Rushes: Spike Lee Heads Cannes Jury, "Uncut Gems" Soundtrack, Kristen Stewart's Acting

• Filmmaker Ivan Passer, a key figure in the Czech New Wave alongside peers like Miloš Forman, has died. For The Guardian, Andrew Pulver writes of Passer's departure from Prague and entry into Hollywood.
• The latest lineup announcement for this year's Berlinale includes the very exciting world premieres of Charlatan by Agnieszka Holland and Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue by Jia Zhangke.
• The Cannes Film Festival has announced that Spike Lee will preside over its jury, making him the first Black jury head in the festival's history. In a statement, Lee writes: "You could easily say Cannes changed the trajectory of who I became 
in world cinema.”
• Amid increasing festival buzz, awards season also continues with the release of the Academy Awards nominations, which can be found here.

• The official trailer for Angela Schanelec's elliptical I Was at Home, But... Read our review by editor Daniel Kasman, who deems the film a "sharply envisioned picture of human fragility, the binds of family, and individual loneliness."

• Moog Music Inc. has released a short documentary following musician Daniel Lopatin, also known as Oneohtrix Point Never, as he details the production process for the Uncut Gems soundtrack.

• Sheila O'Malley continues her Present Tense column for Film Comment with an examination of Kristen Stewart's acting and its relationship to both transparency and reticence.
• We look forward to reading programmer and writer Herb Shellenberger's newly announced newsletter, Rep Cinema International, which aims to cover "repertory and archival cinema programming around the world."
• Many were mortified and creeped out by Warner Bros.'s recent announcement to incorporate an "AI-driven project management system" that will help guide greenlight decisions. For Quartz, Adam Epstein offers a nuanced investigation of the decision's potential benefits and consequences. Elsewhere, TechRepublic's Veronica Combs writes that the use of AI in the film industry "offers a starring role for explainability and a chance to build trust."
• In memory of Ivan Passer, critic Filipe Furtado provides an overview of Passer's filmography, including Cutter's Way (1981), which illustrates "the fictions we create to deal with our own powerlessness."

• In her article of Greta Gerwig's Little Women, Moeko Fuji focuses on the line between a romp and a dance and its relation to the restrictions of other boundaries, from gender and race to visibility and invisibility.
• Filmmaker Diana Vidrascu, the subject of a London Short Film Festival retrospective, discusses the form, research, and the personal elements of her boundary-challenging and inquisitive work.
• "No mere glorification of nature’s ambiance, it is instead a distressing dispatch of violent upheaval, capturing the magnitude of the displacement of earth on a massive scale," writes edditor Daniel Kasman in his review of Nikolaus Geyrhalter's epic globetrotting documentary Earth.

• According to the newly updated technical specs on the IMDb page for Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch, the film's runtime will be 241 minutes, or about four hours!

• The official poster for Nobuhiko Obayashi's anti-war fantasy film Labyrinth of Cinema.

Wishing dir. Nobuhiko Obayashi (b. Jan. 9, 1938) a happy 82nd. Official poster for his latest, LABYRINTH OF CINEMA, just released #大林宣彦 pic.twitter.com/ham0hXBrz7

— Japan Society Film (@js_film_nyc) January 9, 2020