Rushes | India Censors “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” Netflix Denies Plot Repetition, Row K Suffers Cash Crisis

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NEWS

The Voice of Hind Rajab (Kaouther Ben Hania, 2025).

• India’s Central Board of Film Certification has blocked the theatrical release of The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025), the Oscar-nominated docudrama about the Red Crescent’s thwarted attempts to save a five-year-old Palestinian girl from murder by the Israel Defense Forces, allegedly due to fear it would “break up the India-Israel relationship.” This ruling follows Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s recent visit to Israel, which aimed to restrengthen ties between the two countries after decades of pro-Palestinian foreign policy in India.
• At the Oscars, host Conan O’Brien performed a sketch with Sterling K. Brown lightly mocking a rumored mandate from “some studios” to restate plot points to help reorient distracted viewers. Though Netflix wasn’t mentioned by name, the streamer’s film chief Dan Lin released a statement denying the directive exists. Matt Damon alluded to the practice in January, claiming that Netflix gave him and Ben Affleck notes while making The Rip (2026) to “[reiterate] the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they’re watching.”
• At a recent Q&A following the Sundance award–winning documentary American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez (2026), about the Chicano playwright and director who cofounded the El Teatro Campesino acting troupe alongside César Chávez and the United Farm Workers, director David Alvarado discussed recent accusations of sexual abuse against Chávez, which came to light after the film had premiered. Alvarado spoke to the way that documentarians might grapple with shifting contexts surrounding their subjects, noting that they planned to proceed with the film’s release while directly addressing the allegations.
• Hollywood distributor Row K is facing a cash-flow crisis just eight months after officially launching. The company acquired four films from this past TIFF, but after Gus Van Sant’s Dead Man’s Wire (2025) severely underperformed, the company’s founders have been scrambling to pay vendors and consultants. Meanwhile, the company’s top trio of executives are currently negotiating their exits, and Maude Apatow’s Poetic License (2025) is searching for a new distributor following Row K’s decision to push the film’s release from the summer to the fall.

DEVELOPING

Bloodsport (Newt Arnold, 1988).

• Olivier Assayas is at work on a screenplay for a sequel to Something in the Air (2012). The film would feature the same actors played by a different cast and will cover the “punk rock years,” following on from the early ’70s milieu of the first film.
• Christian Petzold is “thinking about making” a movie starring his two muses Nina Hoss and Paula Beer, which is reportedly about a “theater group under pressure.”
• Michaela Coel is set to write and direct a “reimagining” of Bloodsport (1988) for A24. The original cult classic propelled martial artist Jean-Claude Van Damme to stardom.

REMEMBERING

Code of Silence (Andrew Davis, 1985).

• Chuck Norris has died at 86. While stationed at South Korea’s Osan Air Base during his tenure in the Air Force, the American actor began training in the martial art of Tang Soo Do. When he returned to the States in the early ’60s, he opened a martial arts studio and competed in tournaments, steadily accumulating black belts across multiple disciplines. Around this time, Norris befriended Bruce Lee, who invited him to play his nemesis in The Way of the Dragon (1972), a role which launched his acting career. Following early starring roles in independent films like Breaker! Breaker! (1977) and A Force of One (1979), Norris eventually signed a multiple-picture deal with Cannon Films, whose B-films like Missing in Action (1984) and Delta Force (1986) made him one of America’s biggest action stars. His most acclaimed film from this period, however, was the Andrew Davis–helmed, non-Cannon picture Code of Silence (1985), where Norris plays a cop ostracized by his unit for refusing to support a corrupt peer. Norris went on to star in the CBS drama Walker, Texas Ranger (1993–2001), which propelled him to cult status thanks to out-of-context clips highlighted on Late Night with Conan O'Brien (1993–2009) and the “Chuck Norris Facts” internet meme.
• Valerie Perrine has died at 82. The American actress made her film debut in George Roy Hill’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) before garnering widespread critical acclaim playing Honey Bruce, Lenny Bruce’s wife in Bob Fosse’s Lenny (1974). She won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival for the role and was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe. Perrine went on to costar in Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980) as Lex Luthor’s girlfriend Eve Teschmacher, as well as to deliver supporting turns in The Electric Horseman (1979), The Border (1982), and Water (1985). She made multiple appearances on television, including as John Munch’s ex-wife in an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–99). Her career and struggle with Parkinson’s disease were explored in Stacey Souther’s documentary short Valerie (2019).

RECOMMENDED READING

Train Dreams (Clint Bentley, 2025).

• “[Denis] Johnson’s astounding, often dismaying prose dominates the movie in the form of off-screen narration read by Will Patton. The audiobook quality of his performance is a pleasure to hear, but the movie, for all its patience and forest majesty, is bland, an example of the creeping Hallmarkization of American film, or of the domestication of Terrence Malick’s style in service of an illustrated novel.” For n+1, A. S. Hamrah writes about this year’s Oscar selections, many of which feature “the majesty of trees, terrible fathers, and the use of screen-filling black to end scenes with a pause and begin new ones with a jolt.”
• “Unlike his peers, who theorized a seventh art entirely distinct from the traditions of theater and literature, Barnet’s cinema is a container for the abundant irony, melancholy, and hilarity of life itself, which might otherwise pass unremarked.” For Screen Slate, Maxwell Paparella writes about the life and career of Soviet filmmaker Boris Barnet, whose work was recently featured in a thirteen-film retrospective at New York’s Metrograph.
• “The collision in High School (1968) between the earnest inarticulacy of the kids and the disseminating doubletalk of the adults makes syntax itself into spectacle; the film presents teenage growing pains and grown-up capitulations with equal clarity. The justly famous passage when a well-meaning English teacher tries to engage her sullen charges by quoting a selection of Simon and Garfunkel lyrics exists on its own sweetly cringey terms while serving succinctly as a metonym: coming-of-age as a series of dangling conversations.” For the New Left Review, Adam Nayman pays tribute to the late documentarian Frederick Wiseman, whose “work endures in its commitment to life’s myriad inconsistencies.”
• “The primary way that I mean for [the title] to be interpreted is that the film is my attempt to remake my life after losing my son. That doesn’t mean that the grief or the pain goes away. I just accept the fact that you live with that for the rest of your life. But somehow it clears the way for me to move forward again.” For Film Comment, David Schwartz speaks with filmmaker Ross McElwee about his latest film Remake (2025), a devastating portrait of fatherhood and loss.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Here and Elsewhere (Jean-Luc Godard & Anne Marie Miéville, 1976).   

• New York, March 27 through April 4: The Japan Society presents Meiko Kaji: A Retrospective, a weeklong tribute to one of Japan’s finest actresses, featuring films like Stray Cat Rock: Sex Hunter (1970), Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion (1972), and Lady Snowblood (1973). Japan Society will also host Kaji for select Q&As in her first public New York appearance in over 40 years.
• London, March 29: As part of their Jean-Luc Godard: Unmade and Abandoned series, the Institute of Contemporary Arts presents Palestine. The program features five short documentaries about Palestine, including Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville’s Here and Elsewhere (1976) and Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan’s Palestine Will Win (1969).
• Amsterdam, April 3 through September 6: Eye Filmmuseum presents Eye(s) Open: New Perspectives on Colonial Film Heritage, which features eleven artists responding to the institution’s collection of colonial-era works, in turn illustrating “the role of the camera in perpetuating power.” The series kicks off with Bachtiar Siagian’s Turang (1958), a neorealist film believed to be lost that follows Indonesia’s fight for independence against the Dutch army.
• Toronto, April 3 through 21: TIFF Cinematheque presents Love, Sex, Religion, Death: The Complete Films of Terence Davies, a retrospective featuring the work of the late British filmmaker, beginning with a screening of A Quiet Passion (2016) on its tenth anniversary.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• Oscilloscope Laboratories presents a trailer for Mad Bills to Pay (or Destiny, dile que no soy malo) (2025), Joel Alfonso Vargas’s Bronx-set debut feature about a young Dominican entrepreneur who’s forced to quickly grow up when his teenaged girlfriend becomes pregnant. The film will open in New York at Film Forum and the Regal Concourse in the Bronx April 17.
• Janus Films presents a trailer for Sophy Romvari’s debut feature film Blue Heron (2025), which chronicles the fracturing of a Hungarian immigrant family living on Vancouver Island through the eyes of an eight-year-old child. The film will enter limited release April 17.
• Janus Films also presents a trailer for the 4K restoration of La maison des bois (1971), Maurice Pialat’s seven-part miniseries about life in a French village during World War I. The series will receive its first-ever theatrical release in Film at Lincoln Center beginning April 22.
• 1-2 Special presents a trailer for Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada (2025), a surreal drama starring George MacKay and Callum Turner as two men who join the crew of a fishing vessel that suddenly reappears after vanishing 30 years prior. The film will enter limited release June 19.

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

Dao (Alain Gomis, 2026).

• “The film was made on a very low budget, so every decision had to be carefully calculated and executed in the most economical way possible. We had to transform limitations into creative choices. I believe we succeeded in doing so—the realism of the scene comes partly from this raw necessity… Seeing that fragile, chaotic world we built with such limited means come alive in a cinema space felt deeply rewarding—almost like reclaiming the scale that war had tried to shrink.” Daniel Kasman polled a selection of filmmakers whose work screened at this year’s Berlinale to spotlight a memorable image or moment from their films.
• “I can remember in the mid to late ’70s standing outside movie theaters along Broadway and feeling so jealous that I hadn’t done a poster when that was such a great area for illustration. In my recollection, as many posters were drawn as were photographed, or more, since it was cheaper to hire one illustrator rather than both a photographer plus a retoucher.” For his Movie Poster of the Week column, Adrian Curry interviews renowned New York illustrator Nancy Stahl about her film poster work, which includes one sheets for Joan Micklin Silver’s Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979) and the anthology film New York Stories (1989).

WISH LIST

Bugonia (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2025).

• Viscin, a selection of Yorgos Lanthimos’s still photographs shot around the sets and locations of Bugonia (2025), is a new book whose physical form “invokes the unspooling of a film reel.” It is available to preorder from MACK.

EXTRAS

Safe (Todd Haynes, 1995).

• To celebrate the release of Christian Petzold’s Miroirs No. 3 (2025) and Alexandre Koberidze’s Dry Leaf (2025), distributors 1-2 Special and Cinema Guild collaborated with Screen Slate to organize a soccer match between teams coached by the two filmmakers. At this showdown in New York’s Riverside Park, Koberidze’s team ultimately won by a single goal.
• Feminist film publication Another Gaze has relaunched after an extended hiatus. They’ve published a bevy of new pieces, including reviews of Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” (2026) and Robina Rose’s Nightshift (1981), conversations with Paula Gaitán and Clara Law, and an exploration of the cinema of Carolina Adriazola and José Luis Sepúlveda against the backdrop of the neoliberal European festival circuit.
• MACK has introduced a new screening series featuring work made or curated by their stable of artists that promises to “provide a forum to explore the intersection between cinema, writing, and publishing.” The series kicks off with a screening of Bruce Conner’s Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1974) and Todd Haynes’s Safe (1995), two favorites of photographer Larry Sultan, whose book, Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings, was published last month.