‘Magazine’ Review: A Keenly Observed Snapshot of a Young Woman’s Coming of Age Within an Industry on the Brink

To hear editor-in-chief Mickey (Jake Lacy) tell it, publishing a literary magazine isn’t just a matter of writing, editing, designing art, selling ad space. It’s building a temporary community of contributors, permanently frozen within a particular configuration of columns and page breaks. “A snapshot of a single moment in time and then it’s gone,” he declares, “that’s creating a magazine.”

It is also, in writer-director Alexandra Pechman’s feature debut, creating a Magazine. Set in 2010 New York, the bildungsroman is but a brief glimpse into a world in flux: for Nora (Lily McInerny), a young intern at Mickey’s Platen; for the city, always in the process of transformation; for the industry as a whole, on the precipice of the pivot away from glossies and into digital media. What makes it linger long after its 105 minutes have ended is the way it’s rendered, in the fine-grained detail only one who knew and loved it once could have conjured.

Premiering this weekend at TIFF, Magazine begins with an air of romance, albeit not of the sort that revolves around anything so mundane as kissing a boy. For us in 2026, it’s rooted in nostalgia, starting with an opening sequence that lingers over the tactile relics of a not-that-far-bygone era: well-worn paperbacks, a BlackBerry with a keyboard, a tangle of iPod earbud wires.

For Nora, it’s precisely the opposite. An aspiring poet from Arizona, she just knows, instinctively, that the New York literary scene will be where she finally finds her people. As she waits outside the Platen doors for her watch to flip to exactly 10:05 — having been told to come in “a little after 10” — she’s not just awaiting her first day of (unpaid) work. She is anticipating the first step into the glorious future that surely stands on the other side of the sunlit threshold.

And it does, though not quite in the way Nora might have hoped or expected, and not without some dents to her rose-colored glasses along the way. Magazine isn’t the sort of film that traffics in shocking plot twists or showy confrontations, which on initial watch can make it feel slight. Even Nora’s most crushing disappointments over the course of the summer — a hookup situation gone sour, a fight with a friend, a rejected job application — are of the kind nearly any viewer will recall from their own lives, and I don’t suppose it’s much of a spoiler to say she emerges from them only lightly scathed.

It’s only in retrospect that the film’s full impact makes itself felt — not unlike how real life can appear unremarkable as it’s happening to you, and it’s later that you realize what an impression a certain spell of it has left on you. Magazine understands that an experience need not be melodramatic or unique to be deeply transformative, and that moments of joy or bitterness, confusion or clarity, can all sit side by side.

Pechman’s foundational strength is a subtle but razor-sharp sense of observation. As Nora walks into the Platen office, cinematographer Alex Ashe’s camera drinks in the big bright windows, plush entryway couch and tasteful shelves of books (all dreamed up by production designer Valeria de Felice) with the fascination of a would-be lover. It takes to heart how warmly a fellow intern (Lukita Maxwell’s Tabitha) welcomes her as “another comrade,” and how indifferently some of the higher-ranking editors (including Delaney Rowe’s Dominique and AnnaSophia Robb’s Beatrice) receive her by comparison.

Its awareness extends as well to the characters who populate this world. McInerny (Palm Trees and Power Lines) gives an impressively internalized performance that allows us to see the gears turning in Nora’s head, even as the character works to maintain her cool on the outside. As the other interns, Maxwell, Daniel Zolghradi and especially Ruby Cruz make vivid impressions right off the bat — aided by Pechman’s knack for trivial yet unshakable bits of character work, like the way Cruz’s Greer actually says “lol” out loud, or Zohlgradi’s Lenny accurately compares himself to “a giant, lazy cat.” The one off-note in the ensemble is Iris Apatow’s Daphne, a kooky socialite friend too cartoonish to fit into Magazine’s otherwise grounded world.

But if Magazine‘s sense of yearning is what allows it to take in every detail, that attentiveness is also what ultimately complicates the allure of this time and place. Pechman often immerses us in two contradictory perspectives at the same time. From Nora’s, we understand exactly what she sees in slightly older editorial assistant Thomas (Joshuah Melnick, hitting just the right balance between charm and smarm), and why she might be willing to ignore the red flags standing in the way of their flirtation. From our own, we’re able to understand just how terrible an idea this will turn out to be, long before she does.

From Nora’s, we take in the spoken and unspoken rules of Platen’s office culture: the short skirts and girly dresses favored by the young female staffers, the suspicious glances that never quite materialize into awkward questions about who’s been sleeping with whom, the casual condescension of visiting authors who treat Nora and Tabitha as little more than interchangeable eye candy. From ours, we see the way Nora internalizes these norms without actively deciding to do so — readjusting her expectations of professional life to accommodate the soft boundary-pushing of Thomas and Mickey, or her personal style to reflect her male colleagues’ taste in women.

By the time the summer winds down, the bubble of romanticism it had started in has well and truly burst. Magazine pierces it not in order to paint the era as irredeemably toxic, but to dig deeper for the truer gems buried within this universe: the friendships you make, the inspiration you find, the lessons you’ll carry with you for the rest of your life. So the rarified world of prestige magazines isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. As Nora glances around a room full of her fellow interns near the end of the film, the smile on her face says she’s exactly where she’s supposed to be after all.