Rushes | The State of Cinemagoing, Disc Rot and You, “Barney” on the Big Screen

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NEWS

The Blob (Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr., 1958).

• While moviegoing trended downward elsewhere (though box office receipts increased), France, Great Britain, Brazil, and Turkey saw an uptick in cinema attendance last year. French theater owners and analysts point to several nationally specific contributing factors: government art subsidies, distribution laws that mandate long theatrical windows, the inability for urban apartments to accommodate big home-theater setups, and the public's strong cultural connection to the cinema.
• As more small-town movie theaters close because of low ticket and concession sales, local residents have begun forming nonprofit organizations to save them. In 2023, Nicki Wilson of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, successfully organized a fundraiser to save the Triplex Cinema, the town’s only moviehouse. By means of donations, grants, and volunteer labor, more than 250 nonprofit cinemas in the US are staying afloat.

• A Bangalore man won a lawsuit against India’s largest multiplex chain for the length of their pre-film advertisements. According to the suit against PVR Inox, Abhishek MR planned to return to work straight after a screening of the two-and-a-half-hour war drama Sam Bahadur (2023), but because of the additional 25 minutes of ads, he “could not attend [to] other arrangements and appointments” and “faced losses that cannot be calculated in terms of money as compensation.” The consumer court granted him 55,000 INR (roughly $630) for time wasted and mental agony.
• Warner Bros. Home Entertainment released a statement acknowledging that many of the DVDs they manufactured between 2006 and 2008 might be defective due to disc rot. The YouTuber Damn Fool Idealistic Crusader has compiled a list of “known rotted DVD titles” and attributes the faultiness to an error made by a Pennsylvania manufacturing plant. WBHE hasn’t substantiated that claim, but has offered to replace the affected titles or offer “an exchange for a title of like-value” if they no longer hold the rights to the affected title or the disc is no longer in print.

DEVELOPING

Barney & Friends (1992–2010).

• Werner Herzog is set to direct Bucking Fastard, starring Kate and Rooney Mara, marking the first time the sisters have ever acted opposite each other. The film is based on a true story about twin sisters living on the fringes of society.
• Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars has added three new members to its cast: Josh Brolin, Guy Pearce, and Margaret Qualley. They will costar with Jacob Elordi as a lonely crop duster pilot living in a postapocalyptic world. Production is expected to begin this spring.
• Singer-songwriter Frank Ocean’s directorial debut will star British actor David Jonsson, who recently costarred in Alien: Romulus (2024) and is best known for his performance in the HBO series Industry (2020–). The film has reportedly begun shooting in Mexico City.
• Ayo Edebiri is set to write and star in a live-action Barney film, coproduced by A24 alongside Daniel Kaluuya’s 59% Productions. In an interview with Variety last October, Mattel CFO Josh Silverman said that they “want to remain consistent to the authenticity, the DNA of ‘Barney,’ but [they] also want to modernize.” A CG-animated television reboot of the franchise, Barney’s World, was released last year.

REMEMBERING

Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975).

• Gene Hackman has died at 95. The American actor won the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection (1971). A string of acclaimed lead performances in the 1970s include Scarecrow (1973), The Conversation (1974), and Night Moves (1975). He first broke through in American cinema with his supporting turn as Bucky Barnes in Bonnie and Clyde (1967), for which he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and proceeded to have a prolific career across four decades. He’s also known for his performance as Lex Luthor in Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980), his Oscar-winning supporting turn as Sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett in Unforgiven (1992), and as Royal Tenenbaum in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001). Following his final performance in Welcome to Mooseport (2003), Hackman retired to his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he wrote novels and occasionally provided narration for TV documentaries. His last onscreen appearance was in a 2008 episode of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives (2007–).
• Michelle Trachtenberg has died at 39. The American actress is best known for her performance as Dawn Summers in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), the younger sister of Sarah Michelle Gellar’s eponymous character, and as antagonist Georgina Sparks in Gossip Girl (2007–12), a role she reprised in the sequel series of the same name (2021–23). A child actress, she rose to fame when she starred as Harriet Welsch in Harriet the Spy (1996), which began filming on her ninth birthday. She also gave key supporting turns in Mysterious Skin (2004), EuroTrip (2004), Black Christmas (2006), and 17 Again (2010).
• Robina Rose has died at 73. The British filmmaker lensed Celestino Coronado’s Hamlet (1976) and directed a trio of experimental films Birth Rites (1977), Jigsaw (1980), and Nightshift (1981), the last of which premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival and was later acquired for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. “There are few films that offer the sense of exhaustion of the nocturnal wage worker as itself an investigation into new regions of cinematic temporality,” writes Elena Gorfinkel. “Can cinema also reveal the camera’s weariness?”
• Joseph Bernard has died at 84. The American experimental filmmaker made numerous collage-based super-8mm silent films. He was also credited as a concept artist on Manhunter (1986) where he created blood work and spatter effects for Michael Mann. Filmmaker Dean Kavanaugh writes, “Like the cinema of Stan Brakhage, Paul Sharits, and Jonas Mekas—all of whom he knew and deeply admired—Joe’s art offers a distinct way of seeing the world.”

RECOMMENDED READING

The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939).

• “My love for The Wizard of Oz (1939) hasn’t diminished because of what Garland endured; rather, her story helped me turn an abstraction into a person. Knowing what some women went through and how they triumphed, how they expressed their humanity and power onscreen and off, in a male-dominated industry, clarifies the past and present.” For the New York Times, Manohla Dargis examines recent films directed by women that center upon the complex contemporary construction of feminine identity.
• “The paradox is that in this scenario, ‘authentic’ means inhuman: The further from actual humanity these efforts have moved, the more we see them described by filmmakers as ‘perfect.’” For Fast Company, A. S. Hamrah explores the dubious use of AI in last year’s films like The Brutalist (2024) and Here (2024) as well as recent documentaries Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (2021) and American Murder: Gabby Petito (2025).
• “So often, characters will look down the lens at Elwood, and directly into your eyes, and whether their look is of love, disappointment, hatred, terror, the feeling is communicated as if directly to you, generating an empathy so intimate and so pervasive you would need to physically obscure the image to deny it.” For Liberties Journal, Robert Rubsam unpacks RaMell Ross’s first-person POV formal approach in Nickel Boys (2024) and how it illustrates that Being is contingent on recognition.
• “As we talk about the state of independent filmmaking in America, honestly, [we should] all just stop and say, ‘OK, there’s these things that are happening. It sounds like we need to take some time and energy to, instead of stressing and putting all of that work into trying to jam a film or jam an event that’s not sitting well anymore, we have to redraw the whole thing.’” For Indiewire, Kate Erbland conducts an extended interview with filmmaker Shatara Michelle Ford about how directors can subvert the structure of American independent film.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

Poison (Todd Haynes, 1991).

• Berkeley, through April 12: The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) presents “Todd Haynes: Far from Safe,” a collection of films from the New Queer Cinema pioneer, including new restorations of two early featurettes.
• London, through June 1: The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) presents “Spectres: The Cinema of Jacques Rivette,” the first major retrospective of the French filmmaker’s work in the UK in more than eighteen years. The series includes Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974) on 35mm, Claire Denis’s documentary Jacques Rivette, the Night Watchman (1990), and a 4K restoration of the director’s cut of Va savoir (2001).
• Munich, through August 3: Haus der Kunst presents “Shu Lea Cheang: Kiss Kiss Kill Kill,” the first institutional survey exhibition of Taiwanese experimental artist Shu Lea Cheang. The exhibition uses her feature film Fresh Kill (1994) as a jumping-off point to explore her installation work that “has challenged and furthered our understanding of digital culture,” which “anticipated the advance of alternative currencies, investigated gamified societies, and probed biotechnologies.” “Thirty years after its release,” Katherine Franco writes, “Fresh Kill asks with the same urgency: what is the shape—and sound—of global capitalism?”
• Dusseldorf: March 15 through May 25: Kunstverein presents “The Weight of the Invisible,” a two-part exhibition dedicated to the documentary work of Wang Bing, who will present an artist talk on March 15 and a masterclass on March 16. Part II will open June 6 and run through August 24.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• Utopia has released a teaser trailer for “Range Life: A Pavement Story,” a parody biopic of the acclaimed indie rock band starring Joe Keery as frontman Stephen Malkmus. “Range Life” is merely one element of Alex Ross Perry’s upcoming experimental documentary about the group Pavements (2025), which will open in the US on May 2.
• PlayStation has released a lengthy pre-order trailer for Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (2025), featuring actors like Norman Reedus, Léa Seydoux, and Troy Baker, all of whom are reprising their roles in Death Stranding (2019), and will be joined by Elle Fanning, Shioli Kutsuna, and Luca Marinelli.

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

Eureka (Lisandro Alonso, 2023).

• “Don’t get me wrong, I’d have loved to make an actual western—but that’s entertainment. And when I shoot, I’m after something else entirely.” Leonardo Goi speaks with Lisandro Alonso about Eureka (2023), the director’s time-, space-, and genre-spanning odyssey of Indigeneity.
• “The prop’s status as an expressive resource is bound up with the performer’s bodily activity.” In an excerpt from their new book, Elena Gorfinkel and John David Rhodes think through subject-object relationships throughout cinematic history, from Charlie Chaplin to Kelly Reichardt, from On the Waterfront (1954) to Risky Business (1983).
• “In most countries, colonialism had a catastrophic effect on the development of a national cinema, torching the soil in which the seedlings of domestic filmmaking might otherwise have taken root.” Christopher Small finds an exception to this rule in the strange case of the South Korean Golden Age.
• “Pulling from an archive of content meant to be viewed once and not thought twice about, Judd Crud violates the codes of online visual experience so as to clarify them.” Dylan Adamson reviews a parody of a subset of TikTok “day in the life” videos he terms “yuppie-maxxing.”

WISH LIST

• The Film Desk has republished That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, a collection of 33 evocative narrative sketches by director Michelangelo Antonioni that range in length from a single paragraph to several pages. Antonioni called these texts “nuclei” and described them as prototypes for unproduced films.

EXTRAS

• In 1927, Paramount Pictures made a map of California filming locations that could serve as replacements for international regions. (Thanks to Adam Piron for turning this up.)