Rushes | Trump’s Prop-House Party Favors, Streamers to the Front, Villeneuve’s 007

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NEWS

Bedknobs and Broomsticks (Robert Stevenson, 1971).

• The military parade US president Donald Trump held on his own birthday was a boon for beleaguered Hollywood prop houses, many of which received a much-needed injection of capital by fulfilling rental orders for vintage guns and period costumes. “I’m no fan of Trump, hate him in fact, but this was a real life raft for us,” said one prop house manager.
• Since 2021, Nielsen has been tracking US viewership of traditional television as compared to streamers. In the month of May, Americans watched more television via streaming services than linear cable or broadcast for the first time.
• Related: In the first quarter of 2025, for the first time ever, more people in the United States watched YouTube on a television screen than on their mobile devices. Other major streamers like Netflix, Apple, or Amazon have started to express concern about YouTube’s potential to cut into their market share, especially now that the platform has seen an explosion of older viewers and allowed customers to sign up for services like HBO Max and Paramount+ through their app.

DEVELOPING

• Denis Villeneuve is set to direct the next James Bond film for Amazon MGM Studios. “I’m a die-hard Bond fan,” says the French Canadian filmmaker. “To me, he’s sacred territory. I intend to honor the tradition and open the path for many new missions to come.”
• Playwright-turned-filmmaker Annie Baker will write and direct Ancient History, her follow-up to Janet Planet (2024), for A24. Sophia Lillis and Daniel Zolghadri are poised to star.

REMEMBERING

P. Adams Sitney, Jonas Mekas, and Peter Kubelka at the Invisible Cinema, Anthology Film Archives.

• P. Adams Sitney has died at 80. The American film historian and theorist was best known for his contributions to the study of avant-garde cinema. After an influential viewing of Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1929) at the impressionable age of fourteen, he embarked on a cinematic journey that led him to found a film society as a teenager and publish the newsletter Filmwise. In the 1960s, he traveled to Europe and Buenos Aires, where he screened and studied experimental films. His landmark book Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (1974), whose third edition is still in print, was crucial in constructing an initial canon of experimental cinema in the US. He also cofounded Anthology Film Archives in New York and helped curate its Essential Cinema series, advocating for works by Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, and many others. Sitney taught and lectured at various academic institutions, including New York University, Bard College, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He was on the faculty of Princeton University from 1980 until his retirement in 2016. (A fierce critic of academia from within, Sitney maintained that Princeton was “the great enemy of poetry.”) His colleague Daniel Heller-Roazen writes, “With an energy and enthusiasm that only death could extinguish, P. Adams never stopped pointing us to the unknown places where we are, showing us what we have yet to see.”
• Florence Jacobs has died at 84. She was an intimate creative collaborator and uncredited producer on her husband Ken Jacobs’s influential body of work. “When I talk about Flo and I working with film together,” Ken has said, “it really was as two painters seeing what was possible in showing film in unexpected ways and finding unexpected things happening.” Beyond being a beloved member of the New York film community, Florence was also a talented painter in her own right and the mother of director Azazel Jacobs, who cast his parents (and their apartment) in his film Momma’s Man (2008). In the introduction to her interview with Jacobs, entitled “Flo Talks!,” Amy Taubin writes, “The dominant quality she projects—in her facial expressions and body language, and through the timbre of her voice and inflections of her speech—is concern. For the most part, she speaks softly, but she's quick to laugh when something strikes her as absurd and to turn fierce when confronted with injustice.”
• Lalo Schifrin has died at 93. The Argentine American musician and composer is best known for composing the theme for Mission: Impossible (1966), written in the uncommon 5/4 time signature whose meter (dash dash, dot dot) was Morse Code for the letters M and I. The theme was later repurposed for the popular film franchise starring Tom Cruise. He also composed the theme for the successful detective series Mannix (1967), the scores for Cool Hand Luke (1967), Bullitt (1968), and the Dirty Harry film series (1971–88), as well as the Paramount Pictures fanfare used from 1976 to 2004.
• Rebekah Del Rio has died at 57. The American singer was best known for her performance in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), in which she sang “Llorando” (the Spanish-language version of Roy Orbison's “Crying”) at Club Silencio. Her powerful rendition of the song is the film’s emotional and structural fulcrum and embodies cinema’s intrinsically illusory nature. She was featured in Richard Kelly's Southland Tales (2006) singing the national anthem, and her vocals can also be heard on the soundtracks for Streets of Legend (2003), Man on Fire (2004), and Sin City (2005). Del Rio continued to collaborate with Lynch across the past two decades, appearing in his web series Rabbits (2002) and cowriting and performing the song “No Stars” at the end of Part 10 of Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). “I was afraid,” she told Notebook recently, recalling her first meeting with Lynch, “but as David later wrote, ‘Don't be afraid. We're with the stars.’ Because we're all stars.”

RECOMMENDED READING

Yes (Nadav Lapid, 2025).

• “The point is that America’s film industry is displaying a collective degree of cowardice that finds it deliberately acting against its own ethos as both an artform and a business. The former is routine, but the latter is remarkable.” For Indiewire, David Ehrlich opines on the film industry's reluctance to address Israel’s war on Gaza and how it threatens to diminish cinema’s already fading relevance.
• “After nearly a decade, the capable staff at the Eastman have built and maintained a well-oiled machine. But even the most efficient mechanisms catch a wrench in the gears now and again. This year was no exception.” For Screen Slate, Caroline Golum reports from the ninth annual Nitrate Picture Show, which features screenings of vintage nitrate prints from archives around the globe, including Becky Sharp (1935), La Ronde (1950), and a controversial surprise screening of the Nazi director Veit Harlan’s The Journey to Tilsit (1939).
• “What [Frieda Grafe] engaged in between 1962, the moment of her first published article, and her death in July 2002, was translating from one medium and artform to the other by writing, and from one language to the other by making important film books and theory accessible in German.” In a new English translation presented by Sabzian, author Volker Pantenburg recounts six passages from critic and translator Frieda Grafe’s writing that reveal her critical process as well as the unique difficulties of translating her work.
• “Knowing that the question Pacino was asking himself as an actor, from a young age, was ‘where could I emote?’ casts some light on the central mystery of his film acting: how can he be so very subtle at times and so very unsubtle at others?” For London Review of Books, Bee Wilson reviews Al Pacino’s Sonny Boy: A Memoir, exploring the actor’s varied, illustrious career and his unique mixture of “swagger and self-effacement.”

RECOMMENDED EVENTS   

As I Said (Copper Frances Giloth, 1980).

• New York, through July 6: The Museum of Modern Art presents the last chance to see Rosa Barba: The Ocean of One's Pause, an installation spanning fifteen years of the Italian visual artist’s work. The exhibition also features Charge (2025), a newly commissioned work that “examines light as a source of ecological change and scientific innovation.”
• New York, through July 12: Microscope Gallery presents As I Said, a solo exhibition of works by feminist computer artist Copper Frances Giloth, featuring “early computer-animated videos and drawings from the late 1970s and early 1980s” that partly explore the representation of women (or lack thereof) in the digital realm.   
• London, through July 16: The Barbican presents Queer 70s: LGBTQ+ Cinema in the Decade after Stonewall, featuring Chantal Akerman’s debut feature, Je Tu Il Elle (1974), Peter de Rome’s Adam & Yves (1974), and Derek Jarman’s Sebastiane (1976).
• Beirut, through August 1: The Sfeir-Semler Gallery presents Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s latest exhibition, Someone Chewing, which examines the relationship between noise and power in the context of urban political unrest.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• A24 has released a tense, timely trailer for Ari Aster’s COVID-era western Eddington (2025), starring Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal, out July 18.
• Paramount Pictures has released a trailer for Roofman (2025), a Derek Cianfrance–directed crime comedy biopic of Jeffrey Manchester (Channing Tatum), a former Army Reserve officer turned spree-robber who evaded police capture by hiding in a Toys “R” Us, out October 10.
• Project Hail Mary (2026), Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s first film in over a decade, has an early trailer from Amazon MGM Studios. Written by Drew Goddard from a novel by Andy Weir, in their second collaboration following The Martian (2015), the film stars Ryan Gosling as a middle school science teacher sent into space in search of a solution to save humanity. It’s scheduled to be released on March 20, 2026.
• In commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Talking Heads’ first show at CBGB, the band released an official music video for their hit single “Psycho Killer,” starring Saoirse Ronan and directed by Mike Mills. The video features a woman undergoing a mental breakdown as she crumbles under the weight of her daily routine.

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982).

• “One wonders what Freud would have said about First Blood … a superbly sculpted slab of pulp.” Adam Nayman memorializes journeyman Ted Kotcheff, the Toronto-born filmmaker who came to make one of the keynote movies of the Reagan 1980s.
• “The book itself is merely the visible shard of a vast iceberg of scholarship.” Paul Attard reviews a new collection of Tom Gunning’s pathbreaking film scholarship.
• “They harbor nostalgia for values lost amid a crass, money-grubbing modernity, but also recognize what it costs women—and even men—to uphold such ideals.” Imogen Sara Smith studies the central role of women in Mikio Naruse’s filmography, the subject of a recent retrospective.
• “As in the films of Jacques Tati … there is a similar wonder at the sheer facticity of the world—an amazement and delight that this sound should come with this sight.” Lawrence Garcia reconsiders Bruno Dumont’s corpus in light of his recent turn toward the explicitly slapstick, including in this year’s The Empire.

WISH LIST

• The Documentary Audit: Listening and the Limits of Accountability, Pooja Rangan’s examination of documentary cinema’s contentious relationship with “listening” as moral cover and shortcut to achieving social justice, will be published this month by Columbia University Press.

EXTRAS

Pagliacci (Karl Grune, 1936), chemicolor scan courtesy of British Film Institute National Archive.

• The International Federation of Film Archives and the George Eastman Museum have launched Film Atlas, a comprehensive visual encyclopedia of “every motion picture film format, soundtrack, and color process ever invented.” The resource pairs scholarly essays with high-resolution imagery to chronicle the history of film as a physical medium.
• Wrestling finally has its own Letterboxd with Dropkickd, a social catalogue service where fans can log, rate, and review their favorite matches. Aftermath profiled its Chicago-based cofounders about the challenges of launching and operating the app.