Rushes | Sora Shuts Down, Paramount Secures Middle East Funding, Remembering Alexander Kluge

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NEWS

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988)

• Following Open AI’s decision to shut down its text-to-video generative AI app Sora, Disney’s billion-dollar investment deal with the company has come to an end. A major component of the deal involved a lucrative licensing agreement to allow Disney characters to be used in Sora and to eventually integrate the tech into Disney+. While AI platforms are still being created for use in the entertainment industry, video-generation platforms dependent on IP deals have struggled to flourish in the face of legal challenges and bearish investors.
• Paramount Skydance has secured $24 billion from three Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds to back its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. The three funds will reportedly avoid investigation by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States because they “have agreed to forgo any governance rights—including board representation—associated with their non-voting equity investments,” according to SEC filings.
• At the upcoming edition of Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, Claire Denis will be awarded the honorary Carrosse d’Or (Golden Carriage) award, which celebrates innovative filmmakers and their impact on cinema. In a statement describing their motivations, the French Directors’ Guild described Denis’s filmmaking, “with its sensory precision and radical freedom, has never ceased to reinvent itself, rejecting both aesthetic conventions and conventional narratives.” Denis previously won Cannes’ Grand Prix award for Stars at Noon (2022).
• Variety has hired Guy Lodge as its new chief film critic. Lodge replaces Peter DeBruge, who wrote for the trade publication for 20 years and recently became the director of SXSW’s Film & TV festival. “The great joy of writing about film is that, in a sense, you get to write about everything: In this new role, I plan to continue doing just that,” said Lodge.

DEVELOPING

Ally (Bong Joon Ho, 2027)

• The Bookie and the Bruiser has begun filming in Toronto. Starring Vince Vaughn and Theo James, the 1950s-set film directed by S. Craig Zahler, whose previous feature was Dragged Across Concrete (2018), follows a Jewish WWII veteran and “an oversized Italian-American tough” as they join forces to run a gambling outfit.
• Bong Joon Ho has shared the first image of his new animated feature Ally. The film, which centers on the eponymous piglet squid whose life in the South Pacific Ocean is upended when an aircraft goes down into the water, is set to be released in 2027.

REMEMBERING

Yesterday Girl (Alexander Kluge, 1966)

• Alexander Kluge has died at 94. While serving as legal counsel for the Institute for Social Research, the German filmmaker and author befriended philosopher Theodor Adorno, who secured him an internship with Fritz Lang during the production of The Tiger of Eschnapur (1959). Kluge’s experiences witnessing Lang being undermined by his producers led him to consciously embrace independent cinema. A year later, he codirected Brutality in Stone (1960), a twelve-minute documentary that deployed montage to confront public amnesia of Nazism in Germany. In 1962, Kluge and 25 other filmmakers cosigned “The Oberhausen Manifesto,” a founding charter of New German Cinema, which sought to dismantle the conformity of post-WWII German filmmaking. His key contribution to the movement was his debut feature film Yesterday Girl (1966), which won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival. When his next film Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed (1968) won the Golden Lion, its political content caused such a scandal that no top prizes were awarded for over a decade. Kluge went on to film over 150 works, including various one-minute short films, myriad documentaries and interviews for his own television production company, and the nine-hour essay film News From Ideological Antiquity (2008) about Sergei Eisenstein’s failed effort to adapt Das Kapital. Kluge, who primarily considered himself an author, adopted an interdisciplinary approach similar to his filmmaking style across thousands of pages of award-winning writing in various genres and mediums, seeking to embody the contradictions of reality. “Emotion is not realistic,” said Kluge. “It likes illusion. It likes what is good for people, and it denies those things that hurt them.”
• Mary Beth Hurt has died at 79. The American actress made her first screen appearance in Woody Allen’s Interiors (1978) before going on to deliver many acclaimed supporting turns in films such as Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979), The World According to Garp (1982), and The Dead Girl (2006), for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. She collaborated with her husband Paul Schrader on three of his films—Light Sleeper (1992), Affliction (1997), Walker (2007)—and co-starred in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993) and Bringing Out the Dead (1999). She also played Jean Seberg, in voiceover, in Mark Rappaport’s experimental documentary From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995), a notable coincidence given that Seberg used to babysit Hurt as a child growing up in Iowa. “I never felt very beautiful, or incredibly smart or witty, so I was always looking for something about [roles] that intrigued me,” said Hurt. “I remember thinking that an ingénue character doesn’t ever think they’re an ingénue. They think they’re a person, and they have idiosyncrasies. Those idiosyncrasies interested me.”

RECOMMENDED READING

Dry Leaf (Alexandre Koberidze, 2025)

• “The Xennial sensibility will forever fixate on the moment when the internet was tactile, when consumer electronics weren’t slick or seamless, when a digital file’s imperfections and graininess endowed it with character. [Alexandre] Koberidze’s Sony Ericsson is so ridiculous, but his touch is so light that his beautiful joke never wears thin.” For n+1, Mark Krotov reviews Dry Leaf (2025), unpacking its use of low-resolution photography and “metaphysical mystery” narrative at length.
• “The bigger concern with the AI food videos, however, is not specific to children—and it’s not even really specific to AI food videos. A video of a chicken nugget begging for its life is clearly and preposterously fake, but because our brains do not immediately register it as such, some of us are so drawn into its emotional register that we can’t help but feel something.” For Intelligencer, E.J. Dickson explores the viral trend of user-generated “fruit and veggie”-based AI videos and what their proliferation suggests about the future of “slop” content.
• “Speech is our fundamental political act. Wiseman’s cinema has taught me this. In a current cinema landscape rife with corporate docufictions and cookie-cutter murder mysteries, where nonfiction filmmaking as a sustainably independent art feels more fragile than ever, Wiseman’s work seems only more alien for being predicated almost entirely on what, fundamentally, makes us human.” For Filmmaker, K. Austin Collins pays tribute to Frederick Wiseman, his cinema of faces and the tension between systems and citizens that lies at the heart of his filmography.
• “To this day, I feel a pang every time I watch a documentary about artists and they describe the moment when they first became part of a creative community, when nobody was doing it for the cash yet, nobody had betrayed a trusted collaborator or called someone else a sellout. At the time, it all seemed tentative and terrifying, impossible and inevitable. In total, this period lasted only a year or so, but it felt much longer, or maybe wider, because it was when I really fell in love with movies.” For The New Yorker, Lena Dunham writes about her first filmmaking efforts and the lead-up to the SXSW premiere of her debut feature Tiny Furniture (2010) in an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir Famesick.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, 1999)

• New York, April 1 through 30: New York City presents The Whole Shebang, a city-wide tribute to the works of the late experimental artists Ken and Flo Jacobs, organized by Andrew Lampert. The festival features unique programs across fourteen venues, including Anthology Film Archives, Metrograph, and L’Alliance New York.
• Chicago, April 9: The Siskel Film Center presents Useful Fantasy, a shorts program curated by artist Peter Burr featuring 35mm screenings of Susan Pitt’s Asparagus (1979) and Peter Tscherkassky’s Outer Space (1999), that will open the 36th Onion City Experimental Film Festival.
• London, April 16: The Institute of Contemporary Arts, as part of the Open City Documentary Festival, presents Sensual Laboratories, a shorts program curated by Sophia Satchell-Baeza centered upon the intersection of light shows and film, featuring early works by Barbara Hammer, Mark Boyle, and Jerry Abrams. The program will  conclude with a panel discussion between Jarvis Cocker and John Smith.
• Rotterdam, April 18 through September 6: Kunstinstituut Melly presents Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom, a multimedia installation by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme that continues their work in “poetics of resistances” that traces “struggles against dispossession and oppression in Palestine.”

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• Kino Lorber presents a trailer for the 4K restoration of Lina Wertmüller’s sex satire The Seduction of Mimi (1972).
• Music Box Films presents a trailer for The Last One for the Road (2025), Francesco Sossai’s road dramedy, nominated for 16 David di Donatello Awards (the Italian equivalent of the Oscars), about two middle-aged boozers who take a shy architecture student under their wing.
• Lionsgate Movies presents a trailer for The Furious (2025), Kenji Tanigaki’s “nearly two brutal hours of bone-breaking, body-torquing martial-arts frenzy” about a father trying to save his kidnapped daughter.
• A24 presents a trailer for The Invite (2026), Olivia Wilde’s latest comedy about two sets of couples whose secrets are exposed at a consequential dinner.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING

Lady Snowblood (Toshiya Fujita, 1973)

• At a recent screening of Lady Snowblood (1973) at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre, now-80-year-old star Meiko Kaji sang the film’s theme song live during a post-screening Q&A.

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

Amsterdamned II (Dick Maas, 2025)

• “The Netherlands is the seventh largest country in the EU in terms of population and fourth in GDP per capita. It’s one of the most densely populated and urbanized countries in the world, and has only grown denser and more urban since the 1980s. If the number of people is a deciding factor, the Dutch film industry should have flourished, not shriveled.” Tim Brinkhof examines the stagnation of contemporary Dutch cinema through the lens of Amsterdamned II (2025), a “nostalgia-baiting” sequel to the 1988 commercial smash hit.
• “Will [Warner Bros.] remain as committed to artistically and politically daring movies under a chairman who’s boasted of his ties to the Trump administration? Or will Warners go the way of CBS, Paramount’s news division, which Ellison entrusted to self-declared 'anti-woke' culture warrior Bari Weiss, who’s laid off staffers and shrunk the network’s operations ever since she was appointed editor-in-chief in October last year?” In the latest entry in his column The Current Debate, Leonardo Goi revisits the latest Academy Awards and muses about the future of “big-budget, auteur-driven cinema.”

WISH LIST

The Green Ray (Éric Rohmer, 1986)

• Élisabeth, the first and only novel by filmmaker Éric Rohmer, newly translated from French by Aaron Kerner, featuring a foreword by André Aciman, is available to preorder from McNally Editions.

EXTRAS

Between the Lines (Joan Micklin Silver, 1977)

• Applications for the Locarno Critics Academy, an extensive workshop in film criticism held during the Locarno Film Festival, close April 15.