Pechman's "Magazine" Debuts At TIFF With McInerny — SkimNews
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- "Magazine" premiered in the Discovery section of the Toronto Film Festival, the debut feature from writer-director Alexandra Pechman, set circa 2011 at a fictional "New Yorker-lite" monthly called Platen.
- Lily McInerny stars as intern Nora, joined by Lukita Maxwell, Iris Apatow, Ruby Cruz, and Daniel Zolghadri as fellow interns competing for a full-time position that may open up over the summer.
- Joshuah Melnick plays editorial assistant Thomas, whose pursuit of Nora is described in the review as "clearly pre-#MeToo," framing the relationship as a central tension of the story.
- Jake Lacy plays publisher Mickey, who offers the thematic line: "a magazine is like a snapshot of a single moment in time, and then it's gone," the review calling it "prophetic" given the decline of print since 2011.
- Pechman is compared stylistically to Whit Stillman and Noah Baumbach, with the film also linked to Joan Micklin Silver's 1977 "Between the Lines"; the review calls it "a little antidote to The Devil Wears Prada."
- UTA is handling sales; the film was produced by Pechman, Anne Alexander, and Tess Cohen, with a runtime of 1 hour 45 minutes.
- A TIFF audience commenter said the film "lingered with me more than most of the others I saw," singling out McInerny as "a gem" and praising Melnick and AnnaSophia Robb.
Why it matters: A debut filmmaker landing a TIFF Discovery slot with a period piece about the dying print era is itself a quiet cultural statement: independent financiers are still backing small literary-magazine character studies when the industry's appetite for them has supposedly evaporated. Pechman's sharp young cast — including Iris Apatow and a standout turn from McInerny — gives the project sales heat beyond the festival circuit.
Ask SkimNews
