From the Tastemaker
Sam Jay
6 write-ups
The Hand-Off · 23 Aug 2026
The strange physics of trying not to win
The Hand-Off takes a premise that could've been a gimmick — a relay runner agrees to throw a race — and turns it into one of the tensest things we've got. The deal is made in the first five minutes. The rest is the baton refusing to cooperate. It's billed as…
Night Currents · 23 Aug 2026
The body that isn't supposed to exist
Night Currents opens with a river guide finding a body on the last night of the season — someone the whole town has spent years pretending isn't real. It could've been a thriller. It's something better: a study of a community that has agreed, very politely,…
The Last Honey Farmer · 23 Aug 2026
He talks to the hives. They answer.
I put off The Last Honey Farmer for weeks — a documentary about beekeeping sounded like homework. It's the opposite. It's a year spent standing very still next to someone who knows exactly what he's doing, and knows just as well that no one will do it after…
Paper Birds · 23 Aug 2026
What a place owes the ones who leave
Eleven minutes. One folded bird. Paper Birds is the shortest thing on our shelf and it has stayed with me longer than films ten times its length. A hand-folded bird escapes a drawn city, and the city — wounded, proud — tries to redraw itself as if the bird…
Field Notes from Mars · 23 Aug 2026
The woman who recorded the wind on another planet
I keep pushing Field Notes from Mars on people who say they "don't like documentaries." It's about an audio engineer who captured the sound of wind on Mars — and then, home again, couldn't stop listening. It's a film about attention: what happens when you've…
Sky Voyager · 23 Aug 2026
The stars are singing, and one knows your name
Sky Voyager is the kind of science fiction we don't get enough of — quiet, interior, more interested in voice and distance than spectacle. A solo pilot drifts into a region where the stars sing , and one of them remembers her. If you need the plot mechanics…