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NEWS
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941).
- Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar have been expelled from the Writers Guild of America for allegedly working on The Sympathizer (2024) during the 2023 strike. The HBO miniseries was in postproduction when the strike began, and Park and McKellar were reportedly brainstorming responses to studio notes, a task they believed did not constitute “writing services,” a term whose limits have been in dispute for decades. “I have never violated any rules,” Park insisted in a statement and said that he considered appealing the judgment but wanted to focus on his new feature, No Other Choice.
- Last week, the Toronto International Film Festival rescinded an invitation for the documentary The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue (2025), apparently for failing to legally clear footage. After some cried censorship, he festival has now readmitted the film, which focuses on retired Israeli general Noam Tibon’s rescue of his two granddaughters from the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023. TIFF CEO Cameron Bailey and the film’s director, Barry Avrich, wrote in a joint statement that they “believe [the selection] will contribute to the vital conversations that film is meant to inspire.”
- Vanity Fair “will be moving away from news aggregation, reviews, and trade coverage,” according to a leaked memo from new editorial director Mark Guiducci, who has dismissed chief critic Richard Lawson and Hollywood correspondents David Canfield and Anthony Breznican.
- The Chicago Tribune has eliminated the post of film critic, leading Michael Phillips, who had filled that position for twenty years, to take a buyout after penning his final column, and leaving the city of Chicago with no salaried film writer at either of its daily papers.
DEVELOPING
- Dan Sallitt is set to direct What Can’t Be Mentioned, a sequel to The Unspeakable Act (2012), this October. Tallie Medel and Sky Hirschkron will reprise their roles as siblings Jackie and Matthew Kimball, and Kyle McCormack and Kit Zauhar will play their respective partners.
- Paweł Pawlikowski has begun filming 1949, his follow-up to Cold War (2018). The film stars Hanns Zischler and Sandra Hüller as Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika on a road trip across a divided Germany.
REMEMBERING
Teorema (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1968).
- Terence Stamp has died at 87. The son of a tugboat stoker, the British actor worked in a number of advertising agencies and as an assistant pro at an East London golf club before earning a scholarship to train at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. He made his film debut opposite Laurence Olivier in Term of Trial, but garnered notoriety playing the title character in Peter Ustinov’s adaptation of Billy Budd (both 1962). Associated with the Swinging London scene, Stamp received the most acclaim in his career for a series of performances from that decade in films such as John Schlesinger’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1967); Ken Loach’s first feature, Poor Cow (1967); and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968). He had stepped back from acting by the end of the 1960s and moved to an ashram in India, but returned with his most high-profile role as General Zod in Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980). Stamp was acclaimed for his leading performance in Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey (1999) as a career criminal investigating his daughter’s death in sunny Los Angeles. “The closer the camera moved, the more hypnotic his presence became,” remembers Edgar Wright, who directed Stamp’s final performance in Last Night in Soho (2021). “In close-up, his unblinking gaze locked in so powerfully that the effect was extraordinary. Terence was a true movie star: the camera loved him, and he loved it right back.”
RECOMMENDED READING
Americana (Tony Tost, 2023).
- “As Hollywood executives continue to churn out bad films that lose money—box-office receipts are still well below pre-pandemic levels—Il Cinema Ritrovato has proved that certain audiences will not just pay to see good movies but travel thousands of miles for the privilege.” For Air Mail, Will Tavlin explores how Bologna’s festival of restorations and revivals has exploded in popularity while remaining a relatively niche affair.
- “I’m just trying to rapidly live in reverse to hold on to any shred of the Olden Times that’s left. This is called denial and nostalgia—wish me luck. I’m only half kidding. The irony is that the best part of life is the constant forward momentum. It only moves in one direction, so hop on and hold tight. Every ‘sky is falling’ panic has been screamed and screamed again. Best to remain calm, keep your head down, and dedicate yourself to the work at hand. The rest is just noise.” For Esquire, Paul Thomas Anderson and Leonardo DiCaprio converse about One Battle After Another (2025), their respective careers, and the passage of time.
- “Proposing myself as the first writer on a big-budget, major-studio comic book adventure movie was, in other words, kind of a stretch. My screenwriting credits were nil. I had not, as I say, begun the novel that exposed me as one of those people, rarer at the time than they are today, who did that paradoxical thing of taking comic books seriously.” On his Substack, Michael Chabon recalls his experience pitching a Fantastic Four movie, despite being severely undercredentialed, in the early aughts.
- “If anything links Hauser’s characters, it’s that many are broken men, often with an inflated sense of their own capabilities, who nevertheless forcefully assert their own perspective. He wonders if he is unconsciously revealing certain elements of himself: ‘I feel like I have a chip on my shoulder quite often. I have what Christopher Plummer called ‘the Great Rage.’” For Vulture, Nate Jones profiles Paul Walter Hauser amidst his prolific run of supporting performances this year in The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025), The Naked Gun (2025), Americana (2025), and Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere (2025).
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
The Last Day (Rachel Rose, 2023). Installation view at Luma Westbau.
- London, August 29 through September 7: The Institute of Contemporary Arts presents Serge Daney and the Promise of Cinema, a program dedicated to the influential film critic’s writing and ideas through ten films that evoke his worldview. The series—copresented with Sabzian—opens with Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet (1955) and Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956) and closes with Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh (1991).
- Luxembourg, August 29 through January 4, 2026: The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg presents Phantasmic Screens, an exhibition by artist Tiffany Sia that “explores memory in exile through the symbolic dimension of landscape.”
- Zurich, through September 7: Luma Westbau presents Rachel Rose’s The Last Day (2023), a seven-minute video piece that “traverses geological epochs” through thousands of photos taken in her child’s bedroom. The exhibition will be presented at the Westbau space.
- Amsterdam, through September 7: Eye Filmmuseum presents Revolutions, the first European solo exhibition by American filmmaker and artist Garrett Bradley, which includes multiple video installations from across her career.
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
GAZA.MP4 (Diaa Lagan, Mohannad El-Masria, and Fuad Halwani, 2024).
- Film journal and virtual cinematheque Ultra Dogme presents The Dawn Will Break: Two Films for Gaza, which is available to stream through August 29 as a donation initiative for The Sameer Project, a mutual aid organization inside Gaza. The program includes Vincent Guilbert’s If I forget thee, Gaza (2024) and Diaa Lagan, Mohannad El-Masria, and Fuad Halwani’s GAZA.MP4 (2024).
- Film Movement presents a trailer for Stranger Eyes (2025), Yeo Siew Hua’s surveillance thriller, the “formal coldness” of which, writes Celia Mattison, “is matched by its icy portrayal of grief.” The film, starring Lee Kang-sheng, will be in theaters starting August 29.
- Neon presents a trailer for Splitsville (2025), an open-marriage comedy starring Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona, will enter limited release on August 22 before expanding wide on September 5.
- Ben Rivers presents a trailer for his dreamlike feature Mare’s Nest (2025), which follows a young girl’s journey through a strange, adult-free world, based on Don DeLillo’s one-act play The Word for Snow (2007). It premiered at Locarno Film Festival and will play at TIFF on September 4.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
A Song to Remember (Charles Vidor, 1945).
- “The form is made up of the debris and the outtakes, the leftover and the discarded, presenting a parallel to the populations similarly located in dominant social orders.” Yasmina Price’s dispatch from Rome’s UnArchive festival extols the political possibilities of found-footage film.
- “In the 1960s and the ’70s, artists behind the Iron Curtain had to resort to “Aesopian language,” concealing their meaning in metaphors and symbolism in order to pass the scrutiny of censors.” Yoana Pavlova remembers the generation of Bulgarian filmmakers who took refuge in children’s cinema.
- “Her dissatisfaction with her transformation, the recognition of its inauthenticity, is palpable in Oberon’s performance, as though she’d rehearsed this sense of self-hatred all her life.” Nirris Nagendrarajah considers the slippage between the screen personae and personal lives of Merle Oberon and Nancy Kwan.
- “They do much more than using the colonizer’s tongue to curse back in Calibanesque fashion.” Sakhi Thirani delivers a primer on adaptations of Shakespeare in Bollywood, where the tragic romance of Rome and Juliet, for instance, took on new resonance for lovers rebelling against caste-bound arranged marriages.
WISH LIST
- O Brother, What Might Have Been, which gathers three unproduced screenplays from writer-director Preston Sturges and features a foreword from his son Tom, will be available to purchase from Sticking Place Books on August 29.
- Jean-Luc Godard’s Unmade and Abandoned Projects, Michael Witt’s comprehensive survey of the late director’s unrealized works, is available to preorder from Bloomsbury.
EXTRAS
- For those looking to get a head start on Halloween, Funky Bunky has a fairly bizarre selection of face masks for sale, including Agnes Varda, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and Claire Denis.