It's very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present.

Do you believe that someone out of the past can enter and take possession of a living being?

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Welcome back to The Next Picture Show, a movie of the week podcast devoted to a classic film and the way it's shaped our thoughts on a recent release.

I'm Tasha Robinson, here again with Genevieve Kosky.

And Scott Tobias.

Keith Phipps is out again this episode, trying to perfect his two-minute mile, but he'll be back on an upcoming episode.

Or maybe he'll be back on this one, but in a different timeline. Who's to say? Back in 2013, director Steven Soderberg famously said he was retiring from cinema. He said that directors were treated so badly that he didn't want to make movies anymore. It's become a familiar joke since then to diss Soderberg for how many projects he's made since his supposed retirement. pretty much the same way it's fun to twit Japanese director Haya Miyazaki for repeatedly

declaring his retirement and then letting his love of cinema drag him back to the drawing board once

more. But what a lot of those jokes miss is that Soderberg actually has largely avoided

the big screen projects he said he was quitting. He's made a TV show, The Nick.

He's made films for Netflix and HBO.

Projects like the Liberace biopic behind the candelabra or the basketball behind the scenes feature film, High Flying Bird.

He's experimented with shooting on iPhones.

He's experimented with the interactive HBO project Mosaic.

He didn't actually say he was giving up being a director.

He just said he wanted to give up Hollywood.

And true to form, for the last nine years, he's followed his muse down a whole lot of different pathways,

taking advantage of opportunities to tell wildly different kinds of stories in very different media settings,

all without dealing with the parts of the business

that he specifically said he was retiring from because he'd come to hate them.

So the latest in that crop of experimental projects is the straight-to-HBO Max movie Kimmy,

...