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Table of Contents | Notebook Issue 9: “Smoke and Mirrors” - The Daily Notebook

2026-10-22T08:00:00.000Z

"Smoke and Mirrors" is available via direct subscription or in select stores around the world.

And now, for our next trick! Issue 9 of Notebook invites readers to journey through the intertwined histories of magic and cinema, uncovering screen wonders both spiritual and secular. After an unearthed foreword from stage-magician-turned-auteur Orson Welles, Turner Prize-winning artist Mark Leckey and scholar Stephen Ryley revive a ghostly proto-cinematic illusion from the Victorian era that still delights today. Filmmaker Kamal Swaroop’s kaleidoscopic collages showcase a foundational figure from early Indian cinema. Four visionaries (Mona Fastvold, Lucile Hadžihalilović, Barbara Hirschfeld, and Kasi Lemmons) reveal how magic and mystery factors into their different films. Hollywood consultants behind productions including Sinners and Hugo break down how witchcraft, Hoodoo, and performance magic is represented onscreen. And a panel of dynamic filmmakers, programmers, and scholars reflect on how genre cinema—from Showgirls to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre—can open up valuable explorations of gender, sexuality, and identity. Also on the bill: ethereal poetry and imagery by Rhayne Vermette, profiles of film magicians ranging from the iconic Georges Méliès to the impish Ricky Jay, and an essay tackling television trickster Nathan Fielder by Adam Nayman. But before all this, Apichatpong Weerasethakul sets the stage with a fittingly magical contribution to our “Things a Filmmaker Should Know” series.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

THINGS A FILMMAKER SHOULD KNOW by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

The director offers advice and inspiration to today’s filmmakers.

FOREWORD by Orson Welles

One of cinema’s foremost magicians introduces readers to the allure—and the danger—of the magical arts.

INVOCATION by Amy Halpern

An enigmatic and entrancing short film, made by a moving-image artist and dancer, sets the stage.

A TIMELESS ILLUSION: REANIMATING PEPPER’S MARVELOUS GHOST by Stephen Ryley, Mark Leckey, Pablo Martín, and Ed Park

A century and a half after its first appearance, the proto-cinematic sensation is revived at Regent Street.

THE NOTEBOOK COVEN by Mona Fastvold, Lucile Hadžihalilović, Barbara Hirschfeld, and Kasi Lemmons

Four filmmakers reflect on how magic is conjured in their work and thinking.

CINEMATIC ALCHEMY: GENRE, ESCAPISM, AND TRANS AND QUEER CINEMA by Caetlin Benson-Allott, Vera Drew, Cáel Keegan, and Elizabeth Purchell

A conversation around the transformative possibilities of queer spectatorship redefines the "magic of the movies."

CONSTELLATIONS by Rhayne Vermette

Across poetry and imagery, the artist filmmaker draws connections between the camera and the eyes.

MAKING MOVIE MAGIC(K) by Yvonne Chireau, Pam Grossman, and Paul Kieve, with illustration by Dadu Shin

Behind the scenes, who ensures that magic is rendered authentically on screen?

MAGICAL ORIGINS: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF DADASAHEB PHALKE by Kamal Swaroop, with introduction by Debashree Mukherjee

One magical filmmaker offers a touching tribute to another, creatively traveling through time with collage and commentary.

THE NOTEBOOK MAGICAL OBJECT CATALOG

Part 1: Historical Contraptions of Delight and Wonder by Toni Booth

Part 2: Fantastical Cinematic Enchantments by Beatrice Loayza, with illustration by Sarah Mafféïs

A fictitious mail-order catalog details both real-life devices that offer wonder to their viewer and imagined film objects that transform their user.

ASTONISHING SCREEN MAGICIANS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY by Pamela Hutchinson, Katie Gee Salisbury, Joanne McNeil, Angelo Muredda, Nicholas Russell, and Imogen Sara Smith, with illustration by Julien Langendorff

From Georges Méliès to Ricky Jay, a gathering of some of the century’s most intriguing cine-magicians.

GIVING THE TRICK AWAY by Adam Nayman

Television impresario Nathan Fielder pulls back the curtain on his own illusions, yet remains a mystery himself.

Rushes | Netflix Fires Chief Content Officer, Soderbergh Takes Over “The Batman Part II,” R.I.P. Eva Marie Saint - The Daily Notebook

2026-10-21T08:00:00.000Z

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NEWS

Musk (Alex Gibney, 2026).

As part of Netflix’s recent mass layoffs, the streamer has fired chief content officer Bela Bajaria. Many insiders have expressed shock at her dismissal, believing that the company is using her as a scapegoat for lagging user engagement. “People always blame the content, but you don’t lay off 1,000 people unless there’s a big problem with the business model,” explained an anonymous source.
TikTok permanently suspended the advertising account for Musk (2026) ahead of its wide release, the latest in a line of behind-the-scenes hurdles director Alex Gibney has faced in the leadup to his exposé on the tech giant.
Bollywood actor Imran Khan prepares to fight an order from the Bombay High Court to leave India after he attended a protest demanding that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar step down following allegations of widespread electoral fraud.
Following the Paramount-WBD merger, Warner Bros. president and CEO David Zaslav will leave the company with a $606 million payday. During his tenure, Zaslav was one of the most highly compensated executives, while fielding frequent criticism for his controversial business practices.

DEVELOPING

Schizopolis (Steven Soderbergh, 1996).

Steven Soderbergh will complete Matt Reeves’s The Batman Part II after the filmmaker had to step away from production to attend to a family matter.
John Wilson is currently filming pop star Harry Styles during his 30-day Madison Square Garden residency in preparation for an upcoming hybrid concert film/tour documentary.
Sterling K. Brown is set to co-star in Marielle Heller’s sports comedy The Comebacker opposite Tom Hanks and Callum Turner.

REMEMBERING

North by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock, 1959).

Eva Marie Saint has died at 102. The American actress began her seven-decade career in television, first as an NBC page then as a regular actress on many dramatic anthology series'. Saint made her feature film debut in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront (1954) as Edie Doyle, the love interest of Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy, for which she won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. After co-starring in Edward Dmytryk’s Civil War romance Raintree County (1957) and headlining Fred Zinnemann’s addiction drama A Hatful of Rain (1957), she gave her second-most notable performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) as femme fatale Eve Kendall. Following that film, Saint chose to be more selective with her career in order to spend time with her family. Over the next decade, she co-starred in Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960), John Frankenheimer’s All Fall Down (1962), and Vincente Minnelli’s The Sandpiper (1965), as well as two ensemble films: Norman Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming the Russians Are Coming (1966) and Frankenheimer’s Grand Prix (1966). Saint returned to television in the 1970s and ’80s and received Emmy nominations for the miniseries How The West Was Won (1977) and the made-for-TV film Taxi!!! (1978), eventually winning one for her performance in People Like Us (1990). She continued to appear onscreen well into the 2010s, giving her final performance in Winter’s Tale (2014). In her Fresh Air interview from 2000, Saint told a story about being replaced by another actress ahead of her Broadway debut and how she handled such a devastating rejection: “By the time I got home, I decided I was going to try to continue acting, studying and whatever happened…I would never feel this way again. And the ‘feeling this way again’ meant from my neck down, my heart, my soul…You're upset from your neck up, but…your soul will never be crushed again or your heart. And it never has been, I have to say, in all honesty.”

RECOMMENDED READING

You Can See Everything (Nathan Fielder & Lance Oppenheim, 2026).

“Fielder’s presence also becomes rather curious: what exactly is he doing here? Is he lying to [Elisabeth] Holmes and [Billy] Evans to get closer to them? What does he want out of this situation? A confession of guilt? If not, then is it something more personal? Equally vexing and central to the experience of the film is the question of why these two people, so obsessively preoccupied with how she’s perceived in the media and on screen, would allow this comedian—known for television programs that are often described for their “cringe” humor and proclivity to put people in somewhat mortifying situations—to film their family at all, let alone at such an emotionally loaded, fragile moment… By inviting Fielder and crew into their home, they’re not only encouraging a close-quarters discomfort (befitting their evident narcissism) but also subordinating themselves to his fixed, unsparing camera, agreeing to be players in Fielder’s ongoing anthropology project.” For Reverse Shot, editor Michael Koresky reviews, without spoiling, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s film You Can See Everything (2026), unpacking the “absurd redundancy” inherent in cinematic realism, and the search for truth.
“[Oleksandr] Dovzhenko—subject of ‘Earth and Empire,’ a new retrospective at Metrograph—is Ukraine’s most famous director, but he’s a complicated hero for a Ukraine at war with Russia… His films are mind-bogglingly beautiful paeans to Ukraine’s land and its people, animals, and plants, but he also played the Soviet game, his work vetted and reviewed by state organs and censors. He likely survived the 1930s only thanks to Stalin’s personal patronage and protection. Ukraine’s greatest director hid his youthful affiliation with Ukrainian nationalism, embraced Bolshevism, and created magnificent works exalting the October Revolution and the collectivization of agriculture, two of the most traumatic moments in Ukraine’s twentieth-century history. His films celebrate the Communist project, but at their best they depict human suffering and survival with a complexity that is alien to propaganda.” For the New York Review of Books, Sophie Pinkham explores the life and career of Oleksandr Dovzhenko in light of Metrograph’s recent retrospective of the Ukrainian filmmaker.
“Recasting himself as no longer a filmmaker but a man of television, [Roberto] Rossellini insisted that he wasn’t an artist but rather a researcher, archivist, and pedagogue—between the years 1970 and ’74, it may be noted, he was a regular presence at Houston’s Rice University at the behest of art collectors and patrons John and Dominique de Menil, whose only other ‘kept’ filmmaker was one Andy Warhol. As far as one could get from the aloof, politically neutral Warhol, Rossellini viewed himself as taking on the Renaissance role of the artist as a public service-oriented figure, unconcerned with questions of personal expression and individuality. In turning to history, Rossellini looked to the future, to the forging of an enlightened and emancipated citizenry—his histories would provide the facts, but not the conclusions.” For the Metrograph Journal, Nick Pinkerton examines Roberto Rossellini’s Socrates (1970) and the Italian director’s late-career project of historical TV films.
“Jonas [Mekas] had left in ’74, so he had been gone for like three years, but [arts editor Richard Goldstein] understood historically that the [Village] Voice had covered avant-garde film. He suggested that I do that. Initially, I was able to generate my own assignments. The Whitney had film shows, MoMA had Cineprobes, there was the precursor to Anthology, the Film Makers’ Cinematheque, the Millennium, a bunch of venues where I could cover things. So I would suggest that, assign myself this, maybe every other week, and they gave me more space because I never missed a deadline. I delivered clean copy. I was a very reliable writer; I was not a temperament. So, I was able to expand my purview. And there were things which neither [Andrew] Sarris nor Tom Allen had the slightest bit of interest in covering—sometimes to my utter amazement. I was so excited when Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) got a commercial opening and these guys didn't care.” For Screen Slate, Mark Asch interviews writer and critic J. Hoberman about his lengthy career and his new collection of film criticism Across the Movi-Verse.

RECOMMENDED EVENTS

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974).

Paris, through January 16: Anne-Dominique Toussaint and the Galerie Cinéma present Antonioni the Painter, which will feature more than 30 paintings and drawings by filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni never before exhibited in France. Calmann Lévy recently published a book tied to the exhibit featuring Antonioni’s work along with an unpublished interview between Bernard Blistène and Dominique Païni.
Bilbao, through February 21: The Guggenheim Bilbao presents Steve McQueen: 66–76–26, an installation by the British artist and filmmaker featuring two stripped-down recordings of “Wild is the Wind,” one by Nina Simone and another by David Bowie, each playing on opposite sides of a darkened room.
London, October 22 through December 13: The Institute of Contemporary Arts presents The Lower Depths: The Cinema of Shohei Imamura, the first major retrospective of the Japanese filmmaker in the UK in more than 25 years, including new restorations, guest introductions, and a new monograph tied to the series.
Brooklyn: October 23 through 29: Brooklyn Academy of Music presents Area Coded: American Regionalism in Film, a program dedicated to films that highlight the unique, diverse regional histories captured on screen, including Giant (1956), Grey Gardens (1975), and Paydirt (1981).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Netflix presents a trailer for Narnia: The Magician's Nephew (2027), Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s 1955 fantasy novel, the sixth published and first chronological novel in The Chronicles of Narnia series. data-height="natural">
1-2 Special presents a trailer for La Gradiva (2026), Marine Atlan’s debut feature about a group of French teenagers on a class trip to Naples. data-height="natural"
MUBI presents a trailer for Minotaur (2026), Andrey Zvyagintsev’s thriller about a business exec who discovers his wife is having an affair, based upon Claude Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife (1969). data-height="natural">
The New York Film Festival presents the sixth annual Amos Vogel lecture, delivered by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, who discusses his filmmaking process in relation to his latest film All of a Sudden (2026). data-height="natural">

RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK

The Little Mermaid (John Musker & Ron Clements, 1989).

“When the action moves to land, The Little Mermaid (2023) simply looks like any other movie. The 1989 version captivates audiences with its evident, evidently handmade artistry; the 2023 Little Mermaid aims to convince its audience that its characters are worth caring about. If, acting out Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Walt Disney played to an imagined American public comprised of simple folk who would react with simple laughter or tears to things that were happy or dopey or sad, his company now imagines a public that can only be needled into caring once persuaded that the characters have obstacles recognizably similar to our own.” Mark Asch delves deep into the world of live-action Disney remakes and how they suggest a company stuck in a perpetual cycle of “eternal nostaliga and diminishing returns.”
“[Tai] Katō occupied an unusual place in the cinema of the 1960s. His films could be as formally audacious as those associated with the Japanese New Wave, yet he remained firmly rooted in popular genre cinema. Where Masahiro Shinoda, a leading figure of the New Wave, increasingly used modernist form to challenge established modes of representation, Katō worked through the conventions of chanbara, melodrama, and the yakuza film. In this respect, he was closer to directors such as Yasuzō Masumura or Seijun Suzuki, who also found radical visual possibilities within commercial cinema. Katō’s experiments with framing, depth, obstruction, and widescreen space did not reject genre conventions. They transformed them from within.” Olivier Ronat examines the visual language of Tai Katō in honor of a retrospective of the Japanese filmmaker at the Cinémathèque française.
“Such an uneven power dynamic is no stranger to those familiar with queer(-coded) coming-of-age films or the mean-girl trope in American teen cinema, with the two sometimes overlapping. What is so special about Water Lilies (2007), however, is the care Sciamma affords the characters on both sides of this dynamic, and especially Floriane. Although much of the story is told from Marie’s perspective, Floriane is never reduced to the attractive yet cruel girl who toys with others’ feelings without caring. Her ending avoids a simple resolution: she is neither subjected to heartless punishment nor let off easily due to her pretty privilege by a sympathetic backstory that feels forced; nor is she converted into a “good girl.” Instead, [Céline] Sciamma gives both girls enough space to be understood on their own terms.” For Notebook’s One Shot column, Cynthia Dong unpacks a shot from Water Lilies to explore the film’s ambiguous emotions inherent in queer girlhood.
“Despite nothing much happening, Élisabeth demands laborious attention. Its characters are purposefully vaporous, and long reams of talk go by in which unidentified speakers blur together. In one scene, Michel poses as his cousin, Bernard; no reference is made to this doubling in the narration, which only becomes apparent after the fact (and only if you are paying close attention). Locations and characters are divided across a fragmented structure, wrongfooting the reader with unadvertised leaps in perspective and tenses. Even its title is a misdirection; the titular Élisabeth is not, as one would assume, the protagonist of the novel, but a secondary character who sits on the periphery of the narrative.” Oliver Evans writes about Eric Rohmer’s 1946 novel Élisabeth, his only literary work, which was recently translated into English for the first time.

WISH LIST

Fire Festival (Mitsuo Yanagimachi, 1985).

Fire Festival (1985), Mitsuo Yanagimachi’s drama about a volatile, superstitious lumberjack who takes on developers wanting to construct a marine park in his rural village, is available to preorder on Blu-ray from Third Window Films.
Popol Vuh’s previously unreleased score for Werner Herzog’s The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner (1974) is available to preorder from Bandcamp.

EXTRAS

The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, 1980).

Darth Vader’s lightsaber will be auctioned off by Heritage Auctions this November at its Ultimate Star Wars auction. The prop, which appeared in The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983), is expected to go for over $1 million.

Masao Adachi: Demystifying a Legend - The Daily Notebook

2026-10-20T08:00:00.000Z

Masao Adachi in 2015. Photograph by David Matthew Davis.

Masao Adachi is a filmmaker whose reputation well and truly proceeds him.

Born in 1939 in Kyushu, Japan, he moved to Tokyo to attend Nihon University, coming of age during the turbulent protests against the renewal of the mutual security treaty between Japan and the United States in 1959–60. He started making films with a student group and soon emerged as one of the leading figures in the burgeoning underground cinema scene.

In the mid-1960s, Adachi became involved with the sexploitation industry, writing and directing several striking examples of the genre for Koji Wakamatsu’s production company. He was also collaborating with major members of the New Wave like Nagisa Oshima. The political dimension to his output became more explicit in the early 1970s, following a visit to Lebanon, where he filmed Palestinian guerrillas. He continued traveling back to the Middle East, eventually becoming a core member of the Japanese Red Army, a radical group that carried out hijackings, embassy attacks, and other operations in the name of Palestinian liberation. He was arrested in Beirut in 1997, imprisoned, and then deported to Japan in 2000, where he served a brief jail sentence. Upon his release in 2001, he returned to filmmaking in the country of his birth.

Escape (Masao Adachi, 2025).

The basic facts of his life and career have inevitably garlanded Adachi with a notoriety that overshadows some of the subtleties of his work and the complexities of his political interventions. One of the aims of Pink Auteur, Red Outlaw, my recently published book about Adachi, is to demystify and rectify some of the misconceptions associated with him. Crucially, many of those misconceptions have been perpetuated not just by the news media but also in part by Adachi’s own appropriation of them.

Rather than the romanticized narrative of the filmmaker who spent time as, in his own words, a “guerrilla” in Lebanon, a better way to understand Adachi’s work is through the framework of surrealism. This is a label he has himself claimed in recent years, but to call Adachi a surrealist is not simply a reference to the dreamlike aesthetic that is present in his visually striking early underground films. It situates the spirit of Adachi’s work in the key surrealist approaches of free expression, randomness, and a commitment to artistic revolution.

A high-profile interview published in The Guardian earlier this year, for instance, framed Adachi as the elder statesman of “political cinema, revolution and Japan today.” Such aggrandizing may not be helpful in that Adachi’s position was often oblique to his peers involved with making politically engaged films and in the experimental underground. His biography and choices of subject matter lead the viewer to presume his films reflect his own involvement with militant activism as didactic instruments of a particular ideology, but this is not the case, and this is what makes them particularly valuable as works of cinema.

Female Student Guerilla (Masao Adachi, 1969).

In fact, Adachi was both a man unto himself and an uneasy auteur. His filmography is highly diverse in terms of genre and style—encompassing sexploitation, underground cinema, experimental documentary, biopics, and dark comedy—and does not necessarily suggest an artist with a single, singular vision. Rather, such dynamic eclecticism suggests an idiosyncratic director whose trajectory was sometimes haphazard, shifting as he intersected with different artistic and political movements. The very patchy, idiosyncratic nature of his filmography constitutes in itself a kind of core modality, if it may also (like any career) be the arbitrary result of certain circumstances and opportunities.

And while film is an inherently collaborative medium, many of the most interesting examples of Adachi’s output came about due to partnerships with other filmmakers and thinkers, among them Nagisa Oshima, Masao Matsuda, and, most famously, Koji Wakamatsu. Emphasizing the collaborative nature of Adachi’s body of work does not diminish him as an auteur, but rather strengthens his artistic achievements It remains in keeping with an interpretation of Adachi as a surrealist, since collaboration was, for the original surrealists, an extension of their efforts to undermine artistic conventions and bourgeois institutions. And neither does his collaborative nature dilute his aesthetic. The films remain resolutely and recognizably his: tonally and structurally messy, visually unpolished, and abruptly edited. They demonstrate an almost lifelong commitment to nonconformity, a rejection of smooth edges and coherence, and an embrace of the crude mishmash and non sequitur (also in keeping with the surrealists’ approach).

As mentioned above, Adachi is well known for the political sexploitation films he made (either as director or as Koji Wakamatsu’s go-to screenwriter) in the late 1960s and early ’70s. These nominally adopted the format of a so-called “pink” softcore erotic film but featured a cast of characters that seemed drawn from the leftist radicals and countercultural figures then running amok in the streets of Japanese cities, fighting the police, planting bombs, and even (in one instance) hijacking an airliner. But it is important to remember that these films were atypical of pink cinema, and that his partnership with Wakamatsu also produced many less remarkable sexploitation films, including two that are essentially how-to guides for different sex positions, and short works not recorded in official filmographies.

Revolution+1 (Masao Adachi, 2022).

The breadth of his pink films, let alone his overall oeuvre, is often ignored because of the inevitable conflation between Adachi the political activist and Adachi the political filmmaker. Already apparent in the late 1960s, this identification with a certain brand of political filmmaking and anti-authoritarianism is a problem because it is not borne out by the content of much of his work, which is generally more ambivalent toward far-left activism and violence. His earlier films like Sex Game (1969) or Female Student Guerrilla (1969) are satirical black comedies, mocking those in power as much as they mock the misguided radicals, whose antics usually result in self-destructive tragedy. When so much of the mainstream cultural memory of the Long Sixties in Japan (1959–72), especially regarding militant activism, is couched in either outright condemnation or elegiac nostalgia, Adachi’s caustic, take-no-prisoners stance constitutes a significant intervention that prompts a more critical view.

Even films that came significantly later, like Revolution+1 (2022) and Escape (2025), whose subject matters would on the surface seem straight out the “leftist activist and film director” playbook, do not overtly celebrate the trajectory and actions of the protagonists (respectively, an assassin and a bomber), but instead explore them in terms of psychosocial circumstances, personal commitment, and asceticism. Escape, in particular, is a moving portrait of the more literal dimensions of a political struggle (made more in the Japanese title, a homonym for a political struggle and being on the lam), a struggle that continues even after comrades are arrested or dead, in part to repent for the deaths of innocent civilians.

One of Adachi’s most notorious films is The Red Army / PFLP: Declaration of World War (1971), which was interpreted by many at the time as straightforward propaganda for the Palestinian liberation movement and a recruitment film to coax Japanese activists to relocate to the Middle East. But it is better understood as an attempt to remediate revolutionary violence and power through cinema, showing the everyday reality of the Palestinian guerrillas’ lives, and posing questions about the nature of propaganda. In many ways, much more so than the more flamboyant and sensational sexploitation films about young radicals’ antics in Japan, the ambiguously edited Red Army / PFLP marks the zenith in Adachi’s efforts at forging a politics of cinema, pursuing filmmaking as an activist practice through grassroots-organized screenings, talks, publications, and other forms of discourse.

And this brings us to the thorny issue of militant activism, political violence, and terrorism. While Adachi was indeed a core member of the Japanese Red Army, a group generally regarded in the Global North as a terrorist organization, his own role was ambiguous. While it is known that he traveled internationally and met many known figures in groups that engaged in violent tactics, and is alleged to have transported explosives for Palestinian operatives in Eastern Europe, there is no publicly available evidence of direct involvement in violence. According to later trial testimony, Adachi was largely engaged in planning and publicity activities. Even his actual arrests in Lebanon and Japan related to visa and passport violations.

It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve – Masao Adachi (Philippe Grandrieux, 2011).

Though the evidence for Adachi as a gun-toting guerrilla is slim, his association with the JRA made him a pariah to society at large, and persona non grata to much of the film industry (not that his position in the industry even prior to his departure from Japan was ever mainstream). And while this has made it hard for him to attract investors for his films since his release from prison, it has also turned him into a legendary figure, especially overseas, which has proved useful. In fact, he has arguably embraced aspects of the roguish status that his past alleged criminality has endowed, joking about it in interviews and placing an emphasis on it in publicity for his new films.

The effect is contradictory: It has generated a lot of interest in his work outside Japan, yet Adachi cannot leave Japan to visit festivals because his application for a passport is always denied. He lives in a sort of limbo or exile, unable to benefit from his belated international fame.

That is the filmmaker we find in Philippe Grandrieux’s documentary It May Be That Beauty Has Strengthened Our Resolve – Masao Adachi (2011), which presents him as an isolated figure, a political has-been in a Tokyo awash with consumerism and indifferent voters. How much Adachi is consenting to or participating in this reframing of his image is uncertain, though it may largely be shaped by Grandrieux’s imposed narrative of political failure in late-stage capitalism. The documentary has much to admire, not least visually, yet it does not capture Adachi’s personality, which is playful and jocular, nor does it give a viewer a sense of Adachi’s prolific output following his return to Japan: writing and publishing books and articles, teaching students, acting in various independent films, participating in political movements, and making his own films. Adachi’s age notwithstanding, the directing has picked up pace, resulting in three feature films since Grandrieux shot his documentary.

Kamal Aljafari’s new short film, Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo (2026), might reflect Adachi’s character better. With its pastel-colored aesthetic and sedate pace, the film draws a parallel between two elderly figures: the filmmaker and a widowed owner of a photo studio running a business about to become obsolete. The owner seems to know nothing of the filmmaker’s notoriety, and Adachi is shot almost entirely from the side or back, only shown from the front for the titular passport photos that he gets taken, all while resigning himself to the likelihood of another governmental rejection. In this way, the film is about a quiet resilience and visual craft, the meaning imbued in creating an image as everyday as a passport photo.

Masao Adachi Takes a Passport Photo (Kamal Aljafari, 2026).

The metaphor is particularly apt in Adachi’s case, since he is almost synonymous with landscape theory, a body of moving-image and photographic practices that inquired into the latent politics of the landscape in Japan at the height of the high-growth period. Adachi and his collaborators made a film called A.K.A. Serial Killer (1969), which traced the trajectory of a spree killer through the landscapes he presumably saw during his peripatetic life up to his crimes, and by doing so the film looks beyond the sensational media coverage to probe what it identifies as the true aggressor: state power, incubated in the landscape that was homogenizing Japan as capitalism rampaged in the postwar years.

Landscape theory has recently become something of an academic buzzword, perhaps especially because the concept has currency and relevance far beyond the contexts of late-’60s Japan, and various other filmmakers were engaged in similar practices around the same time and subsequently. But Adachi’s close association with landscape theory might be somewhat misleading, since the theoretic aspects were primarily developed by his collaborator, the critic Masao Matsuda. Adachi was generally self-deprecatory about his own talents in this regard. “I am not particularly theoretical,” he once confessed in 1968.

A.K.A. Serial Killer (Masao Adachi, 1969).

This should not discount his output as a writer and critic. Although his work was not as famous as Matsuda’s, Adachi has penned a corpus of essays about the Red Army / PFLP screenings that form a significant contribution to discourse, and he was also closely involved with publishing a major interdisciplinary journal in the late 1960s and early ’70s. His achievements as a screenwriter are also impressive. Some of his best scripts were never produced, and though they are published, they remain almost unknown.

This may all suggest a magpie of an artist, picking up styles, movements, and genres as his career has progressed across fifteen feature-length films, but that is not wholly true. With the exception of some starkly serious works like A.K.A. Serial Killer and Red Army / PFLP, the tone of much of his work is consistently bawdy and parodic. This makes sense to anyone who has met Adachi, who is a jocular character and a force of nature. Confronted by his dynamic personality and the sheer weight of his reputation and past exploits, it is all too easy to slip into the mythologizing trope of the director who is a former guerrilla. But by looking beyond the sensational aspects of his biography, albeit without downplaying the importance of politics and direct action to his work, we arrive at a more nuanced vision of Adachi as a filmmaker.

God Laughs: Stanley Kubrick’s Cinema - The Criterion Collection: The Current

2026-10-20T07:12:00.000Z

Stanley Kubrick would not appear, at first glance, to have the stuff of a Kubrickian hero. He did not in any sense resemble the ringleader of a racetrack heist, a colonel or a soldier of fortune, not an astronaut or a droog or Tom Cruise. He wore a uniform of anoraks and gratuitously pocketed fatigue jackets; he mumbled; he feared airplanes. But Kubrick did share with his heroes one essential trait. He endeavored, to quote one of his favorite philosophers, to become an Übermensch—a master of his own universe, engineering his fate through force of will, with an obsession bordering on monomania. His eye was ever on the sparrow. Unlike Johnny Clay or Humbert Humbert or Barry Lyndon, Kubrick got away with it.

The first shiver of an auteur-instinct can be detected at age six, when Kubrick was told (presumably) to go to school. He refused. Is there any power more awesome in a child than the power of refusal—and any power less likely to be countenanced, particularly in a grandchild of striving Austrian Jewish immigrants in the Depression-era Bronx? Kubrick, in any case, was triumphantly, virtuosically truant. He missed exactly half of first grade, half of second, and more than half of third. The Bartleby act continued right through his formal education. He refused to study for a bar mitzvah, refused to attend more than a minimum of high school (he graduated with a low C-minus), and did not attend college—with the notable exception of auditing several classes at Columbia University, taught by Mark Van Doren, F. W. Dupee, and Lionel Trilling.

The two pastimes that did interest him, however, he undertook with a ferocity of focus that his peers found bizarre, if not frightening. Introduced to chess by his exasperated father, Kubrick took it up with all the energy he had withheld from his studies. After high school, he would support himself by playing for quarters in Washington Square Park. Later in life, he boasted, wistfully, that he could have been better than Bobby Fischer, if only he’d been allowed to study chess nine hours a day. Then again, who was stopping him?

But it was photography—in the form of an eight-pound Graflex the size of a shoebox, a gift from his father on his thirteenth birthday—that swallowed him up entirely. Finally, he had a good reason to skip school: marathon picture-taking excursions across New York City, the Graflex hidden in a brown paper bag, a hole torn for the lens to poke through. Even then, Kubrick’s approach was marked by strict command over form and narrative, applied through doleful, unblinking repetition. The day after Franklin Delano Roosevelt died of a cerebral hemorrhage, Kubrick had the idea to photograph a newsstand on Grand Concourse and 172nd Street. In the image, a disconsolate vendor sits slumped in the newsstand window, head in hand, framed by 120-point headlines. Kubrick brought the picture to the Manhattan office of Look, one of the nation’s most prominent photo magazines, and sold it for twenty-five dollars, launching his professional career. Kubrick claimed at the time that the photo had been a lucky shot, a scene he had just chanced upon, but that was a lie. As biographer John Baxter revealed decades later, Kubrick had admitted to a friend that he had “sweated blood” trying to convince the seasoned old news vendor to pose with sufficient despair.

Look was the ideal training ground for a photographer who hoped to graduate to motion pictures. The magazine specialized in narrative photojournalism, though when the two mandates came into opposition, the masthead cheerfully sacrificed journalistic etiquette for drama. Kubrick’s editor, Arthur Rothstein, permitted his photographers to go so far as to stage a reenactment, provided “the photographer honestly believes that his directions are creating a true picture of what actually happened.” It was a permissive policy, by any journalistic standard, but Kubrick would not be so constrained. Forget reenactment: he elected enactment.

An early success was “A Short-Short in a Movie Balcony,” a series of photographs that purported to show a young man making a move on a “total stranger” in a theater during a film screening, only to be rebuffed with a slap. In fact, the two principals were Kubrick’s high-school friends, the sole other audience member in the frame was his younger sister, Barbara, and the shoot was staged in a closed theater. In another series, “Life and Love on the New York City Subway,” a young couple embrace beside a body sprawled unconscious (dead?) on the Museum of Natural History station platform. The scene unfolds in a stark, noirish chiaroscuro—an effect created by the professional lighting equipment Kubrick had hauled down the subway steps. The couple were his first wife, Toba Metz, and his best friend, Alexander Singer. Whether the unconscious body was a third confederate is unknown, though one clue is provided by the fact that, in the test photographs taken for the series, the corpse pops up in different locations.

It was a Look assignment, a day in the life of the boxer Walter Cartier, that Kubrick developed into his first film. Despite the documentary billing (“All Events Depicted in This Film Are True”), Kubrick staged Day of the Fight (1951) as deliberately as he did his photographs. The day was shot over several weeks, and nothing was left to chance. A typical directive: “I want you to get out this side of the bed, walk, stretch, and yawn.” To elicit the viewer’s sympathy, Kubrick eliminated Walter Cartier’s girlfriend from the narrative and replaced her with a little cocker spaniel, whom Cartier feeds from his plate. The fight itself was restaged (the tell: in the close-ups, Cartier doesn’t wear a mouth guard), and supplementary crowd shots were taken in Kubrick’s living room, with Singer and his wife posing as bloodthirsty fans.

The real star of the bout was obvious, even to the film’s hero. “Stanley comes in prepared like a fighter for a big fight,” Cartier later said. “He knows exactly what he’s doing, where he’s going, and what he wants to accomplish.” Though others are listed in the credits—including Singer, with an assistant-director credit—Kubrick claimed to have done everything himself, “from keeping an accounting book to dubbing in the punches on the soundtrack.” Sharing the screen with the film’s title is the credit, “A Stanley Kubrick Production.” He was twenty-two years old.

There is one significant way, however, in which Kubrick’s debut breaks from the films that would follow: Walter Cartier wins his fight.

Kubrick would win most of his bouts too. According to his own unsparing appraisal, he finished with a career record of 8–3, with one split decision (and one no contest). His first two features, Fear and Desire (1952) and Killer’s Kiss (1955), he considered apprentice works. He disowned Spartacus (1960), his first large-budget production, on which, at star Kirk Douglas’s request, he replaced director Anthony Mann two weeks into filming. It was the only time in Kubrick’s career that he was not granted final cut. “I tried with only limited success to make the film as real as possible,” he complained nearly three decades later, “but I was up against a pretty dumb script.” He judged Lolita (1962) flawed (grumbling that he failed to “sufficiently dramatize the erotic aspect of Humbert’s relationship with Lolita”), and he died four months before the opening of Eyes Wide Shut (1999), which he may not have finished editing. But the rest were knockouts.

Over the decades, Kubrick’s sensibilities evolved, as he went where his reading took him. He claimed that he had never read a book for pleasure until he turned nineteen, but he made up for it for the rest of his life. He was a consummate autodidact—another vehicle for his bootstrapped self-creation—and interlarded his promotional interviews with knowing references to arcane academic studies, Continental philosophers, and Central European novelists. He confounded expectations with each new film, exchanging the lavishly populated toga rebellions of Spartacus for the claustrophobic college-town angst of Lolita, the brutalist dystopia of A Clockwork Orange (1971) for the baroque eighteenth-century romanticism of Barry Lyndon (1975). He rarely worked with the same leading actor twice, the only exceptions coming early in his career for Sterling Hayden, Kirk Douglas (by contractual necessity), and a multiplicity of Peter Sellerses in Lolita and Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). “He was a chameleon,” said Steven Spielberg. “He never made the same picture twice.” But a chameleon only sheds its skin—not its nervous system.

Barry Lyndon

How, then, to chart Kubrick’s nervous system? How to define Kubrickian? If you blur your eyes to the varied settings and genres and periods, a central conceit emerges. The critic James Naremore describes it as “the story of how a carefully constructed plan fails.” Biographer David Mikics: “His movies are about mastery that fails. Perfectly controlled schemes get botched through human error or freak accidents.” Writer Geoffrey O’Brien characterizes it as “the obsessiveness of the human attempt to control the future—one’s own or the world’s—and the complicated ways in which that attempt fails.” The films begin with vanity and end in failure, failure, failure.

The Kubricks, and everyone they knew, would have had a more concise way of putting it: “Mann tracht, un Gott lacht.” Man plans, and God laughs. This is the DNA of Kubrick’s storytelling. Like any other genetic trait, once you know to look for it, you can’t unsee it.

Kubrick liked to say that he was not really a Jew, he just happened to have two Jewish parents. He also happened to have a Jewish sibling and Jewish cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and friends and wives. His Galician great-grandfather, Hersh Kubrik, arrived on the Lusitania in 1899. Kubrick’s father, Jacob, in the well-worn tradition of assimilationist German-speaking Jews, changed his name to Jacques (and later to Jack). Jack graduated from NYU, studied obstetrics at the New York Homeopathic Medical College and Flower Hospital, and moved from the Lower East Side to the Bronx, where he began his own practice, specializing in otolaryngology. Stanley grew up comfortably middle-class, which to many of his friends resembled opulence. “He lived in a house,” Alexander Singer told Baxter. “I didn’t know anybody who lived in a house.”

Though Kubrick received no religious education and was disdainful of all monotheistic religions, an emergent branch of Kubrick studies has devoted itself to reclaiming his Jewishness. The biographical evidence for the claim lies in his devotion to the literature of Mitteleuropean Jewry (Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Stefan Zweig, and Arthur Schnitzler, whose Traumnovelle Kubrick adapted into Eyes Wide Shut), his association with Greenwich Village’s Jewish intellectual scene (Diane Arbus invited him to Saturday-night charades), and his lifelong preoccupation with Nazi Germany, which bloomed when he met his third wife, Christiane Harlan.

Kubrick spotted Harlan on German television and, after they began dating, cast her in the stunning, ennobling final scene of Paths of Glory (1957)—a last-minute addition to the film. She sings “The Faithful Hussar” to the cynical and weary French troops, offering a redemption that has been withheld on the battlefield. Harlan, to whom Kubrick remained married for the rest of his life, was the daughter of entertainers who performed for Nazi troops at the front. Her uncle was Veit Harlan, the director of the Joseph Goebbels–sponsored film Jud Süss (1940), after Triumph of the Will the most notorious, and effective, work of Nazi propaganda. (Before meeting Veit Harlan and Christiane’s other Nazi relatives, in 1957, Kubrick fortified himself by chugging a glass of vodka. “I’m standing here like Woody Allen,” he later told Christiane, “looking like ten Jews.”) Kubrick spent most of his career trying to make a film about European Jewry during World War II, obsessively reading Hannah Arendt, Raul Hilberg, William L. Shirer. “Given that he wanted to make a film about the Holocaust and researched it for years,” said his daughter Katharina Kubrick, “I leave it to you to decide how he felt about his religion.” At his funeral, mourners recited the kaddish.

Yet it is in the narrative design of his films that you can see most clearly the shadows of Job, and Absalom, and Nebuchadnezzar. Ambitious schemes unerringly collapse, often with the abruptness of a punch line. Hubris is mocked; ambition is undermined by incompetence; humiliation is inevitable, and usually delivered with comic bathos.

The climactic sequence of Killer’s Kiss is structured around a carefully timed meeting organized by Davey (Jamie Smith), a boxer about to abandon his career—essentially Walter Cartier, had he lost his bout. Davey tries to rescue his downtrodden neighbor Gloria (Irene Kane), a taxi dancer in Times Square, from her loutish boss by arranging to pick her up outside her club at the exact moment his manager drops off his payment. The plan seems poised to succeed until two teenagers steal Davey’s scarf. When he chases after them, he blows the timing of the various handoffs, inviting a whirlwind of violence, chaos, and a misery that withstands the embrace between Gloria and Davey that concludes the film.

The Killing tracks the slow-motion unraveling of a heist that succeeds marvelously in its conception, only to fail, in every possible way, in its execution—a film noir that unfolds with the narrative logic of a screwball comedy. In Paths of Glory, a suicidal attack mission, undertaken for no strategic reason other than to help a succession of French generals each curry favor with his superior, backfires predictably and catastrophically. Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), the only one in the line of command to protest the order, manages to retain his humanity, but nothing else. Dax learns that even a selfless act of heroism cannot obstruct the cruelty of a system founded upon a single motivation: to increase its own power.

Paths of Glory

The same synopsis could be applied, with slight adjustments of tone and emphasis, to Kubrick’s other war pictures, Dr. Strangelove and Full Metal Jacket (1987). Lolita is the story of a domestic, if equally shortsighted, scheme: H. Humbert’s seduction of a child, enabled by chance (a car accident) and undone by self-deception and clumsiness. Barry Lyndon pursues a succession of half-baked plans that yield fleeting triumphs, only to cost the hero his honor, his fortune, his son, his left leg . . .

As Kubrick’s canvas broadened, and his budgets expanded, the “carefully constructed plan” became, more often than not, the product of institutional groupthink: a military desperate to train brainless killers, a government pursuing the principle of mutually assured destruction to its logical end, a conformist dystopian society, a secret cabal of lecherous plutocrats. Kubrick was always careful to personify the cruelty of institutions in a character, the better to expose the inhumanity of rationalism gone amok. Eyes Wide Shut’s Victor Ziegler, A Clockwork Orange’s minister of the interior, and even HAL 9000 announce their schemes with a disarming charm that under pressure is revealed to be a charade, hiding power-hungry depravity.

“The most terrifying fact about the universe,” Kubrick told Playboy in 1968, “is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent.” This is also the most terrifying quality of Kubrick’s glare. The slow, receding zoom, used in the opening shot of A Clockwork Orange and as a central motif in Barry Lyndon, reduces Kubrick’s heroes from giants to ants. His tracking shots pin his characters in the center of the screen as the world, indifferent to their crises, transforms around them. The implacable rigor, symmetry, and stateliness of Kubrick’s framing devices—particularly his use of the magisterial one-point perspective, which draws the eye toward a single vanishing point in the center of the screen—lead the viewer to assume an interpretative stance. Instead of encouraging an intimate identification with his heroes, Kubrick’s formalism travels in the opposite direction. We are not face to face, eye to eye, but standing in the museum gallery, examining the canvas, asking questions of composition, context, perspective. On the rare occasions when Kubrick does move in tight, it tends to be during outbursts of violence, or to suggest a character has gone insane (which explains the preponderance of the technique in 1980’s The Shining).

Barry Lyndon’s epilogue would suit most of his films: “Good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor they are all equal now.”

Yet Kubrick never submitted himself to this equalizing view. On the contrary: with each passing film, his method grew increasingly pharaonic. Only Kubrick would be exempted from the laws of hubris—and the laws of gravity. For 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), rather than use camera tricks to simulate weightlessness, Kubrick commissioned Vickers-Armstrongs Limited to construct a working centrifuge at the full scale of the spaceship Discovery, for the equivalent of about eight million dollars in 2026. Weighing thirty tons and resembling a Ferris wheel, it rotated at three miles an hour, allowing the actors to appear to walk up the walls, across the ceiling, and down the other side. The centrifuge forced the production into an extraordinary series of contingent measures: every piece of the set needed to be bolted down; crew members wore steel helmets to protect against flying debris; and so many cables, lights, speakers, computers, and climate-control systems had to be installed that Kubrick insisted a fire-department rescue team remain on call. “Had there been a fire,” said one studio executive, “it could have been a flash fire like the one in Apollo 1 that killed the three astronauts.” A camera traveling the walls of the set did once tear loose from its track, falling thirty feet to the floor; but since this was life, and not a Kubrick film, nobody was hurt.

2001: A Space Odyssey

The tales of Kubrick’s exactitude—his “rage for order,” in Mikics’s phrase—are the subject of an entire lineage of documentary films (see, for instance, Jon Ronson’s Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes, from 2008), but any list would have to begin with Candlegate. Insisting that Barry Lyndon be lit exclusively by period-consistent light sources, Kubrick embarked on a global search to find a lens capable of capturing night scenes by candlelight, settling upon one developed by NASA to photograph the dark side of the moon; to preserve continuity, dozens of new candles had to be burned to precise lengths for each take (causing the actors to complain of breathing problems). The Guinness Book of World Records credits Kubrick with the highest number of retakes of a single scene with dialogue, by filming Scatman Crothers telling Danny Lloyd how to shine 148 times; in the shot used for the film, the six-year-old’s expression is convincingly catatonic. (Director Lee Unkrich, after studying the shot logs at the Stanley Kubrick Archive in London, has recently contested this claim, insisting that the longest Kubrick spent on any scene in The Shining was on the early dolly shot following Jack and Wendy on their tour of the Gold Ballroom, completed in a mere sixty-six takes—a distinction without much difference.) With Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick set the record for the longest uninterrupted film shoot in history, at eighteen months—followed by nine months of editing (which concluded with a heart attack). Once a film was completed, he supervised the editing; the marketing; the graphic design of the posters; the press tour; the projection systems of the individual cinemas in which the films would screen; the foreign translations of not only his film titles but every line of dialogue dubbed into French, Italian, Spanish, and German; and the selection of voice actors . . .

Kubrick knew he was getting away with something. In a recorded speech accepting the Directors Guild of America’s D. W. Griffith Award for lifetime achievement, he cited the myth of Daedalus and Icarus: “I’ve never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ‘Don’t try to fly too high,’ or whether it might also be thought of as, ‘Forget the wax and feathers, and do a better job on the wings.’ ” Nobody did a better job on the wings than Kubrick.

More than a quarter century after his death, it is possible to pursue Kubrick’s influence down nearly every hallway and cul-de-sac of modern culture. It would be difficult to find a prominent contemporary director who hasn’t credited him for some foundational aspect of their own work. “Kubrick is something you live by,” Martin Scorsese has said. “Not that you live with the work, but you live by the work. It’s part of your experience of being a human being.” Christopher Nolan, who for the fiftieth anniversary of 2001’s release initiated and oversaw a new 70 mm print of the film, speaks of Kubrick as an ideal he can only chase. “I don’t think there is anybody who hasn’t been influenced by Stanley Kubrick,” said Paul Thomas Anderson, who met Kubrick on the set of Eyes Wide Shut. Direct homages to Kubrick’s films can be found in the work of Jordan Peele, Tim Burton, Sofia Coppola (who reused costumes from Barry Lyndon in Marie Antoinette), Greta Gerwig, Jonathan Glazer, Frank Darabont, Lars von Trier, Guillermo del Toro, the brothers Coen and Duffer and Safdie.

Kubrick has been claimed by architects, designers, photographers, sculptors, sociologists, urbanists, musicians. His costume design has inspired lines by Alexander McQueen and Gucci; his use of music has been cited by the Weeknd, Daniel Lopatin, and Jonny Greenwood and has inspired works by Blur, New Order, Kate Bush, and Lana Del Rey. Aphex Twin imagined his masterpiece, Selected Ambient Works Volume II, as an alternative soundtrack to The Shining, which was also the inspiration for Dorothea Lasky’s eponymous poetry collection (“I have eaten all the cans of beans and lemons / And am face drunk on the floor . . .”). The Simpsons alone has referenced Kubrick forty-six times. For more than fifteen years, beginning in 2007, a one-thousand-square-meter exhibition of his work has traveled to more than a dozen museums all over the world, to Melbourne, Istanbul, Seoul, San Francisco, Berlin. Political scientists speak of the “Strangelove effect,” neuroscientists of the “Clockwork Orange problem,” forensic psychologists of the “Kubrick stare.” The space-age set design of 2001 has so profoundly influenced modern technological product development that Samsung successfully used the film to defend itself against a copyright lawsuit filed by Apple; to dispute the claim that the Galaxy tablet mimicked Apple’s iPad, Samsung insisted that both devices had instead stolen the concept from the tablets used on board the Discovery.

The Shining

And now that civilization dangles over the maw of machine learning, Kubrick has reclaimed his status as one of the leading techno-ethicists of our age:

There’s no doubt that we’re entering a mechanarchy . . . Eventually, we will have to share this planet with machines whose intelligence and abilities far surpass our own . . . Looking into the distant future, I suppose it’s not inconceivable that a semisentient robot-computer subculture could evolve that might one day decide it no longer needed man.

That was Kubrick in 1968, promoting the first great work of art about artificial intelligence, and still widely considered the best. Not far behind is A.I. (2001), a film Kubrick tried to make for decades, before ceding it to Steven Spielberg (Kubrick had optioned the short story on which it is based, Brian Aldiss’s “Supertoys Last All Summer Long,” in the early seventies). Both films examine, with harrowing precision, many of the still-unsolved ethical conundrums posed by machine intelligence. The central drama of 2001 concerns the alignment problem, today commonly known as the “HAL 9000 problem”: What happens when superintelligent machines conclude, as seems inevitable, that humanity stands in the way of their goals? A.I., which begins with a minute-long voice-over detailing the inevitable consequences of unchecked climate change and ends in a drowned New York City, asks what happens when we can no longer distinguish between imitation and reality, or when we no longer want to. Behind that question stands a series of additional ones, each nested within the last like the hedges of the maze at the Overlook Hotel. Can one fall in love with a machine? Can a machine feel? Can a machine love? Can humanity survive technological progress beyond a certain threshold? If we merge with silicon, will we still be human? Now that we have begun to merge with silicon—now that we have, to a greater or lesser degree, outsourced our memories, our characters, our intellects to the cloud—have we already lost our humanity? What more is there to lose? What to gain?

An even more uneasy resonance can be found in the sudden preponderance of Daedalus figures in American public life. Call it the “Jack D. Ripper problem,” or the “Paul Mireau effect”—or the “Napoleon complex,” to borrow the subject of another of Kubrick’s unrealized projects: imperious men in positions of influence who believe themselves responsible for ushering in a new world order. The political scene perennially disgorges such figures, but now that the power locus has shifted west, the Jack D. Rippers and Dr. Strangeloves have proliferated in Silicon Valley, where 2001 has acquired the status of a sacred text—the tech industry’s chosen monolith. Elon Musk credits 2001 as the source of his core convictions about AI. In 2024, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin sent miniature black slabs modeled after the 2001 monolith into outer space. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has chided the public not to associate AI with “the haunting voice of HAL,” as if the neutral, gentlemanly tenor of actor Douglas Rain were to blame for fears that humanity will cede authority to androids.

There is a temptation, when writing about artists who have left the stage, to ask what they might have made of this or that contemporary phenomenon. With Kubrick, the temptation is misplaced. What would he have made of our current predicaments? We already have the answer. You can find it in Dr. Strangelove, 2001, and A.I., but also in The Killing, where a meticulously designed scheme fails under the weight of incompetence and envy. Or in A Clockwork Orange, a satire about a society in which constant barrages of images of sex and violence become, as Kubrick himself put it, “dangerous new weapons for a totalitarian government to use to impose vast controls on its citizens and turn them into little more than robots.” You can find it in Paths of Glory, where Kubrick never shows us the opposing army—because the real enemy wears the embroidered stars of the French high command. You can even find it in Eyes Wide Shut, in which extremities of wealth and power lead, ineluctably, to barbarism. Kubrick’s films are timeless because he asked, with as much psychological clarity as any filmmaker ever has, timeless questions—the kinds of questions that will be with us, no matter what technological powers we inherit, at least until the city of his childhood sinks to the bottom of the sea.

Christiane F.: Up Against the Wall - The Criterion Collection: The Current

2026-10-19T18:31:00.000Z

One of the great Berlin films, Uli Edel’s Christiane F. (1981) is also one of the grungiest. Based on the true story of teenage heroin user and sex worker Christiane Felscherinow and shot on location in and around West Berlin’s notorious Zoo Station, the film captures both the magnetic fascination of the divided city and its tarnished atmosphere of decadence and doom. Christiane F. interlaces raw scenes of youth rebellion with harrowing depictions of drug addiction in an indelible mix that has captivated audiences, stymied censors, and left an enduring aesthetic imprint on popular culture.

Although we never catch a glimpse of the Berlin Wall in Christiane F., the film reflects West Berlin’s exceptional status as a city on the front lines of the Cold War. Known for the insular ambience forged from its geographical location as a western outpost in the Eastern Bloc, the city derived its postwar allure as much from its association with Weimar-era culture as from the material conditions, including rent stabilization and wage subsidies, that enabled the experiments in art and living—both luminous and disconsolate—taking place there.

The claustrophobia of West Berlin, and the attendant urge of its denizens to escape into excess, figure prominently from the first frames of Christiane F. A slow pan to a close-up introduces the film’s eponymous protagonist, who recounts in voice-over the squalid conditions of the high-rise apartment buildings in the Gropiusstadt, the housing estate where she has lived since she was six. Bearing the name of its architect, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, the satellite city was developed from 1962 to 1975 in order to create affordable housing in the district of Neukölln, along the perimeter of the wall, an area whose open vistas would allow for light-filled and airy modern residences.

But as Christiane describes it in the very first sentence of her voice-over, by the time the complex was completed it had already become a flash point for the social neglect that is on full view in Edel’s film: “Nothing but piss and crap everywhere. You just have to look closely.” A shot of the project’s narrow, low-ceilinged corridors allows us to do just that: before Christiane appears, we see an anonymous kid skateboarding into view, bathed in the film’s signature cold blue fluorescent light, which reveals the building’s dank, fetid floors and peeling paint. When Christiane exits the high-rise, her gaze lands on a poster for Sound, “Europe’s most modern disco,” whose logo of lusciously painted lips rhymes with her own rose-colored mouth in the film’s opening close-up of her face, underscoring the disco’s lure for Christiane, whose voice-over concludes with the words: “I want to go there.”

Christiane F. then takes viewers on a ride from the periphery of West Berlin to its center, following Christiane to Sound, the entry point for her descent into the underground world of drugs and sex work. This ride is figured through successive tracking shots recorded by cameras mounted on the side and front of a subway car moving along elevated tracks against the backdrop of the night city, recalling similar panoramic shots in Walter Ruttmann’s landmark film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), which begins with the arrival of a train in the metropolis. These shots suggest a form of virtual tourism, offering viewers proximity to the desolate thrills of the city in which Christiane is soon immersed.

Born in Hamburg in 1962, the real-life Felscherinow moved with her parents to West Berlin as a child. Growing up in the Gropiusstadt, she began smoking hash at the age of twelve, and by thirteen she was using heroin, supporting her addiction through sex work. In 1978, Felscherinow told her story to the journalists Kai Hermann and Horst Rieck, who published it first as a serialized feature in the magazine Stern and later in book form as Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (We Children from Zoo Station, 1979). Framed as a memoir told in Felscherinow’s own words, with additional sections written by her mother and a youth pastor, Hermann and Rieck’s narrative became the top-selling nonfiction book in the history of West Germany. Estimates suggest that more than twenty million West Germans—nearly a third of the population—read Felscherinow’s story in either magazine or book form, and it was subsequently translated into numerous languages.

The book’s resonance derives from its authentic account of the increasingly dismal drug scene in West Berlin, which saw more overdoses than any other European city in the late 1970s. A by-product of youth unemployment and Cold War ennui, addiction also drove the child prostitution and petty crime that ran rampant on the so-called Babystrich around Zoo Station. Although Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo was billed as a cautionary tale, its cult status was certainly fueled by both trauma voyeurism and, on the part of young readers, a fervent attraction to its antihero protagonist. The newspaper Die Zeit referred to the book as “the bible of the tennis-shoe generation”—a German term for Generation X—even comparing it to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s classic novel of youth rebellion, The Sorrows of Young Werther.

For Bernd Eichinger, the young producer who acquired the rights to Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo and played a key role in its creative development as a feature film, the book’s sensational treatment of controversial social problems and its remarkable popularity made Felscherinow’s story ripe for adaptation. With Christiane F., which became the top-grossing film of 1981 in West Germany, Eichinger patented a strategy of producing adaptations of major best sellers that would make him the most successful German producer of the contemporary period, ushering in a shift away from the auteur-driven aesthetic experiments of the New German Cinema and toward commercially oriented genre films.

Eichinger initially hired the filmmaker Roland Klick to write and direct Christiane F. on the merits of Supermarket (1974), a crime thriller about young people on the streets of Hamburg. Shortly before shooting began, however, Eichinger decided that Klick’s vision for the film was incompatible with his own and parted ways with him, necessitating a new screenplay and a new director. Eichinger turned to two of his friends from the University of Television and Film Munich, the screenwriter Herman Weigel and the director Uli Edel, both of whom shared his passion for mainstream American film. Edel had discovered cinema during his teenage years at a strict Jesuit boarding school and, after graduating from film school in 1974, began working in television. Christiane F. was Edel’s first feature film for the cinema, and its success laid the groundwork for his subsequent career as one of Germany’s most assured film and television directors, known for his distinguished oeuvre of transnational and multilingual productions. As a frequent collaborator with Eichinger, Edel directed a series of successful screen adaptations, including Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989) and The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008).

For Christiane F., Edel and Eichinger achieved an immersive sense of authenticity by casting nonprofessional teenage actors, including thirteen-year-old Natja Brunckhorst in the leading role; by shooting on location amid actual drug use and sex work; and by using handheld cameras and other techniques reminiscent of documentary film. At the same time, they amplified the generic dimensions of the story to create multiple points of access for viewers, enhancing the movie’s widespread appeal with conventions of the after-school special, the social-problem film, the love story, the musical, and the horror film.

From the moment she takes off her tennis shoes and straps on high heels over her tube socks outside the disco, Christiane embarks on a journey that swiftly leads from an LSD trip to a heroin habit, and from a crush on the dreamy Detlef (Thomas Haustein) to joining Detlef’s hustle selling sex to men. This journey is set in motion by the music of Felscherinow’s idol David Bowie, whose songs figure prominently in Edel’s film. When she first enters Sound, Christiane’s friend Kessi (Daniela Jaeger) pulls her into the venue’s cinema, where Christiane is offered pills and groped by a boy. This initiation takes place during a projection of George A. Romero’s 1968 zombie film Night of the Living Dead, an apt segue into Christiane F.’s presentation of addiction through the genre logic of horror, via dark settings, chiaroscuro lighting, ominous music, jump scares, erupting bodily fluids, and abject bodies, including half-dead junkies and corpses that appear unexpectedly. References to horror films abound, including to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), which shapes the visual language of the sequence in which Christiane and Detlef withdraw from heroin, and to F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), which plays in the disco cinema, linking Christiane F. to the Weimar classics that Bob Fosse’s blockbuster Cabaret (1972) had revived in the public imagination.

The Weimar renaissance of the 1970s—along with a personal predilection for the films of Murnau, Fritz Lang, and Robert Wiene; the expressionist paintings of Die Brücke; and the city’s historical queer culture—is often cited in discussions of David Bowie’s decision to move to West Berlin with Iggy Pop in 1976. The move took place shortly after Bowie gave a concert at the Deutschlandhalle, where he first met trans burlesque performer and West Berlin personality Romy Haag, who would become his lover—a concert that Felscherinow also attended. Bowie’s two-and-a-half-year sojourn in Berlin produced a trilogy of legendary albums recorded with Brian Eno: Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger. Ostensibly based on a stealthy kiss in the shadow of the wall, the anthemic “‘Heroes’” has sometimes been described as providing the template for Christiane F.’s sparse plot, and it certainly drives the film’s most iconic scene, the music-video-style sequence in which Christiane and her friends race through the empty hallways of the Europa Center shopping mall, collapse on the floor to the rhythm of Bowie’s song, and, finally, ascend to the rooftop, where they bask in the glow of the gigantic rotating neon Mercedes-Benz logo mounted there to make it visible in East Berlin.

With work on the film well underway, Eichinger was able to persuade Bowie to participate by contributing music to the soundtrack and making a cameo appearance, a performance of “Station to Station” that was filmed in New York and interlaced with footage of fans at an AC/DC concert in Berlin. Given that Bowie moved to Berlin from Los Angeles to kick his cocaine habit, it is ironic that his concert serves as the setting for Christiane’s first experience snorting heroin. Although it was heralded by authorities, including West Germany’s federal minister for youth, family, and health, for its realistic and sobering depiction of drug addiction, and its ending portrays Christiane, now clean, in a rural landscape far from the city, Christiane F. ultimately resists simplistic didactic messaging, and Bowie’s role in the film certainly contributes to its glamour.

Screenwriter Weigel referred to Christiane as “a female James Dean”; the film links her to Ulrike Meinhof, the militant founder of the left-wing terrorist group Red Army Faction, whose image hangs above the bed where Christiane and Detlef first have sex. When Christiane dyes her hair red partway through the film, she resembles the vampire in Edvard Munch’s famous painting, an unforgettable image of female voracity that resonates in Christiane’s vocal desire for sex, for heroin, for a life beyond the confines of working-class domesticity. An unparalleled role for a teenage girl, in a remarkable performance by Brunckhorst, Christiane was (and continues to be) idolized by viewers who saw in her not just a tragic case but an original rebel girl the likes of which had rarely appeared on-screen. A forerunner of diverse styles in fashion and music, from heroin chic to grunge to riot grrrl, the film’s influence on cinema can be seen in professed fan Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), in the flame-haired protagonist of Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998), and in Catherine Hardwicke’s postfeminist coming-of-age film Thirteen (2003). Nearly five decades after it premiered, Christiane F.’s viral afterlife on social media, where it is the subject of countless Pinterest boards and TikTok video edits, is a testament to Edel’s visceral, gut-wrenching filmmaking and to the film’s enduring vision of female rebellion against social norms, whatever the cost.

The Wall Between Us: Possession at 45 - Little White Lies

2026-10-19T11:19:00.000Z

Andrzej Żuławski's grotesque vision of a marriage collapsing is an unnerving reflection of our increasingly disconnected world. If handled with care, could a remake remind us of what we stand to lose?

Over the past few years, Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession has been put on the internet’s radar as a morbid curiosity. You can find the film on endless ‘most disturbing movies ever made’ iceberg lists that the algorithm favours; the gruesome, uncanny moments being perfect visuals for clickable thumbnails. And then there is Anna (Isabelle Adjani) thrashing around in oversized Yves Saint Laurent sunglasses, becoming the ‘weird girl’ Halloween costume of recent years. Screenshots of her mid-scream and covered in blood have become an essential Instagram grid post for the girl who’s going through it. But beyond fear and social media, it’s the film’s dedication to raw emotion that makes it stand out in our apathetic time.

Adjani’s unique performance, inspired by Jerzy Grotowski, the influential Polish theatre director whose approach to performance tested the limits of physical endurance and “exploited the intimacy of live theatre to confront the audience directly,” can feel alien in a time when we are so used to seeing perfection, even when it is meant to be ugly. The source of her palpable rage is open to interpretation: the loss of identity after motherhood, falling out of love, the visceral pain of divorce. While these themes are evergreen, it is Possession’s collapse of communication which makes it stand out more than ever 45 years later. Anna and Mark (Sam Neill), a young married couple with a son living in West Berlin, reach otherworldly neurotic heights as they go in circles, figuratively and literally: arguments that sound like unsolvable riddles, chasing one another around identical bare streets, and doppelgangers that take the narrative even further from reality.

Whilst we watch Anna and Mark’s relationship crumble, we repeatedly see the Berlin Wall looming around them. The film opens with the graffiti, “DIE MAUER MUß WEG” (“The Wall Must Go”), and ends with real guards on the Wall peering into the camera through binoculars. Watching Possession today, it’s hard not to see the film as a mirror. Like Anna and Mark, we must go about our lives being watched in a pressurised, paranoid, and confused reality, where online censorship is disguised as a safety act, and AI is causing people to be wrongly jailed. Indeed, as Adam Curtis puts it, "we live in a time of great uncertainty and confusion. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of control." This external chaos seeps into the home, often without us even realising, as we’re left wondering why a loved one in front of us is now a stranger, and how a life that should have been simple came to resemble a haunted house at a theme park.

A few hours of doomscrolling can make you want to throw yourself around an empty subway, screaming and throwing up. With the average day in 2026 including smiling for the Flock cameras and giving websites your passport details that will be leaked onto 4chan in a few months, watching Possession is relatable and cathartic. We can live vicariously through Anna’s thrashing and screaming, her performance a convincing choreography of suffocation. Possession is a rare piece of media that successfully conveys the surreal, absurd terror that has crept into everyday life over the past 20 years. Films like The Social Network and Ingrid Goes West no longer cut it when there’s an AI boyfriend epidemic; instead, the stories we crave ought to be as unbelievable as the one we are living in. Being plugged in to a constant stream of disturbing, hyperreal content has unsurprisingly desensitised us. Anna and Mark’s doppelgangers, cold and complacent, are eerie parallels to our own online personas – curated versions of ourselves that must follow terms and conditions in order to exist convincingly, divorced from real human experience in their deliberate and fine-tuned makeup.

Żuławski raised the bar for horror, and his influence is felt in today’s features: when watching Nell Tiger Free thrashing around in The First Omen (2024) or Lily Rose Depp teary-eyed and manic in Nosferatu (2024), the blueprint is clear. Alongside directing legendary moments, his dedication to creating his work despite constant setbacks imposed by authoritarian governments was just as inspiring. His 1972 film The Devil was banned, and Polish authorities defunded his unfinished sci-fi On the Silver Globe during production in 1977-1978, but this did not hinder his radical filmmaking ethic, which remained confessional in the face of repression.

Considering these unique and intimidating feats in filmmaking, you might imagine a Possession remake would be low on Hollywood's to-do list, but, of course, the fact that they’re making it anyway comes as no surprise. Starring Margaret Qualley as Anna and Callum Turner as Mark, the film is currently in production, directed by Smile creator Parker Finn. In July, we saw images of Qualley running down a street in New Jersey on set, and while Qualley looks more like Adjani than she does her own mother, an uncanny resemblance is not enough reason to potentially botch a classic.

That being said, a remake, unfortunately, makes sense. Every other week, a reboot or a 20-years-too-late sequel is announced that relies purely on manufactured nostalgia to bring in viewers, neglecting worthwhile storytelling in the process. We’re in need of a piece of well-made, accessible media that can cut through slop and show how catastrophe can happen when we’re unable to communicate and live under constant surveillance. They don’t have to give Anna an iPhone or have Mark work for Palantir; the original setup could be enough to convey these messages if the creators tap into Żuławski’s filmmaking approach, not retreating into Hollywood glossy and embracing the core elements that made Possession a classic in the first place.

A good film can shift social consciousness and spark conversation, and considering we are living in an internet discourse economy, a remake of this classic could bring to light how we have all felt like Anna, at one time or another. A Possession remake, if done right, could scare us back into reality. In Żuławski's own words: “This film comes from a very simple vision: we are all unhappy, and we don’t deserve it.”

Making Marie Antoinette review – passing the baton - Little White Lies

2026-10-19T11:10:00.000Z

Pieced together from Eleanor Coppola’s behind-the-scenes footage and journal entries, this intimate documentary becomes a moving portrait of a mother witnessing her daughter’s artistry.

Making-of documentaries tend to be a mixed-bag proposition. They can risk seeming like extras on a Blu-Ray release or exercises in navel-gazing. But when Eleanor Coppola picked up a camera and began to film the on-set circus of her husband Francis’ chaotic 1979 production of Apocalypse Now in her film Hearts of Darkness, she showed herself capable of extracting beautiful insight from the process of filmmaking. It helped, of course, that she watched with the eye of a wife and a mother who knew her family’s foibles and talents.

Making Marie Antoinette is, ostensibly, about the ambitious process of bringing what many now see as a modern classic to the screen. When Sofia Coppola was given her largest budget to date – $40 million – to make her third film, she had her work cut out for her. An ambitious stab at representing a historical figure from a girlish, candy-coloured POV, it required a larger cast and crew than she had yet managed, with hordes of lavishly costumed extras and special permission to film in the Palace of Versailles. And so Eleanor, dressed in black and trying to move invisibly through the chaos, joined her daughter on this courageous project of female ambition and artistry.

Constructed from 80 hours of footage Eleanor shot on set in 2005, it wasn’t until the Covid-19 lockdown that she took it upon herself to make something from it. It was only after her death in 2024 that Sofia gathered these incomplete materials and set about finishing them. Bringing in lines from her mother’s journals, spoken in voiceover throughout by Diane Lane, Making Marie Antoinette plays like a posthumous transmission as much as it does a tribute to Eleanor.

“Sofia looks too small and unprepossessing to be the director of a $40 million movie,” she says near the start of the doc. It sounds less like doubt and more like concern for her child. We see her camera zoom in on Sofia’s face on numerous occasions, searching her daughter’s expression for anxiety. As Sofia, now a mother of teenage daughters herself, recounts her late mother’s reaction to her, it must feel like a poignant passing of the baton.

Beamed back to us through the BTS footage on a noughties digital camera, there’s another layer of nostalgia and charm to the pastel-coloured frippery of Coppola’s prettiest film. Those refracted images – a pink-wigged Kirsten Dunst dashing through her gilded rooms, Barry Lyndon costume designer Milena Canonero adding a blue velvet ribbon around the actor’s throat – remind us of the film’s bold use of anachronistic colour and detail. But they also reveal small moments of humour and wisdom: someone cracking a Spinal Tap joke at the sight of a fog machine, or Sofia telling Kirsten Dunst about her character: “They treat you like you’re just a dumb girl and you let them. But every once in a while, you let them know you’re not an idiot.”

Intended as a mother’s document of her daughter’s artistry, it works as a feedback loop due to her daughter’s completion of the material. In its endless reflection, this unassuming film is its own Hall of Mirrors – intricate, melancholy and lovely.

Remake, Remodel, Remarket - The Daily Notebook

2026-10-19T08:00:00.000Z

Cinderella (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, 1950).

In the early 2000s, stores including Barneys and Hot Topic briefly stocked saucy T-shirts depicting classic Disney characters, including, as James B. Stewart describes it in the book DisneyWar, “an archival drawing of Tinker Bell eyeing her derriere in a mirror.” The shirts were the brainchild of Andrew Mooney, the executive brought in to revive Disney’s moribund Consumer Products division, and they so incensed Roy E. Disney—Walt’s nephew and the vice chairman of the company’s Board of Directors—that he sent Mooney a note accusing him of “positioning Tinker Bell as a prostitute.” Mooney’s job was saved by the peacemaking efforts of the company’s then-president and COO Bob Iger, and another one of his initiatives would go on to have more success: the Disney Princess.

Encompassing toys, dolls, Funko POP!s, clothing, kids’ jewelry, accessories, decor, home goods, and other categories, the Disney Princess line of products is unified by a term that would quickly enough become ubiquitous. It connects the female leads of the so-called “Disney Renaissance” of the 1980s and 90s—characters such as Ariel, Belle, and Jasmine—across the generations. It looks forward to Rapunzel, Anna, and Elsa—characters from Disney films made in the twenty-first century, following the transition to 3D digital animation—and back to the hand-drawn 2D princesses of classic Disney, to Snow White, Cinderella, and Aurora. Though in fact, the three latter princesses were in fact the only such characters in the studio’s 55-year history of feature animation before The Little Mermaid.

The Little Mermaid, released in 1989, as the studio embraced computer animation, was the first Disney film with a princess protagonist since 1959’s Sleeping Beauty. Coming at the end of a decade in which new chairman Michael Eisner revitalized Disney’s flagging stock price and park attendance, the movie was a critical and commercial smash, launching the narrative of an artistic revival at the flagship animation studio, and encouraging further variations on the princess theme.

For its own part, Sleeping Beauty had been an attempt to recapture the magic of 1950’s Cinderella, itself a desperate attempt to recapture the magic of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) after a decade of war, labor unrest, and the financial failures of Fantasia (1940), Pinocchio (1940), and Bambi (1942). It was made expediently and restrictively: To save development time, the entire film was blocked with live actors rather than worked out from scratch with pen and paper. “This was,” write two of Disney’s longest-tenured animators, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, in their 1981 book The Illusion of Life, “undeniably, a way of doing it.”

The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements, John Musker, 1989).

The past is never really past at Disney, where the breakthroughs of previous generations are kept forever young at heart with new innovations—which are often primarily economic in nature. Disney has always controlled its “vault” (the back catalog known at other studios by the more access-oriented word “library”), stoking demand for its core products by limiting supply, via selective theatrical rereleases and, later, video editions. For over a decade now it has turned to the live-action—or nominally live-action—remake of its own films. While Disney’s previous back-to-basics moments came in response to times of acute corporate crisis, the autoremake cycle comes during the long and happy reign of recently departed CEO Bob Iger, a time characterized—except during Bob Chapek’s tumultuous interregnum—by elevated stock prices and world-bestriding expansion, including the acquisitions of Marvel Entertainment, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox.

Since the mid to late 2010s, the rise of streaming has made Disney’s prior strategy of limited-edition vault drops impractical, and the decline of theatrical moviegoing (and cable television, also a key part of Disney’s business) has instilled in Hollywood a permanent crisis mentality. Its own streaming service, Disney+, additionally points to a more company-specific version of the general problem: Disney’s movies are eventized throughout their commercial life cycle, but they’re also beloved de facto babysitters that have been imprinted on generations of children through repeated viewings—and they’re now available in a medium that, unlike magnetic VHS tape, does not deteriorate physically as it becomes increasingly well loved. How to be both a constant companion and a special treat? Disney has fought back against diffusing attention spans by constantly revivifying and resurfacing its dormant intellectual property, constantly turning over the soil in the form of plot point-by-plot point remakes of prior decades’ animated hits, this time with real costumes, famous faces, and fan-service subplots.

Cinderella (Kenneth Branagh, 2015).

This cycle began, once again, with Cinderella. After the financial success of Tim Burton’s reimagined Alice in Wonderland (2010) and the origin story Maleficent (2014), in 2015 Disney returned to the film whose castle serves as the studio’s logo, with a new Cinderella, directed by Kenneth Branagh, that builds out its lead character and buffs up a message of female empowerment. This Cinderella (Lily James), while still kind-spirited and humble, is also, in the preferred parlance, unapologetic: She meets her prince (Richard Madden) while out on horseback, stunning him with her boldness and defiance of convention. She gets her gold carriage and her fairytale wedding, here spun as the enlightened award of a People’s Princess who, alongside her husband, would be the “fairest, kindest rulers” her people ever knew.

Many characteristics of this Cinderella would become constants of the Disney remakes to follow, up to and including Moana (2026), just released to theaters this July, particularly its convoluted and apologetic reframing of the escapist, aspirational Disney Princess. The more than a dozen subsequent films made in this vein in the last dozen years show Disney constantly refreshing its beloved products and overwriting its own narrative, in an act of nostalgic pandering and corporate positioning: the product is an eternal childhood, the company is a never-ending brand-management case study.

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Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (William Cottrell, David Hand, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, Ben Sharpsteen, 1937).

The initial appeal of Disney animation was that it was a marvel, not a morality tale. The standard test for new Disney animators used to involve drawing a bouncing ball. As Thomas and Johnston explain in The Illusion of Life, a series of drawings simply tracking the movement of a rigid circle would look lifeless. The challenge in those early days was to imbue drawings with a sense of movement, vitality, personality, and, therefore, emotion. Techniques such as “squash and stretch”—compressing or elongating a constant volume, as with the bouncing ball—could make figures moldable and lively.

Walt Disney used the word “realism” to mean not that an animation appeared exactly true to life, but that it was communicative and relatable, even if exaggeratedly; his instincts were populist, and the medium, in its early days, was crudely expressive. Though Disney himself quickly hit his ceiling as an animator, he was a hands-on editor and micromanager. One night, before embarking on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, he gathered his animators together at the company’s soundstage, and proceeded to act out the entire film for them. As Neal Gabler writes in Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination, he stood, illuminated by a spotlight, “assuming the characters’ mannerisms, putting on their voices, letting his audience visualize exactly what they would be seeing on the screen,” imitating each of the seven dwarfs in turn.

The first Disney films, in the 1920s and ’30s, were comic shorts, and the animators were gag men who learned from vaudeville and silent-film comedians how to make ordinary action interesting. Thomas and Johnston reprint notes from one Snow White meeting in which Disney insisted:

Dopey isn’t cute looking in these drawings. His body should be longer and his legs shorter. […]When anything happens, Dopey runs as fast as he can and gets ahead of the other dwarfs—turns around and looks back like a kid. [Silent film comedian Harry] Langdon had that kid action. He would hold on to his hat when running along with some fellows.

Even Disney’s “story men” were animators, and when they developed character, it was by conceiving action that could be staged broadly and vividly, winning attention and wringing sympathy.

Cinderella (Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske, 1950).

Today, when we speak of “characterization,” we mean motivation, which is the terrain of screenwriters. The 2025 remake Snow White expands its backstory: This Snow White is a “fair” princess who rules justly, even baking apple pies for her subjects, before the arrival of the Evil Queen. In new songs, by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, that are stapled onto the old, she advocates for resistance against her stepmother’s reign of terror, in spirited opposition to the individualism of her love interest, now a rakish bandit instead of a prince; she wins him over to her side, and demonstrates her bravery in battle.

The 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and 1950 Cinderella films are not primarily about princesses. Disney animators discovered that what appeared refined and appealing in a single drawing of a beautiful girl came off as stiff and bland in motion. They are, rather, films about those funny little fellows the Seven Dwarfs, and Cinderella’s rambunctious mouse friends, who drive the stories forward and account for much of the interest. Thomas and Johnston write that it was best practice around Disney to “tell your story through the broad cartoon characters rather than the ‘straight’ ones. There is no way to animate strong-enough attitudes, feelings, or expressions on realistic characters to get the communication you should have.”

The remakes reverse and defy this, accompanied by an equally prosaic hyperrealism in their visuals. In the animated Cinderella, the fairy godmother shimmers into view as Cinderella weeps, head in arms, so that, suddenly, the orphaned girl is sobbing in the lap of a sympathetic maternal figure; in live action, Cinderella’s fairy godmother (Helena Bonham Carter, inevitably) simply pops up out of the background.

The seven diminutive friends of 2025’s Snow White—not identified as “dwarfs” in the film, and referred to as “magical creatures” in the marketing materials—were achieved through motion-capture performances and other digital techniques. Their movements are plasticky and herky-jerky, rather than springy and liquid—they’re not squishy, they’re rubbery, straining at verisimilitude instead of appealing to anthropomorphism.

Top: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (William Cottrell, David Hand, Wilfred Jackson, Larry Morey, Perce Pearce, Ben Sharpsteen, 1937). Above: Snow White (Marc Webb, 2025).

To create the appearance of depth in hand-drawn cel animation, Disney, beginning in the 1930s, developed its multiplane camera that, in a staggeringly complex and time-consuming process, could photograph multiple painted glass plates in configurations adjusted frame by frame. In 2025’s soundstage production, the depth is simply there, in the sets—but instead of luxuriating in it, Snow White director Marc Webb and cinematographer Mandy Walker shoot much of it in shallow focus, with the edges of the frame blurry, in keeping with the current fad for imitating anamorphic lenses to muss up the clarity of high-resolution digital. The look is already dated—a risk when budding a received classic with an up-to-the-minute polish, and one that Disney remakes also encounter on the level of story.

Disney is all things to all people, a business model based on Walt’s humanist and opportunistic belief in universal entertainment. The Disney remake cycle coincides with an era of identity politics leveraged for corporate messaging, and in refurbishing now-problematic legacy properties with like-new sensitivities, the films often end up playing a kind of representation Jenga, assembling a teetering stack of demographic signifiers. The animated Mulan, from 1998, quite freely adapted from the Chinese legend of the girl soldier Hua Mulan, indulges in blithe orientalism, including, among other things, a dragon named “Mushu,” voiced by Eddie Murphy. The grimly action-oriented 2020 remake, which retains the melodies but not the words of the original’s songs, presents itself as more authentically Chinese, by dressing up inferior wuxia choreography with the handsomely compensated and gently utilized Donnie Yen and Jet Li. It mothballs Mushu in favor of a nonspeaking phoenix who rises from the ashes (not a Chinese concept), and downplays Mulan’s power-imbalanced romance with her superior officer in favor of a new female antagonist, played by Gong Li, who implores her to recognize her power as “a woman. A warrior.” The effect is to cheapen a foundational myth of female bravery in a male-dominated field (perhaps not incidentally: the 1998 Mulan is the favorite Disney movie of my younger sister, a neuroscientist) with triple-underlined girlboss buzzwords.

Top: Mulan (Tony Bancroft, Barry Cook, 1998). Above: Mulan (Niki Caro, 2020).

This is cynical, and it makes Disney’s remakes feel untrustworthy and primarily self-protective. The company’s well-documented triangulations—Iger fought anti-woke activist investor Nelson Peltz’s bid to join the Disney board in early 2024, then walked back DEI language after Trump’s reelection—invite audiences to be hyperattentive to the political valence of its every choice; Snow White’s financial underperformance was foreordained following weeks of bad press, and disgust, from opposite quarters, about the casting of either the anti-Zionist Rachel Zegler or the IDF veteran Gal Gadot. If the backlash against the casting of a Black actress, Halle Bailey, as Ariel in The Little Mermaid (2023), was obviously racist, other revisionist gambits have warranted more genuine scrutiny. As part of its effort to recenter a Chinese perspective, the live-action Mulan was shot partly in Xinjiang—home of China’s persecuted Uyghur minority, which raised eyebrows in concert with the story’s themes of filial and imperial loyalty.

The remakes also underestimate the flexibility of audiences, who might identify with a film for many reasons beyond demographic determinism. Sloppy and imprecise attempts to integrate Chinese concepts like “chi” into Mulan only served to remind Chinese-diaspora viewers that the director, Niki Caro, and key members of the writing and production team were no more Chinese than the makers of the original, and in any case the film performed poorly with Chinese moviegoers. As it happens, the highest-grossing foreign film released in China so far this year is another Disney animated film, Zootopia 2 (2025)—a point, perhaps, in favor of the broad-brush humanism school of populism, as opposed to the 2020 Mulan’s attempt at narrowcast pandering.

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The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1967).

Walt Disney was a holistic entrepreneur, a “storyteller” in the modern, advertorial sense. A cartoonist first, he became a mogul in the Thomas Edison mode; the innovative films made under his aegis were one part of an empire touching on all aspects of mass production and mass communication. After the difficult 1940s, he diversified his portfolio in the 1950s, moving into live-action filmmaking, television, and parks, beginning with Disneyland—which began the same way his animated films did, with concept illustrations, and relied on many former animators, retitled “Imagineers,” to design the narratives and special effects of its attractions.

Disney had myriad methods of coaxing, berating, and evading his employees in order to get them to execute his vision, which was clear in his head if not in his words. He was what we would now recognize as a founder: emotionally manipulative, inscrutable, and inspiring. As he grew less involved in the day-to-day operations of the animation department, processes became more streamlined, making hand-drawn animation financially sustainable beginning in the 1950s, and eventually leading to the integration of the Computer Animation Production System (CAPS), developed with the engineering laboratory Pixar, beginning in the 1980s.

Production of The Jungle Book (1967), released shortly after Disney’s death, made use of a copying technique developed by in-house wizard Ub Iwerks in collaboration with the Xerox corporation. The machine could copy animators’ drawings, enabling headcount reductions in the Ink and Paint department, but would render outlines in uniformly thick blacks, and couldn’t pick up lighter lines. As a consequence, the colors in The Jungle Book are blockier, with less shading; movement comes from accent lines (or, in the case of Milt Kahl’s design for Shere Khan, tiger stripes). Animators had long performed anatomical studies, reviewing nature footage, skeletal models, and even dissections to pick out the aspects of musculature and gait that could make, for instance, Shere Khan seem sensual and sinister rather than beefy and brutish; they allowed themselves more leeway with the eyes and ears, which communicate in a very human language of squints and scrunches.

Top: The Jungle Book (Wolfgang Reitherman, 1967). Above: The Jungle Book (Jon Favreau, 2016).

Jon Favreau’s 2016 Jungle Book remake was an entirely virtual production except for the young actor, Neel Sethi, who plays Mowgli. He acted opposite puppets on soundstage, in front of a blue screen later filled in with animated backdrops derived from reference images. Conjuring the animals with a balance of relatability and accuracy, Favreau and his digital artisans faced the same challenges as classic Disney animators, and likewise used nature footage for modeling, though their definition of “realistic” is very different from Walt’s, and involves “54 species of animals and 224 unique animals with new computer programs to better simulate muscles, skin and fur,” created by effects house MPC. The panther Bagheera is fully black, as he could not be in the hand-drawn version, and as a result, changes of expression are lost in his muzzle; rather than the hand-drawn Bagheera’s pious head-and-neck poses, MPC created “subtle facial cues that don’t stray too much from an animal’s normal range,” according to supervisor Adam Valdez.

The remake hits all the main beats of the original with additions integrated from Rudyard Kipling’s stories and ingested whole from screenwriting labs: To give audiences points of identification, formulaic story hacks replace fantasy and imaginative empathy. The wolves that raised Mowgli are now his chosen family (as the magical beings would be to 2025’s Snow White). The film vacillates in tone from whimsy to beefed-up action-film grammar, with several animals enlarged to be more intimidating, and a climactic Avengers-assemble interspecies battle. The realism here is literal-minded, rather than intuitive. A flashback explains why Shere Khan—who is a tiger—fears fire and harbors animosity toward mankind.

For many of the Disney remakes, the line between live action and animation is as fine as any of the thousands of computer-generated, algorithmically controlled hairs on the squash-stretch animals of Snow White and Cinderella. It certainly is in 2019’s Aladdin, a film concerning a genie who can conjure digital special effects.

Top: Aladdin (Ron Clements, John Musker, 1992). Above: Aladdin (Guy Ritchie, 2019).

It was not until the Eisner years that Disney animated features began to be developed from a script first, rather than iterated by animators, but 1992’s Aladdin was unique in that Robin Williams, as the genie in the lamp, was given license to ad lib all his dialogue. Directors John Musker and Ron Clements selected the choicest riffs from Williams’ sixteen hours of improvisation, much of it in his slightly old-fashioned pop-culture vocabulary, which then affected layout, sight gags, and especially the genie’s shapeshifting character design as executed by animator Eric Goldberg. Guy Ritchie’s remake tries to replicate this energy with Will Smith’s genie, but he’s still Will Smith: He gets a love interest this time, and raps the plot of the movie over the ending credits, as he did for Barry Sonnenfeld’s Wild Wild West (1999).

Like most of the live-action remakes, this Aladdin runs more than a reel longer than the original; as with most of the live-action remakes, the padding is attributable to the movie recreating everything fondly remembered about the original, while adding new material for audiences who would love to revisit a childhood favorite, either with their own children or for their own pleasure, but who today, after a lifetime of listening and learning, feel squicky about some of the dated lyrics, or the regressive gender dynamics. This Aladdin brings in Pasek & Paul to rewrite some of the racist lyrics of “Arabian Nights,” and to give Jasmine a new number in which she declares she “won’t go speechless,” but will assume her rightful place as Agrabah’s benevolent monarch.

Williams was the genie of 1992’s Aladdin, speaking animation into being; the real genies of the remake are its previz artists and visual-effects technicians, to whose magic we are rather inured to these days. If hand-drawn animation aimed to inspire wonder at what artists could create, digital animation aims to inspire wonder at what computers can do—a wonder enfolded into a more functional and industrial vision of progress.

The Lion King (Jon Favreau, 2019).

Favreau’s next photorealistic remake, The Lion King (2019) is even more impressive and less expressive than his Jungle Book. The Jungle Book follows classic Disney in varying its levels of realism character by character, taking more exaggerative license with comic-relief characters—many of Baloo’s expressions, particularly around the eyes, are voice actor Bill Murray’s own, via motion capture—but the characters of Lion King are almost uniformly true to life, like outtakes from a 4K David Attenborough documentary. This type of realism is incongruous when the film’s dancing and comic choreography is equally true to the 1994 original: Yup, that really is what it would look like—the rippling of the muscles under the fur, the minuscule twitches in response to buzzing insects—if a mandrill raised up a lion cub to be adored by assembled throngs of elephants and antelopes, or if zebras at a watering hole scattered because a warthog farted.

Frame-by-frame nature footage enabled Disney animators to see “the chest working against hips, or the backbone bending around […] living examples of the ‘squash and stretch’ principles,” as Thomas and Johnston write. But these movements were too “complicated” and “subtle” to animate effectively. The 1994 Lion King was well cast (“casting” once meant something closer to character design), giving animals characteristic actions and body shapes that fit the energy of their character—the nervous and obsequious hops of Zazu the hornbill or the neurotic posture of Timon the meerkat. The 2019 animals do realistic animal things during the dialogue—lions scratch themselves, nuzzle each other, or sprawl indolently—but Favreau surrendered a certain amount of control in directing performance to an AI algorithm, trained on videos of animal behaviors associated with hunger or aggression. Virtual production supervisor Ben Grossman described the film as being almost “like a simulation.”

Three years on from Jungle Book, the facial cues engineered by MPC for The Lion King are subtle to the point of Kuleshovian: minuscule wrinklings of the nose, widening or blinking in the eyes, repositioning of the ears. Seeing the same dialogue from the 1994 version being acted out by “real” lions quickly becomes absurd—it plays like a joke dub, like What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966) with lions talking about fulfilling their destiny.

While the Disney live-action remakes had started as spin-offs and reimaginings, this Lion King is a high-water mark for fidelity, with cosmetically updated dialogue about Nala (Beyoncé Knowles-Carter) stepping into her power integrated into an almost shot-for-shot recreation, including replicating zooms that seem impossibly hacky outside the context of colorful 2D drawings. Hans Zimmer’s score, a reworking of his music from 1994, is soaring, awestruck, hermetic in its reverence for its predecessor.

***

Lilo & Stitch (Dean DeBlois, Chris Sanders, 2002).

In his 1961 book The City in History, the social historian and architecture critic Lewis Mumford described the suburb as a “child-centered environment,” an idyllic space “segregated” from the environmental and economic malaise of the overcrowded city, but also from its cultural and intellectual stimulation, so that “reality has been progressively reduced to what filters through the screen of the television set.” With suburbia’s salubrious green space and emphasis on recreation, leisure, or more specifically “childhood, became the pattern for all the seven ages of man,” and life devolved into “a bland ritual of competitive spending” in which “one might live and die without marring the image of an innocent world, except when some shadow of its evil fell over a column in the newspaper. Thus the suburb served as an asylum for the preservation of illusion.”

As suburbia came to dominate the American built environment in the decades following World War II, Walt Disney became interested in urban planning. Disney based Disneyland’s walkable and close-knit Main Street, U.S.A. on his own hometown, Marceline, Missouri, as it was in his own childhood at the dawn of the twentieth century. The EPCOT theme park was originally conceived as a utopian community, with futuristic technology such as the monorail facilitating a garden city, with green belts separating residential dormitories from a concentrated commercial core—a pastoral and collectivist model, originating in the utopian socialism of the Industrial Revolution, which without central planning invariably devolved into automotive sprawl and, in Mumford’s words, “the temptation to retreat from unpleasant realities, to shirk public duties, and to find the whole meaning of life in the most elemental social group, the family.”

Both before and after the child-centered 1950s, Disney oversaw an American imaginary as manicured as a well-kept lawn, which was maintained through the related mediums of television and consumer products. In the cultural desert of suburbia, “television,” the historian Steven Mintz has written, “provided the ideal medium for reaching child consumers.” After ABC’s Disneyland broadcast several episodes based on the life of the nineteenth-century frontiersman Davy Crockett, in 1955, the coonskin cap emerged as “the first Baby Boomer fad,” with as many as five thousand caps sold in a day. This would be a rehearsal for Elvis, for Beatlemania, for Swifties: for childhood fancies, and the memory of them, vouchsafed as national icons by the power of the checkbook. Under Eisner, Disney set the goal of releasing one theatrical animated feature per year, while also acquiring direct-mail toy retailers and aggressively pursuing tie-in opportunities.

Lilo & Stitch (Dean Fleischer Camp, 2025).

Having done so much to define the childhood of its most loyal customers, the company cannot now reify new IP without incurring the retrograde anger of Disney adults, who are protective of their traditions, and upset that their history of spending has not given them more of a say in their maintenance. With its infantilized audience trapped in the amber of postwar suburbia, Disney finds itself backed into a creative cul-de-sac. “The [original] ride was great because of the nostalgia,” complained one disgruntled fan of the reskinned Pirates of the Caribbean unveiled earlier this year. Disney is always ruining somebody’s childhood. A representative article from a popular gaming website runs down some objections to 2025’s live-action Lilo & Stitch, such as that the treatment of the mad scientist who created Stitch, a cute alien bioweapon who falls to earth and is adopted by a six-year-old girl, “robs him of his arc of discarding his selfish scientific ambitions in favor of treating his creations like his children, much to the chagrin of some long-time fans.” Disney has assumed the unenviable position of remaking movies which people loved as children; people will reverse-engineer positive messages out of any work of art that gave them positive feelings as a child.

It is those childhood warm-fuzzies that animate Mumford’s “ritual of competitive spending.” In both versions, Lilo & Stitch is a sugary comedy about a troubled girl and the mischievous pet she loves unconditionally—it is essentially a film in which a little kid interacts with a plushie. In the live-action remake, Stitch, now a 3D digital animation, squashes and stretches just like the animated version does, or a well-loved doll. And so, despite the chagrin of some long-time fans, Stitch was “shaping up to be this year’s most popular toy,” it was reported in early 2025.

Pinocchio (Norman Ferguson, T. Hee, Wilfred Jackson, Jack Kinney, Hamilton Luske, Bill Roberts, Ben Sharpsteen, 1940).

The postwar explosion of suburbia and the rise of Boomer consumer culture were products of a time characterized by increasing standards of living and a thriving manufacturing economy; today, economic growth driven by consumer spending is fueled by escalating personal debt. There is a parallel here with Disney’s strategy of driving its stock price by plundering its old IP, rather than investing in something new. In this context, Robert Zemeckis’s Pinocchio (2022) is the most interesting film in the cycle.

The 1940 Pinocchio is revered by latter-day fans of Disney’s Golden Age for its cutting-edge effects, particularly its stunningly elaborate multiplane shots, including a legendary 45-second pan through (by my count) six background plates, in imitation of a crane shot taking us from the hills out on the outskirts of Pinocchio’s village, through the bustle of street life, and right to his front door. The virtual production environment of Zemeckis’s remake is hardly a marvel on that level, but in other ways the director imbues the film with a pleasingly elastic, Golden Age-sense of relatable, exaggerated “realism.” He stages violence with actually cartoonish slapstick timing; Pinocchio moves with a stiff-jointed knock-kneed walk and limp feet turned in awkward directions, like a puppet, or a vaudeville performer imitating one.

Zemeckis recreates story beats and even specific visual jokes with eerie accuracy and fitting embellishment. Pleasure Island, where wayward children are lured with the promise of rampant and destructive play, becomes a Disney park, which Pinocchio tours on a boat as if on a ride: first an old mill ride, then a log flume, a Ferris wheel, and a roller coaster called Sugar Mountain—a pun on Disney’s own Thunder, Space, and Splash Mountains, and also a reference to Neil Young’s eponymous Boomer lament, about a fun fair, full of balloons and candy floss, that everyone has to leave upon turning twenty.

Pinocchio (Robert Zemeckis, 2022).

The script, which Zemeckis cowrote with Cinderella and (uncredited) Snow White cowriter Chris Weitz, makes Geppetto (Tom Hanks) a bereaved father who carves Pinocchio as a replacement for his dead son, but the film surprisingly avoids many of the traps it sets for itself. Pinocchio gets a love interest—not the real girl in Stromboli’s theater, whose leg brace does not thwart her love of dance, but the marionette she puppeteers. The girl marionette is elegantly integrated into a reprise of “I’ve Got No Strings” from the original film, and her facial expressiveness is more literally wooden than Pinocchio’s own, yet still appealing, clearly an “illusion of life.”

Geppetto is a prolific fashioner of cuckoo clocks, which ring all at once; each automaton is a Disney character, from Donald Duck and Sleeping Beauty to Hanks as Woody from Toy Story (1995) and Zemeckis’s own Disney/Warner Bros. crossover, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). With his long-standing interest in classic texts and new technologies, Zemeckis is a filmmaker who practically lives in the uncanny valley, and the cuckoo clock gags are, like the Overlook Hotel sequence in his fellow Boomer self-mythologizer Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One (2018), sprightly, recursive, and definitionally lifeless—which is also a description of Pinocchio himself. This imitation of a 1940 movie, itself about a doll built in imitation of a real boy, is deft about its commercial imperatives and ontological superfluousness.

***

Top: Moana (John Musker, Ron Clements, 2016). Above: Moana (Thomas Kail, 2026).

Moana, released in theaters in July of this year, marks the first time Disney has remade in live action a film made with 3D digital animation: All prior originals discussed in this article are 2D animation, and all except Aladdin and The Lion King were entirely hand-drawn.

What this means, in practice, is that there is no sense of distance, no curiosity factor in seeing the same story told with a different look, or excitement at revisiting a familiar world rebuilt with new tools. To create the ocean in 2016’s animated Moana, technicians customized the visual-effects software Autodesk Maya to build out lapping waves, frothing wakes, and thousands of tiny bubbles, and created algorithms, similar to the ones used in The Lion King three years later, to randomize its movement. Autodesk Maya is used in both animated and live-action films, and the VFX water is not measurably different in 2026’s live-action Moana, though the stormy nighttime scenes and encounters with digitally animated mythical beasts, also a feature of the original, are lit darker, presumably to cover the compositing of human actors into the scenes.

Water, an eternal problem for animators, is a major component of some of Disney’s key transitional films. The animators of The Little Mermaid hand-drew some million bubbles for the underwater scenes, building on the many color tests conducted during Pinocchio on inks and highlights to create the proper iridescence of Ursula’s crystal ball, onto which visions of Ariel are superimposed, is reminiscent of the soap-bubble effects devised by Ub Iwerks for 1950’s Cinderella. Disney would be open about its use of AI in the 2019 Lion King, before as much stigma attached to the technology, but its use of CAPS to expand the color palette of Ariel and Prince Eric’s wedding was not revealed for years, until the studio had fully transitioned to computer animation, making The Little Mermaid is something like a last hurrah for hand-drawn cel animation. It makes use of many special effects devised during the golden age: Visual effects supervisor Mark Dindal looked back to Pinocchio, in particular, for its use of distortion effects, including glass plates passed between the camera and the cel for a ripple effect, and a multiplane camera was sourced from outside the studio, as the in-house camera was no longer functional. The extravagant use of these retro techniques was the basis of the “Disney Renaissance” narratives, along with the profound nostalgia of Baby Boomers, now parents, taking their young children to a movie about a Disney princess who, like Snow White, is tormented by a wicked witch with a magic mirror, and, like Cinderella, is magically transformed and given a chance to win her prince. (One difference: Ariel, with her enormous eyes, is a pretty girl finally expressive enough to carry the narrative herself, though she still has cute and caricatured animal sidekicks.)

Top: The Little Mermaid (Ron Clements, John Musker, 1989). Above: The Little Mermaid (Rob Marshall, 2023).

Those million bubbles add depth and constant movement, which is essential in a film whose underwater scenes depict 2D ink-on-celluloid figures bobbing up and down in front of a painted blue background. In the live-action Little Mermaid, the blue background of the underwater scenes evokes a bluescreen, in front of which the characters were filmed on rigs, with their gliding fins animated in after. It is evident, despite their gently bobbing hair, that they are not underwater. Water is three-dimensional; in underwater photography, there is texture between the subject and the camera. In 1989’s “Part of Your World,” the bubbles suggest depth, while the traditional special effects create an impression of light shining down from above the ocean’s surface and variegated by the prismatic effects of the currents. The 2023 Little Mermaid frequently simply adjusts the blue tint of the color palette to be brighter or duller depending on the depth of the ocean in a particular scene; many underwater closeups are clearly illuminated by three-point lighting.

When the action moves to land, The Little Mermaid simply looks like any other movie. The 1989 version captivates audiences with its evident, evidently handmade artistry; the 2023 Little Mermaid aims to convince its audience that its characters are worth caring about. If, acting out Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney played to an imagined American public comprised of simple folk who would react with simple laughter or tears to things that were happy or dopey or sad, his company now imagines a public that can only be needled into caring once persuaded that the characters have obstacles recognizably similar to our own.

The ending of The Little Mermaid is a boss battle with a giant Ursula; what was a challenge for the 1989 version’s traditional animators is a problem for the live-action version’s 3D digital animators, since it looks exactly like any other effects-heavy CGI spectacle. Likewise for the action set piece at the climax of this year’s Moana, with the added issue that it additionally looks exactly like its predecessor. And it sounds like it, too. The original Moana was released the year after the live-action Cinderella, and its story was evidently shaped by the same priorities reflected in Disney’s changes to its older stories: The daughter of an island chief, the princess of 2016 was already in line to become her people’s leader, as Cinderella and Snow White were reworked into being; the villain of 2016 is already simply misunderstood (during the climactic song, Moana tells it that its trauma “does not define” it). Dwayne Johnson and Jemaine Clement return as the characters they voiced in 2016; in the case of the apparently ageless Johnson, the role of the vain, charming demigod Maui was already tailored around his cartoonish but lightly borne physique.

The question of motivation—Who, at what age, are these movies for? Would anyone watch them if they didn’t already love the original? But in that case, why would they want a remake?—is never far from the surface in Disney’s live-action cycle, but the bloatware updates of previous films at least provided a plausible explanation: Political considerations, splashy stars, flashy tech. This Moana is closer to the original than any other Disney remake to date. The film proceeds scene by scene, line by line and camera setup by camera setup, with any variations amounting to a few doodles in the margins—barely enough to qualify as a dialogue pass. Few girls who were twelve years old in 2016 have children old enough to sit still for an entire movie in 2026; more generally, few parents of Disney-aged children would naturally gravitate toward a live-action version rather than the more juvenile-coded animated film which is readily available on Disney+. Perhaps a weary caregiver, worried about a child growing restless on the umpteenth rewatch of a reliable favorite, might hit Play on the remake, betting that the novelty of a second-verse-different-from-the-first take will extend its utility. Perhaps, given that the only real difference between then and now is that we’re all ten years older, Disney’s bet is simply that there’s big money to be made in eliding this difference, if only for two hours.

Disney will, it seems, keep making these movies as long as people keep watching them; industry reporters attributed Moana’s less than boffo box office to remake fatigue, but its success or failure will be determined by its staying power on Disney+. When you simply imagine what your favorite Disney Princess would look like in real life, you’re engaging with Disney IP without paying for it. Previous leadership of the company colonized that mindspace with toys, games, costumes, and other merchandise; today it’s an expanded menu of options on the company’s streaming service. Tomorrow, who knows, but it seems unlikely that OpenAI’s discontinuation of Sora, and winding down of its Disney partnership, is the Mouse House’s last dalliance with generative AI. If Roy E. Disney, protective of his family’s legacy, once accused the company of pimping out Tinker Bell, no one today seems to mind if Disney is staring into a mirror, looking up its own ass.

The Criterion Channel’s November 2026 Lineup - The Criterion Collection: The Current

2026-10-19T07:19:00.000Z

Channel Calendars

This November, discover the link between pop style and turn-of-the-century cinema’s exuberant visual innovation with From MTV to Hollywood, a collection gathering work from directors who honed their imaginations making music videos before unleashing their talents on the big screen. A Nicolas Cage retrospective looks back at the electric, bewildering career of one of our most unconventional actors, while a spotlight on Gene Tierney gathers the films that cemented her elusive and hypnotic screen presence. There’s so much more to choose from this month, including Roy Andersson’s Existential Comedies, the newly restored New York indie No Picnic, a tribute to legendary producer Jeremy Thomas, and an all-time comedy classic that goes to eleven.

If you haven’t signed up yet, head to CriterionChannel.com and get a 7-day free trial.

* indicates programming available only in the U.S.

From MTV to Hollywood

In the era when MTV reached full cultural domination, music videos served as petri dishes for experimentation, allowing up-and-coming auteurs to hone their boundary-pushing styles before unleashing them on the big screen. Directors who cut their teeth finding a cinematic language for hip-hop, indie, and pop acts went on to envision some of the freshest, most thrilling and even avant-garde movies released around the turn of the century. Kinetic, audacious, and hyperstylized, these Y2K-era touchstones from filmmakers like David Fincher (Se7en), Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich), Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and Hype Williams (Belly) rewired the possibilities of visual storytelling.

Programmed by Sean Fennessey

FEATURING: Guncrazy (1992), CB4 (1993),* Se7en (1995), Belly (1998), The Replacement Killers (1998), Being John Malkovich (1999),* The Cell (2000), Sexy Beast (2000), CQ (2001), Human Nature (2001), Adaptation. (2002), One Hour Photo (2002), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004),* Thumbsucker (2005),* ATL (2006), The Runaways (2010)

Starring Nicolas Cage

Pioneer of a style of acting he calls “nouveau shamanic,” Nicolas Cage stretches the boundaries of screen performance to their limits, pursuing a heightened, kabuki-like expressionism that is instinctive, abstract, and thrillingly unpredictable. That he has deployed this approach across offbeat independent projects and major Hollywood blockbusters alike makes him a truly one-of-a-kind star: the leading man as wild man, a force so galvanic that, even when working with major directors like Spike Jonze (Adaptation.), David Lynch (Wild at Heart), Werner Herzog (Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans), and Martin Scorsese (Bringing Out the Dead), he often emerges as the film’s co-auteur, reshaping its texture through his live-wire physicality and risk-taking choices few other actors would dare attempt.

FEATURING: Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982),* Rumble Fish (1983),* Valley Girl (1983), Birdy (1984), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), Moonstruck (1987), Raising Arizona (1987), Vampire’s Kiss (1988), Wild at Heart (1990),* Leaving Las Vegas (1995), City of Angels (1998), Snake Eyes (1998),* Bringing Out the Dead (1999),* Adaptation. (2002), Matchstick Men (2003), The Wicker Man (2006), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

Starring Gene Tierney

Featuring an introduction by critic Imogen Sara Smith, part of Criterion’s Spotlight series

With her porcelain beauty and a cool sophistication that seemed to conceal turbulent emotional depths, Gene Tierney emerged as one of the most arresting stars of Hollywood’s golden age. Though equally striking in the sparky con-woman comedy Rings on Her Fingers, the brooding gothic melodrama Dragonwyck, and the gorgeously atmospheric romantic fantasy The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, it was in the realm of noir that she perhaps made her greatest impact, bringing a fascinating, enigmatic ambiguity to classics like Laura, Night and the City, and, above all, Leave Her to Heaven, in which her elegant poise masks a shocking monstrousness.

FEATURING: Rings on Her Fingers (1942), Laura (1944), Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Dragonwyck (1946), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), That Wonderful Urge (1948), Night and the City (1950), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), Way of a Gaucho (1952), Never Let Me Go (1953)

Celebrating Jeremy Thomas

As founder of the British film production outfit Recorded Picture Company, Jeremy Thomas, who passed away this September, set in motion some of the most sensational, provocative, and culturally impactful art-house hits of the last fifty years, enabling creatively restless directors to realize their visions. From challenging audiences with his very first production, Jerzy Skolimowski’s terrifying enigma The Shout, to courting controversy with Nicolas Roeg’s daring study of erotic obsession Bad Timing to achieving Oscar glory with Bernardo Bertolucci’s sumptuous epic The Last Emperor, Thomas left a titanic imprint on film culture by giving uncompromising, personal cinema a space to flourish.

FEATURING: The Shout (1978), Bad Timing (1980), Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), The Hit (1984), Insignificance (1985), The Last Emperor (1987), The Cup (1999), Sexy Beast (2000), Palermo Shooting (2008), The Storms of Jeremy Thomas (2021), EO (2022), Anselm (2023), Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus (2023)

CRITERION ORIGINALS

Hiro Murai’s Adventures in Moviegoing

One of the major forces behind some of the most talked-about pop-culture sensations of the last decade—from the zeitgeist-capturing music video for Childish Gambino’s “This Is America” to the acclaimed series Atlanta, The Bear, and Widow’s Bay—multi-Emmy-winning director and producer Hiro Murai is a creative powerhouse with a deep, lifelong love of cinema. In this episode of Adventures in Moviegoing, he joins Chris Ryan (editorial director of The Ringer and cohost of The Watch podcast) for an entertaining and insightful conversation about the creative overlap between his life, his work, and the films he has watched and loved, from early memories of movie-watching in Japan with his cinephile father to the transformative influence of cinematic visionaries like Spike Jonze, Quentin Tarantino, and Wim Wenders.

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

No Picnic

A wonderfully scruffy, deadpan time capsule from the bohemian fringes of the 1980s East Village, this freewheeling urban picaresque follows Mac (David Brisbin), a hangdog jukebox repairman, as he searches the city’s margins for a mysterious woman—an odyssey that captures the eccentric flavor of downtown Manhattan when it was still the epicenter of cool, as well as the stirrings of gentrification that would soon transform the neighborhood. Shot in gloriously grainy, noir-tinged black-and-white images (which won experimental filmmaker Peter Hutton a Sundance award for Best Cinematography) and featuring classic New York personalities like Richard Hell, Steve Buscemi, and Luis Guzmán, No Picnic serves as a gloriously grimy elegy for a bygone era.

Utu Redux

A landmark of New Zealand cinema composed in images of shocking, feverish power, this blistering Kiwi western is an audacious vision of anticolonial rage that’s been championed by the likes of Pauline Kael and Quentin Tarantino. In 1870s New Zealand, Te Wheke (Anzac Wallace), a Māori warrior working as a scout for the colonial troops, finds his tribe massacred by the very army he is helping. Anguished and betrayed, be vows to exact retribution—“utu”—on those occupying his people’s land. Originally released in 1983 and distributed internationally in a compromised recut, the film is now presented in its definitive director’s cut, Utu Redux.

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984)*

Criterion Collection Edition #12

The mock rock doc that goes to eleven follows a trio of British heavy-metal headbangers as they embark on a hilariously disastrous American tour.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Three audio commentaries by cast and crew members, a conversation between director Rob Reiner and actor Patton Oswalt, ninety-eight minutes of outtakes, and more.

The Last Waltz (Martin Scorsese, 1978)

Criterion Collection Edition #1118

The Band, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and other legendary artists put on a concert for the ages in Martin Scorsese’s ecstatic elegy for the classic-rock era.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Two audio commentaries by Scorsese, his crew, and performers; an interview with Scorsese; a documentary on the making of the film; and more.

Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996)*

Criterion Collection Edition #1268

A jolt of pure adrenaline shot straight to the heart of 1990s British indie cinema, Danny Boyle’s edgy, darkly funny portrait of addiction chooses life in all its ugly, beautiful, terrifying, strange exhilaration.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald, screenwriter John Hodge, and actor Ewan McGregor; documentaries on the making of the film; deleted scenes; and more.

The Secret of the Grain (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007)

Criterion Collection Edition #527

Passions and problems explode when the patriarch of a bustling French-Arab family sets out to open a restaurant specializing in his ex-wife’s couscous and fish.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Interviews with director Abdellatif Kechiche, actors Hafsia Herzi and Bouraouïa Marzouk, and the film’s musicians; Sueur, Kechiche’s extended reedit of the climactic belly-dancing sequence; and more.

Welcome II the Terrordome (Ngozi Onwurah, 1995)

Criterion Collection Edition #1329

Following a young boy’s murder, racial tensions explode in a segregated slum in this radically ahead-of-its-time landmark of Afrofuturist cinema.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by director Ngozi Onwurah, cinematographer Alwin H. Küchler, and Criterion curatorial director Ashley Clark; a Meet the Filmmakers interview with Onwurah; and more.

Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)*

Criterion Collection Edition #611

Spike Jonze invites you to enter the cerebral cortex of John Malkovich for a wildly surreal, meta-cinematic adventure unlike any other.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Selected-scene audio commentary by Jonze’s friend and competitor Michel Gondry; a behind-the-scenes documentary by filmmaker Lance Bangs; a conversation between Malkovich and humorist John Hodgman; and more.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982)*

Criterion Collection Edition #1075

Southern California teens explore love, sex, and independence in director Amy Heckerling and screenwriter Cameron Crowe’s look at the wild world of adolescence.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Heckerling and Crowe; a conversation with Heckerling and Crowe, moderated by filmmaker Olivia Wilde; a documentary featuring interviews with the cast and crew; and more.

Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983)*

Criterion Collection Edition #869

Francis Ford Coppola gives mythic dimensions to intimate emotions in this deeply personal tale of estrangement and reconciliation between two rebellious brothers.

SUPPLEMENTAL FEATURES: Audio commentary by Coppola; interviews with Coppola, author and coscreenwriter S. E. Hinton, associate producer Roman Coppola, and actors Matt Dillon, Diane Lane, and Mickey Rourke; and more.

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Featuring an introduction by Hamaguchi, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series

The films of Japanese auteur Ryusuke Hamaguchi are feats of alchemy, transforming weighty philosophical exploration into engaging, gracefully humanistic narrative; imbuing epic runtimes with an intimately immersive rhythm that seems to reconfigure time itself; and making conversation-driven, literary dialogue feel elegantly cinematic. Bringing together the richly absorbing portrait of evolving female friendship Happy Hour, the Oscar-winning exploration of grief and unexpected connection Drive My Car, and the enigmatic eco-thriller Evil Does Not Exist, this collection showcases the singular touch of a master.

FEATURING: Happy Hour (2015), Drive My Car (2021), Evil Does Not Exist (2023)

Roy Andersson’s Existential Comedies

Featuring an introduction by filmmaker Ari Aster and cartoonist Daniel Clowes, part of Criterion’s Spotlight series

The absurdity of everyday life comes into bleakly humorous focus in the meticulously crafted, miniaturist tragicomedies of Swedish auteur Roy Andersson. Though he has made only six features over the course of a nearly sixty-year career (filling much of his time directing surreal advertisements that earned the admiration of Ingmar Bergman), his later work is constructed with an extraordinary, painterly precision, each frame a deep-focus tableaux teeming with deadpan visual invention. In his acclaimed Living Trilogy—Songs from the Second Floor; You, the Living; and A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence—Andersson offers a panoramic vision of modern society through dozens of intricately composed vignettes that explore both the despair and the strange poetry of the human condition.

FEATURING: A Swedish Love Story (1970), Songs from the Second Floor (2000), You, the Living (2007), A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014),* About Endlessness (2019)*

Directed by Mary Stephen

Mary Stephen’s life and career span a remarkable distance of world geography and film history. Born in British Hong Kong and raised in Montreal, she traveled to Paris as a young cinephile and became one of Eric Rohmer’s closest collaborators, serving as his editor and co-composer for many years. She has since become a go-to editor for filmmakers both emerging and established, including Ann Hui. Yet her own work as a director remains relatively underseen. Brimming with discoveries, this collection brings together her newly restored experimental short films, alongside a mesmerizing, Marguerite Duras–inflected vision of unspoken sapphic desire in 1930s Shanghai (Shades of Silk) and a fascinating inquiry into her own complex family history (Palimpsest: The Story of a Name).

FEATURES: Shades of Silk (1978), Palimpsest: The Story of a Name (2025)

SHORTS: Labyrinthe (1973), The Great Canadian Puberty Rite (1974), A Very Easy Death (1975)

DOCUMENTARIES

New York Documentaries by Bobbito García

Legendary DJ and quintessential New Yorker Bobbito García has been at the forefront of East Coast hip-hop culture since his early days cohosting The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show, the taste-making underground radio show that gave early exposure to artists like Nas, the Notorious B.I.G., Jay-Z, and Wu-Tang Clan. Steeped in the vibrant, DIY energy of New York’s street culture, this trio of candid and kinetic documentaries directed by García showcases the intersecting passions—basketball, sneakers, and music—that have defined his life.

FEATURING: Doin’ It in the Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC (2012), Stretch and Bobbito: Radio That Changed Lives (2015), Rock Rubber 45s (2018)

A Body to Live In

This provocative and revealing look at the rise of BDSM performance art and body-modification culture considers what it means to live freely in one’s own skin.

Two Gods

An intimate documentary about faith, renewal, and healing follows a Muslim casket maker in New Jersey as he takes two teenage apprentices under his wing.

SHORT FILMS

Two Short Films by Elisabeth Subrin

What does it mean to be a woman artist asserting her agency in a capitalist, male-dominated film industry? Inspired by a haunting interview given by actor Maria Schneider, in which she alluded to the trauma of filming Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris opposite Marlon Brando, Elisabeth Subrin’s arresting recreation Maria Schneider, 1983 casts three captivating actors—Manal Issa, Aïssa Maïga, and Isabel Sandoval—as versions of Schneider, giving them space to blend Schneider’s responses with their own unique perspectives on race and gender. In Subrin’s companion short Manal Issa, 2024, the French Lebanese Issa once again answers the same questions, this time fully in her own words as an Arab artist rethinking her priorities amid escalating Israeli air strikes on Beirut.

FEATURING: Maria Schneider, 1983 (2022), Manal Issa, 2024 (2024)

Duke of Groove

A stacked ensemble cast including Tobey Maguire, Uma Thurman, Udo Kier, and Elliott Gould stars in Griffin Dunne’s woozy, bittersweet portrait of adolescence amid the 1960s counterculture.

Oh, Christmas Tree

A father and daughter’s attempts to recreate their favorite holiday traditions bump up against the sobering reality of an altered family dynamic.

MUSIC FILMS

Home of the Brave

Laurie Anderson’s mesmerizing concert film blends video art, puckish wit, and her oddly infectious synth anthems into a singular record of the ’80s avant-garde.

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA

Drunken Noodles

A young art student’s experiences of sex, creativity, and self-discovery take the form of a languorously dreamy, magical realism–inflected queer fantasia.

NEW ADDITIONS TO PREVIOUS PROGRAMS

Premiering November 1 in Daniel Clowes’s Adventures in Moviegoing: *The President’s Analyst**

When the pressures of his job push the president’s shrink over the edge, he goes on the run through a funhouse-mirror version of ’60s America in this psychedelic cult satire.

An Artist Who Built Japanese Animation - Animation Obsessive

2026-10-19T03:36:22.000Z

Reiko Okuyama in 1963, courtesy of Reiko Okuyama: Legendary Animator

Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s the plan:

1. Reiko Okuyama, artist.
2. Animation newsbits.
3. The last word.

With that, let’s go!

1. Dissatisfaction

In the ‘50s, something happened in Tokyo. A major film company, Toei, opened a new studio to make cartoons. It was called Toei Doga, and it became a greenhouse for Japanese animation.

Hayao Miyazaki, who joined in 1963, was a latecomer; Isao Takahata had been there since 1959. Miyazaki’s future wife Akemi Ota got hired as an artist in 1958.1

Everyone came to Toei Doga for different reasons. Takahata showed up after a certain French film sparked his lifelong interest in animated storytelling. Ota answered Toei’s call for recruits because, as she said, “Particularly at that time, I don’t think there were many jobs where women could make a living by drawing.”

An artist named Reiko Okuyama arrived even earlier, and for a surprising reason. In 1957, she’d applied mostly by mistake. “I didn’t know what animation was,” Okuyama admitted, “and because it was called ‘Doga’ (ドウガ) I mistook it as ‘pictures for children’ (童画, doga).”2

Okuyama had expected an illustration job. By accident, she ended up on the ground floor of modern Japanese animation. Passing the test for new animators, she started on The White Snake Enchantress (1958), Toei Doga’s debut feature.

Over time, she would grow into a Toei ace. The press was profiling her by the ‘60s, and she kept animating for years — even for Studio Ghibli in the ‘80s. More recently, a TV drama based on Okuyama (Natsuzora, 2019) made her story famous throughout Japan.

Yet the real Okuyama was a complex, larger-than-life figure. And, for all her talent, she carried a certain dissatisfaction with her career. As she wrote in 1968, “I have never been satisfied with the work I have done.”

Hayao Miyazaki (left) and Reiko Okuyama (right) at work on Horus: Prince of the Sun in 1966. Courtesy of Reiko Okuyama: Legendary Animator.

Some of Okuyama’s many gag drawings of the Toei staff — these of Miyazaki. Courtesy of Reiko Okuyama: Legendary Animator.

When Okuyama first joined Toei, her feelings about the job were a bit mercenary. She wanted to earn money to pay for college, then move abroad and never come back. “However, when I actually jumped into it, despite my initial impressions, I became more captivated by the charm of animation the more I worked on it,” she wrote.

Film after film, she was promoted.3 By the early ‘60s, she stood among Toei’s few key animators. Her attitude was tough, competitive. Okuyama drew so quickly that she sometimes helped her colleagues finish their work after she’d done hers. “Some people were afraid of her,” said her co-worker Norio Hikone.

At the same time, she was popular with both men and women at Toei. Okuyama was cool — from her personal style to the rock and contemporary jazz (Thelonious Monk) she listened to.4

Less cool were the kinds of movies that Toei Doga made at the time.

Back then, animation was known in Japan as manga eiga (“cartoon movies”), a term associated with bright, family-friendly, commercial stuff. The Toei films were marketed as manga eiga, too. None of it suited Okuyama. “Disney’s and Fleischer’s works are very interesting when I see them, and I admire their technique and so on, but I don’t like them that much,” she once wrote.

She was succinct later: “I wasn’t inclined toward commercial works.”5

In the early ‘60s, the Toei Doga team started a labor union. “Preparations for forming it were an underground activity,” Okuyama recalled, undertaken in the late night. She was a main member, and it changed her. The union shared and discussed art from all over and, at one point, Okuyama encountered the puppet films of Jiří Trnka. Like she explained in 2003:

Although it was many decades ago now, Trnka’s works captivated me from the first time I saw them. I was an animator at Toei Doga, and I was feeling more than a little dissatisfied with my days of drawing “manga” movies for children. Thankfully, my company sometimes held screenings of overseas animation that could not be seen anywhere else at the time, and I was able to watch works from Europe and the former Soviet Union. I was especially fascinated by animation made in 3D space, since I didn’t have that skill and I could be a pure spectator.
I like everything about Trnka, but I particularly like his forms. For example, Oberon [from A Midsummer Night’s Dream] has a design that makes you fall in love with him. I have a rather large art book of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in German. Although it’s very old, every now and then I pull it out to look at it, immersing myself in that world.6

In 1978, Okuyama made a list of her favorite animation that included Trnka’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep from France and The Snow Queen from the USSR. All had screened at Toei.7

You could say that she was made by this era, and the creative environment of the union. Okuyama turned into one of its fiercest, longest-serving members.

Top photo: Reiko Okuyama, Akemi Ota, Isao Takahata and Yasuo Otsuka at a demonstration in the ‘60s. Bottom photo: Okuyama at Toei with her child in 1966. Courtesy of Reiko Okuyama: Legendary Animator and Manga eiga hyoryu-ki.

When Okuyama married her colleague Yoichi Kotabe in 1963, she and the union had to fight Toei. As artist Kyoko Yamashita said, “When women employees joined the company, they were made to pledge in writing, ‘I will retire when I get married and have children.’ ” Okuyama refused to quit, or even to switch from a salaried position to a contract job, as she was pressured to do.

Once, Yamashita said, higher-ups barred Okuyama from entering the studio gate while holding her new baby. So, she walked inside alone, and her union friends brought the baby after her. Through clashes like that one, Okuyama cut a path for other women to stay in their jobs at Toei Doga. Likewise, she kept using her maiden name; Akemi Ota followed suit after marrying Miyazaki.

Like Ota remembered:

We rarely did anything together, we were just in the same workplace, but I’m glad I was with her.
I really felt like I had a great senior at work, and I think having her in front of us made it easier for us juniors to connect with each other.

Besides better working conditions, the union also fought for more creative freedom. That led to Isao Takahata’s Horus: Prince of the Sun (1968). From its violent first scene, Takahata wrote, it was meant to seem “different from previous ‘cartoon movies.’ ”8

Miyazaki was the top idea guy on Horus. Less well known is that Okuyama was up there with him. “She was very proactive in suggesting ideas for characters,” Kotabe said. “For Horus: Prince of the Sun, she was second only to Miya-san in coming up with ideas.”9

Okuyama was established at Toei by that point — she’d been the lead animator on the Land of Night sequence in The Little Prince and the Eight-Headed Dragon (1963).10 But her contributions to Horus were on a different level. “I felt like I’d summoned all my strength and gone beyond my abilities,” she wrote. This film, she said in the ‘70s, was the first to make her serious about animation.

She animated a large amount of Horus, but just as important was her design sense. Okuyama drew countless sketches for Hilda, the character at the center of the story (her version was closer to the final product than Miyazaki’s), and she developed the looks of the film’s villain and villagers.

Trnka’s influence stands out in Okuyama’s art from this era. Her characters often look like his puppets, with wistful eyes, odd proportions and complex, organic silhouettes. Her villager drawings have the old-world European flair of Trnka puppet films like The Czech Year. The style differs from Miyazaki’s character sketches for Horus, but it’s clearly visible in the film.

A few of Okuyama’s villager sketches, courtesy of Reiko Okuyama: Legendary Animator

Okuyama kept pushing her skills post-Horus. Her ocean-wave animation for Toei’s Flying Phantom Ship (1969) has been called a precursor to the “Kotabe waves” used in Animal Treasure Island (1971), a technique later adopted at Ghibli.11 And that Trnka influence kept turning up. Some of Okuyama’s design sketches from the ‘60s and ‘70s all but quote his characters.

Kotabe, Miyazaki, Takahata and a bunch of others had quit Toei by the early ‘70s. There was a sense that the studio was losing interest in high-quality animation. Many expected Okuyama to follow her husband out the door.

“I was thinking of quitting as well,” she said, “but then there was a lockout [in 1972], and staff members who had been in my group for a long time started to be dismissed, so I couldn’t quit even though I knew I couldn’t make anything good [at Toei Doga].”

Her colleague Osamu Kasai once suggested that Okuyama stayed because of her sense of duty and gratitude toward the union. She didn’t leave herself until 1976.

Those last years were rough. Guiding low-budget movies like The Little Mermaid (1975), Okuyama was far from the non-commercial animation she loved. Japanese independents were doing arthouse films like Dojoji Temple (1976) at the time, and they impressed her. But only occasional and imperfect moonlight work, outside Toei, got her anywhere near the experience.

Okuyama’s wave animation for The Flying Phantom Ship (1969)

Okuyama still dreamed of more meaningful projects. And, after a stint on Takahata’s 3,000 Leagues in Search of Mother (1976), she and Kotabe returned to Toei as freelancers on Taro the Dragon Boy (1979). It was seen internally as a rebirth of the Horus years. The remaining staff “wanted to make a film like Prince of the Sun again,” Kotabe said.

Taro was commercial, but it drew from traditional Japanese art and stories in ways that resembled what the independents were doing. Okuyama had a big role in its animation and design. Although Kotabe’s characters for Heidi were acclaimed by then, he argued that Okuyama sometimes outclassed him here:

Okuyama created better female characters than I do, whether it’s 3,000 Leagues in Search of Mother or Taro the Dragon Boy. Certainly I draw them too, but I tend to draw cute, squishy girls. Okuyama created good characters with a bit of firmness inside them. That’s why I think my female characters are no match for Okuyama’s after all.

As a couple, the two had been opposites from the beginning. Kotabe was meek at Toei; Okuyama was a powerful force. But they got along and stayed together. Whenever they did fight, Kotabe noted later, he held out the olive branch first: “I don’t remember her ever apologizing to me, though (laughs).”

Okuyama design sketches for Taro the Dragon Boy, courtesy of Reiko Okuyama: Legendary Animator

In the ‘80s, Okuyama animated on Takahata’s Chie the Brat (1981) and Grave of the Fireflies (1988), among other things. Even so, she and Kotabe were looking for an out. Increasingly, Kotabe said, his industry work was “not interesting.”12

He ultimately joined Nintendo, where he perfected the designs of characters like Mario, Bowser and Peach. Okuyama started to teach animation and, in the late ‘80s, to work in copper-plate etching. She mostly left animation behind, exchanging it for personal art.

“When Yoichi-san joined Nintendo, I think the question became what Okuyama-san wanted to do,” said Hiroshi Ikeda. He was another Toei veteran at Nintendo — he’d brought Kotabe into the fold. Seeing Okuyama’s art exhibitions and her personal work, Ikeda felt that this was where she really wanted to be.

Some of Okuyama’s work for Winter Days (see the sequence here)

When Okuyama did animate again, it was as a lead on the independent Restaurant of Many Orders (1991). She used a copper-plate style, finally doing the type of non-commercial animation she loved — something more like Frédéric Back. The same held true in Okuyama’s section of Winter Days (2003).

The former project was especially important to her. Okuyama said in the ‘00s, “It wasn’t until I worked on Tadanari Okamoto-san’s Restaurant of Many Orders that I started to feel glad that I had animation skills.”

That should be taken with a grain of salt — she’d said similar things before, after Horus. But it’s obvious that Okuyama was never really satisfied as a commercial animator. She was an artist’s artist, deep down.

Still, what she did in her long career speaks for itself. In 2004, the scholar Seiji Kanoh released a book called The People Who Built Japanese Animation. It profiles six animators who laid the industry’s foundations — legends like Yasuo Otsuka and Yasuji Mori. Among the six was Reiko Okuyama.

She’d joined animation by chance and had always, to some extent, felt out of place. When she finally had a real chance to leave, she left. But, in this career she was so ambivalent toward, she achieved huge things. In a sense, you could say that those achievements were pushed forward by her dissatisfaction itself.13

2. Newsbits

We lost Loyd Price (64), a top Aardman animator, and the longtime Kazakh animation educator Altynbek Umirzakov.
An upcoming American documentary, Somewhere Out There, will tell the story of Don Bluth’s career. Cartoon Brew has a trailer and details.
Director Enzo D’Alò is getting a career retrospective in Italy next month, including a screening of the restored version of his Lucky and Zorba (1998).
The American animator Victoria Vincent did the poster for a live-action movie, Anna by the Window, screening in Los Angeles soon. (Also, Vincent made her own hybrid live-action and animated short, Lifewasters, last year.)
At MIPCOM in France, a report discussed the fall of film and TV production for kids. Among other causes: competition from YouTube and games, plus streaming audiences’ overwhelming preference for old work over new.
The Canada-based artist Nishant Jain (a longtime friend of the newsletter) passed the crowdfunding goal on his new book project, with 26 days to go.
In Vietnam, the trailer for The Naked World, a GenAI film, received a lot of pushback on social media.
In its coverage of Durban FilmMart in South Africa, Variety looked into the growth of African animation. The next step: building “a sustainable infrastructure” that allows current animation talent to bloom.
The Puffin Rock movie, by Ireland’s Cartoon Saloon, was screened for children in Gaza.
Finally, we looked into the career of Karen Aqua, and her excellent animation for Sesame Street.

3. Last word

Thanks for reading today’s issue! Hope you’ve enjoyed. As usual, we’re closing out with some personal thoughts:

John: I love to study directing in animation. And Isao Takahata was a great theorist on that topic — his writing about it always expands my mind. So, reading an article on Takahata’s craft by Idris Kellermann Williams (published over the summer in Mechademia) was a high point of my week. It shows how Takahata’s ideas evolved between the ‘80s and ‘90s, as he left behind immersive realism for a more cerebral, distanced style in Only Yesterday. Idris is a contact of ours and we’ve admired his work for a while, but he’s outdone himself here. I recommend his new piece to anyone who wants to dig deeply into the techniques of this master filmmaker.

Jules: While researching for an art project, I’ve been looking at a lot of work by artists who aren’t (at least from my understanding) considered canonical right now. Many of them, even if they don’t have the qualities of artists like Michelangelo or Jan van Eyck, have special qualities of their own. The art canon is always being revised: Vermeer only became widely known as great many, many years after his time. Painters, writers and composers are always being reevaluated based on the tastes and priorities of the current moment. But, as long as their work still exists, its impact can’t truly disappear. Who’s to say that the down-to-earth, realist paintings of Giacomo Ceruti, or the wild, wind-blown images of the Ebbo Gospels, for example, won’t become better known again someday?

Until next time!

From Ota’s interview in the book 漫画映画漂流記 (Manga eiga hyoryu-ki). This book was our main source today. It also includes interviews with Yoichi Kotabe, Hiroshi Ikeda, Osamu Kasai, Kyoko Yamashita and Norio Hikone that were invaluable to this article.

From a 1968 write-up by Okuyama collected at the back of Reiko Okuyama: Legendary Animator – Her Animated Drawings, an incredible book from recent years. We also looked at (and quoted) other essays and interviews in it, and a few of the biographical details.

See Okuyama’s section of The People Who Built Japanese Animation: New Edition, used several times.

Kotabe mentioned Okuyama’s interest in jazz in this interview (part 2, part 3).

From the interview with Okuyama and Kotabe in Japanese Animated Films: A Complete View from Their Birth to Spirited Away and Beyond, used several times.

This is Okuyama’s write-up on A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Best 150 World and Japanese Animation Films.

These films were confirmed as screening at the studio in Kanoh’s book The King and the Mockingbird: The Origin of Studio Ghibli (王と鳥―スタジオジブリの原点).

From the intro to The Visual Expression of Horus.

See this interview.

Kotabe confirmed Okuyama’s credit in his interview for the booklet in the Little Prince Blu-ray box set.

The author of Manga eiga hyoryu-ki makes this argument on page 98.

From Kotabe’s Iwata Asks interview.

Today’s lead story is a revised reprint of an article that first ran in our newsletter, behind the paywall, on February 29, 2024.

7 Miles Out – first-look review - Little White Lies

2026-10-17T20:56:00.000Z

Carol Morley’s bittersweet chronicle of youth in revolt is lovingly ripped from the pages of her own memoir and is one of the finest British films of 2026.

If the British filmmaker Terence Davies had been more into the Manchester post-punk scene rather than Doris Day and The King Singers, then there’s a chance he might have made something akin to Carol Morley’s captivating, ripped-from-the-heart memory piece, 7 Miles Out. This new fiction feature from the reliably leftfield writer/director offers a tragicomic bildungsroman detailing life below the poverty line in late Seventies Stockport, where the sum of £1.50 for pop concert tickets is an unfathomable fortune that’s entirely inaccessible to even the most resourceful teenager.

The film is based on Morley’s own 2015 memoir of the same name, with the title denoting the distance between Stockport and Manchester which, to those with no possibility of upward mobility, would be considered the equivalent to going end-to-end on the Trans Siberian Railway. They are also words spoken by the father (a brief, cooly charismatic turn by Aidan Gillen) to the bouncy and inquisitive Ann Westbourne (Amelie Hughes) prior to his sudden decision to up sticks and abandon the family, leaving his once-upbeat brood in a state of confusion and even deeper penury.

Ann’s mother Bryn (Gemma Whelan) suffers from chronic heartbreak and falls to pieces, taking many years of sleeping in doss houses and gleaning pleasures from making bonfires of the trinkets of her old life to get back on the straight and narrow. Meanwhile, her siblings manage to break out of Stockport at the soonest opportunity and follow professional and domestic dreams, tacitly severing ties with the grim old country.

The majority of the film follows Ann as she louchely hopscotches through life, brushing off bullies, forging meaningful friendships, eye-rolling at flashers and processing the latent trauma of her family disintegration. She is later played by Lucy Halliday as an older teen and we observe her trying to counterpunch against the sexual, social and economic inequalities that serve to pin her down to her sorry lot.

The one release in life – the great leveller – is music, particularly the depressive electronic dronecore of on-the-up local lads, Joy Division. Morley laces the soundtrack with evocative tracks by the likes of The Fall, Durutti Column, The Raincoats and Magazine, not only giving a sense of alternative art as a mode of escape and salvation, but signalling the winds of potentially positive change and, for Ann, offering a viable route into the future. Indeed, the film offers a fictionalised, unsentimental retelling of the Morley’s own experiences fronting a feminist post-punk trio.

The narrative arc is episodic in nature, and this allows Morley to create a satisfying and constant tension between moments of levity and anguish. In one scene we witness this in full circle, with Ann coming home and having a rollercoaster conversation with her mother which begins as a snarky chat, quickly escalates into a bout of accusatory screaming and then ends with sorrow and acceptance. There’s a sense that the cast are all in total sync with Morely’s vision – by the story’s end we see that this highly combustible mode of communication is the thing that prevents Ann from breaking out of her rut.

In 7 Miles Out, the lives of all the characters are in a constant state of flux, and the film mirrors these interior worlds by combining a colourful patchwork of episodes, anecdotes and primal memories rather than just training its focus on a single event. (Sidenote: this is all represented and elevated by the sparse but careful period production design). There’s a section where Ann and her two besties are hatching schemes to sneak into a Joy Division concert, and while it makes for a fun little escapade, Morley is wise to not make it the load-bearing narrative beam for the entire film. She instead fully commits to the idea that things don’t happen to us in a vacuum, and that people are the product of a wide variety of influences, from family members, friends, acquaintances, enemies and even ghosts.

7 Miles Out – first-look review - Little White Lies

2026-10-17T17:30:00.000Z

Carol Morley’s bittersweet chronicle of youth in revolt is lovingly ripped from the pages of her own memoir and is one of the finest British films of 2026.

Movie Poster of the Week | F.W. Murnau’s “Faust” - The Daily Notebook

2026-10-16T08:00:00.000Z

This month, MUBI Editions, in partnership with the Cinématheque Française, is publishing an extraordinary document: a cinephilic Rosetta Stone known as “The Faust Bible.” When, 100 years ago, director F. W. Murnau completed work on his final German film and his most ambitious one to date, members of his crew compiled a scrapbook of illustrations and photographs that documented the making of that film, bound inside a prop Bible, and presented it to Murnau as a memento of the production prior to his impending move to Hollywood.

Considered lost for many years, the Faust Bible was recently rediscovered and restored by the Cinématheque, and now MUBI and the Cinématheque have recreated this “stunning artefact of cinema history” and are publishing it under the title The Faust Bible: The Making of F.W. Murnau’s Masterpiece. Laurent Mannoni, Scientific Director of Heritage at la Cinémathèque française, who guided the restoration and publication of the book, writes:

One of the most influential and pioneering filmmakers of the silent era, F.W. Murnau was known for the privacy of his film sets. Reluctant to welcome visitors, he was even less inclined to reveal his creative process. The rediscovery of the Faust “Bible” offers extraordinary insight into the making of one of cinema’s great masterpieces. Published in its entirety for the first time, it allows readers to trace the creation of this legendary film.

Alongside the book, MUBI has commissioned this gorgeous poster for the film, designed by MUBI Lab and printed in black ink on bronze paper with foil stamping on the title treatment. It will be released in a limited edition by the MUBI Shop. The Faust Bible: The Making of F.W. Murnau's Masterpiece was designed by Mathias Clottu and Valérian Charmasson for Studio Mathias Clottu. The Rudolf Koch letters featured on the cover and the poster were redrawn by Adrien Vasquez.

Posters play a significant part in the story of Murnau’s Faust. In mid-August 1926, after production had ended and a couple of months after Murnau had departed for the US, the producers at the studio UFA (Universum-Film Aktiengesellschaft) held a competition to design a poster for this most prestigious of films. In total, 359 designs were submitted, the winners were announced on September 20, and on October 12, the best of the designs were exhibited in the foyer of the Ufa-Palast am Zoo, Germany’s largest movie palace, two days before the film’s gala premiere. The winner of the first prize of 2,000 marks (equivalent to about $9,000 today) was the Berlin artist and printmaker Karl Michel (1885–1966), who by 1926 was already well known in artistic circles.

The poster, which measures 36” × 55” (almost twice the size of an American one sheet) is a thing of beauty and quite unlike anything else from that period. Painted in the style of a medieval woodcut it, nods to the sixteenth-century origins of the legend of Faust. It features Doctor Faustus reviving a dying man while a crowd watches and three horsemen of the apocalypse—War, Plague, and Death—gallop overhead. What it does not depict, surprisingly, is Mephistopheles, the Devil incarnate, unless he is supposed to be one of the hooded figures behind Faust. Mephistopheles, or Mephisto as he is known in the film, was played by Emil Jannings, one of German cinema’s great stars, so his omission is peculiar.

Michel’s poster is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and is widely regarded as one of the great movie posters (it has been featured in numerous MoMA exhibitions, from the landmark “Movie Posters” exhibition of 1960—which I wrote about in the first edition of Notebook magazine—through to “Weimar Cinema 1919–1933: Daydreams and Nightmares” in 2010). But it was not always held in such high regard.

On October 13, 1926, the day before the film’s premiere, the German trade magazine Film-Kurier wrote a most scathing article on the exhibition of the best of the submitted designs. The article started out very sympathetically while taking a swipe at the general state of movie poster design.

It should be noted that the idea of holding a public competition for the Faust poster was excellent. First, it provided an opportunity for good publicity, and second, it offered the chance to attract new and unknown poster artists for the film, which is urgently needed given the regrettable artistic and advertising-related low level of the majority of our film posters.

From there, it descends into a wholesale condemnation of the results, saying, “Seventy percent of the designs are undeniably amateurish” and “among the remaining images, there is not a single one that could be even remotely satisfactory.” It offered the caveat that “UFA is, of course, innocent of this deplorable fiasco” since “the subject matter was extremely appealing and the prizes were very high.”

Part of the problem seemed to be that a lot of fine artists and illustrators entered the competition without much or even any knowledge of film poster design and that, above all, the result was supposed to be a piece of advertising. Film-Kurier goes on to say that “apparently, the most headaches were caused by trying to fit in the text. Title, subtitle, the names of director, author, librettist, and four actors, plus two logos—that's a lot, but not an insurmountable task.”

Finally, they get to Karl Michel’s winning design—yet without mentioning the artist’s name anywhere in the article:

The first prize of 2,000 marks was awarded to a design that, in the style of an old woodcut, depicts a series of symbolic figures and scenes. It deliberately deviates from the usual movie posters, but that is pretty much its only merit. The actors’ names are completely relegated to the background; it can hardly be described as particularly effective. Add to that the bright yellow overprint, typical for Berlin, and the whole thing makes a highly unsatisfactory impression.”

Despite Film-Kurier’s objections (which, surprisingly, did not include the omission of Mephisto), Karl Michel’s poster was used, at least initially, as the official German poster for the film. It was reproduced with different colors on the promotional flyer for the film’s opening (above) and it was also used, in a redrawn black-and-white outline version, on the inside cover of a 40-page booklet that was handed out at the premiere. The booklet, titled Worte zu Faust, contained the unused intertitles written by Nobel prize-winning poet Gerhart Hauptmann. Hauptmann had been asked to revise the existing intertitles but, after watching the film, ended up writing 700 lines of rhyming verse. When screenwriter Hans Kyser objected in an open letter to various newspapers that Hauptmann’s titles were too literary and “an unwarranted intrusion into the work of another artist,” they were abandoned, but to placate Germany’s most famous poet, they were printed in this booklet and disseminated at the screening. Note that Hauptmann’s name has been added to the credits on this version of the poster.

Another program for the film’s original release does, however, do away with Michel’s design and features Mephisto more prominently.

I wish we had photographs of the exhibition, but I’ve been unable to track any down. It would be fascinating to see the other submissions. Film-Kurier gives us a hint of the runner-up, saying that “second prize was awarded to a poster featuring the heads of Faust and Mephisto—both well-executed—but a poorly rendered Gretchen.” It would seem to be this poster that is signed by one Kurt Lange.

I found a 1928 article on Lange from the magazine Die Kunstschule – Illustrierte Monatsschrift für Kunst und Kunstpflege (The Art School – Illustrated Monthly Magazine for Art and the Cultivation of Art), which says that Lange was born in Berlin on February 25, 1898, and that he worked as a painter and also designed several film posters. The article mentions that Lange’s design for Faust won third, not second, prize in the UFA competition. And it includes an alternative poster for Faust and a study of Jannings for the poster above.

Here is another German poster for the film, unsigned by its artist.

And maybe this below—which was used to advertise a screening at the Oeser-Kino in Vienna in February 1927—was adapted from the third (or was it second?) prize-winner, which Film-Kurier said “gives typographic posters their due.”

Faust opened in New York on Sunday December 5, 1926, less than two months after the German premiere, and the same day as Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (then known as Armored-Cruiser Potemkin). It played for two weeks at the Capitol on Broadway and 51st St., advertised as the “world’s largest and foremost motion picture palace.” Here is the New York Times opening ad:

The American posters for Faust leaned in heavily to Mephistopheles, though he is rendered far more cartoony and does not at all resemble Emil Jannings’ portrayal (Jannings’ Mephisto is clean-shaven). Here is the 1926 US one sheet and insert poster at their relative sizes (artists unknown):

And here is a window card and lobby card:

And finally, the front and back of a herald flyer for the film, which incorporates a lot of the elements from above.

In 2006, 80 years after the original release, the UK label Eureka’s Masters of Cinema resurrected the Karl Michel art on the cover of their DVD release and did the same for their 2014 Blu-ray release.

It was also used for the theatrical poster for a French rerelease of the restored film.

In 2015, Kino Lorber released a fully restored version of the film on Blu-ray with art that uses one of the most dramatic and iconic scenes from the film, strangely ignored by earlier poster designers, of a gigantic horned Mephisto looming over the city, an image stunningly repurposed in MUBI’s new poster.

A similar image was used in 2020 for Johnny Dombrowski’s tribute posters for Mondo and Black Dragon Press.

For 100 years, Murnau’s Faust has proved to be a rich source of design inspiration, despite what a contemporary trade magazine might have said. The Faust Bible gives us a comprehensive look behind the scenes at this marvel of silent cinema and into the mind of one of its geniuses.

An Independent and ‘Sesame Street’ - Animation Obsessive

2026-10-16T03:47:04.000Z

A still from Kakania (1989)

Welcome! It’s a new Thursday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. This time, we’re looking into Karen Aqua, an independent animator from the East Coast.

Not everyone knows Aqua’s name today. But, in her scene, she was beloved. Michael Sporn adored her films. Her peer Joanna Priestley called her “one of the truly great b…

Klara and the Sun review – send it back to the factory - Little White Lies

2026-10-15T20:18:00.000Z

Taika Waititi funnies up Kazuo Ishiguro’s beloved 2021 novel about the life of an inquisitive android and dispenses with much of its profundity in the process.

We’ve come to a mystifying juncture in human history, as the rampant onslaught of AI clogs up our news feeds and provides daily threats to all life in existence. Fun, eh? There are many who believe we’re getting close to a five-alarm extinction event if we don’t act now, turn off the big switch and leave a small group of billionaires with a few less billions in their vaults/bunkers. Contemporary anxieties about the forced integration of AI are blithely swiped away in Taika Waititi’s new feature, Klara and the Sun, in which we join a future dystopia in which World War Three has come and gone, the internet has been nixed entirely and people find solace in humanoid artificial friends.

It’s a film which places a sunny, smiley face and manic pixie façade onto the industrial output of future big tech, though in this instance, the robots that are now all the rage and are supplied through highstreet stores seem to have no branding, no provenance, and no-one is there basking in the glory of their apparently successful integration into society.

We meet B1 model artificial friend Klara (Jenna Ortega) as a wide-eyed sale item at a run-down robot shop. She peeks through slits in the metal shutters and converses (confesses?) with the rising sun, believing it to be a God-like manifestation that will answer her various pleas. The crotchety store manager (Natasha Lyonne) knows that her entire misfit stock will soon likely be chopped up and raided for parts, but is pleasantly surprised that Klara, with her symphonic range of cutesy tics, manages to score a new owner in the form of Josie (Mia Tharia).

We’re then transported from a bustling urban hellscape that plays home to the smog-generating Cootings machines to a remote mansion that’s surrounded in all directions by swaying, heavenly cornfields. Josie is tickled by her new pal, and quickly explains to her that she has undergone the surgical process of “lifting”, which essentially amounts to having her chromosomes fiddled with so she becomes an instant genius. Yet the reason Klara has been purchased is because mother Chrissy (Amy Adams) is too busy with work to tend to her daughter – Josie’s sister Sal died suddenly, and this caused her father to walk out on the family. (There’s the vague suggestion that Chrissy had something to do with Sal's death, but it’s never brought up again). Klara believes she is a strut brought in to help prop up this broken-down family unit, but the situation is far less simple than she is led to believe.

This potentially rich subject matter is squandered by Waititi who has a juvenile habit of undercutting any hint at profundity with a jolt of silly humour or a comic rug pull. He seems unable to take the core ideas in the text – which touch on subjects as profound as the nature of love and the importance of human relations – with the ethereal seriousness that author Kazuo Ishiguro did in his lauded 2021 novel of the same name. The result is a garbled mess of half-cocked speculative sci-fi and sentimental platitudes, with Klara’s fuzzy logic dragging us along on a circuitous journey without any satisfying destination.

The film is certainly more bearable in its more comic first half, and Waititi has fun introducing us to all the societal shifts that have taken place and his own little bits of worldbuilding. Yet when the film desperately needs to “get serious” it just falls to pieces, particularly when it comes to the Chrissy character whose bizarre motherly impulse is tantamount to psychological abuse. Throughout the film, intentions are obscure, motivations are lacking, and the human characters seem less well adjusted to operate in the world than the robots do – which is maybe the film’s crass point? Perhaps the main problem here is that there are so many little set-ups and ideas introduced in the script that are either left to dangle, or if they are revisited, it's done so in an airy-fairy manner that never manages to justify their purpose.

Visually, the film is a mess of sparkling pastels, with the lens flare-o-meter turned up to 11 and computer glitches used liberally throughout as a visual shorthand of Klara’s gradual learning process. There’s certainly a sense that Waititi is attempting to emulate the uncanny glow of Stephen Spielberg’s AI: Artificial Intelligence, yet the film itself, and the way it presents its ideas, is closer to a coffee table refit of Eighties fluff like Short Circuit.

Programmers Picks from the Breeze Film Festival - Little White Lies

2026-10-15T17:57:00.000Z

A selection of insider recommendations from the team behind this upcoming London-based celebration of cinema.

London Breeze Film Festival was founded in 2016 by Sam Cullis as Barnes Film Festival, originally taking place at the London Wetlands Centre and Olympic Studios in East London. Over the past ten years, it has blossomed into a reliable Autumn fixture in the capital, having re-branded to London Breeze in 2023. Still a grassroots festival that supports emerging talent and underrepresented voices in the industry, it now spans five days in multiple venues across London. Boasting a variety of special guests, industry events, an immersive storytelling exhibit, and with programming this year focused on the vital theme of courage, foregrounding women in film, and celebrating music and sound’s role in storytelling, Breeze’s 11th edition offers 147 titles for your delectation. To help us discover some of the pearls in the line-up, co-lead programmer Emily Bolton has plucked out three shorts and one feature for your consideration…

1. The Couch
Directed by Lara Kuijper

A refreshingly wholesome and hopeful observation of male friendships and the cracks that can begin to form under the pressure of impending adulthood. On the surface, this is a film about a trio of friends going to pick up a couch to be able to host a party at their flat. Sounds simple? Yet, the simplicity of the premise is what allows the relationship between these young men to breathe and each of their performances to shine. With shades of Richard Linklater’s Slacker and Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, director Lara Kuijper’s version of the walking/talking “slice of life” film feels entirely fresh, showcasing her own clear and precise directorial voice. The film also features an immersive original score by WLDAN which draws you into the characters’ orbit and brings the London streets they pass through to buzzing life. Special mention, as well, to the Feature we curated alongside The Couch – Sahand Kabiri’s brilliant The Crowd, an underground entry to the new wave of Iranian film. Shot in just 12 days, it follows a group of friends as they navigate friendship, loss, and life in Tehran as young queer people while planning an illegal party for one of the members of their group.

2. Silly Little Plastic Cat
Directed by Zack Grant

Part of our IMPACT programme this year – a collection of shorts concerning the environment – is the short documentary Silly Little Plastic Cat directed by Zack Grant. Filmed on the coast of Brittany, France, the film investigates a mysterious legend that has haunted the region's shores for the past four decades: the apparition of sun-bleached, bright orange, plastic, (formerly) talking Garfield-themed telephones. The words ‘legend’ and ‘apparition’ are used here facetiously, because these objects are not simply appearing out of thin air, they are a reminder of the lasting impact of human overconsumption and the resulting issue of plastics in our oceans. There is nothing “silly” about the very real environmental commentary running throughout the film, but director Grant manages to strike a perfect tonal balance between humour and whimsy, quirk and the sombre realisation of what this unexpected phenomenon represents. It is perhaps not a coincidence that the phone is orange, as the colour symbolises both creativity and abundance. Yet, in society, it’s a colour that also triggers potential hazards. In other words, we keep creating and buying and continuing this cycle despite its costs to the Earth.

3. Point
Directed by Ari Sohn

Point is a trippy, entrancing and intricately detailed hand-drawn animation with a violin score composed and performed by director Ari Sohn herself. Go on a kaleidoscopic journey through this world of rebirth, regeneration and renewal – part of our ‘Sound of Storytelling’ shorts block that features films with outstanding sound and music design that enhance the stories they accompany. The violin music shapes the visuals that unfold before us, and becomes tangible within the world of the film, entangled in an audiovisual representation of the passage of time, and the transformation all living things go through with it. ‘Point’ as a word and symbol indicates a location, a passage of time, an action, and both an origin and an end. It also shapes language and music. Point allows each of these interpretations to exist on one plane.

4. Delupi
Directed by Mohammad Touqir Islam

Delupi was filmed in a remote village in Bangladesh in the aftermath of great political and environmental turmoil that shook the country, especially its poorest communities. Director Mohammad Touqir Islam and his crew embedded themselves within the village, allowing events to unfold organically and gaining the trust of the people around them by joining in relief efforts. Islam also uses real villagers and first-time actors, lending an added layer of authenticity to the film. When we hone in on the love story between Partha and Nupur, Mihir’s activism, and the seedy escapades of Chairman Zakir as he attempts to use the chaos of the situation to gain power, it feels wholly believable and provides an openness that makes it easy to connect with these characters and their lives.

Instead of the film becoming bogged down by the different threads of the narrative, they combine to form a tightly woven tapestry – a testament to the importance of community and that we are stronger together. The word that comes to mind when looking at Delupi’s interconnected storylines is ‘protection’: from Mihir’s political and environmental mission, Partha’s wish to rescue Nupur and shield their love from her strict parents, the Jatra troupe’s defiance in preserving their art, to the entire population of the neighbouring villages as they unite to protect their land. Delupi is a powerful tale of young love, the resilience of the human spirit in the face of environmental crisis.

London Breeze Film Festival runs from 21-25 October, 2026. To explore the full programme, head to londonbreezefilmfestival.com

MUBI Podcast | “Pulp” Live!: Jarvis Cocker and Garth Jennings Capture the Power of Pop - The Daily Notebook

2026-10-15T12:06:00.000Z

Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore? is now streaming on MUBI globally.

Pop icon Jarvis Cocker and director Garth Jennings (Sing, 2016) sit down with host Rico Gagliano to talk about their huge-yet-heartwarming concert film Pulp: What Do You Do for an Encore? (2026). Other topics include: death, Abba, heads in boxes, and where they get their dapper threads.

Watch the episode on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

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Whalefall review – an underwhale-ming survival story - Little White Lies

2026-10-15T12:05:00.000Z

A younger diver tries to escape from the stomach of a sperm whale in Brian Duffield's nautical thriller.

As a child who grew up attending Sunday school every week, I suppose I’ve thought about being swallowed by a whale more than the average person. In the classic Old Testament story, the prophet Jonah is swallowed by a whale (it might have just been a big fish) because he defies God’s direct instructions to go to the city of Niveah and tell the citizens to buck their ideas up. After three days praying in the whale/big fish, Jonah tells God he’s sorry, he’s vomited back out, and goes on his way. With the gift of hindsight, this all seems a bit passive aggressive of God, but Old Testament God was quite petty. Just ask Adam and Eve.

In Brian Duffield’s Whalefall – based on the book of the same name by 2026 Pulitzer Prize winner Daniel Kraus – a young man named Jay (Austin Abrams) also comes across a cropper of a whale, while out diving in Monastery Bay in search of his father’s remains a year after his suicide. (Monastery Bay has the nickname ‘Mortuary Bay’ due to its reputation as the most dangerous beach in California, but generally this is referring to rip tides rather than the likelihood of being accidentally swallowed by a sperm whale who was innocently trying to eat a giant squid.)

The introverted Jay had a complicated relationship with his father Mitt (Josh Brolin), an ageing diving enthusiast and local legend who was extremely hard on his son, seeing him as his heir rather than a person in his own right. In flashbacks he’s revealed as an imposing, single-minded parental figure who clashes frequently with Jay, and his gradual decline due to lung cancer only further exacerbates tensions in their relationship. After shutting down in the wake of Mitt’s suicide at sea, Jay returns home from college determined to retrieve his father’s body to bring closure to his mother and sisters, even though it seems obvious that Mitt made the decision to die in the ocean because it was where he was happiest.

In a stroke of extreme bad luck, Jay is swallowed by a sperm whale after getting between him and his lunch. The set piece of this moment is genuinely thrilling, but sadly underserved by dingy cinematography and lighting; while the ocean is understandably dark, some of the dramatic tension of Whalefall goes out of the window when you can’t see what on earth is going on. Things don’t improve much once poor Jay is in the whale’s digestive tract, both from a visual standpoint and a survival perspective. With just under an hour of oxygen in his tank, Jay has to form an escape plan quickly while contending with stomach acid, darkness, and the not-quite-dead squid.

Duffield has an uphill struggle matching the outrageously goofy premise of Whalefall with the grounded drama of the film's family dynamic. While Austin Abrams – recently the tragic hero of Zach Cregger’s excellent Resident Evil – is well cast and likable as Jay, there’s a sort of cloying sombreness about the film’s tone, particularly given how unpleasant Mitt is towards his son in the plentiful flashbacks. It’s difficult to reconcile this with the earnest third act feature of Jay talking to the disembodied spirit of his father...which is also the voice of the whale he’s trapped inside. The tonal mismatch keeps Whalefall way out of ‘unhinged b-movie’ territory but still swimming far from the warm shore of ‘strangely moving’.

Rebellion – first-look review - Little White Lies

2026-10-14T20:00:00.000Z

This inspiring and hopeful documentary pithily tells the story of the 1981 defence of the Bradford Twelve.

It’s hard not to feel numb to today’s endlessly grim headlines. Anti-migrant blockades in Portsmouth; Reform lobbing political hot potatoes left, right and centre; streamers slashing life-saving dinghies for metrics. Contemporary politics has been glutted with grimness. Yet, in Ken Fero and Tariq Mehmood’s 2026 film Rebellion, a report on Seventies/Eighties radical social justice movements stemming from Bradford, drum-beating drowns out doomscrolling. In this pithy documentary, contemporary viewers are reminded that the fire that fuelled social justice decades ago still burns bright today.

The documentary centres on the 1981 defence campaign of the Bradford Twelve, a landmark trial where several activists were arrested for possession of Molotov cocktails, leading to a charged awareness campaign against racialised violence. Encircling this case was a wave of progressive unrest catalysed by years of deadly injustice in the Seventies, as the film’s heavy opening lays out. Yet, the first footage seen is of contemporary pro-Palestine marches, making it clear that Rebellion is not retrospective. In documenting a wide-spread national protest movement, Rebellion radically transposes history’s freedom fighters across time, positioning this archive-heavy documentary in both the “then” and “now”.

Before radical action, however, the suffering must be expounded. Anchored to their childhoods, the beginning of Rebellion builds a case file of multifarious racial abuse subjugating the documentary’s subjects, those primarily being members of the activist group the United Black Youth League. Memories of the National Front and unpunished murders evoke tears decades on from victims and families, but despite the scars, the story at the heart of Rebellion is one of resistance. It is the creation of the League, the Asian Youth Movement, the maternal fight of Anwar Ditta to reclaim her children from The Home Office, such totemic shifts are the coordinates for the film’s charted course, mapping a previous anti-Imperialist campaign to progressive protest today.

Said milestones are formally retold dually: firstly through archival footage and secondly through talking heads. The former is used liberally, painting broad, Super 8 strokes of the simmering scene. Grainy swathes of placards, mullets and rage are presented, less to punctuate any narration, more as a means to cultivate inflating tensions through sheer volume of footage. Its narrational companion, the talking heads, are executed more conservatively. Formulaic neutral backgrounds and snippety statements, none of it is new territory for a documentary, but this directorial light-touch is well founded. Choked-back tears, unshakeable anger, and poise in the face of hostility–the rebels’ words are weighty enough without intervention from Fero and Mehmood.

Steadily these two formal legs march the viewer through an immense chapter of political unrest, yet even at the credits, Rebellion doesn’t drop its arms. No one is under any auspices that the job is done, even when the timeline of the Twelve is complete. This isn’t a history lesson but an urgent reminder that protest still has power. Concessions from foreign secretary Ed Miliband, about the previous government wrongly ignoring pro-Palestine protests, suggest that Rebellion couldn’t be more accurate and timely.

Case 137 review – dodgy cops get a taste of their own medicine - Little White Lies

2026-10-14T12:23:00.000Z

Léa Drucker leads this French policier about an internal affairs officers looking to bring some trigger-happy members of the riot squad to justice.

In late 2018, France ground to a halt on the back of the gilets jaunes protests in which naffed-off labourers downed tools and expressed their grief on the streets. In Paris, members of the law enforcement anti-gang brigade (BRI) were handed a
remit to tool up as quickly as possible and take whatever steps were necessary to calm tensions and suppress those protestors who were deemed a public menace.
This new film by reliable French director Dominik Moll zeroes in on the fate of a single teenager who, as a result of this loosey-goosey approach to crowd control, is shot in the face and suffers life-altering brain damage as a result. Léa Drucker’s Stéphanie heads up an internal affairs unit – the person who polices the police – looking into the incident and the rogue band responsible for destroying this person’s life.

The first half of Case 137 is its most interesting, with Moll grinding down into the micro details of the investigation and showcasing all the tools at Stéphanie and her team’s disposal. Yet in its second half, the film shifts into a more conventional moral debate about the issues that such a case throws up: whether police solidarity should be maintained in all instances so as to maintain the illusion of strength and order, or should the bad eggs be punished as a way to demonstrate that the police are not an impenetrable and monolithic unit who formulate the rules as they go along.

A Little Film & TV List - BlogFlock

Table of Contents | Notebook Issue 9: “Smoke and Mirrors” - The Daily Notebook

Rushes | Netflix Fires Chief Content Officer, Soderbergh Takes Over “The Batman Part II,” R.I.P. Eva Marie Saint - The Daily Notebook

Masao Adachi: Demystifying a Legend - The Daily Notebook

God Laughs: Stanley Kubrick’s Cinema - The Criterion Collection: The Current

Christiane F.: Up Against the Wall - The Criterion Collection: The Current

The Wall Between Us: Possession at 45 - Little White Lies

Making Marie Antoinette review – passing the baton - Little White Lies

Remake, Remodel, Remarket - The Daily Notebook

The Criterion Channel’s November 2026 Lineup - The Criterion Collection: The Current

From MTV to Hollywood

Starring Nicolas Cage

Starring Gene Tierney

Featuring an introduction by critic Imogen Sara Smith, part of Criterion’s Spotlight series

Celebrating Jeremy Thomas

CRITERION ORIGINALS

Hiro Murai’s Adventures in Moviegoing

REDISCOVERIES AND RESTORATIONS

No Picnic

Utu Redux

CRITERION COLLECTION EDITIONS

This Is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984)*

Criterion Collection Edition #12

The Last Waltz (Martin Scorsese, 1978)

Criterion Collection Edition #1118

Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996)*

Criterion Collection Edition #1268

The Secret of the Grain (Abdellatif Kechiche, 2007)

Criterion Collection Edition #527

Welcome II the Terrordome (Ngozi Onwurah, 1995)

Criterion Collection Edition #1329

Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999)*

Criterion Collection Edition #611

Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Amy Heckerling, 1982)*

Criterion Collection Edition #1075

Rumble Fish (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983)*

Criterion Collection Edition #869

DIRECTOR SPOTLIGHTS

Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Featuring an introduction by Hamaguchi, part of Criterion’s Meet the Filmmakers series

Roy Andersson’s Existential Comedies

Featuring an introduction by filmmaker Ari Aster and cartoonist Daniel Clowes, part of Criterion’s Spotlight series

Directed by Mary Stephen

DOCUMENTARIES

New York Documentaries by Bobbito García

A Body to Live In

Two Gods

SHORT FILMS

Two Short Films by Elisabeth Subrin

Duke of Groove

Oh, Christmas Tree

MUSIC FILMS

Home of the Brave

TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY CINEMA

Drunken Noodles

NEW ADDITIONS TO PREVIOUS PROGRAMS

Premiering November 1 in Daniel Clowes’s Adventures in Moviegoing: The President’s Analyst*

An Artist Who Built Japanese Animation - Animation Obsessive

1. Dissatisfaction

2. Newsbits

3. Last word

7 Miles Out – first-look review - Little White Lies

7 Miles Out – first-look review - Little White Lies

Movie Poster of the Week | F.W. Murnau’s “Faust” - The Daily Notebook

An Independent and ‘Sesame Street’ - Animation Obsessive

Klara and the Sun review – send it back to the factory - Little White Lies

Programmers Picks from the Breeze Film Festival - Little White Lies

MUBI Podcast | “Pulp” Live!: Jarvis Cocker and Garth Jennings Capture the Power of Pop - The Daily Notebook

Whalefall review – an underwhale-ming survival story - Little White Lies

Rebellion – first-look review - Little White Lies

Case 137 review – dodgy cops get a taste of their own medicine - Little White Lies

Premiering November 1 in Daniel Clowes’s Adventures in Moviegoing: *The President’s Analyst**