The concept of the celebrity sex pass has been around for a while, probably since the dawning of celebrity itself. It goes like this: In an otherwise monogamous relationship, each partner gets to select one famous person they’re allowed to sleep with, in the unlikely event that such an opportunity presents itself.
It’s a jokey thing—or maybe a half-jokey thing, which is what makes it so fun. But here’s a question: What if it actually happened?
That’s the premise for Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass, the new comedy from director David Wain and the makers of the great 2001 cult classic Wet Hot American Summer. The setup: When her fiancé somehow manages to cash in on his sex pass, small-town Kansas girl Gail (Zoey Deutch) flies to Los Angeles for the express purpose of evening the score. Her quarry: The professionally handsome (and admirably game) Jon Hamm. Events progress. Hollywood satire ensues.
Advance buzz on this one is very buzzy indeed. The film was a sensation at this year’s Sundance festival and has since been tagged as the summer comedy of 2026. Director Wain’s movie isn’t a Hollywood satire so much as a stylized fever dream of a Hollywood satire. John Slattery—Hamm’s costar in Mad Men—plays himself in a central role, setting the tone for the rest of the film’s severely meta approach. Weird Al Yankovic, for instance, cameos as a psychotic gun nut. Jennifer Aniston is involved. Intimately.
If nothing else, Wain’s movie scores points for being an original story in a July that’s otherwise swamped with sequels and remakes—Minions & Monsters, Moana, and Christopher Nolan’s ultimate rebooted IP, The Odyssey. Click around online and you can find a few more good options playing locally this month.
For instance, several local theaters have booked the fascinating documentary Everywhere Man: The Lives and Times of Peter Asher. Well, fascinating for music history nerds of a certain intensity, anyway.
Musician, producer, and elite-level scenester, Asher was a major player in multiple consecutive eras of pop music history—from 1960s Swinging London, through the California rock scene of the 1970s, and into various nooks of the 1980s and 1990s. (He produced In My Tribe, that stone-cold classic from 10,000 Maniacs.) Asher also collaborated with Paul McCartney, produced giant records by James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt, and introduced Mick Jagger to Marianne Faithfull. Legend holds that Asher, circa 1966, was the original inspiration for Austin Powers.
The new documentary is directed by the filmmaking team of Daniel Geller and Dayna Goldfine, who brought us 2021’s lovely Leonard Cohen doc, Hallelujah. Like that film, Everywhere Man is centered on famous people telling cool stories, which can be delightful when done properly. Among the friends and admirers paying tribute: McCartney, Taylor, Steve Martin, Eric Idle, Twiggy, Yoko Ono, Carole King, and Natalie Merchant.
For a different kind of multiplex experience this month, watch for Hadestown: The Musical, a live recording of the Tony Award-winning stage musical, playing in U.S. theaters for a limited five-day run, July 23–27. Edited together from three 2025 performances at London’s Lyric Theatre, the film version features many of the original Broadway and East End cast members.
Hadestown is a wildly ambitious mélange of multidisciplinary storytelling. The musical combines elements of two ancient Greek myths—Hades and Persephone, and Orpheus and Eurydice. But the updated story deals with complex social, political, and ecological themes: poverty, hope, art, apocalypse. Add in Broadway-level choreography and design, and you’ve got a top-shelf theater production optimized for the moviegoing experience.
Bonus trivia for local musical theater fans: The Durham Performing Arts Center will be hosting the national touring production of Hadestown next spring, March 5–7, 2027.
Quick Picks
Speaking of mythologies, the historical war epic Young Washington follows the early life of our first president as he takes command in the French and Indian War. Heads up that the film is being released by the self-described “values-based” distribution company Angel Studios. Bring your flag!
Actor and filmmaker John Early writes, directs, and stars in the indie comedy/drama Maddie’s Secret, the story of a foodie influencer whose sudden fame triggers an eating disorder relapse.
Evil Dead Burn, the latest chapter in producer Sam Raimi’s wigged-out horror franchise, is being billed as a direct sequel to 2023’s Evil Dead Rise. The director this time out is up-and-coming French filmmaker Sébastien Vaniček, whose debut Vermines (Infested in the U.S.) was a big hit with art-house horror fans.
Here’s an odd one: The documentary Wham! 10 Days in China chronicles the duo’s brief but apparently quite eventful tour of China in 1985. They were the first Western pop act to perform in the country since the end of the Cultural Revolution, and things got weird.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the fourth installment of the third reboot series, finds young Peter Parker going back to his roots and fighting street-level crime in New York City. It seems that Dr. Strange cast a spell that toggled a kind of cosmic reset button, so Spider-Man is back to square one. Superhero movies are a sort of mythology, too, which maybe explains why we keep telling ourselves this story, over and over and over.
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