Rushes | AI Bruce Lee, Made in New Jersey, Supertrump

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INTRODUCING...

Action shot from the Locarno Critics Academy. Photography: Carlo Pisani.

• The cohort for this year’s Locarno Critics Academy, co-organized by Notebook, has been announced. Stay tuned for more by these ten young critics in these pages.

NEWS

A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986).

• The China Film Foundation (CFF) plans to partner with businesses to license over 100 Hong Kong films to AI companies, hoping to “breathe new life into the classics” and attract younger audiences. Announced projects include an animated version of John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986), of which neither Woo nor Bruce Lee’s family were previously aware.
• YouTube has modified guidelines for its Partner Program, which lets high-profile creators monetize their videos, to “better identify mass-produced and repetitious content” in order to combat “spam” videos. Some tech journalists and commentators believe the change is related to the proliferation of AI content on the platform, including entire channels dedicated to mass-produced fake news.
• New Jersey governor Phil Murphy approved legislation to expand tax credits for film and television productions in the state from $150 million to $250 million for 2026. The law also expands the types of expenses companies can claim, and provides credit bonuses if they hire local workers or market their production as “Made in New Jersey.” It has been criticized from the Left by those who argue that expanding corporate tax breaks in the face of the state’s fiscal difficulties, on top of large cuts in federal aid by the Trump administration, spits in the face of struggling New Jersey families.
• The official White House X account photoshopped President Trump onto the poster for Superman (2025) to make him look like the Man of Steel, declaring him “SUPERMAN TRUMP.” This comes on the heels of conservative backlash following director James Gunn’s comments that the eponymous superhero is “an immigrant.”

REMEMBERING

Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992).

• Michael Madsen has died at 67. The American actor started his career working at the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago where he studied under John Malkovich and appeared in a production of Of Mice and Men. Through the early 1990s, Madsen made key supporting turns in a number of high-profile films, including The Doors (1991) and Thelma & Louise (1991). His breakthrough came when he costarred in Quentin Tarantino’s debut, Reservoir Dogs (1992), where he played the psychopathic Mr. Blonde, who tortures a policeman by cutting his ear off while dancing to “Stuck in the Middle With You.” Madsen reunited with Tarantino on Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004), in which he played Bill’s brother Budd, and went on to appear in The Hateful Eight (2015) and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). Madsen appeared in over 300 film and television productions across his career, including Species (1995), Donnie Brasco (1997), and Boarding Gate (2007). When asked about the litany of B movies that pepper his resume, he told The Independent, “Some of them I’m only in for 10 minutes, but they bought my name, and they bought my face to put on the DVD box with a gun. What people don’t always understand is that I established a certain lifestyle for my family. … I wasn’t about to move my six kids into a trailer park. So when people offered me work, it wasn’t always the best, but I had to buy groceries and I had to put gas in the car.”
• Mark Snow has died at 78. The American, Juilliard-trained composer was one of the first of his generation to work exclusively with electronic instruments beginning in the late 1980s. He was best known for composing the spooky theme song for the TV series The X-Files (1993–2002; 2016–18) as well as its two subsequent feature film spinoffs (1998 and 2008). Snow devised the basis of the theme when he accidentally leaned on a keyboard with an echo-delay effect engaged; he later incorporated a whistling sample from his synthesizer combined with his wife’s own whistling to flesh out the eerie tone. A version of the theme was released as a single and topped the charts in France and the United Kingdom. Snow went on to compose the music for two other shows by X-Files creator Chris Carter, Millennium (1996–99) and The Lone Gunmen (2001). A vocal fan of The X-Files throughout its run, Alain Resnais hired to Snow to score his final four features: Private Fears in Public Places (2006), Wild Grass (2009), You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (2012), and Life of Riley (2014).

RECOMMENDED READING

Rosa la rose, fille publique (Paul Vecchiali, 1986).

• “Frémaux may not be a technocrat, but when I asked fellow film critics at Cannes how they would describe him, the most common responses were ‘politician’ and ‘diplomat’. One Australian programmer compared him to ‘a sales rep for Cartier watches’.” For the London Review of Books, Daniella Shreir recounts her experience at this year’s alternatively charged and subdued Cannes Film Festival and contextualizes its uniquely political history.
• “It's never the film that is made at the moment because it's trying to do the right thing or be the right thing or make you feel the right way. Movies and art—movies that are considered art—are always doing something a little more complicated and nothing that endures ever was the politically expedient thing in that moment.” For Defector, Nicholas Russell interviews Michael Koresky about his new book, Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness.
• “The program dedicated to the versatile classic Hollywood filmmaker Lewis Milestone, for instance, had one of the best entries in the festival, the Al Jolson–starring musical comedy Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933); and one of the worst, The Captain Hates the Sea (1934), which plays like Grand Hotel (1932) on a shitty cruise ship where half the characters seem drunk, if not asleep.” For Film Comment, Beatrice Loayza reports from Bologna’s Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival, a festival dedicated to classic cinema and new restorations.
• “Rather than a creature imprisoned by debt, Rosa is instead presented as a victim of her own certainty, a perfect avatar for the new esprit of individualism over the commons. Rosa la rose tells a traditional story of innocence lost, but with the added twist that our heroine believes she has seen it all already—a jadedness that falls too easily into naiveté.” For Metrograph, Steve Macfarlane unpacks Paul Vecchiali’s lush melodrama Rosa la rose, fille publique (1986), whose new restoration is currently playing in theaters.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Carmen Jones (Otto Preminger, 1954).

• London, July 2 through 28: The British Film Institute presents Re-introducing Dorothy Dandridge: The Cool Flame, a retrospective of the actress and singer’s work that includes a 16mm print of Gerald Mayer’s Bright Road (1953) and a screening of Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones (1954), which netted Dandridge an Oscar nomination.
• New York, July 8 through 29: L’Alliance New York presents Yannick Bellon: The Happy Pessimist, the first in a two-part retrospective of the French filmmaker’s work, which was made outside the New Wave and focused on the reclamation of dignity in a harsh, unforgiving world.
• Berlin, July 17 through August 24: silent green presents Breathing Matter(s), a program dedicated to the work of artists and anthropologists Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, whose films, made through Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, have renewed interest in visual ethnographic study.
• Chicago, through August 2: Corbett vs. Dempsey presents Poised Compression, an exhibition of Rosa Barba’s sculpture, film, and sound work. Barba’s Chicago debut is her first gallery exhibition following her recent solo show at the Museum of Modern Art.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (Marie Losier, 2011).

• As part of its annual month-long Summer Music Festival series, Le Cinéma Club presents Marie Losier’s The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye (2011), which chronicles the relationship between avant-garde pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and their partner, Lady Jaye. The film explores their lifelong “pandrogyny” project amidst the US and UK art scenes.
• Janus Films has released a trailer for the new 4K restoration of Ardak Amirkulov’s The Fall of Otrar (1991), a thirteenth-century historical epic about the eponymous city in the Persian kingdom of Khwarazm ahead of its invasion by Genghis Khan’s troops, out August 1 in New York. The film has drawn comparisons to the large-scale work of Akira Kurosawa and Andrei Tarkovsky.

• Paramount Pictures has released a trailer for Edgar Wright’s The Running Man (2025), starring Glen Powell and Josh Brolin, out November 7. The film marks the second adaptation of Stephen King’s novel following the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle.
• Neon has released a trailer for Sentimental Value (2025), Joachim Trier’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated The Worst Person in the World (2021). The film stars Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgård and is out November 7.

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

Pavements (Alex Ross Perry, 2024).

• “Pavements proves how much fun it remains to be beholden to no one, and who can resist getting a little sentimental about that?” Jenn Pelly considers truth, fiction, and mischief in Alex Ross Perry’s new rocku-dramedy.
• “Cunningham is all about the push and pull of cold mechanics up against the living and breathing human form.” Florence Scott-Anderton drops her latest soundtrack mix, sourcing samples from Chris Cunningham’s iconoclastic music-video and commercial work.
• “Rather than simplistically connecting alienated psyches with desolate landscapes or impersonal cityscapes, his photographs and films alike dramatize landscapes as sites in which Turkish identity is staged and challenged.” Forrest Cardamenis provides salient historical context for a recent exhibition of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s films and photographs.
• “Benegal’s rural uprising trilogy ... was crowdfunded entirely by 500,000 dairy farmers in Gujarat, each of whom contributed two rupees.” Arun A. K. reviews a new book on Indian Parallel Cinema, a movement that overturned the industrial hegemony of Bombay.

WISH LIST

Illustration by Stephanie Monohan.

• Two new books by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum are available to purchase from Sticking Place Books: Travels in the Cities of Cinema: Conversations with Ehsan Khoshbakht, a wide-ranging interview book with the chief curator of the Cinema Ritrovato festival, which doubles as a catalog of memories and experiences from the critic’s life; and Camera Movements That Confound Us, an “experimental investigation into a neglected yet essential part of moviegoing.”

EXTRAS

Om Dar-B-Dar (Kamal Swaroop, 1988).

• UK-based programmers and curators Omar Ahmed and Ranjit S. Ruprai have announced a Kickstarter to fund the Blu-ray release of Kamal Swaroop’s Om Dar-B-Dar (1988), a landmark of Parallel Cinema that follows the adventures of a school boy in Rajasthan. It’s the first release from their boutique home video label, The Cloud Door, which specializes in South Asian cinema.