Rushes | China May Ban American Films, Sundance to Boulder, Bingeing the Beatles

This week’s essential news, articles, sounds, videos, and more from the film world.
Notebook

This week, we are pleased to introduce Rushes Extra, a new series of reported pieces that go beyond the headlines to take a closer look at developing stories from throughout the film world. In this first installment, Vikram Murthi reports from the picket lines of the New York cinema workers strike at Alamo Drafthouse.

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NEWS

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (John Hughes, 1986).

DEVELOPING

Help! (Richard Lester, 1965).

REMEMBERING

The Doors (Oliver Stone, 1991).

  • Val Kilmer has died at 65. The American actor initially garnered acclaim in comedies like Top Secret! (1984) and Real Genius (1985) before breaking out as a dramatic actor in Top Gun (1986). He quickly became well known for a variety of diverse lead performances, such as Jim Morrison in The Doors (1991), Doc Holliday in Tombstone (1993), and Batman in Batman Forever (1995). His supporting turns in films like Heat (1995), Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), and MacGruber (2010) also endeared him to audiences across generations. A true eccentric, Kilmer felt just as comfortable in direct-to-video entertainment as he did playing Mark Twain on stage. His final film role was in Top Gun: Maverick (2022), in which he reunited with costar Tom Cruise. In The Atlantic, Beatrice Loayza writes in tribute, “He was an actor who could complicate the entire meaning of a film with a strut and a glimpse, and convey savagely weird and wonderful humanity in a brief encounter.”
  • Masahiro Shinoda has died at 94. The Japanese New Wave director joined Shochiku Studio in 1953 as an assistant director and worked under numerous directors, including Yasujiro Ozu, before being promoted to director alongside peers like Nagisa Oshima and Yoshishige Yoshida. He turned to independent filmmaking in 1966, after his acclaimed Yakuza noir Pale Flower (1964) caused internal controversy at Shochiku (cowriter Masaru Baba accused Shinoda of making an “anarchic” film). Across his four-decade career, Shinoda directed such celebrated works as the historical drama Double Suicide (1969)  and the surreal kabuki film The Scandalous Adventures of Buraikan (1970). He won the Silver Bear at Berlinale for Gonza the Spearman (1986) and the Japan Academy Prize for Best Director for Childhood Days (1990). Shinoda retired from filmmaking in 2003 following the release of his final film, Spy Sorge (2003).
  • Richard Chamberlain has died at 90. The American actor became a teen idol during his tenure as Dr. Kildare (1961–66) on the medical soap opera of the same name. He’s best known for his work during the post-Roots (1977) miniseries boom in the late 1970s and ’80s, including starring turns in Centennial (1978-79), Shōgun (1980), and The Thorn Birds (1983). He also made a strong impression on the big screen with a key supporting turn in Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968), as well as Aramis in the The Three Musketeers (1973) and its sequels, and ​​Allan Quatermain in King Solomon’s Mines (1985). He was the first actor to play Jason Bourne in the two-part TV adaptation of The Bourne Identity (1988).

RECOMMENDED READING

The Chosen (Dallas Jenkins, 2017–).

  • “Though the world is currently short on neither right-wing governmental drift nor parallel evangelical movements, there is something uniquely and unexportably American about these films.” For Film Comment, Vadim Rizov unpacks the recent wave of Christian evangelical filmmaking in the US.
  • “Whenever I did a Q&A, someone would attack me. Even in 2010, I was showing films in Denmark. Someone said, ‘These films are terrible, why are we even seeing this?’ I said, ‘I got paid $1500 to come! That’s why you’re watching it!’” For the inaugural issue of Big Toe Magazine, co-editors in chief Ryan Akler-Bishop and Vicky Huang interview underground filmmaker Richard Kern about his long career, the Cinema of Transgression, and his Gen Z following.
  • “Not unlike a tarot reading, the film deals in a number of central questions that it turns over for interpretation and, though its deeper themes are grand, they are held lightly, even tenderly, by the filmmaker, who enjoys the visual world of concrete, mirror, glass, feathers and fluff that she captures.” For Frieze’s Film Issue, Laura McLean-Ferris unpacks the lasting influence of Agnes Varda's sophomore feature Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962) in light of her recent motherhood.
  • “I needed an escape, but not to a phony world where everything is awesome. In Twin Peaks, I found a warm bath—of cyanide. A refuge where good and evil are, at best, evenly matched.” For Vanity Fair, Mike Hogan dives deep into the history of Twin Peaks (1990–91, 2017), its lengthy fan-driven afterlife, and its enduring appeal among writers and political operatives alike in the context of its 35th anniversary and David Lynch’s recent death.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Kitch's Last Meal (Carolee Schneemann, 1973–76).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

  • Warner Bros. has released a trailer for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (2025), a loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland starring Leonardo DiCaprio, scheduled to be released on September 26.
  • Metrograph Pictures has released a trailer for Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April (2024), in which an obstetrician in rural Georgia who offers illegal abortion services comes under investigation.
  • In the latest entry in MoMA’s Art for All series, filmmaker John Wilson discusses his artistic practice and daily routine, with a sneak peek inside his new microcinema.
  • Le Cinema Club presents Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s archival short film Moune Ô (2022), about his father’s troubled relationship with French Guiana, on the occasion of the New York premiere of Jean Baptiste’s feature debut, Kouté Vwa (2025), at New Directors/New Films.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

Photograph by Eleanor Petry.

WISH LIST

Martina’s Playhouse (Peggy Ahwesh, 1989).

  • Tight Heads, a book collecting Polaroid photographs of 1970s film luminaries by Candy Clark, is available to order from All Night Menu. It features never-before-seen images of Jeff Bridges, Anjelica Huston, David Bowie, and many more.
  • The Attractions of the Moving Image: Essays on History, Theory, and the Avant-Garde—a collection of new and selected essays by cinema and media studies scholar Tom Gunning—is available to purchase from University of Chicago Press.
  • The Virgin Suicides, a volume of photographs by British fashion photographer Corinne Day taken during the film’s 1999 production, featuring new texts by director Sofia Coppola and Jeffrey Eugenides, who wrote the novel. It’s available to pre-order now from MACK and will ship in May.
  • A collection of sourcebooks from experimental filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh is available to purchase from the Visual Studies Workshop. It includes “facsimiles of articles, letters, images, and notations and drawings” collected through the production process of such films as The Deadman (1987) and Martina’s Playhouse (1989), as well as a link to a playlist of audio recordings selected by the filmmaker.

EXTRAS

  • Applications are open for the seventh edition of the European Workshop for Film Criticism, comprising two weeklong sessions during Curtas Vila do Conde in July and the Ljubljana Short Film Festival in August. The workshop is organized by the European Network for Film Discourse (END) and Talking Shorts and hosted by Notebook’s own Leonardo Goi.
  • Prada, in collaboration with director Wong Kar-wai, has launched Mi Shang Prada Rong Zhai, its first standalone restaurant in Asia. With a design inspired by the aesthetic of Wong’s films, the restaurant is housed in Shanghai’s historic Rong Zhai mansion and offers an “all-day dining experience, blending Italian cuisine with Chinese influences.”

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