MOVIE OF THE MONTH

A film like Primetime shows what great feats can be accomplished when talented young minds unite in the realm of art. 

The director Lance Oppenheim has burst onto the national scene with this film, his first narrative feature to reach the big screens. Meanwhile, the lead actor Robert Pattinson is currently at his peak, starring in Primetime on the heels of The Drama and The Odyssey. The combination of Oppenheim’s excellent direction with Pattinson’s hilarious, striking performance enables Primetime to reach heights that its script alone might not have allowed. (The supporting performances by Merritt Wever and Skyler Gisondo are equally brilliant).

Primetime tells the mostly-true story of Chris Hansen’s 2000s NBC reality show To Catch a Predator. The show would feature Hansen and his camera crew ambushing and confronting child predators at houses they were lured to by decoy actors (who were posing as children). Primetime highlights the particularly lurid and sensationalist nature of To Catch a Predator amidst the gauche, reality TV-obsessed landscape of 2000s American entertainment. The show is presented as an unstoppable force, until its tactics ultimately result in a death which shuts down the whole operation.

Primetime is a genuinely brave film. Some social media critics accuse it of encouraging sympathy toward pedophiles, but that is not what the film is actually doing whatsoever. Rather, the film is questioning the righteousness of turning justice from a rational, ethical, legal matter into a public spectacle for a bloodthirsty mob that allows them to enjoy the sight of a humiliation ritual with the approval of their moral conscience. This is a highly relevant topic in 2026, a year where the federal government has called for the live-streaming of an execution and many online call for the public humiliation of accused predators before any guilt has been proven. We may no longer have the medieval town square with whipping posts and gallows, but modern technology offers a digital approximation.

There is a scene in Primetime in which Hansen confronts a genuinely frightening predator who, instead of cowering (like most of the show’s predators would do), stares into Hansen’s eyes with a malevolent glare and grabs him. This moment, along with some others, shows that the predators are deeply disturbed people, and turning these confrontations into reality entertainment trivializes the dark, tragic nature of the situation. 

Finally, this film stands out for its gorgeous and surreal musical score and visuals. The composer Ari Balouzian’s score is part jazz and part electronic, and it oozes with sleaze and suspense. Meanwhile, the visual style comes from a mix of camera formats, all of which were printed to 16mm film stock and then digitized. The colors are bold and pastel-like. The result is a look reminiscent of CRT television, but with a psychedelic haze to it. It’s fitting that a film this unique in story also gets a look and sound that is equally one-of-a-kind.

- AJ