire a gun and I will start running. For just under four hours (barring any horrific missteps), I will run through St. George, Utah, alongside 8,000 other crazy people who call themselves marathon runners. When I was looking for my comeback race, St. George quickly became the obvious choice. It's a desert race for a desert person. It simply felt right to cross the finish line in the same kind of landscape where I learned how to run again.
A year ago, I couldn't run a single mile without stopping.
This wasn't always the case. I ran a 3:57 marathon in Los Angeles in 2023. But then, after a sequence of personal catastrophes, I simply stopped. I stayed in, I never laced up, and I forgot what a runner's high actually feels like.
Thankfully, one day last fall, I got fed up with being stopped. I didn't plan it. I woke up and knew I had to go for a run. So I started over. I stepped outside my front door and I just started running. I made it about four blocks before I had to stop. I stood there with my hands on my knees, laughed a bit about thinking it would be easy, and then cried a bit about how hard it actually was. By spring, I ran my first 10k in three years. This summer, while the desert spent weeks above 100º, I logged most of my miles on a treadmill, staring at an emergency exit door across the gym for hours, because the race wasn't going to run itself.
And it turns out I'm not the only one lacing up. Everyone runs now. Run clubs are the new bars, the new dating apps, and the reason your street corner suddenly feels like a third space. London received more than 1.3 million ballot applications for its 2027 marathon, and this spring nearly 60,000 people finished it, making it the largest marathon ever run. On paper, marathons aren't niche anymore. Getting into a big-city marathon now feels like trying to get Coachella tickets in 2014.
But here's the twist: when you really boil it down, the group of us who are actually crazy enough to run a marathon is quite small. Only about 1.2 million people finish one each year, roughly 0.015% of the planet. So while wanting to run a marathon has gone mainstream, actually running one has not.
I think I understand why. A run club gives you people to run with. A marathon eventually asks you to keep going when no one's next to you.
That's why it still means something. You can buy the shoes, the watch, and the electrolyte powder in seven flavors. But you can't buy the settings my body has memorized on my favorite treadmill at my Joshua Tree gym. That is something you earn.
And you definitely can't buy the half marathon I ran on my own last month. No bib, no crowd, no medal. Just me, the river path in Frogtown, and 13.1 miles of talking to myself and singing to no one. Somewhere around mile seven, I realized I love running because I love hanging out with myself. That was the day I knew I was ready.
Nobody will run the last 10k for me. The marathon is one of the last things in modern life that can't be hacked, optimized, or faked, which is what makes race day a victory lap. The months of preparation are the real work. Right now, that work is already done.
For the record, the average marathon finish time is around four hours and twenty minutes, so if I come in under 3:57 and run a PR, I will most likely be insufferable for weeks. Tomorrow, when that gun goes off, I'll be thinking about every treadmill mile this summer, those four blocks last fall, and my last marathon in 2023. Then, somewhere around mile 17, I'll stop thinking entirely, which is the other gift a marathon gives you. I won't think again until someone at the finish line hands me a medal.
Then I'll think about how proud of myself I am.
Turns out, I'm pretty good company.
