Rushes | Capra Classic Abridged, Nolan’s “Odyssey,” IMAX for Your Benz

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Dear readers: We are pleased to share the first Rushes roundup of 2025, with big plans for how this feature will develop throughout the year. Among our ambitions is to better represent the film culture everywhere our readers live. Please help us do so by submitting screenings, series, talks, and other events for our listings consideration. Many thanks! –Ed.

NEWS

It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946).

• This holiday season, fans of Frank Capra’s Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) were outraged to discover that Amazon Prime streams an abridged version of the film that cuts almost 25 minutes from the original, including the entire “Pottersville” sequence: what Bedford Falls would look like if George Bailey had never been born. Prime also streams the original (entitled the “Black & White Version”) and a colorized version of the film.
• Sony Pictures Entertainment has upgraded its in-car entertainment service RIDEVU with “IMAX Enhanced® content” from its library—including Uncharted (2022), Gran Turismo (2023), and Madame Web (2024)—starting with Mercedes-Benz models. A representative from IMAX reports that they are “excited to bring IMAX fans closer to their favorite movie moments through powerfully immersive experiences in the car.”
• The Galway arthouse cinema Pálás will close its doors at the end of February 2025, just seven years after they first opened. The Light House Cinema Group, which invested €1.5 million in the Pálás in 2018, blames “rising costs, the impact of COVID and the oversaturation of commercial cinemas in the Galway area” for the closure.
• The big winners of the 82nd Golden Globe Awards were Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez (2024) with four awards, including Best Musical or Comedy and Best Non-English Language Film, and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024) with three awards: Best Drama, Best Actor (Drama), and Best Director. Other notable wins include Demi Moore for Best Actress (Musical or Comedy) and Sebastian Stan for Best Actor (Musical or Comedy).

DEVELOPING

• Christopher Nolan is set to follow his Oscar-winning Oppenheimer (2023) with an IMAX adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey (IMAX not yet available in the Honda Odyssey). The film will reportedly star Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Robert Pattinson, Matt Damon, and Charlize Theron. Universal Pictures has penciled a July 17, 2026, release.

REMEMBERING

Romeo and Juliet (Franco Zeffirelli, 1968).

• Olivia Hussey has died at 73. The British actress was known for playing Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's adaptation of Romeo and Juliet (1968), for which she received widespread acclaim. In 2023, Hussey, along with her co-star Leonard Whiting, filed a suit against Paramount Pictures alleging sexual abuse and harassment, claiming that Zeffirelli filmed them—both of whom were minors at the time—in the nude without their knowledge. Hussey also delivered lead performances in Black Christmas (1974) and the Jesus of Nazareth (1977) miniseries, as well as supporting turns in Lost Horizon (1973) and Death on the Nile (1978).
• Shyam Benegal has died at 90. The Indian filmmaker was widely regarded as a pioneer of parallel cinema. His early quartet—Ankur (1973), Nishant (1975), Manthan (1976) and Bhumika (1977)—cemented his professional legacy and garnered attention for Indian cinema. Benegal’s political and social conscience informed his cinematic practice, which focused on marginalized characters and critiqued oppressive systems. Following his “Muslim Women” trilogy, spurred by the deadly 1992–93 Bombay riots, he received the Dadasaheb Phalke Award, India's highest cinematic honor, in 2005.
• Jeff Baena has died at 47. The American director and screenwriter was known for dramedies like Joshy (2016), The Little Hours (2017), and Spin Me Round (2022). Upon entering the industry, he was a production assistant for Robert Zemeckis on What Lies Beneath (2000) and Cast Away (2000) before moving onto being David O. Russell’s assistant editor. While recovering from a minor car crash, Baena collaborated with Russell on the screenplay for the existential cult comedy I Heart Huckabees (2004).

RECOMMENDED READING

Classe tous risques (Claude Sautet, 1960).

• “Sautet, of course, never did become France’s ‘greatest filmmaker.’ But by 2000, the year Sautet died from liver cancer, he was at least one of its most underrated.” For The Baffler, Sean Nam examines director Claude Sautet’s work, especially Classe tous risques (1960), in the context of the French New Wave.
• “Though his name is too rarely uttered alongside such figures in the pantheon of political modernists—particularly in the Anglophone world—the landscape of contemporary experimental documentary is replete with tendencies that testify to Kramer’s enduring importance.” For the New Left Review, Erika Balsom surveys leftist filmmaker Robert Kramer’s career in light of Richard Copans’s essay-film tribute to the director, Looking for Robert (2024).
• “Like most filmmakers, I am intimately convinced that new technologies are a source of opportunity, and I feel betrayed by this limitation of digital. I very much want the passage to digital to be all gain and no loss.” For e-flux, Babette Mangolte considers the transition from analog to digital filmmaking in an excerpt from her 2003 essay “Afterward: A Matter of Time: Analog Versus Digital, the Perennial Question of Shifting Technology and Its Implications for an Experimental Filmmaker’s Odyssey.”
• “What does a man do when he discovers he has no rights? For some, that’s the seed of revolution. For me? Realizing I may have squandered months of my life, I rushed back to HQ, rolled my sleeves up to the antecubital fossa, and … professionalized.” For Triple Canopy, filmmaker James N. Kienitz Wilkins recounts his attempt to adapt Percival Everett’s Telephone (2020) across three different mediums: an essay, a (redacted) screenplay, and a dossier of materials.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Xala (Ousmane Sembène, 1975).

• New York, January 10 through 20: Anthology Film Archives presents “Blackout 1973,” a crucial year in Black cinematic history and political energy. The series is guest-curated by writer and programmer Yasmina Price.
• Toronto, January 10 through 29: TIFF Cinematheque presents “Marco Bellocchio: A Leap in the Dark,” a major retrospective comprising fourteen films by the prolific, still-active Italian auteur. Titles include his debut feature, Fists in the Pocket (1965), as well as The Eyes, The Mouth (1972) and the series’s namesake, A Leap in the Dark (1980).
• London, January 12: Close-Up Film Centre presents “Experiments From the 60s Avant-Garde in Taiwan and Hong Kong,” a collection of experimental short films from the likes of Chang Chao-tang and Law Kar, among others, that presage the Taiwanese and Hong Kong New Waves of the 1980s.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• The Internet Archive, via uploader BoysRBackInTown, presents a rip of Yukio Ninagawa’s performance of Medea (1984), which was released by TOHO Video only on VHS and hasn’t previously existed online. According to the uploader, the rip "took about 6 months and at least 3 destroyed VCRs to do correctly." The performance was referenced in an episode of Chris Marker's The Owl's Legacy (1989).
• An English-subtitled trailer has been released for Tsui Hark’s latest film Legends of The Condor Heroes: The Greatest Hero (2025), an adaptation of Jin Yong’s classic wuxia novel, which is set to be released in China on January 29.
• In the latest entry of his “Unloved” video essay series for RogerEbert.com, Scout Tafoya unpacks Robert Zemeckis’s divisive latest film, Here (2024).

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

• On an episode of the podcast Novara FM, James Butler and Eleanor Penny examine the action (and Christmas) classic Die Hard (1988) in the context of “corporate power, class antagonism, mid-century terrorism and women in the workplace.”

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

Guns (Robert Kramer, 1980).

• “As spoken American English teems with detours, ellipses, and unfinished sentences, so do Kramer’s films.” Leonardo Goi writes about the peripatetic career of Robert Kramer, who started as a chronicler of the New Left.
• “For a filmmaker predisposed to patterning and repetition, the airport setting seems a natural habitat, a labyrinth of perpetual motion in which people, objects, and power dynamics keep criss-crossing.” Adam Nayman considers Jaume Collet-Serra’s Carry-On (2024), a Christmas Eve airport-security caper.
• “He carefully trod back and forth between science fiction and reality, turning more and more frequently toward overtly political themes.” Carly Mattox commemorates the work of Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone (1959–64), on his centennial.
• “I was drawn to sourcing sounds and music that echo enigmas and different states of emotion.” Florence Scott-Anderton delivers a 70-odd-minute mix surveying the year in cinematic sounds.
• “His kicks form a cleaner visual line from hip to toe than one might expect from a guy his size.” Jonah Jeng submits his appreciation of the year’s best action scenes, revelling in the balletic pleasures of on-screen violence.

WISH LIST

• Problem Press has published Laura Paul’s Film Elegy, a poetic tribute to both her mentor Amy Halpern and celluloid itself. Modified from 16mm and formatted to fit the page, Film Elegy formally embraces the properties of film projection to communicate its lament for filmic craft as well as its craftspeople.

EXTRAS

Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975).

• Steven Soderbergh has published his annual comprehensive viewing log on his personal website. Some notable entries include multiple viewings of Star Wars films from the original and prequel trilogies, possibly spurred by watching the series Andor (2022), and four screenings of Jaws (1975), which he accompanied by reading Peter Benchley’s original novel, Edith Blake’s on-location exposé, and two documentaries on the making of the film.