Films of 2026:Q2 - by Scott Sumner
The Pursuit of Happiness
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Films of 2026:Q2<br>Plus a new sponsor and a major milestone
Scott Sumner<br>Jul 01, 2026
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Today’s post is brought to you by my sponsor, Mechanize. They’re hiring junior software engineers at $300K/year base salary. Apply now!<br>Before getting into last quarter’s films, a few important announcements:<br>While LLMs have achieved impressive success, I’ve noticed that many firms have trouble fully utilizing this new technology. The firm Mechanize sells evaluations and training data to frontier AI labs to help them make their AIs better at coding specializes in helping companies use AI to boost productivity. They have agreed to sponsor The Pursuit of Happiness because they hope to recruit some of the highly talented readers who subscribe to this blog. (And that’s not just flattery; I was pleasantly surprised by the number of brilliant young people I met up at Lighthaven who read my blog.) Click on this link if you believe you are a good fit for Mechanize.
I originally intended not to have any ads in this blog, but Mechanize’s offer was too good to pass up. The good news is that it is a 100% exclusive contract, which does not allow for any other ads. So you’ll merely see a one sentence ad at the top of each post, and another small ad at the very bottom. But I’d also like to share at least a small portion of my financial gain with readers. Thus I will commit to never raising subscription prices as long as they continue sponsoring the blog, and may even cut prices next year when subscriptions come up for renewal.
As you’ll see in the next item, the unpaid subscribers are much more numerous than paid subscribers. For that group, I’ll move from my current system of one half free posts to a new system of two thirds free posts and one third paid posts. I hope this increases my total number of subscribers, even if it eventually costs me a few paid subscriptions (by making the free option modestly less disadvantageous.)
I’m a midwesterner at heart and always look for Pareto optimal solutions. :)
Thanks to you guys this blog has finally reached an important milestone, crossing the 10,000 subscriber line:
In other news, I read a bunch of novels by people like Modiano and Krasznahorkai, as well as two African travelogues (by Teju Cole and Paul Theroux) and an unconventional guide to Japan by Pico Iyer. But for me the standout book in Q2 was Witold Gombrowicz’s Diary. I’ll probably do a post on it at some point. Another standout was Richard Hanania’s Kakistocracy, which I’ll discuss in my next post.<br>Daniel Frank has a beautiful post discussing the Taiwanese film Yi Yi.<br>And here are two Youtube videos that I enjoyed. The first on one of my favorite British films:
And one on the difference between modernism and mid-century modern:
This interview of Tyler and Nabeel has some fascinating observations on music and film.<br>And finally, some astute comments about art by Janan Ganesh:<br>This obsession with the floor is even more extreme in other fields. In modern entertainment, almost nothing is total rubbish. A song or TV series will have a minimum of polish and a recognisable structure. Some of this is down to technological progress: the worst studio kit now is quite good. The rest is the result of corporate risk-aversion in an ultra-competitive market. If the audience can stream things from around the world, a content platform can’t afford to empower the kind of eccentric artist who might make a dud (or a masterwork). The captive audiences of the pre-streaming age perversely allowed creators to shoot for the ceiling.
This is also my view. Modern films have higher floors and lower ceilings.<br>2026: Q2 films<br>Newer films:<br>Lumière, le Cinéma! (France) 3.6 Not for everyone, but I was fascinated by this documentary composed of 120 clips from the dawn of cinema. Oddly, I’ve gone almost my entire life without seeing what life in the 19th century actually looked like. Now I know. It’s even stranger than I imagined, partly because the people being portrayed regard their world as perfectly “normal”, just modern life. And yet, other than trains there’s almost no signs of modern technology. Even though the second industrial revolution began a couple decades earlier, the world portrayed in this film doesn’t yet seem to be affected by the newest technology. You don’t see any automobiles or electrical appliances—everything is done by hand.<br>If you are too lazy to sit through the entire 105 minutes, check out the scenes of women working around the 46 to 48-minute mark—a real eye-opener. Especially the French women mining coal. People talk about the possibility of AI replacing all jobs, but if the people of 1895 were transported to today’s world, they’d say that almost no one in the year 2026 is doing any “work” at all—just a bunch of people sitting in offices. Today, almost everything difficult and dangerous is done by machine.<br>Backrooms (US) 3.6 I don’t like...