The Projection Booth

Rok (Urban Kuntarič), a lonely gas station clerk, steals a bicycle and ends up sidekick to its owner, The Girl (Lara Wolf), a blank-eyed, scarred vigilante who may or may not be a superhero. Luka Marčetić's Girl in the Night (2026) just took Best Picture in Fantastic Fest's Main Competition, and Mike talks with Marčetić and Wolf about the Slovenian deadpan charmer.

Marčetić traces the film from a one-line logline and a scrapped romantic comedy to a tone shaped by Napoleon Dynamite, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Riley Stearns. The pair recall 20 winter nights of whispered filming in Ljubljana, the one-inch difference between "puppy eyes" and menace, and blinks erased in post. Plus: a ferret fight staged with a puppet, inspired by Bela Lugosi's rubber-octopus wrestling in Ed Wood, and a story rewritten in the edit.

Follow the film on Instagram at @dekle_noci.

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Sirens wail, smoke drifts past the hedgerows, and inside a tidy English cottage two grown adults earn "nifties" for good behavior. Scott Tinkham and Michael Woloson's darkly comic feature debut, Littermates (2026), turns a vague apocalypse into a strange, tender story of siblinghood, and Mike talks with both directors about how they pulled it off.

Friends since film school, the pair recount reverse-engineering the script around a borrowed country house and three performers they know best, including Liam (Joey Bader), a character Bader had been doing around the house for years. They also relive shooting the entire film on one hulking Panavision zoom lens, with a tripod so heavy the cast had to help haul it.

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Manchester Film Festival and the Narrative Feature Audience Award at Dances With Films LA, Littermates screened at Fantastic Fest before opening at Alamo Drafthouse on November 6. Learn more at littermatesfilm.com and follow @littermatesfilm.

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Lou Ferrigno talks with Mike about Hard Redemption (2026), the martial-arts action thriller from director-writer-star Jino Kang and co-director Christine Lam. The film plays out a Die Hard-in-a-classroom premise: a GED teacher with a hidden past (Kang) has to fight off a San Francisco gang holding his students hostage, one grudge match at a time through the school's hallways to a gymnasium showdown.

Ferrigno, best known as television's original Hulk, joins the cast in a supporting role opposite David Kurzhal, Jessie Pettit, James Aaron Oh, and Mikaila Maei. Mike talks with Ferrigno about the film, his role in it, and his long career in genre filmmaking. 

Hard Redemption is available now.

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Agata Trzebuchowska joins Mike for a Special Report on Sick (2026), her feature debut as writer and director, fresh off winning Best Director in Fantastic Fest's Next Wave competition. Sent to the Polish countryside to nurse their ailing grandmother (Monika Niemczyk), sixteen-year-old Maks (Konrad Kąkol) and his older sister Emma (Katarzyna Łubik) feel the summer heat bend their bond into something neither of them can name.

Best known as the novice nun at the heart of Paweł Pawlikowski's Oscar-winning Ida, Trzebuchowska talks about moving behind the camera, from her Sundance short Heat to the stalled project whose frustrations gave birth to Sick. She digs into building dread through suggestion rather than explanation, guiding Kąkol and Łubik to performances that earned their own special mention from the Fantastic Fest jury, and the double meaning of that title.

Touch me, I'm sick. 

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Rob St. Mary and Jedidiah Ayres join Mike for The Salton Sea (2002), D.J. Caruso's meth-fueled noir starring Val Kilmer in a dual role: junkie informant Danny Parker, who's secretly Tom Van Allen, a grieving trumpet player hunting the corrupt cops who murdered his wife. Chasing them drags Danny deep into the orbit of Pooh-Bear (Vincent D'Onofrio), a nose-less speed freak who'll snort anything, and Jimmy the Finn (Peter Sarsgaard), closing in as his double life unravels.

Screenwriter Tony Gayton and director D.J. Caruso join Mike to talk making the film — Gayton on writing the script and his run-ins with John Milius, Caruso on landing D'Onofrio for Pooh-Bear and his kinetic, music-video style. Rob and Jed dig into Amir Mokri's cinematography, Thomas Newman's score, and how the real, decaying Salton Sea — once California's desert Riviera, now a toxic ghost resort — becomes the film's rotting metaphor. Part of our Val Kilmer retrospective.

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Become a supporter of The Projection Booth at http://www.patreon.com/projectionbooth