This month's thread is the long way home. Not the easy kind, the kind where home stops being a place and becomes the thing you have to fight your way back to. Six films, in order: a chain gang in Mississippi, a tsunami, a potato farm on Mars, a frozen planet, a beach in France, and then the theater. Watch them in order. The last one hits different if you do.
·1 min read
What to Watch: July 2026
By The Backlot
@backlotfriends
01
O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
The Coens moved Homer to Depression era Mississippi and got a bluegrass masterpiece about a fast talking convict conning his way back to a wife who has told everyone he is dead.
02
The Impossible (2012)
A family torn apart by the 2004 tsunami spends the whole film clawing back to each other, with a 16 year old Tom Holland carrying entire stretches of it.
03
The Martian (2015)
Matt Damon, stranded impossibly far from home, grows potatoes, does the math, and refuses to die on the way back.
04
Interstellar (2014)
Christopher Nolan's space odyssey sends a father across galaxies and decades to get back to his daughter, with Anne Hathaway on the crew and Matt Damon waiting on a frozen planet.
05
Dunkirk (2017)
Nolan again, and this time home is just across the Channel, with four hundred thousand men on a beach and the sea as the only way back.
06
The Odyssey (2026)
Nolan films Homer with Matt Damon as Odysseus, ten years of gods and monsters between one man and home, on the biggest screen you can physically reach starting July 17.