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NEWS
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (Bassam Tariq, 2026).
- The Toronto International Film Festival has unveiled its full lineup for its 51st annual edition. Some of the whopping 293 films in the festival include Bassam Tariq’s Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (2026), Danny Boyle’s Ink (2026), and Mike Leigh’s potentially final film Tender Loving Care (2026).
- Vimeo announced the end of its “Vimeo on Demand” service, a video rental/purchase platform used by filmmakers since 2015, effective November 20. This announcement arrives six months after the company laid off the majority of its staff following their acquisition by Milan-based mobile app developer Bending Spoons.
- A federal judge has scheduled a trial date for March to determine whether the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger violates antitrust law, denying Paramount’s request to start the trial in November. Meanwhile, Paramount owner David Ellison penned an op-ed in the New York Times defending the deal, claiming its critics “imagine a Hollywood that no longer exists.”
- Swiss businessman Simon Afram is suing Netflix for over $100 million after the company lost an unencrypted copy of Fortitude, a WWII film starring Nicolas Cage that Afram wrote and produced. His lawsuit argues that Netflix’s negligence has hurt the film’s market value while Netflix claims that Afram is trying to extort money from the company.
DEVELOPING
Spring Breakers (Harmony Korine, 2012).
- Bella Thorne is set to write, direct, and star in a sequel to Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012), which stars Grace Van Dien, Ariel Martin, and True Whitaker.
REMEMBERING
The Wild Wild Rose (Wong Tin-lam, 1960).
- Grace Chang has died at 93. The Hong Kong actress and singer rose to fame starring in a string of musicals in the 1950s and ’60s, such as It Blossoms Again (1954), Mambo Girl (1957), which sparked a dance craze that spread around Asia, and The Wild, Wild Rose (1960), where she plays a Carmen-like figure in arguably her most acclaimed performance. Her international popularity led Hollywood to invite her to make a cameo appearance in Edward Dmytryk’s Soldier of Fortune (1955) starring Clark Gable. Chang left the film industry in 1964 at the height of her acting career, but her songs have made an indelible impact long after her retirement, appearing in Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole (1998) and The Wayward Cloud (2005) as well as in Crazy Rich Asians (2018), which introduced her to a new generation of fans.
RECOMMENDED READING
Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Jane Schoenbrun, 2026).
- “It wouldn’t be overstating things to describe [Jane] Schoenbrun as the most prominent trans filmmaker working right now. Though you can quibble over this framing—the Wachowskis have done work on a larger scale, but neither sister has directed since 2021—it’s a designation that says as much about the industry as it does about Schoenbrun’s indisputable rise. They say they sometimes feel like the ‘only trans person in America getting money from film financiers to make work,’ and even then, they had to fight for [Teenage Sex and Death at] Camp Miasma (2026).” For Vulture, Alison Willmore profiles Jane Schoenbrun upon the release of their latest film, discussing topics that include their upcoming debut novel and working within commercial systems while also wanting to destroy them.
- “The bartender is the host of the third place, ‘that font of local information, that symbol of authority, that arbiter of disputes, that “character,”’ and a good host is essential to establishing and maintaining the vibrant culture of a third place. A key aspect of the video store’s clerk/customer relationship was exactly the sort of local authority that [sociologist Ray] Oldenburg mentions. Just as bartenders were expected to be up to speed on the concerns of the community of regulars, video clerks were expected to have a certain level of expertise with the items at the center of video store culture: the movies themselves.” For the MIT Press Reader, Joshua M. Greenberg examines the video store as a lost “third place,” a source of community and conversation, where expertise and curiosity collided.
- “Today, a movie like Romance (1999) probably couldn’t be made without intimacy co-ordinators—or, in [Catherine] Breillat’s words, those ‘little ayatollahs who surf the waves of our current puritanism.’ From her perspective, the people who sent sticks of butter to [Maria] Schneider’s table and the people who want love scenes scripted down to the last eyelash flutter represent two sides of the same coin. They all think sex is dirty and disgusting, something to which no virtuous woman would subject herself and from which she must be protected. This seems right. But it would be more convincing if Breillat were willing to accept the lesson that her own films teach: that the interior lives of others may be opaque to us, but that doesn’t mean we should treat them as fabrications or fantasies.” For the London Review of Books, Anahid Nersessian surveys the work of filmmaker Catherine Breillat, her book-length conversation with film critic Murielle Joudet, and her “stirring and maddening” perspective on sexual violence.
- “The Archers, as they branded themselves when they set up as a production company, are more than a British affection… In fact, they’ve become even more accessible in recent decades thanks to the advocacy and restoration work of Martin Scorsese. Yet their films do seem somehow distinctly British. They focus predominantly on British people, British places, British customs, and supposedly British values. With the fond irony that makes many characters slightly ridiculous but few seriously bad, they do so in a British way. In A Matter of Life and Death (1946), this focus is literal: the genial village doctor observes his (charming, thus British) village through the (remarkable-if-eccentric, thus British) lens of a camera obscura.” For Bright Wall Dark Room, Robert Wilton explores the myths and borderlands of Britishness in the films of Powell and Pressburger.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
Boy (Nagisa Ōshima, 1969).
- New York, through August 20: Film at Lincoln Center presents the fourteenth edition of Scary Movies, a showcase for horror and genre cinema from around the globe, which includes the New York premieres of Casper Kelly’s Buddy (2026) and Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick’s Family Movie (2026).
- Ljubljana, through August 30: The Cukrarna Gallery presents Nothing Is Inevitable Until It Happens, a solo exhibition of English artist Phil Collins’s video work, featuring individual selections from across his career as well as “an unconventional overview” of his moving-image practice.
- London, through September 1: The Institute of Contemporary Arts presents Cinema and State: Films by Nagisa Ōshima, a selection of the Japanese filmmaker’s work from the 1960s and ’70s, including Boy (1969) and Dear Summer Sister (1972).
- Venice, through September 6: The Palazzo Marin presents Do U Dare!, Shirin Neshat’s film trilogy inspired by the tragic story of Iranian-born YouTuber Nasim Aghdam.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- A24 presents a trailer for Primetime (2026), Lance Oppenheim’s debut narrative feature about the television show To Catch a Predator (2004–07) and its host Chris Hansen, played by Robert Pattinson.
- Sony Pictures presents a trailer for The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (2026), a crime thriller starring John Turturro as an aging criminal in a race against the clock.
- Greenwich Entertainment presents a trailer for The Scout (2025), Paula González-Nasser’s debut feature about the trials and tribulations of a location scout (Mimi Davila) tasked with finding the perfect interiors for a TV pilot.
- Janus Films presents a trailer for the new restoration of Ngozi Onwurah’s Welcome II the Terrordome (1994), a dystopic drama that was the first theatrically distributed British feature directed by a Black woman.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
The Hole (Tsai Ming-liang, 1998).
- “I remember starting on the film What Time Is It There? (2001) and telling my French cinematographer [Benoît Delhomme] that I wanted the images to be still and stagnant—fixed camera shots without any movement. And because this was a cinematographer who is well versed in camera movements, it became a very big challenge for him. With the fixed camera, you need to pay a lot more attention to lighting design, to creating the kind of atmosphere that you want to express in the film, because you can no longer rely on camera movements to accomplish those things.” Jordan Cronk interviews filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang about the new restoration of The Hole (1998), its origins in the “2000, Seen By…” project, and working with his muse Lee Kang-sheng.
- “Asked about what attracted him to making maritime films, the director once said he was motivated by fear—fear of the sea, yes, but also and more significantly, “fear that demands we do what we fear to do.” That his films have lost none of their electricity is precisely because of their proclivity for risk, their willingness to demand more than what we routinely expect from cinema—to refuse to treat the camera as a mere extension of our retina. Epstein courted the unknown as assiduously as his protagonists did death. And in the ocean, he found an ever-moving, ever-changing being that was both an endless source of inspiration and a kind of refuge.” Leonardo Goi surveys the films of Jean Epstein, an aquatic filmmaker who “saw water as embodying the kind of cinema he aspired to create: fluid, tempestuous, unpredictable.”
- “Moments I have a lot of affinity for, such as the goings-on in Berkeley academic life early in Oppenheimer (2023), are quickly made into symbolizing events… Such a tendency has been there from the get-go. The Following (1998) begins, in a setup not dissimilar to Joy Williams’s fine novel Breaking and Entering, with two criminals breaking into people’s homes not for material gain but to luxuriate in another person’s ordinary life. However, the bracingness of this conceit, which Willams’s novel stays with to the end, is lost as Nolan’s compulsion for generic and temporal spectacle overtakes his fascination for ordinary life. It sets the template for his career—compulsion, repetition.” Thomas Quist examines Christopher Nolan’s filmography and its propensity to swallow up the ordinary in favor of spectacle.
WISH LIST
North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959).
- The Secret Hitchcock, Nat Segaloff’s exploration of the Master of Suspense and how he filtered his private obsessions and darkest dreams through Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, the two recurring stars of his films, is available to purchase from the University of Kentucky Press.