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NEWS
Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015).
- After Mark Ruffalo criticized the financial connections between Larry Ellison’s technology company Oracle, which has supplied software to the Israel Defense Forces, and Paramount Skydance amidst their impending merger with Warner Bros., Paramount released a rare statement condemning the actor for invoking “antisemitic tropes.” Ruffalo responded that their accusation is “appalling and fundamentally dishonest” and that scrutinizing the Ellisons and their business practices is “fair and necessary.”
- Director Ilya Khrzhanovsky has taken to Facebook to defend his upcoming film DAU (2026) against claims by the Ukraine government that it’s “linked to the Russian state and its networks of influence.” In a detailed response ahead of his film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, Khrzhanovsky, who is no longer a citizen of the Russian Federation, insists that DAU is not a Russian film, has not been financed by Russia, and does not represent pro-Putin propaganda. Read Notebook’s Ella Bittencourt on the multidisciplinary project.
- More than two years after the killing of five-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab in Gaza, Israel has announced that it will open an investigation into whether the Israel Defense Forces were in the area at the time of her death. Kaouther Ben Hania, director of docudrama The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025) about the event in question, has decried their efforts as a smokescreen. “What is needed now is not a public relations operation,” she says in a statement on Instagram. “What is needed is justice (delivered by an independent authority) for Hind and for all the victims of the genocide in Gaza.”
- The Walt Disney Company has sued the Federal Communications Commission, claiming that the agency’s decision to review ABC’s broadcast licenses two years ahead of schedule is part of a retaliatory campaign by the Trump administration. The FCC order comes on the heels of Trump’s criticism of late-night hosts, especially Jimmy Kimmel, who was briefly pulled off the air by FCC Chairman Brendan Carr for comments on the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
DEVELOPING
Ramy Youssef in Poor Things (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2023).
- Johnnie To is set to direct his English-language debut Two Gun Cohen, a “dim sum western” about grifter and conman Morris Cohen who became the aide-de-camp to Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen.
- Ramy Youssef is set to write and direct his feature debut, which chronicles a white widowed socialite (Sharon Stone) and her relationship with a young Muslim man (Youssef), for A24.
REMEMBERING
Scream 4 (Wes Craven, 2011).
- Hayden Panettiere has died at 36. The American actress got her start on soap operas One Life to Live (1968–2012; 2013) and Guiding Light (1952–2009) before making her feature-film debut in A Bug’s Life (1998) as Princess Dot. As a child actress, she made supporting turns in Remember the Titans (2000), Raising Helen (2004), and Ice Princess (2005). Panettiere’s breakthrough was as Claire Bennet, a cheerleader with the power of cellular regeneration, on the NBC drama Heroes (2006–10), a role she played for four seasons. Following Heroes, she went on to star as up-and-coming country singer Juliette Barnes in the ABC/CMT musical drama series Nashville (2012–18), whose storylines often reflected Panettiere’s documented struggles with depression, addiction, and abuse. Panettiere also garnered recognition for her performance as highschooler and Ghostface-target Kirby Reed in Scream 4 (2011), a role she later reprised in Scream VI (2023) where her character has become an FBI agent. “I wish the world had more time with you,” said actress Viola Davis in tribute, “because I had a burning curiosity about who you were becoming. I saw this beautiful Phoenix rising from the ashes. Your tests became your testimony, and your testimony became your legacy. You will be remembered.”
RECOMMENDED READING
Late Fame (Kent Jones, 2025).
- “This confluence of consumer trends and changes in production workflow has effectively resulted in frames that strive less for innovation or beauty and more for a quick fix. The quickness and disposability here has infiltrated the set. This means that, outside direct-to-streaming films and the glut of plasticky Marvel and grim DC movies … the late 2010s and 2020s have seen the screen get grayer. Regardless of the quality of the movies, their visual identity is constricted by a notable lack of oomph, an absence of substantiality in their colors, highlights, and blackpoints.” For The A.V. Club, Kyle Turner unpacks the generally desaturated “look” of contemporary film by interviewing cinematographers, colorists, and camera operators.
- “She currently has five projects in development: ‘two treatments, three scripts. That’s because of Covid really; I wrote a lot.’ Stone Mattress is an adaptation of the Margaret Atwood short story about wealthy tourists on an Arctic cruise. Julianne Moore is attached to star as a passenger seeking to punish her high school rapist against the backdrop of melting icebergs. ‘It’s a revenge film, but it’s environmental,’ Lynne says. ‘The character uncovers the past, and the landscape is uncovering the past as well; it’s melting.’” For The Gentlewoman, Mark Smith profiles Lynne Ramsay about how she balances her artistically uncompromising career and her domestic responsibilities.
- “Even so, I was surprised to hear [Kent] Jones declare during an onstage interview at the film’s NYFF premiere that [Samy] Burch’s Late Fame (2025) screenplay was superior to [Arthur] Schnitzler’s novella. It is, frankly, an insane opinion … In the novella, Saxberger is obliviously narcissistic, childish, and ridiculous—an overlooked poet, in other words, exotic and prickly as a puffer fish. In the film, however, he has been thoroughly dulcified, reduced into a charmingly bashful and tender gentleman, as if the contemporary poet were an endangered species too sacrosanct to poke. In shielding him from the sharp needles of Schnitzler’s irony, the relentless sympathy for Saxberger actually flattens the most human part of the story: our embarrassing, blindly feckless need to be revered.” For The Baffler, Brittany Dennison examines the deficiencies in Late Fame, and how Jones and Burch’s adaptation misunderstands the source text.
- “Over the course of making The Bend in the River (2025), I was reading about the death of the Colorado River. I kept thinking that the river is running out of water as we’re running out of time. And, that the temporal frame of the river and the human frame of our mortality crosses for a moment … I couldn’t finish the film without acknowledging our relationship with this river and our love of it, and just being able to experience the river and then being on it again to have this experience, which is a representation of not being able to stay in the same river twice. It’s not the same river and you’re not the same person.” For Screen Slate, David Schwartz interviews documentarian Robb Moss, a pioneer of personal cinema whose latest film represents the culmination of his River Film Trilogy.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
The Third Man (Carol Reed, 1949).
- New York, August 29: Film at Lincoln Center presents the Bibliomania Book Fair, a free public book fair tied to the literary-themed cinema series Bibliomania: A Preface to Chronovisor.
- Boston, through September 19: The Harvard Film Archive presents The Cold Heart is More Precious than Diamonds: The Cinema of Graham Greene, a program featuring films either written by or adapted from the works of English writer and film critic, including Confidential Agent (1945), The Third Man (1949), and Our Man in Havana (1959).
- London, through October 6: The BFI Southbank presents Claude Chabrol: Elements of Crime, a retrospective of wryly entertaining thrillers by the “French Hitchcock.”
- San Francisco, through October 31: The Yerba Buena Center for the Arts presents Through an Open Window, a film series inspired by the aesthetic and thematic elements embedded in the work of Korean painter GaHee Park.
- Seoul, through November 8: The Seo-Seoul Museum of Art presents Kim Heecheon: Moles, which features the video and game work by the eponymous contemporary South Korean media artist, the first of a series of solo exhibitions produced by the museum.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- A24 presents a trailer for Club Kid (2026), Jordan Firstman’s debut feature about a party promoter who is forced to take care of the ten-year-old son he didn’t know he had.
- Grasshopper Film presents a trailer for Chronovisor (2026), a literary mystery about a Columbia University scholar who comes across the existence of an ancient time-traveling device while researching an unrelated topic. Read Notebook’s Vadim Rizov’s interview with directors Kevin Walker and Jack Auden about their hypnotic debut.
- The Independent Film Company presents a trailer for The Stunt Driver (2026), about real-life Canadian stuntman Ken Carter (Jay Baruchel) who attempts a mile-long jump across the St. Lawrence river in a rocket car.
- Kino Lorber presents a trailer for the 4K restoration of My Brother’s Wedding (1983), Charles Burnett’s sophomore feature about a young Black man struggling with his brother’s choice to marry an upper-class woman and his childhood friend’s recent release from prison. “One of the things I respect a lot is older people who had an interest in me and others who saw the future and what it took to be an adult,” Burnett recently told Notebook. “This film is a tribute.”
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan, 2026).
- “A cinema as commons is not simply a different way of programming films. It is a different kind of social proposition altogether. What happens when a community gathers to watch a film it has chosen together, in a space it has collectively claimed, cannot be replicated by watching the same film alone. The film becomes a shared reference point, a starting place for conversation, a way of recognizing something in each other. The room produces a temporary public, and that public, however briefly, understands itself as one.” Lena Mrachacz explores the idea of cinema as a commons, and cinemagoing as a radical act of communal formation.
- “Above all, 4Columns was a writer’s publication, a showcase for a vast array of styles, idiosyncrasies, points of view. It was the kind of forum in which turns of phrase such as “raging daughter of Bilitis that I am” and “lesberation”—deployed in my first 4Columns review, of Battle of the Sexes (2017), a staid Emma Stone-starring docudrama about the stunt 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs—were left completely untouched, with no edits demanding explanation. (My 4Columns word cloud would likely feature “lesbian supremacy,” “misandry,” and “heterosexual depravity” in the largest font.)” Melissa Anderson reflects upon her tenure as film editor and critic at 4Columns, a weekly online arts-criticism site that recently published its final issue.
- “Wilson need not worry: Nolan’s dialogue, toggling between lyrical passages and more unadorned exchanges spiced with the occasional present-day expletive … is most definitely not culled from her work. And she may well be right about some of her points, too. I wouldn’t go as far as to call the script ‘abysmal,’ but the film is certainly not immune to its fair share of clunky, expository passages, and for an epic that features plenty of erotic interludes, Nolan’s chaste rendition can feel like a missed opportunity. Yet I cannot help but find it ironic that such scathing criticism should come from someone who—by trading the ornate vocabulary of previous Homeric translations for a simpler language—also sought to make the hallowed text more accessible to new audiences.” In the latest edition of The Current Debate, Leonardo Goi examines the conversation around The Odyssey (2026), its depiction of PTSD, and the various strengths and pitfalls of Nolan’s idiosyncratic blockbuster-sized vision.
- “I always thought that The Swindle (1997) was one of his most autobiographical films, like a hidden self-portrait of himself and our relationship as a director and as an actress. It was easy for me to relate to Michel Serrault’s character. There was something in the complicity, in the connections between the two of us, in the film that was close to maybe what our complicity and connection was in reality. It was also a movie about moviemaking. He would consider the cinema world and moviemaking as, sometimes, a world of little crooks—you know, people trying to make money and make their way. I think he was speaking about himself in that film and about the world of cinema, in a very fun and tender way. Everybody was trying to make a little business, you know?” Vadim Rizov interviews Isabelle Huppert about her collaboration with filmmaker Claude Chabrol in honor of a recent retrospective at L’Alliance New York.
WISH LIST
Dont Look Back (D. A. Pennebaker, 1967).
- I’m Glad I’m Not Me, Ethan Warren’s exploration of Bob Dylan on film, from D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back (1967) through Martin Scorsese’s documentaries No Direction Home (2005) and Rolling Thunder Revue (2019), is available to preorder from Columbia University Press.