News You Can Bruise for 2026 February 7

• An Unmarried Woman (1978): Like Claudine, one of those hidden gem '70s rom-coms that's now forgotten because a) all old movies have been forgotten, b) it doesn't fit the post Nora Ephron rom-com formula. I feel like Judd Apatow tried to give the genre a raunchier spin in the 2000s but I haven't seen any of his movies and if he changed the heading of the USS Rom-Com, it wasn't by more than a few degrees. Anyway, this is a really fun, romantic and somewhat raunchy (by 1970s non-porno standards) movie.

  Saw this on a date with Sumana and we were both primed by modern rom-coms for the psychologist to be portrayed as a comic-relief blowhard, but her advice was actually pretty sensible! Later on we learned from IMDB trivia that the psychologist was played by a real therapist who was improvising a therapy session with Jill Clayburgh. Classic '70s improv/Method acting; I love it. The therapist, Penelope Russianoff, also cashed out on her sudden fame with a tie-in self-help book. Another classic move!

• Blithe Spirit (1945): A Noel Coward play... in movie form? Maybe he figured he was doing his bit for the war effort. It's entertaining, but mostly because of the visual effects and Margaret Rutherford's kooky old crone, the only character who doesn't know she's in a Noel Coward play. The other characters are content to waft timelessly around their country house like the holodeck people in Celine and Julie Go Boating. In fact, I think the holodeck people in that movie are made up to resemble the ghost from Blithe Spirit.

  Coward was pretty cranky about the adaptation of his screenplay and claims the ending ruined the best thing he ever wrote, which a) the movie ending is way better than his original ending, b) if I thought this was my best work I wouldn't brag about it.

• One Battle After Another (2025): An exciting thriller with the huge thematic problem that the first part really wants to take place in the early '70s, and they barely make it look like 2007. I assume this is a requirement of the source material (which I'm reading now and it's hilarious). Would it have cost that much extra to make this a period piece? Then you wouldn't need to add cell phones to the story and then clumsily take them out again. Or just claim the second part of the movie is taking place in 1990 and bluff your way through it, the way Uncut Gems is set in 2012 but any New Yorker can tell it was filmed much later. What am I going to do, post a nitpicky three-hour rant on Youtube? I don't have the time!

  The most thriller-y part of the movie was the exciting middle sequence with Guillermo del Toro. And the part I hope comes directly from Vineland is that the protagonist bumbles through the entire movie having no idea what's happening and no effect on the plot, but ends up saving the day retroactively by having been a loving and supportive father.

• What Did the Lady Forget? (1937): A charming "brassy dame" kind of family comedy goes sour near the end with an act of domestic violence that was acceptable in a 1937 movie but won't fly today. The dame is brassy the whole way through, to the point of becoming a kinda unlikable antihero—itself, a brassy move.

This month the Television Spotlight shines on both versions of Guy Montgomery's Guy Mont-Spelling Bee, a comedian panel show themed as a volatile and often unfair spelling bee. Sumana and I met Guy with the infamous season 2 of Taskmaster NZ and he has the same kind of sinister charm necessary to be a Taskmaster himself, or (as seen here) any kind of game show host. Since the entire New Zealand comedy scene seems to be about as big as Dropout, it was a relief when Guy moved the show to Australia and got a wider variety of... wait, people are showing up in both versions? I just don't know, man.