Rushes | Hollywood Opposes Paramount Deal, Soderbergh Embraces AI, Tony Leung Recreates Chungking Entrance

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NEWS

Letty Lynton (Clarence Brown, 1932)

• The Cannes Film Festival announced the full lineup for its 2026 edition. The Official Selection will feature new works by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Andrey Zvyagintsev, among others. Meanwhile, Un Certain Regard will open with Jane Schoenbrun’s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (2026) and Directors’ Fortnight features Radu Jude’s loose adaptation of Octave Mirbeau’s novel The Diary of a Chambermaid (2026), previously adapted by Jean Renoir and Luis Buñuel.
• Over 4,000 Hollywood professionals have signed an open letter opposing Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, a deal that is expected to close by the end of the year. “This transaction would further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, reducing competition at a moment when our industries—and the audiences we serve—can least afford it,” explains the signatories, some of whom include Denis Villeneuve, Joaquin Phoenix, and Kristen Stewart. A Paramount spokeswoman responded by saying that, though they understand their concerns, the deal will ensure “creatives have more avenues for their work, not fewer.”
• Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings will be leaving the company in June. Though he stepped down as co-CEO in 2023, Hastings remained the company’s board chair for the past three years, but he will not be seeking reelection at their annual meeting. An SEC filing confirms that Hastings’s departure was neither tied to Netflix’s failed bid to acquire WBD nor resulted from any disagreements with the company.
• In an interview with Filmmaker, Steven Soderbergh revealed that he deployed AI in his new documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview (2026), premiering at Cannes in May, and that he plans to use “a lot of [it]” in an upcoming Spanish-American war film starring Wagner Moura. “I’m not threatened by it,” explains the director. “I don’t think it’s the solution to everything, and I don’t think it’s the death of everything…You show me a new tool. I want to get my hands on it and see what’s going on.”
• Legally out of circulation for over 90 years, Clarence Brown’s Letty Lynton (1932) will screen at the TCM Festival in a new restoration. Based on the Madeleine Smith scandal, the Joan Crawford vehicle has been unavailable since 1936 due to a successful copyright lawsuit waged by playwrights Edward Sheldon and Margaret Ayer Barnes who claimed that the film hewed too closely to their work Dishonored Lady.

DEVELOPING

Ocean's Eleven (Steven Soderbergh, 2001)

• Bradley Cooper is set to write, direct, and costar in an Ocean’s Eleven (2001) prequel opposite Margot Robbie.

REMEMBERING

Day for Night (François Truffaut, 1973)

• Nathalie Baye has died at 77. The French actress first came to prominence by appearing in key roles in François Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973) and Maurice Pialat’s The Mouth Agape (1974) before breaking through in Jean-Luc Godard’s Every Man for Himself (1980), which netted her a César Award for Best Supporting Actress. She won two more Césars in quick succession, one for her supporting performance in Strange Affair (1981) and the other for her lead role in La Balance (1982). Baye also collaborated with Gérard Depardieu on six films over the course of her career, most notably The Return of Martin Guerre (1982). Though she gained recognition in the United States with supporting roles in Roger Spottiswoode’s TV drama And the Band Played On (1993) and Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002), Baye remained a prominent French actress through the 2010s. She won her fourth César for her turn in Xavier Beauvois’s The Young Lieutenant (2006), garnered acclaim for her collaborations with Xavier Dolan, and made an appearance on the popular French series Call My Agent! (2015–20) opposite her daughter Laura Smet. Her final film role was as Madame de Montmirail in Downton Abbey: The New Era (2022).

RECOMMENDED READING

Faces of Death (Daniel Goldhaber, 2026)

• “Romania is extremely online. It has one of the highest rates of social-media use in Europe, with nearly half the population on TikTok. [Radu] Jude is an omnivorous consumer of social-media slop. Its combination of inventiveness and mundanity reminds him of the early films of the Lumière brothers, who paved the way for modern cinema with their invention of the cinematograph.” For The New Yorker, Rebecca Mead profiles Radu Jude about his unique career and his conflicted relationship with his home city of Bucharest.
• “Notably, Jia Zhangke’s Dance (2026) wasn’t even the director’s earliest outing with AI. Jia’s first AI short film Wheat Harvest (2024), was sponsored by Kling AI and effectively served as a commercial for the brand. Here was Jia Zhangke, the auteur who had so tirelessly championed realism, a sense of authenticity, and an ethical engagement with his subjects, producing a film that felt utterly plastic, mechanical, and soulless.” For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael Berry contextualizes Jia Zhangke’s latest AI short as a reflection of the ever-changing Chinese film industry and the filmmaker’s own auteurist interests.
• “Barbie runs for the fence, and the question now is whether her top billows out enough that it’ll look plausible that she’s been grazed but not hit after a bullet hole is added with vfx. On the fourth take, the hard drive she’s holding in her pocket disappears as she’s running, and no one can find it despite combing the grounds. The footage is reviewed for forensic evidence, but offers no clues; half an hour later, the hard drive will be found floating in the pool.” For Screen Slate, Vadim Rizov details his time on the set of Faces of Death (2026) three years prior to the film’s release.
• “[Golum] worked with Mr. Bond to adapt the story into a film that took her almost a decade to make. It ended up costing about $200,000, money she cobbled together with a crowdfunding page and emails to ‘everybody whose birthday I’d ever been invited to,’ she said. The rest she strung together with grants, a bank loan and a credit card. ‘I’m never paying off that credit card,’ she said, adding that she doesn’t recommend others follow her model.” For The New York Times, Paul McAdory profiles director Caroline Golum about her sophomore feature Revelations of Divine Love (2025) and the joys and struggles of filming a medieval film on a microbudget.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (Abrar Alvi & Guru Dutt, 1962)

• New York, April 29 through May 3: Prismatic Ground presents its sixth annual experimental documentary and avant-garde film festival. Screenings will be held in person over the course of five days at BAM, Anthology Film Archives, DCTV Firehouse Cinema, Light Industry, and Metrograph. The festival also presents a selection of short films from its first five editions on the Criterion Channel.
• Bryn Mawr, May 2: The Bryn Mawr Film Institute presents the North American premiere of the 4K restoration of Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962), codirected by Guru Dutt, who occupies “an in-between space within the larger traditions of Indian cinema,” says Sucheta Chakraborty.
• London, May 2 through June 5: The Institute of Contemporary Arts presents Nothing But Life: The Cinema of Rita Azevedo Gomes, the first complete retrospective of her work in the UK., beginning with her first feature The Sound of Shaking Earth (1990) and concluding with the UK premiere of her latest film Fuck the Polis (2025). 
• South Korea, May 2 through June 13: The Korean Film Archive presents a complete retrospective of Hong Sangsoo’s films to mark the 30th anniversary of his debut feature, The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well (1996).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• Kino Lorber presents a trailer for The Currents (2025), Milagros Mumenthaler’s psychological mystery about an Argentinian designer’s paralyzing fear of water.
• Memento Films presents a trailer for Asghar Farhadi’s latest drama Parallel Tales (2026)—starring Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Efira, and Vincent Cassel—ahead of its Cannes premiere.
• 20th Century Studios presents a trailer for Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars (2026), a post-apocalyptic drama starring Jacob Elordi as a civilian pilot who searches for better life amidst the wasteland.
• Searchlight Pictures presents a trailer for Wild Horse Nine (2026), Martin McDonagh’s latest darkly comedic two-hander starring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell as two CIA officers dispatched to Easter Island.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

• Listen to Florence Scott Anderton’s “Floating Through the Darkness,” a two-hour sound collage dedicated to David Lynch, who, she says, “had an almost supernatural sensibility when it comes to using sound and song to express something deeply about the world he lived in.”

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

Blue Heron (Sophy Romvari, 2025)

• “It was, at the script level, important to me that the film was not dogmatic in its perspective, because the film reveals itself to be about memory, and I don't think you only remember the things that you see or hear. I think you remember the things you heard about later, and you can imagine the scenarios that you think might have happened. You can remember your parents talking in bed, but you weren't there.” Mark Asch interviews Sophy Romvari about her debut feature film Blue Heron (2025), the importance of childhood archives, and the lifelong journey of processing grief.
• “When the avatars fight, they are at once confronting each other and themselves. This love-hate, dance-like battle between the two is both seductive and heart-wrenching, expressing deep emotions through violent gestures, despite existing within a highly technologized, artificial world. Kim’s work suggests a haunting vision of post-human identity: the self fighting against herself under algorithmic control.” In the latest entry in the Around the Galleries series, Gladys Lou examines Ayoung Kim's Delivery Dancer Codex, her solo which showed at MoMA PS1, which “addresses narcissism as an ethical and existential warning.”
• “We had originally planned on doing traditional subtitles, but when we got into the edit, we were gaining less and less confidence, because of the amount of foreign language text, that subtitles were going to be a pleasant way to experience the film with the up-and-down. As soon as we got into the editing suite, we threw these words on top and it worked immediately. Looking back, it’s such an essential feature that I can’t believe we didn’t know it on day one.” Vadim Rizov interviews Kevin Walker and Jack Auen about their debut feature Chronovisor (2026), the criteria and availability of hand models, and sourcing obscure VHS footage.

WISH LIST

Pompei: Below the Clouds (Gianfranco Rosi, 2025)

• The third issue of Narrow Margin, which juxtaposes texts about the works of Larry Cohen and Rita Azevedo Gomes, is available to preorder. The editors explain their “decentralized rationale” for choosing these two disparate filmmakers as the issue’s focus in their introduction.
• A companion zine to Gianfranco Rosi’s Pompei: Below the Clouds (2025), along with a limited-edition poster and vinyl soundtrack, is available to preorder from MUBI.
• Scénario: The five notebooks by Jean‑Luc Godard, a limited-edition boxset of five reproduced notebooks detailing the late filmmaker’s final project, is available to order from Le Livre d’Image Éditions.
• After Hours: Clubbing on Film, a record of the 2023 Batalha Centro de Cinema film series featuring original essays and contributions from the filmmakers presented in the series, is available to order from Loja da Curtas.

EXTRAS

Chungking Express (Wong Kar-wai, 1994)

• Tony Leung recreates his entrance in Chungking Express (1994) for Fast Paper Magazine to promote his latest film Silent Friend (2025).
• Applications for the Locarno Film Festival’s Heritage Restoration Contest, which determines one classic film to be selected for complete restoration, is open until May 6.