Now Playing: June 2025

Our June 2025 edition of Now Playing spotlights everything from American country blues to Nosferatu to Danish cinema!

Alex Bortell

Recent reads: Look by Solmaz Sharif, MPH and Other Road Poems by Ed Roberson, and My Manservant and Me by Hervé Guibert (trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman). Films of note: The Girl with the Needle (2024) and Problemista (2023), as well as a rewatch of Secretary (2002).

Ella Harrigan

Lately, I've been trying to listen to more music, and I've got Karen Dalton on repeat. I discovered her two years ago now, but have been obsessive for a few months now. I found her because I was at this Yoshimoto Nara exhibit, and he always listens to music while he works, and the last room had a playlist going that he'd made special for the retrospective. Anyway, her song 'Something on Your Mind' was on it, and I listened to it and thought it was spectacular. Really, it's just so good. 

Jack Barrie

I saw Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu when it came out in cinemas and felt transported by it, although almost everyone I recommended it to came out saying it was either bleh or really hated it. For me, I hadn’t felt engrossed in a setting like that in forever. Eggers’ gritty overcast style is so convincing, and the performances are so rich. My friends’ gripes with it are gripes one would have about a horror film, specifically; it was too slow, wasn’t scary, etc. I loved it for being a convincing, visceral, grimdark fantasy period piece first, and horror (with the genres’ expected tropes) second. It’s like Bloodborne meets Curse of Strahd, and I’m aaall over those. They aren’t horrifying, or really that scary per se, but their atmosphere is unrivalled, and Nosferatu is thick with atmosphere. I thought so anyway.

They were giving out A3-sized posters upon exiting, and I took one and had it framed, to my partner’s horror. Now it hangs to the left of our bed between some local art and a Twilight happy birthday card. I unironically love those films too, which undoubtedly eviscerates my credibility and invalidates all of this.