What led you to this article? A love for film? B.F. Skinner believed this wasn’t a choice but the result of psychologically programmed behavior. Skinner stands alongside Ivan Pavlov as a father of modern behaviorism. Yet, Skinner was interested in topics far beyond science. He wrote on the philosophical impacts of his discoveries, questioned free will, and became one of the most enigmatic academics of the 20th century.
Remember that time when Batman and Superman stopped fighting because they realised they had both been raised by women named Martha? Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, adapted from the 2020 novel by Maggie O'Farrell, is centred on an equally silly contrivance. Just as Zack Snyder noted the aforementioned tenuous link between Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent, O'Farrell twigged that William Shakespeare had a short-lived son named Hamnet and also wrote a play titled 'Hamlet'. Could the two be linked? Err, no. 'Hamlet' was based on the Danish legend of Amleth and doesn't feature so much as a single dead son. But in O'Farrell's eyes Willy the Shake wrote the tragedy as a coping mechanism for the grief he felt over the loss of his boy, which is odd given how the bard penned a couple of comedies in the immediate aftermath of his kid's death.
The beautiful short documentary A Way to Be Together screens at the New Jersey Film Festival on Saturday, January 24, 2026! Here is my interview with A Way to be Together Director Trina Bardusco.
A moving meditation, Portrait of a Monastery is a stunning documentary on the Holy Cross Monastery in upstate New York. In it, we are taken through three seasons in the lives of these monks. We enter a space of cultivated peace and reflection—the monastery itself and the natural world surrounding it.
Though it's adapted from a novel from the '90s (Donald Westlake's 'The Ax', previously filmed as The Axe by Costa-Gavras in 2006), Park Chan-Wook's No Other Choice speaks to very modern fears around job stability in the age of AI. Like Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, it's centred on desperate measures taken by a protagonist to acquire a job, but there is no class satire here. AI doesn't care about our socio-economic backgrounds. It's coming for us all.
Remember that time when Batman and Superman stopped fighting because they realised they had both been raised by women named Martha? Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, adapted from the 2020 novel by Maggie O'Farrell, is centred on an equally silly contrivance. Just as Zack Snyder noted the aforementioned tenuous link between Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent, O'Farrell twigged that William Shakespeare had a short-lived son named Hamnet and also wrote a play titled 'Hamlet'. Could the two be linked? Err, no. 'Hamlet' was based on the Danish legend of Amleth and doesn't feature so much as a single dead son. But in O'Farrell's eyes Willy the Shake wrote the tragedy as a coping mechanism for the grief he felt over the loss of his boy, which is odd given how the bard penned a couple of comedies in the immediate aftermath of his kid's death.
Though it's adapted from a novel from the '90s (Donald Westlake's 'The Ax', previously filmed as The Axe by Costa-Gavras in 2006), Park Chan-Wook's No Other Choice speaks to very modern fears around job stability in the age of AI. Like Bong Joon-ho's Parasite, it's centred on desperate measures taken by a protagonist to acquire a job, but there is no class satire here. AI doesn't care about our socio-economic backgrounds. It's coming for us all.
"I turn sideways to the sun Keep my thoughts from everyone It's a jungle, I'm a freak Hear me talk, but never speak"
