The next season of the TCM podcast The Plot Thickens will train a spotlight on the famously reclusive, notoriously obsessive Stanley Kubrick.

Hosted by Ben Mankiewicz and made in partnership with the Criterion Collection, the 11-episode “Stanley” premieres Sept. 24 and features excerpts from a never-before-heard 1972 audio interview with the filmmaker conducted by Newsday film critic Joseph Gelmis tied to the release of A Clockwork Orange (1971).

In the interview, Kubrick talks about directing actors, independent filmmaking, football and even his beloved pets, offering a rare glimpse into the mind of one of cinema’s most influential figures.

The podcast also includes Mankiewicz interviews with Steven Spielberg, Sofia Coppola, Matthew Modine, Josh Safdie, George Miller, Phil Rosenthal, Michael Bauman and Lee Unkrich; with Kubrick’s stepdaughter, Katharina Kubrick; with longtime Kubrick collaborator James B. Harris; and with authors Claire Dederer and Jon Ronson.

“The Plot Thickens podcast has become one of the most ambitious and rewarding ways we explore the stories behind the people who shape filmmaking, and this season on Stanley Kubrick is a perfect example of that,” Charlie Tabesh, TCM senior vp programming and content strategy, said in a statement.

“The discovery of this previously unheard conversation with Kubrick is truly extraordinary, and alongside new interviews and other archival recordings, it helps create the most complete portrait of the filmmaker possible. As a network dedicated to preserving and celebrating film history, TCM is the ideal home to share a recording like this, pairing Kubrick’s own voice with thoughtful storytelling and the insights of those who knew and studied his work.”

New episodes will be released every Thursday. (Watch the trailer here.)

In conjunction with the seventh season of the podcast, TCM will present every one of Kubrick’s features over four consecutive Thursdays next month, starting at 5 p.m. PST on Sept. 3 with Killer’s Kiss (1955).

Viewers also will be treated to Fear and Desire (1952), The Killing (1956), Paths of Glory (1957), Spartacus (1960), Lolita (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1964), 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon (1975), The Shining (1980), Full Metal Jacket (1987) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Two of his short films, Day of the Fight and Flying Padre, both from 1951, will also be screened.

Criterion, which put out The Killing and Paths of Glory on laserdisc back in the day, will release a “Complete Kubrick” special edition box set in October.

Previous Plot Thickens seasons have focused on Peter Bogdanovich, the 1990 film The Bonfire of the Vanities, Lucille Ball, Pam Grier, John Ford and the making of Cleopatra (1963).

Between her experimental shorts and her two narrative features so far, Ann Oren has firmly established herself as a modern master of erotic cinema. More specifically, her work is concerned with unorthodox sexual awakenings, much of it rendering mutations of the flesh — both naturally developing or forced — with such sensuality and spellbinding craft that it could trigger something within even the most white-bread normie viewers. Sickos already banging on windows in anticipation will find much to embrace in her new “Objet a,” but even the most chaste viewers around could be captivated by Oren’s particular brand of cinematic kink.

Oren’s previous feature, “Piaffe,” followed an introverted young woman named Eva (Simone Bucio) as she covered for her unwell sister in her job as a foley artist. Her first gig involved producing sound accompaniment for a pharmaceutical commercial based around horse footage. By the end of act one, Eva had grown a horse’s tail; a lustrous appendage that she began to wear with pride. Feeling empowered by her new body part, Eva used it to lure her crush into an affair based around submissive foreplay; the hot botanist making use of both his and her specific skillsets by deep-throating Eva with a plant and later auto-erotically asphyxiating her with her own tail.

While there were intentionally comedic beats, that premise was not played for laughs. There was something joyful about its tone, but it would be reductive to say that “Piaffe” was a body-positive celebration of pleasure in all its forms. Oren’s particular calibration across all aspects of her atmosphere, design, pacing, and performances make that movie an especially fascinating film to revisit, as the reading of it differs quite wildly each time. One suspects that’s going to be the case with returning to “Objet a,” as well, which carries over most of the same features and qualities.

In the uncanny world of “Objet a,” Ingeborg (Aenne Schwarz) and Adam (Louis Hofmann) are renowned hand surgeons who share a life together; a glimpse of a magazine profile early on suggests that they manipulated a fungi to become a human skin generator. Gaia (Bucio once more) has her parasitic finger repaired by the couple, as the young woman – whose name is rooted in a personification of Earth – wants to bury what was removed from her body. Adam seems confused by the request, while Ingeborg is perfectly obliging.

Outside of their surgery, the couple have an emotional and sexual relationship that is expressed through objects. Ingeborg is regularly compelled to steal things, while Adam is fixated on becoming an object himself. “Like a doll” is how he asks to be treated, a request made during one of the many sequences in which Oren displays her deft skill with making the tactility of even the slightest touch of flesh against surfaces — of both the natural world or constructed — an utterly transfixing fusion of sight and heightened sound. Cinematographer Juan Sarmiento G. brings an appropriately sterile, less luscious color scheme than Carlos Vasquez’s red-heavy work on “Piaffe,” though heavily saturated greens become more and more prominent — shot on Super 16mm, the film is a real feast for the senses.

The couple’s sex life, at first, is devoid of more traditional human touch. Adam gets off on being asphyxiated, while Ingeborg has hypersensitive fingertips to the extent of them effectively being her erogenous zone; gracing her hands against the fabric that’s wrapped her lover during his orgasm seems to set off her own. As for penetrative sex, kissing or much in the way of regular skin-to-skin contact, that seems to be a void more gaping than some of the wounds they treat. In Adam’s subplot, there’s a suggestion this hesitance for human-to-human touch is widespread beyond just this specific relationship, as his pursuit of a fling is conducted through a trail of thirst-trap photos left around a bar, even though a proper face-to-face conversation (or kiss) with the other party was possible mere minutes earlier.

Beyond that crisis (or perhaps informed by it), the characters are also constantly fed word of ever-increasing climate catastrophes. Adam can’t seem to escape it, to the extent that whenever he’s close to climax in the bedroom, he starts listing off words connected to either extreme weather conditions (e.g. “typhoon”), diseases or wider phenomena (“pandemics”) that will only worsen as the environment collapses. But if humanity has fucked it, maybe the direct intervention of nature can at least save this couple.

After a snail gets lodged in her exhaust pipe, Ingerborg’s kleptomania screws her during a subway trip to the office. Swiping a man’s lighter as she exits the train, she badly falls while fleeing up the stairs. On the street to help her is recent patient Gaia, who Ingeborg hires as an assistant and driver while she recovers. Refusing to take proper time off, Ingeborg gets a custom leg prosthesis at a place called “Objet a.” Hey, that’s the name of the movie! But it’s also a term borrowed from French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, standing for an unattainable object of desire; a force that induces desire towards any particular object.

Disrupting the delicate balance of the couple’s relationship, Gaia’s enigmatic presence, personality, and physicality induce desire in Ingeborg, who’s transfixed by her obedient aide’s relationship to nature — specifically fungi — and the serotonergic sweat emitting from her mossy-haired armpits. Adam, meanwhile, seems envious of Ingeborg’s wood and leather leg prosthesis, in that it helps to make her more of an “object” like he so craves to be; Rosanna Arquette in David Cronenberg’s “Crash” now has worthy competition in the realm of kinky brace-based costumes.

As the living embodiment of a magic mushroom that is Gaia transforms the surgeons both chemically and physically, the careful choreography of the film’s (terrific) lead performances and its broader aesthetic lead to something altogether more abstract in the final stretches, with considerably different camerawork, in particular. The vibe shift, as it were, will likely polarize even those who’ve happily stuck through all the seat-licking and cum-like substances oozing out of a wooden corset.Thematically, though, the late swerve is fully all of a piece with Oren’s riveting exploration of the nature of desire, and how that can reframe our relationship to the natural world around us.

Grade: A-

“Objet a” premiered at the 2026 Locarno Film Festival. Oscilloscope will release it in the United States.

Camille Delamarre will direct Andrea Iervolino’s sports car movie Bugatti: The Final Race.

The director of pics such as Brick Mansions, The Transporter Refueled and Assassin Club will direct based on an English-language story from producer Iervolino about the life of race car driver Ettore Bugatti. The Andrea Iervolino American Company is producing.

We first reported on the Bugatti movie in 2024, at which point frequent Iervolino collaborator Bobby Moresco was expected to be scripting the project. A rep today confirmed to Deadline that Iervolino is now scripting the film himself alongside Albert Ferrari. This marks the first time Iervolino has taken a writing credit on one of his pics.

Iervolino is known for bringing films about other classic Italian car brands Lamborghini, Ferrari and Maserati to the screen. The Bugatti story will be set in Paris, in 1947, where Bugatti is living out his last months in an apartment where past and present blur into one. He has one final race ahead of him: To win back Molsheim – the factory, and the name, that were taken from him.

For Iervolino, the film is the final circuit on a tour that began with 2022’s Lamborghini: The Man Behind the Legend, starring Frank Grillo, and was followed by Michael Mann’s Ferrari, starring Adam Driver and Penélope Cruz, and and Maserati: The Brothers, directed by Bobby Moresco with Anthony Hopkins, Michele Morrone, Andy García, Al Pacino and Jessica Alba starring.

“With Lamborghini, Ferrari and Maserati I told the story of the Italian obsession with speed,” said Iervolino. “Bugatti is something else: It is art applied to an engine, a man who designed cars the way others carve sculpture, and who paid for that dream with the loss of his son.

“I have carried this story with me for years, and for the first time I felt the need to write it myself, together with Alberto Ferrari. Then I needed a director who could put speed in the audience’s stomach and, at the same time, hold the silence of a family tragedy. Camille has spent twenty years building a language of movement. He is the right man for this race.”

Delamarre added: “I grew up a few kilometres from the Bugatti legend, and for me Molsheim is not just a name: It is the place where impossible objects were built. When I read Andrea and Alberto’s screenplay I found exactly what I was looking for – a film in which the cars are not scenery, they are characters.

“We will shoot with real machines, in real places, because you cannot fake the sound of a 1939 straight-eight. But the race that interests me most is the one between a father and a son: Two men chasing the same perfection from opposite directions, with far less time than they think.”