Barely out of his twenties, Lance Oppenheim has already established himself as something of a moving image renaissance man. With documentaries, shorts, music videos and more under his belt, he turns his hand to dramatic fiction with Primetime, a portrait of American TV presenter Chris Hansen (played with oily precision by Robert Pattinson) who was responsible for the ratings behemoth, To Catch a Predator, in which potential sex offenders are caught in the act.

LWLies: You would have been eight when To Catch a Predator started. I’m curious what place Chris Hansen occupied in your cultural consciousness? 

Oppenheim: It’s a long story, but I’m gonna try and make it really short. I discovered the show through South Park and, of course, through eBaum’s World. I was obsessed with this sketch group, The Human Giant. There’s a lot of great comics and comedy directors that worked on it. And Mad TV, where Jordan Peele plays a Predator and I forget who plays Chris Hansen in it. But anyway, I kept seeing all of these imitations of To Catch a Predator, but I didn’t really understand what I was seeing. I think it wasn’t until I was in middle school when the show was off air that I discovered that I had actually watched the show, and I started to understand why people were so obsessed with it.

What were your initial impressions of Hansen? 

I thought Chris Hansen – at least in my child brain version of him – was like a superhero. He reminded me of Tony Montana in Scarface with his catchphrases and one-liners, and there was something so epic about the way he would enter these rooms and essentially have this superhuman ability to dismantle someone’s life with cameras. And not only that, I guess I just was so fascinated by like the theatricality of it and how it almost, like an adult actor pretending to be a child, hovering in the background as a man is like crying and realising that his life is effectively over. So there was something that I was confused about as a kid. I remember thinking, is this like MTV’s Punk’d? Did it feel like it would belong there? Or was it like a news programme? Or was it like a circus where Chris Hansen was the ringleader? There was something very carnivalesque about the whole thing. And yeah, I guess it stuck with me for a really long time.

Although Chris Hansen is at the centre of the story, Primetime also explores this moral terrain from multiple perspectives, including an actor and producer on To Catch a Predator.

I think one of the reasons the show was so successful was because it’s like, encoded in our DNA. For as long as human civilisation has existed, there was always like a pillory, there was always a whipping post, and there was always a person that was doling out the lashes. The thing that’s that’s different about it is they are commercialising it and turning it into entertainment. And I thought it would be interesting, from a cinematic point of view just to attempt to turn this vision of justice into a performance.

The thing I find so fascinating about To Catch a Predator within a contemporary milieu is that, at the same time as this is out there, Chris Hansen still has this huge fan base. 

I’m very aware that these people are on Reddit – they’re out there, they’re in the comments and very adamant about how much of a hero Chris Hansen is. But at the same time, TikTok is full of child exploitation that is accepted. It’s people monetising their children. The cognitive dissonance in society regarding what the best way is to protect children and the best way to call out child predators is fascinating, and I think a lot of that is to do with the boundary between justice and the law. The line between criminal enterprise and entertainment has become so fragile. It started many, many years ago, from the birth of live television. This has become an industry within itself. I think that that’s part of the reason Primetime is arriving at an interesting moment. There’s still a conversation that people don’t really know how to have, because, yeah, fundamentally Chris Hansen’s mission is a noble one. But when you’re asking, how, every week do we beat that? How do we build on that? How do we get more viewers every week? It’s like inevitably you have to scale with these things. And that’s where the darkness is.

In Primetime, we see these people that have built very, very controlled environments where they’re able to thrive, and then we’re waiting for all that to collapse in on itself. Which leads to Elizabeth Holmes and the other film you’ve made, You Can See Everything. It feels like there is a thematic overlap.

Well, it’s funny. I mean, so You Can See Everything started four years ago. It had been going on for a really long time. Primetime came midway through. 

Oh wow, so you were already deep in it by then? 

I was deep into You Can See Everything for years. Nathan Fielder, myself, David Boland who shot Primetime, Ari Balouzian, my composer who did Some Kind of Heaven, Spermworld, Ren Faire, Primetime. Christian Vasquez, my producer… The same crew essentially was making both films at the same time, but we started You Can See Everything years ago. We started it while I was in the edit on Ren Faire and Spermworld. So it’s been happening for forever. But it’s a very different thing. It’s one of those movies where the more I say anything about it or skew your perception of it, the more it will become a less fun experience. And I still haven’t really made up my mind about what the film is, what actually happened there. Nathan and I will always have different opinions about different moments, which is why we felt like it was really strong. But the experience of constructing and filming that movie was different to anything else I’ve done. 

For Nathan and I it was very important to us that You Can See Everything was the closest thing that either of us had ever made to a very rigorous documentary, just like going back to the original tenets of documentary filmmaking. It was us trying to make something that really felt like a hopefully a verité film like Frederick Wiseman would make, Salesman by the Maysles brothers… there’s a lot of movies we would talk about. A lot. It was also one of those things, too, where you can’t really have any references for what was going on. We just had to be curious and respond to things happening.

The subject of male violence and the manosphere entered the political arena around the release of Adolescence on Netflix, which featured Ashley Walters in an acting role. Its impact was profound and it is currently the second most watched Netflix show ever made. In his debut feature film as director, Walters collaborates with screenwriter Nick Love (The Football Factory) for a gut-wrenching look at life behind bars at a young offenders’ institute. It’s the perfect setting to view a microcosm of marginalised working-class men that follows in the footsteps of Alan Clarke’s Scum in terms of its bleak, oppressive ambience. It sets itself apart by serving as a harsh yet hopeful male coming-of-age film. Walters spent nine months on remand when he was 19 years old awaiting trial, and the central character in this film finds himself in the same position.

We first meet 15-year-old Troy (Tut Nyuot) as he’s entering an institution. He’s scared and bullied into sneaking in a burner phone by a lad who seems familiar with the system. At the same time, he meets new Polish inmate Krystian (Vladyslav Baliuk), with whom he forms a close bond as they navigate the humiliation and volatility of prison life. They’re both first-time offenders and outliers shoved into a hostile environment where the pressure to perform as something that you most certainly are not leads to desperate measures and depression. Stephen Graham also appears as a welfare officer who offers support and advice, including that Troy reconnects with his estranged mother (Sharon Duncan-Brewster).

In recent years the British prison drama has documented the inhumanity and futility of the penal system, as seen in films such as Wasteman, while Starred Up was written by Jonathan Asser (who has experience of running group therapy sessions for inmates) and took a compassionate look at the possibility of rehabilitation. Walters’ film translates Troy’s anxiety and interior feelings into nerve-shredding tension that’s nicely balanced with tender moments. Calm is only ushered in when Troy and Krystian show vulnerability, and some of their scenes are infused with a gentle warmth. However, their shared storyline is hampered by Love’s hit-and-miss script, which is occasionally predictable and both upends and falls into frustrating tropes.

For the most part, Walters’ confidence behind the camera serves the film well. He focuses on small details such as etchings on cell walls that scream out silently for help. He is also clearly gifted at guiding his actors who turn in credible performances across the board. Thematically, Animol is a film that is concerned with the lessons that young lads are being taught when it comes to masculinity. It takes the viewer on a disturbing journey through brutal violence, shame and pain while also delivering a redemptive sense of sweet relief through a character who eventually finds a path through an unwelcoming macho wilderness. It’s a film that elicits a huge amount of empathy for any man or boy who doesn’t adhere to social convention and instead finds the strength to rebel against it.

In a world where much of mid-budget Hollywood cinema comes in a cacophony of sludgy greys and browns, Boots Riley is a glorious peacock. His films seem almost indecently alive. He plays with the frame like a child prodigy, acutely aware of the possibilities of lenses, angles and composition. He has yet to have the imagination and joy squashed out of him by life.

That exuberance is particularly well suited to I Love Boosters, a riotous anti-capitalist caper about the Velvet Gang, a trio of professional shoplifters who steal designer clothes to sell cheaply to those whose sartorial ambitions extend beyond their wallets. Their turquoise-loving ringleader, Corvette (Keke Palmer), has ambitions of becoming a designer herself, even as she targets mathematician turned fashion mogul Christie Smith (Demi Moore), whose business model offers Riley a suitably grotesque microcosm of capitalism: exploitation dressed up and sold back to you with a mark-up.

What begins with the gang liberating armfuls of luxury goods soon expands into a considerably stranger battle between Corvette and Christie, as Riley sends his thieves deeper into the machinery of the fashion industry. Corvette’s desire to destroy Christie becomes increasingly tangled up with her need for access to the world Christie controls, and a simple rich-versus-poor equation is muddied by the fact that the people dismantling the system are not immune to wanting what it promises.

Naturally, the clothes are fabulous. Costume designer Shirley Kurata meets Riley’s cartoonish, lightly surreal aesthetic with glorious excess, creating a world of screaming colour and maximalist silhouettes straight out of a fashionable fever dream. There is something particularly delicious in Riley filling his fashion-world fantasia with stars accustomed to scaling the Met Gala steps in couture, then dressing them as though the invitation had stipulated ​“Eat the Rich Avant-Garde” and everyone had actually bothered to stay on theme.

Riley has an equally good eye for the people inside the clothes. Naomi Ackie and Taylour Paige join Palmer in the Velvet Gang, while LaKeith Stanfield, Don Cheadle and Moore populate an ensemble that understands precisely the frequency Riley is on. Plus, the writer/director’s politics are no more muted than his colour palette. He has little interest in subtext and I Love Boosters is so heavily seasoned with jokes, arguments, visual gags and outright political instruction that occasionally it becomes difficult to absorb any one of them before the next arrives. The film’s singularity means it marches to the beat of its own drum, but there will inevitably be viewers who find themselves unable to dance to it.

Still, in an increasingly risk-averse cinematic landscape, there is something beautiful about encountering an artist so uncompromising in both style and substance. Riley may not always know quite when to stop, and remains considerably better at soaring into the stratosphere than landing the plane. But when so much cinema seems frightened even to leave the runway, it’s hard to begrudge him the altitude.

This new film from writer/​director Marie Kreutzer (Corsage) charts the tortuous predicament of Léa Seydoux’s Lucy Weiss, a musician whose marriage to filmmaker Philip (Laurence Rupp) is irrevocably shattered when he is taken into police custody under suspicion of possessing and distributing sexualised images of children. Before the visit from the police, Lucy and Philip were settling into their new lavish countryside manor. We first find the couple spending leisurely afternoons attempting to assemble a garden trampoline or singing ​‘Yellow’ to their nine-year-old son Johnny (Malo Blanchet). Lucy cooks while Philip goes on early-morning runs – when he returns home he heads straight to the shower, only to emerge naked and dripping wet, running after Johnny and placing him firmly on his lap to ensure the boy brushes his teeth properly.

This is one of many unsettling but ultimately vapid scenes of provocation, with Kreutzer’s insistence on empty suggestion – coupled with a nagging seesawing of repeated set-ups with no proper payoff – turning Gentle Monster into a frustrating dissection of a taboo that demands more careful consideration. It is a shame this meta-drama-slash-thriller shows an almost unbelievable resistance to tug and pull at the tough knots of the shattering ripples of paraphilia. What remains in its place is a carcass of possible brilliance, too afraid to cross a line that had already been shredded from the start.

If Hansen’s gum-smacking producer, Andie Bender (Merritt Wever) doesn’t share her star’s unwavering superiority complex, it’s only because she’s got the ratings in mind. Her only mission is to make the number one show on television. She doesn’t really care about any of the others – not Hansen, Plum, nor ​‘Perverted Justice’ mastermind Xavier Von Erck (Matthew Maher) or decoy Del Harvey (Phoebe Bridgers) – beyond how they serve her career plans. And what career plans they are! Summoned into the office of NBC head honcho Jeff Zucker (playing himself!), Hansen and Bunker are told Predator is moving to the 9pm Wednesday night timeslot. Primetime. Opposite ABC’s juggernaut Lost. ​“We’re going to be bigger than Lost,” a manically excited Hansen hisses. ​“BIGGER THAN LOST!”

That’s what To Catch A Predator was about, really. Not about justice, or saving the children, but climbing the ratings and personal glory. When NBC News golden child Stone Phillips condescendingly remarks he’ll be watching the show from Afghanistan you can see the tight set of Hansen’s jaw. This is a man who have never once questioned the morality of his actions and only sees the world in black and white, despite the fact that he recognises the mob justice aspect of To Catch A Predator. ​“There used to be a pillory in every civilised town,” he tells Dan. ​“Now there’s a television in every home… and I’m on it.” That’s not shame in his voice. It’s wonder.

While the positioning of Hansen’s extramarital affair as a parallel to the cases on Predator doesn’t quite mesh, the voyeuristic CCTV footage and grainy blown-up early-digicam certainly does, recreating the glory days of reality television that opened Pandora’s Box for our current age of normalised hyper surveillance. Rapid-fire editing gives the sensation of channel-hopping; of the early inklings of the attention economy. It’s not that Oppenheim seeks to eviscerate Hansen or exonerate the lowlifes who took the bait and ended up shaking before him surrounded by cameras – rather, as was the case in his excellent previous work Some Kind of Heaven and Ren Fair, he’s merely looking at the material from a different angle.

When people feel maligned by the institutions supposed to serve and protect them, they have a tendency to reject them entirely. The sort of society that produced To Catch A Predator was one born out of the post-millennium disillusionment that followed 9/11 on a political and social level. Against the backdrop of Primetime, Saddam Hussain’s trial plays out on television. America’s government and media purports the myth that the War on Terror was won – a myth that wouldn’t be dismantled for years. In theory the threat of a television camera should produce the truth; in reality it simply makes the truth easier to obfuscate. 

What is the truth about To Catch A Predator? The show broadcast 20 episodes during its tenure, amounting to just under 15 hours of footage total. Bill Conradt shot himself when NBC’s cameras arrived with a SWAT team on his doorstep; he never made any attempt to meet the Predator decoy in person. There is still debate over whether or not CSAM was found on his devices. Dan Schrack, the decoy actor who was previously communicating with Conradt, felt personally responsible for his suicide. Chris Hansen went on to front a host of true crime shows, often focussed on child predators. He was parodied several times on Family Guy; To Catch A Predator became a meme more than it was ever a child protection operation. YouTube and TikTok have become the new pillory. A new generation of ​“PedoHunters” who worship Hansen take their cues from the pioneer to lure alleged sex offenders in via social media and online games such as Roblox so they can post dramatic confrontation videos for fame and financial gain.

Primetime is as much about the voracious societal appetite for blood and guts journalism and the evasive concept of criminal justice in an unjust world as it is Hansen and his unwavering certainty of his own righteousness, but his fascinating looming figure serves as a simulacrum for those who believe To Catch A Predator was a success, doing what the legal system wouldn’t or couldn’t despite a lack of legal authority. By replicating the can’t-look-away atmosphere that catapulted the show to the top of the ratings at a remove, Oppenheim makes evident that justice can’t be served playing at 9pm up against ABC’s Lost, while putting a worrying lack of media literacy in the firing line. With the television static still crackling, Primetime asks the same question of its audience that Hansen did of all those pathetic men who ended up prostrate before him. You see how this looks, right? 

The cosy, romantic status quo that hetrosexual couples enjoy in the formative stages of a relationship tends to fall by the wayside when a new child enters the scene. Our bodily chemistry suddenly alters as this bundle of joy must be protected, pandered to and become the centre of all attention, even if it’s driving a giant wedge between mother and father. Finnish genre filmmaker Hanna Bergholm draws on the tensions that come from a baby entering the brood and adds an additional supernatural twist with this bucolic, fitfully-chilling maternal horror story that follows up the director’s 2022 film Hatchling.

Saga (Seidi Haarla) and Jon (Rupert Grint) are middle class urbanites who have decided to decamp to her family plot out in the relative wilderness. They fix up the musty old house, clear out most of the mechanical detritus on the grounds and then choose to celebrate with some impulsive coitus smack dab in the middle of the haunted woodland adjacent to the property. The pair create a magical dream nursery space for the child, with muslin drapes, lots of vintage toys and soft light streaming through billowing curtains. When the little blighter arrives, it transpires that they would have done better to line the crib with razorwire and placed a giant meat hook in the middle of the room.

The film kinda works as a very overstuffed metaphor for post-partum psychosis, as Saga’s maternal instinct kicks in hard and she refuses to see anything problem with the monstrous being she has birthed, even while it bites her nipples till they bleed and she discovers the only thing that can nourish it is raw red meat. Yet absurdity quickly takes over, with all logic tossed out of the window, as Bergholm goes through the motions of forcing conflicts between Saga and Jon, Jon’s religious in-laws, her old work colleagues and the entire medical profession.

Haarla certainly goes full banshee mode with her performance, though it’s very difficult to empathise with her actions as she’s apparently so blinded by awful reality. Grint, meanwhile, doesn’t really pass muster as the concerned salaryman father who just seems to snicker his way through life, and most of the supporting cast are thin stereotypes engineered to upset Saga. As things gravitate towards an inevitable blow-out finale, it becomes increasingly clear that this sorely lacks the wit, sophistication and originality of films such as Rosemary’s Baby or We Need to Talk About Kevin. 

None of the couples are truly in love in co-directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson’s adaptation of Ursula Wills short fable, The Wicker Husband. It is medieval times and the population are held prisoner to social convention and the hallowed institute of marriage where women are literally placed in a collar like a dog on their wedding day and damned to servitude. When a single woman asks a basket weaver to make her a husband out of wicker, the human couples get jealous and question their life choices. In the age of chatbot romances and computer-generated desire this high concept comedy about companionship, romantic bonding and sexual fulfilment amusingly strikes pertinent notes as it examines the toxic ties of matrimony. It’s all served up with saucy humour and an unholy helping of double entendres.

This cautionary tale has much in common thematically with romantic sci-fi films such as Maria Schrader’s I’m Your Man and Steve Barron’s Electric Dreams as it deconstructs delusions about love. Yet its magical fairy-tale elements set it apart as the scarecrow-like figure at the centre of it all is given a brain, and to be blunt and shallow about it, the body (albeit under prosthetics), eyes and voice of Alexander Skarsgård who charms the pants off Olivia Colman’s Fisherwoman. In that sense, sparks fly between the two in an alluring and poignant manner that brings to mind Spike Jonze’s Her with Colman and Skarsgård delivering genuine pathos through their performances. The comedy may be one note but the two actors fully commit to both the humour and the dramatic elements of their roles.

The supporting cast are made up of a mixture of well-known British comedic talent including Kiell Smith-Bynoe and Nabhaan Rizwan, British icon Phil Daniels and acclaimed actors Elizabeth Debicki, Richard E. Grant and Peter Dinklage who is given some of the funniest one-liners. Debicki excels as that girl who acted like Angelica from Rugrats when she was little and is now giving off side-eye stares, jealousy and repression while Dinklage revels in Shakespearean style soliloquies.

Wētā are in charge of the look and design of the wicker husband, and thankfully it is not the stuff of nightmares or the deeply unsexy transformation of Jonathan Bailey’s Fiyero in Wicked: For Good. The workshop created a fabricated suit and facial prosthetic makeup for Skarsgård and they are seriously impressive practical effects. They are also used brilliantly for another creation further along in the narrative with a dark twist which stays true to the original text.

Wilson and Fisher have fleshed out the material with a greater emphasis on the emotional confusion and joy between the couple at the centre of the film. Colman’s character who is simply described as ​“the ugly, dumpy girl” is also afforded more of a personality as a stubborn outlier. In a film about shaking up the status quo when it comes to heterosexual relationships Wicker doesn’t quite match the feminist intellect and febrile imagination of Angela Carter’s subversive fairy-tales but it is quick-witted enough to be entertaining.

Mystery is something that remains thoroughly connected to the influential German director FW Murnau – both in terms of his work and their fate, as well as to his mythology. It is devilishly tempting to view this air of mystery in connection to Murnau’s singular ability to capture the supernatural. Several Murnau pictures are lost in their entirety, including Satan and 4 Devils, while others – 1922’s Phantom, The Burning Soil, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, and 1930’s City Girl – have been reinstated in various degrees, accompanied by intriguing stories of near-loss and resurrection: fires, government orders for destruction, and a print discovered in an Italian asylum.

In her study of German Expressionism, ​‘The Haunted Screen’, Lotte Eisner wrote that ​“no other director, not even [Fritz] Lang, ever succeeded in conjuring up the supernatural as masterfully as [Murnau].” Although this reputation has somewhat overshadowed an entire filmography, which also includes great works of mystery, romance and drama, it is nonetheless accurate and seductive to consider the director’s exquisite gift for phantasmagorical conjurings. 

Murnau’s final German film, 1926’s Faust, proclaims to depict the opening of the gates of hell, – a grand infernal spectacle that cements his reputation for cinematic darkness. Adapting Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s play with meticulous detail and bringing forth its eschatological themes, the film opens with a wager between Heaven and Hell via the Archangel and Mephisto. Mephisto bets that he can wrest the soul of alchemist Faust away from God, and if successful, he shall claim Earth. The demon unleashes a plague, and as Faust looks for a cure, the ensuing deaths and chaos inspire a crisis of faith in the townsfolk. Disillusioned, Faust swears an oath to the lord of darkness and makes a blood-pledged deal with the devil for a day’s trial of power, but is soon tricked into the temptations of hedonism and regained youth. When the trial ends, Faust agrees to surrender his soul to continue his pleasures, and having exhausted all delights, he falls in love with the virtuous Gretchen. Eventually, Faust and Gretchen die together, the union of their tragic love bringing an end to Mephisto’s claim to the Earth.

Murnau’s on-screen conjurings would intriguingly intertwine with his off-screen life, retroactively adding to their allure through lore and legend. Directly following the production of Faust, he left for Hollywood, having been signed by studio head William Fox, who subsequently gave Murnau creative freedom to make his ambitious American debut, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans. In May 1929, the film took home the special Academy Award for Best Unique and Artistic Picture – the only one of its kind in Oscars history. 

However, the sweet smell of success would soon sour. Soon after the ceremony, Fox was in a serious automobile accident and by October of that year, he had lost a large part of his fortune during the Wall Street Crash. By 1930, he’d lost control of the studio and was later jailed on bankruptcy related charges of conspiring to obstruct justice and defraud the United States. The following year, Murnau died tragically in an automobile accident. In a strange parallel to Fox’s accident – where Fox had survived but his chauffeur was killed – Murnau, alone in the back seat, was the sole fatality. The signing of a creative genius by a wealthy studio head who would together make Hollywood’s only Unique and Artistic Picture before falling into ruin has, at the very least, a tinge of the Faustian bargain to it, at least in the way it is often told. 

Salacious myths persisted around Murnau’s death, including a scandalous rumour perpetuated in a short passage of Kenneth Anger’s infamous book ​‘Hollywood Babylon’. Anger’s apocryphal assertion that Murnau had been performing a sexual act on an underage boy at the wheel at the time of his death continues to circulate, even if only in telling of his chauffeur’s efforts to dispel the rumour. In relation to Faust, this mythical version of events places Murnau as the cursed genius meeting his fate amidst the moral corruption of a scandal-ridden hedonistic pre-Hays Code Hollywood. Viewed through a century of a seemingly ​“cursed” legacy, these events seem significant and tantalising. Even the master negative for Sunrise would perish in the 1937 Fox Vault Fire, with the film still the subject of restoration efforts in 2026.