There is something happening in film right now that I haven't quite figured out how to articulate. Directors are becoming internet obsessions. Movies are generating discourse that outlives their theatrical runs by months, sometimes longer.

For a generation raised to believe that cinema's cultural dominance was a thing of the past, this feels like a contradiction worth investigating.

Maybe film never died. Maybe we simply forgot what it felt like to be excited about it together.

Lance Oppenheim, the 30-year-old Florida-born filmmaker behind Primetime and, alongside Nathan Fielder, You Can See Everything, seems particularly well positioned to capture this moment. His filmography was already substantial before this year, with the documentaries Some Kind of Heaven and Spermworld establishing him as a filmmaker interested in the strange, often theatrical performances people construct around their own lives. But 2026 has introduced a new chapter in his career, one that feels capable of permanently changing the scale of his work and the way audiences encounter it.

Primetime, his fiction feature debut, stars Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, the television journalist whose To Catch a Predator became one of the early 2000s' most disturbing and enduring spectacles. Yet Oppenheim is less interested in delivering a straightforward condemnation than in examining the machinery that makes such a spectacle possible. The result is a film that feels both nostalgic for a particular era of television and deeply suspicious of what that nostalgia asks us to forgive.

Oppenheim has described his intention as making something close to a superhero movie, with Pattinson, currently associated with another iconic masked vigilante, embodying Hansen. 

In Oppenheim's telling, Hansen occupies a strange space between journalist, crusader and vigilante, a man whose identity has become inseparable from the public performance of fighting evil. Even as the director maintains his affection for Hansen and the original show, the film's moral ambiguities become increasingly difficult to ignore.

Following Primetime's premiere, Hansen's response to the film became a kind of continuation of its central argument, with the director observing that the ensuing dispute seemed to reproduce the very behavior the film was trying to trace. Art began imitating life, and life, in turn, began imitating the art. In an interview with GQ, Oppenheim described feeling as though he were witnessing another movie play out in real time.

Oppenheim has encouraged audiences to arrive without context, describing a process in which even he and Fielder could not always agree on what they were witnessing. Fielder, he explained, became an amateur detective of ordinary, everyday things, eventually finding himself drawn into a film in which he had never intended to appear.

Together, the two films mark a shift in Oppenheim's approach to filmmaking. His earlier documentaries often involved spending years with subjects and using the tools of narrative cinema to reconstruct their subjective experiences. Primetime, by contrast, required an enormous production, involving hundreds of people and 20 different camera formats. Where his documentaries once allowed him to wait for an image until it felt right, this new work demanded a different relationship with control, performance and uncertainty.

It is a fitting evolution for a filmmaker whose subjects seem perpetually caught between the person they believe themselves to be and the person the public has decided they are.

But Oppenheim's moment also belongs to something larger. Cinema has had its resurrection, although for some of us, it never really died. The theatrical experience, too, seems to have found a renewed cultural significance. We are watching films, talking about films, arguing over films and, perhaps most importantly, allowing films to remain in the conversation long after their initial release.

I keep thinking about the persistence of Obsession, about the way its online discourse has continued to circulate months after its release. I think about the excitement surrounding Parsons's Backrooms, a project emerging from internet-native horror and moving into the machinery of mainstream filmmaking. Their visibility suggests that the distance between internet culture and cinema has become less of a barrier than a creative possibility.

For years, the internet was accused of shortening our attention spans, making sustained engagement with art increasingly difficult. Now, the same platforms are allowing audiences to turn films into shared languages, to dissect individual scenes, build theories and revisit a work until it becomes something larger than its original runtime. 

So what are we looking for in film now that we weren't looking for before? Has the work changed, or have we? Are filmmakers like Barker and Parsons benefiting from opportunities that would have been nearly unimaginable a decade ago, or have audiences simply become more willing to recognize new forms of authorship? Perhaps the distinction doesn't matter as much as we think. The internet has changed how films are discovered, but it has also changed what it means to participate in their cultural lives.

I find myself asking these questions with genuine excitement, and a little apprehension. I don't want this moment to end. I want the next strange, ambitious, difficult film to arrive and give everyone something to argue about. I want directors to be allowed to take risks, to make work that resists immediate explanation, and to trust audiences to meet them there. Oppenheim's insistence that viewers approach You Can See Everything without context feels almost radical in a culture where every new release is accompanied by a demand for instant interpretation.

And yet, I can't celebrate this renewed enthusiasm without noticing how male-centric much of the conversation remains.

Coralie Fargeat's The Substance, released in 2024, was one of the defining films of this renewed appetite for cinema: grotesque, formally audacious and unwilling to make its ideas about women's bodies palatable. Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, released in 2025, offered another kind of cinematic intensity, demonstrating how intimate human grief can become something enormous on screen. Their work belongs in any serious conversation about what audiences are responding to when they say they want movies to feel like movies again.

It is easy to celebrate a renaissance when its leading figures already fit the image of the auteur we've been taught to recognize. It is harder, and more interesting, to ask whose work we have overlooked while waiting for cinema to return. The excitement is real, but so is the possibility that our definition of cinematic importance remains narrower than the art itself.

Oppenheim's recent work is compelling precisely because it seems to understand that performance and spectatorship are inseparable. His subjects perform for the camera, the camera constructs a version of them, and the audience arrives ready to decide what it all means. Now, as his own films become subjects of public fascination, Oppenheim is caught in that same process. The filmmaker who studies the spectacle is becoming part of one.

I'm excited to see what he makes next, and what he chooses to reveal or withhold. More than that, I'm excited by the prospect of a film culture that gives him room to surprise us. I hope we can preserve this feeling: the sense that cinema is not a finished cultural institution we are trying to revive, but a living thing whose future is still being negotiated