What I Am Watching
We live in an era of infinite content and finite attention. Every streaming platform demands our subscription, every algorithm curates our next binge, and the sheer volume of visual media available to us has become overwhelming. Yet within this saturation, something vital persists: the experience of being truly moved by what we watch. Whether it’s the collective hush of a darkened theater, the intimate ritual of a Sunday night series, or the breath-held moment standing before a painting that seems to see you back—certain works demand more than passive consumption. They ask for our full presence. This season, I’ve been deliberately curating my watchlist, seeking out films, television, and art that reward attention with transformation. These are the works that have stopped my scroll, quieted my mind, and reminded me why we watch in the first place.
The Return of the Cinematic Experience
There’s something happening in film right now that feels important. After years of streaming dominance and the “content”ification of cinema, we’re witnessing a renaissance of the theatrical experience—movies that demand to be seen on the big screen, that reward attention, that refuse to be background noise.
Martin Scorsese’s The Killers of the Flower Moon is the obvious place to start. Yes, it’s three and a half hours. Yes, it requires commitment. But in an era of algorithm-driven entertainment, there’s something radical about a film that trusts its audience to sit with discomfort, to absorb complexity, to witness a story unfold without rushing toward resolution. It’s a film about complicity that refuses to let its viewers off the hook.
Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things offers something entirely different—visually exuberant, sexually frank, and deeply weird. Emma Stone’s performance is fearless, but it’s the production design that haunts: a steampunk fever dream that feels both anachronistic and urgently contemporary.
I’ve been supplementing new releases with a self-directed study of 1970s American cinema—The Conversation, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Three Women. There’s a looseness to these films, a willingness to meander, that feels revolutionary now. They weren’t afraid to be boring. They weren’t afraid to be beautiful without explaining why.
Television That Earns Its Runtime
Television has become the dominant art form of our era, but not all small-screen storytelling is created equal. This season, I’m gravitating toward series that understand something crucial: length is a choice, not a requirement.
The obvious standout. Yes, it’s a show about a restaurant. Yes, it’s stressful. But episode four—the Christmas episode—is simply some of the finest television ever made. A single-take (or seemingly single-take) journey through family trauma, love, and the ways we hurt the people closest to us. It’s virtuosic without being showy, emotional without being manipulative.
Offers the opposite energy: dry, British, quietly devastating. Gary Oldman’s performance as Jackson Lamb—disheveled, flatulent, secretly brilliant—is a masterclass in underplaying. It’s a spy show that understands that espionage is mostly waiting, mostly disappointment, occasionally terrifying.
Prestige world-building at its finest. Post-apocalyptic storytelling that uses genre to ask questions about community, trust, and what we owe each other. Rebecca Ferguson’s performance in Silo is all contained intensity—watching her think is more compelling than most action sequences.
Visual Art That Stops You Cold
There’s a particular alchemy that happens when you stand in front of work that demands something of you. Not decorative art—not something that matches your sofa—but art that reaches across time and insists on being felt. For the Fall 2026 window, these three major museum shows pair visual art with compelling cultural and storytelling angles:
The Cultural Story: Taryn Simon is one of today’s foremost conceptual artists, known for exposing the secret machinations of power, government archives, and institutional censorship. Taking over the Guggenheim’s entire iconic spiraling rotunda, this interactive installation mixes photography, text, video, and sculpture.
Why It Fits: It bridges visual art and cinematic storytelling. It operates like a living investigative documentary about national identity, public record, and modern media framing—making it a natural segue from cinema or political documentary TV.
The Cultural Story: Instead of repeating the tired myth of Jackson Pollock as a solitary, tragic genius, this major fall exhibition re-examines the creative feedback loop and complex dynamic between Pollock and his wife, Lee Krasner. It explores how two radical visual artists profoundly shaped each other’s work and legacy within mid-century American culture.
Why It Fits: It delivers a powerful narrative about artistic partnership, gender dynamics in art history, and pop-culture mythology. It reads like a prestige drama series brought to life in a gallery setting.
The Cultural Story: This ambitious blockbuster tracks how Paul Cézanne became hailed as “the father of us all” across global visual culture. Co-organized with the Centre Pompidou, it pairs 70 of Cézanne’s masterworks alongside works by 80 subsequent artists—ranging from early avant-garde pioneers like Picasso to modern media creators—to dissect how artistic legacy is created, passed down, and constantly reinterpreted.
Why It Fits: It tackles the evolution of visual language itself, exploring how the way we see images today—whether on a canvas or on a cinema screen—traces back to a single revolutionary shift in perspective.
I’m skeptical of digital immersive experiences—the Van Gogh rooms, the Klimt projections. They offer accessibility, yes, but at what cost? Art as Instagram backdrop, as content. And yet: when I attended one, purely out of curiosity, I watched children run through projected sunflowers with pure delight. Maybe there’s room for both. Maybe the gateway drug isn’t the enemy.
The Documentaries Staying With Me
Non-fiction filmmaking is experiencing its own golden age, and the documentaries that have stayed with me this year share a quality that’s hard to articulate: they bear witness. They understand that some stories carry weight, that the act of recording is itself a form of resistance.
Kokomo City—about Black trans sex workers in New York and Georgia—is formally daring, structurally innovative, and deeply humane. It refuses the tropes of victimhood or inspiration porn, instead offering something rarer: complexity, contradiction, humanity in full.
20 Days in Mariupol is essential and devastating. The first twenty days of the Russian invasion, filmed by the last journalists remaining in the city. It’s journalism as heroism, as sacrifice. It’s also a reminder that cinema can do what other mediums cannot: make the abstract concrete, make distant suffering immediate.
The Eternal Memory follows a couple navigating Alzheimer’s—she’s a famous Chilean journalist, he’s a former minister, and their love story unfolds in real time as memory disappears. It’s about what remains when everything else is stripped away. Devotion. Recognition that transcends cognition.
Editorial Conclusion
“In a world designed to fragment our attention, choosing what to watch with intention becomes a quiet act of devotion. Find the art, cinema, and stories that challenge and transform you, and give them your full presence.”
