Rushes: Fall Blockbusters Delayed, Revisiting "You've Got Mail," the Drive-in's Return

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NEWS

• A number of this year's fall blockbusters have been delayed and rescheduled for 2021 releases, including Warner Bros.' The Batman, the latest James Bond picture No Time to Die, and Denis Villeneuve's Dune.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

• San Francisco Cinematheque has made the program Memories of Earth: (A)wake in a House of Worlds available for free online. The program, which includes artists from Yoko Ono and Yvonne Rainer to Sky Hopinka and Kevin Jerome Everson, features films that "recast notions of what constitutes the cinematic, the political and the poetic." 
• From Ken Jacobs' Vimeo channel, his 2004 experimental feature Star Spangled to Death—a six-hour commentary and critique of the United States—in its entirety.
• An official trailer for Robert Zemeckis' adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Witches (produced by Guillermo Del Toro), set to premiere on HBO Max.

• On Amazon Prime, Borat 2 (also known as Borat Subsequent Moviefilm: Delivery of Prodigious Bribe to American Regime for Make Benefit Once Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan) will be making its premiere.

• A trailer for Alexander Nanau's documentary Collective, which will be available on demand on November 20. The film, now perhaps even more apt than at the time of its 2019 premiere, follows a healthcare scandal in Romania and public response to the government's actions. Read our interview with filmmaker Alexander Nanau here.

• Heidi Ewing's I Carry You With Me, which premiered at this year's New York Film Festival, follows a gay couple that emigrates from Mexico to New York.

RECOMMENDED READING

• For 4 Columns, Hanif Abdurraqib revisits the "epistolary pleasures" of Nora Ephron's You've Got Mail, and reflects on relating to the villain of Joe Fox, and "the pure ecstasy of receiving an email from a person you are excited about."
• In a recent profile by Vulture, Kirsten Johnson discusses the process of derailing "anticipatory grieving" with her new film, Dick Johnson is Dead and the emotional perversity of humor.
• "What does the drive-in offer, besides momentary escape? Besides the paradoxical enjoyment of privacy and community at once?" From Film Quarterly, Marc Francis' assessment of the return of the drive-in, and its significance for both audiences and programmers.
• In response to a new Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma that aims to educate the public about social media algorithms and its influence on everything from mental health to politics, Facebook has published a rebuttal. Online in full, it's worth checking out if only to witness the ethical confusion caused by our algorithm-dependent technology, including "Netflix, which uses an algorithm to determine who it thinks should watch ‘The Social Dilemma’ film, and then recommends it to them."

• To mark the 30th anniversary of her documentary Sink or Swim, Su Friedrich speaks with Split Tooth Media about the film's inclusion in the National Library of Congress, the trial and error of constructing images, and her most recent project, the William Greaves website.

RECENTLY ON THE NOTEBOOK

• Our correspondences from the New York Film Festival continue with editor Daniel Kasman on screenings of films by Pedro Almodóvar, Sofia Coppola, and Steve McQueen. Meanwhile, Michael Sicinski concludes his coverage of the features in this year's Currents program.
• Sean Gilman and Evan Morgan have conducted a dialogue on Hong Sang-soo's latest The Woman Who Ran, focusing on Hong's shift towards structure and subtext.
• Kelley Dong investigates notions of masculinity, egotism, and artistic taste in Charlie Kaufman's recent novel Antkind and film I'm Thinking of Ending Things.
• "This film for me is about looking, in a very direct way and also indirectly, in a more metaphorical way, about looking." Georgian director Dea Kulumbegashvili discusses her award-winning debut feature Beginning.