Alex Barasch

A24’s Empire of Auteurs The studio is brilliant at selling small, provocative films. Now it wants to sell blockbusters, too.

A24 executives are infamously press-shy, but I interviewed dozens of people who’ve worked with them—directors, producers, at least one Satanist—and eventually persuaded the people inside to talk to me, too. My piece about the studio’s rise and where it’s headed: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

The Volunteer Data Hoarders Resisting Trump’s Purge Can librarians and guerrilla archivists save the country’s files from DOGE?

Trump is purging the federal web in a digital book burning of unprecedented scale. I wrote about the librarians and “data hoarders” who are backing it up as fast as they can www.newyorker.com/news/the-led...

A Feminist Director Takes On the Erotic Thriller Halina Reijn has always loved the genre—and revelled in creating a steamy melodrama for Nicole Kidman in which the protagonist is “greedy,” “dark,” and “wrong.”

Erotic thrillers from the 1980s and ’90s had been a revelation for the young Halina Reijn, but the director of “Babygirl” knew that an erotic thriller in 2024 had to look different. “I want to use the tropes but twist them . . . to have fun with them,” she said.

A Feminist Director Takes On the Erotic Thriller Halina Reijn has always loved the genre—and revelled in creating a steamy melodrama for Nicole Kidman in which the protagonist is “greedy,” “dark,” and “wrong.”

For this week’s @newyorker.com I profiled the great Halina Reijn, the director of Babygirl. We talked about her past life as a stage actress in Ivo van Hove’s company, her wild, off-the-grid childhood, her relationship with Nicole Kidman, and much more: www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Helen do you want to see Barbie with me

Wonderful, dryly funny piece by Alex Barasch about Mattel’s affords to toyify Hollywood: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/after-barbie-mattel-is-raiding-its-entire-toy-box