Rushes | Court Weighs Review Ban, Hong Kong Cinemas Shutter, List Season Continues

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NEWS

Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003).

• The Tamil Film Active Producers Association has filed a writ petition to ban social-media film reviews for the first three days of the theatrical release, claiming financial losses due to negative “review bombing.” Theater owners have likewise proposed banning YouTubers from recording audience reactions in cinema lobbies and parking lots.
• The MCL Cinema in Hong Kong’s Diamond Hill district has shuttered after just two years of operations, the seventh theater in the city to have closed this year. Insiders are bracing for the hit to the local film industry’s reputation and financial stability that could follow.
• For the past decade, Hollywood executives believed that brief theatrical windows would boost subscriber numbers for their streaming services. Now, they have largely reversed course, with a number of this year’s titles finding streaming success after a robust theatrical campaign—even if they were box-office flops.     
• The year-end list season continues unabated. Film Comment has published its best-of-2024 list (alongside its Best Undistributed Films and its voters' individual ballots). Sight and Sound has an aggregated list alongside the ballots. Screen Slate’s also includes “First Viewings and Discoveries.” Richard Brody’s picks are in The New Yorker, Clarisse Loughrey’s list can be found at The Independent, and Nicholas Barber and Caryn James’s highlights are at the BBC. In honor of the centennial anniversary of the founding of the Belgoskino film studio, the Belarusian Independent Film Academy published a poll on the best Belarusian films of all time. Plus, shortlists for the 97th Academy Awards have been announced in ten categories.

DEVELOPING

• Austin Butler is set to suit up as Patrick Bateman in Luca Guadagnino’s new take on Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.
• John C. Reilly will play Buffalo Bill in Alessio Rigo de Righi and Matteo Zoppis’s surrealist western Heads or Tails? alongside Nadia Tereszkiewicz, Alessandro Borghi, and Peter Lanzani. The duo’s follow-up to The Tale of King Crab (2021) is now in postproduction and due to premiere in the new year.
• A documentary about Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, is in preproduction. The film will reportedly “explore how killers are created, what this killing says about our society and the values we place on who lives and who dies.”

REMEMBERING

The Road (Yılmaz Güney and Şerif Gören, 1982).

• Şerif Gören has died at 80. The Turkish filmmaker is best known for codirecting The Road (1982) with Yılmaz Güney, who was in prison at the time and helped helm the film remotely, escaping in time for postproduction. A portrait of five prisoners during a week’s home leave in the aftermath of the 1980 coup, The Road won the Palme d’Or in 1982, though it was banned in Turkey until 1999.
• Yoji Kuri has died at 96. The Japanese filmmaker and cartoonist was a member of the “Animation Association of Three,” alongside Ryohei Yanagihara and Hiroshi Manabe, and pioneered avant-garde adult animation in the 1960s. His short film Human Zoo (1962) won the Special Jury Prize at Annecy and the bronze award for animation at Venice.

RECOMMENDED READING

Castle One (Malcolm Le Grice, 1966).

• “As far as I’m concerned, it is only culture that can safeguard us against barbarity.” Sabzian has published the text of Sergei Loznitsa’s lecture on the state of cinema in 2024.
• “Over the past decade, Netflix, which first emerged as a destroyer of video stores, has developed a powerful business model to conquer television, only to unleash its strange and destructive power on the cinema. In doing so, it has brought Hollywood to the brink of irrelevance.” For n+1, Will Tavlin examines the history of Netflix and the new models of attention it has imposed upon entertainment.
• “The dialogue Dahomey sets up between the voice of King Ghezo and the Beninois youth makes clear that what is at stake is an unfinished project of self-determination with cultural, political, economic, social, and spiritual consequences.” For The Baffler, Yasmina Price unpacks Mati Diop’s Dahomey (2024) in the context of anti-colonialist nonfiction cinema and the history of museums as repositories for pillaged cultural objects.
• “There was a sense of things being revealed, the guts of cinema and art being reformulated.” For the British Film Institute, William Fowler eulogizes Malcolm Le Grice.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Diary of a Lost Girl (G. W. Pabst, 1929).

• New York, through December 26: Film Forum presents “Brando 100,” a commemoration of the actor’s centennial with many titles playing on 35mm.
• San Francisco, through February 28: BAMPFA presents “G. W. Pabst, Selected Films 1925–38,” including nine of his films produced in the Weimar Republic, plus two French productions.
• Berlin, January 2 through 12: Arsenal presents its annual Unknown Pleasures — American Independent Film Festival at Neukölln's Wolf Kino cinemas. The lineup includes India Donaldson’s Good One (2024), Carson Lund’s Eephus (2024), and Courtney Stephens’s Invention (2024).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• Charlie Shackleton’s “Meet the Artist” video, commissioned by the Sundance Film Festival for their YouTube channel, was apparently rejected for being “vastly too long.” The five-minute video introduces the viewer to Shackleton’s forthcoming Zodiac Killer Project in the course of running a possibly sinister errand.
• Altered Innocence has released a trailer for Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel’s Eat the Night (2024), in which two siblings respond to the shutdown of their beloved online roleplaying game.
• Focus Features has released a trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag (2025), an interspousal spy caper starring Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett.

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

Nickel Boys (RaMell Ross, 2024).

• “The distance one might trouble over as a critic, or feel unable to establish as a viewer at a film screening or art exhibition, is the one Ross works to sublimate as an artist.” Cassie da Costa profiles RaMell Ross, whose Nickel Boys (2024) is a daring experiment in first-person cinema.
• “I knew if we filmed very fast, we wouldn’t waste much money.” Matthew Thrift interviews Johnnie To, the doyen of Hong Kong actioner, focusing on his work outside of the genre for which he is best known in the West.
• “War has put life on pause, and yet time inevitably proceeds.” Celluloid Liberation Front considers the films of Jocelyne Saab, who chronicled her own war-torn Lebanon with both fearlessness and vulnerability.
• “The picture floats by on an ocean of sound that ebbs and flows but never breaks, never crashes.” Robert Barry reviews the year in soundtracks, of which music is just one aspect.
• Part two of “On the Way to the Movies,” a new serialized comic by Dash Shaw, went out in the Weekly Edit. Subscribe today to catch the next installment!

WISH LIST

• MACK Books has announced the launch of Sofia Coppola’s new publishing imprint, Important Flowers. Coppola’s selected books include a collection of photographs from Corinne Day shot on the set of The Virgin Suicides (1999), a visual history of Chanel Haute Couture House, and a day planner designed to emulate the director’s personal diary (next year’s planner is already sold out, but one can preorder for 2026).