Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook on X and Instagram.
NEWS
The Invite (Olivia Wilde, 2026).
- Paramount Skydance is set to purchase Warner Bros. after Netflix backed out of the negotiations when it declined to meet its competitor’s bid. “We believe we would have been strong stewards of Warner Bros.’ iconic brands,” said Netflix co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters in a joint statement, “[but] this transaction was always a ‘nice to have’ at the right price, not a ‘must have’ at any price.” Following their withdrawal, Utah senator Mike Lee canceled a planned antitrust hearing that would have scrutinized the streamer. In addition to combining HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single streaming service, Paramount CEO David Ellison has promised that the company would release 30 movies a year with a 45-day theatrical window, and maintain the company’s linear cable channels, including CNN, which he claims will “maintain its editorial independence.”
- Meanwhile, Megan Ellison is poised to rebuild Annapurna Pictures, the company she founded in 2011 that became overextended when they chose to enter into distribution. Following a pivot into video games, Ellison has recommitted to film by purchasing Olivia Wilde’s The Invite (2026) out of Sundance and rehiring two former Annapurna executives as coheads of the film department.
- Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle will retain her job following an “extraordinary meeting” with the German Culture Ministry to address this year’s politically charged festival. While the festival’s managing body has recommended the establishment of an advisory forum and a code of conduct, Tuttle said that she “would not have continued as director without a firm belief in the clear and unequivocal reaffirmation of the independence of the Berlinale.”
DEVELOPING
Four Rooms (Allison Anders, Alexandre Rockwell, Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, 1995).
- Quentin Tarantino is developing an “old-fashioned British farce” that he’s hoping to stage in London’s West End by the fall of 2027.
REMEMBERING
Revenge of the Nerds (Jeff Kanew, 1984).
- Robert Carradine has died at 71. A member of the Carradine family, the American actor made early film appearances in The Cowboys (1972) opposite John Wayne and in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) in which he kills his brother David. Carradine became known for delivering key supporting performances in films like Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978), Walter Hill’s The Long Riders (1980), and Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One (1980). He starred as Lewis in the college comedy film Revenge of the Nerds (1984) and went on to reprise the role in its three subsequent sequels. His most notable role on television was playing the patriarch Sam McGuire on the Disney Channel series Lizzie McGuire (2001–04). “We will take solace in how funny he could be, how wise and utterly accepting and tolerant he was. That’s who my baby brother was,” said Keith Carradine.
RECOMMENDED READING
The Mastermind (Kelly Reichardt, 2025).
- “In 2026, well after an intervening ’90s when all of Eurotechno’s image manipulation techniques became the vapid language of broadcast bump transitions and computer screensavers, it’s remarkable how fresh the work still feels—fresh in its air of confidence, fresh in its technological deftness, but, most presciently, fresh in taste.” For Reverse Shot’s symposium on technology and cinema, Max Carpenter examines media collective Stakker’s “videola” Eurotechno (1989), whose score and visuals proved to be influential in avant-garde and rave cultures.
- “One of the marks of Yam Daabo is the reliance on point of view, on the shift from objective to subjective standpoints—exactly the sort of conspicuous composition that draws a line between documentary and fiction, as filmmakers, in lieu of observing characters, take their place.” For The New Yorker, Richard Brody highlights Idrissa Ouédraogo’s first feature Yam Daabo (1987), which is now streaming on the Criterion Channel.
- “[In Reichardt’s films, the actors can refine their performances most when they’re not speaking. It’s not just the text but also thoughts that are acted out.” For Sabzian, Nina de Vroome explores Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind (2025) in the context of a filmography defined by “the realism of the moment.”
- “[Wallace] Shawn has written so many self-lacerating pieces (no one épaters the liberal bourgeoisie like Shawn) that I kept trying to apply the lessons of My Dinner With André to the middle-class confessions in [What We Did Before Our] Moth [Days]. I tried to question the seemingly autobiographical and to listen for dry humor when language seems most sincere. But despite my efforts, I have, probably foolishly, started to believe Shawn is demonstrating the process of his own forgiveness.” For the New York Times, Helen Shaw reviews Wallace Shawn and André Gregory’s new play What We Did Before Our Moth Days (2026), featuring a series of interlinked monologues about life and death.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Powwow People (Sky Hopinka, 2025).
- New York, March 13 through April 4: Metrograph presents Boris Barnet, a Soviet Poet, a twelve-film retrospective of the influential director’s work, from his silent films to his “acknowledged, back-to-back masterpieces” Outskirts (1933) and By the Bluest of Seas (1935).
- Osaka, through April 4: Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka presents Transactional Authority, the first retrospective exhibition of American artist Sarah Morris’s work in Japan. The exhibition will feature all of Morris’s seventeen films alongside her paintings, drawings, and a “newly commissioned large-scale wall painting.”
- San Francisco, through April 18: Slash Art presents Sonic Transmissions, an exhibition of Sky Hopinka’s video work from 2016 to 2025 that explores the sonic aspects of his work. Curated by Gina Basso in collaboration with Hopinka, the “site-specific exhibition” combines the videos with specially-written text and a playlist designed to generate “a sense of immersion and of being there, or having been there, even if in a dream (or hallucination).”
- London, through April 19: The Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art presents Paper Tiger Television: It’s 8:30. Do you know where your brains are?, which features 40 programs from the US-based video production and distribution collective. PTTV specialized in critiquing corporatized media and set out to create a radical, democratized alternative to the mainstream communications industry. “By recognizing that the responsibilities of mass media to educate and entertain are not mutually exclusive, the best of Paper Tiger Television offers a model of resistance,” writes e-flux editor-in-chief Ben Eastham.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Several Futures presents a trailer for Revelations of Divine Love (2025), an adaptation of Julian of Norwich’s 14th century memoir, directed by filmmaker and critic Caroline Golum. The film will receive a theatrical release beginning March 27 at Anthology Film Archives timed to a curated series of medieval films that inspired Golum’s second feature. Revelations will also play at Nitehawk Prospect Park (April 5), Low Cinema (April 11), Roxy Cinema (April 17 through April 19, April 24 through April 26), Spectacle (April 24 through 26), with more cities to be announced.
- Neon presents a trailer for Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers (2025), a two-hander that chronicles the tentative relationship between a disillusioned forger (Michaela Coel) who poses as an assistant to an aging pop art icon (Ian McKellen) in order to secretly finish the artist’s unfinished paintings at the behest of his estranged children. The film will enter select theaters April 10.
- 1-2 Special presents a trailer for Pete Ohs’s Erupcja (2026), which stars Charli XCX as a Londoner who abandons her boyfriend during a romantic getaway in Warsaw to reunite with a friend (Lena Góra), except that a volcano erupts every time they’re together. The film will enter limited release April 17.
- Beginning Friday, Le Cinema Club presents the 4K restoration of The Savage Eye (1959), a dramatized documentary about a divorcée’s stream-of-consciousness experience in Los Angeles. Featuring camerawork from Haskell Wexler and Helen Levitt, The Savage Eye has been described by Jonathan Rosenbaum as akin to “T.S. Eliot strained through pulp.” The film will be available to stream from March 13 through 20.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Remake (Ross McElwee, 2025).
- “I do think that there’s a direct connection between the kind of filmmaking I was doing 35 years ago—and the other films in which the filmmaker’s personal lives were a component—and the explosion of social media. As you said, people are constantly dealing with representations of their own images and of other people in their lives. But within all this artificiality, the truth is embedded in what you’re saying.” Matt Turner interviews filmmaker Ross McElwee about his latest autobiographical documentary Remake (2025), which chronicles the life and death of his son Adrian.
- “The problem with Fennell’s centering of sexuality is that it becomes the only thing motivating Heathcliff, whose interiority dissipates. By eliminating the object of his vengeful ire in Hindley, his elemental darkness shifts from a titanic, suicidal rage to a shallow, sexy moodiness. Played skulkingly by Jacob Elordi, Heathcliff comes off like a scruffy Edward Cullen, a real danger only to himself.” Rafaela Bassili unpacks Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights and why her “provocative” approach does the material a grave disservice.
- “So how did an essentially active medium become reliant on the supposedly passive strictures of the moving image? Why ape the mechanics and conventions of a century-old medium instead of creating new means of storytelling befitting a technologically sophisticated, rapidly advancing form? And is it possible to convey a dramatic, authored story without taking control away from the player?” In the latest entry of his Cutscenes column, Matt Turner explores the history of cutscenes in video games and the myriad academic debates about their value and necessity.
WISH LIST
Gus Van Sant, Paintings, published by Blue Moon Press, 2026
- Gus Van Sant – Paintings, the first monograph of the American filmmaker and photographer’s paintings, is available to purchase from Idea Books. The publication includes an essay by Rhode Island School of Design professor Dennis Congdon and an interview with Van Sant.
- Nowhere Near (2026), which documents experimental filmmaker Miko Revereza’s journey from Los Angeles to Mexico City through “film stills, photographs, family archives, and a rapt, first-person narrative,” is available to preorder from Wendy’s Subway. The book is a companion to Revereza’s 2023 film of the same name, which explores his time living undocumented in the United States for 26 years and his return to the Philippines.