Editor’s Notebook

In the last quarter of 2025, the president of the United States demolished the White House screening room along with most of the East Wing (which now will be strictly ballroom). He then threatened to insert himself personally into the regulatory process following the bidding war over Warner Bros. Discovery between Netflix and Paramount Skydance (whose original, losing bid was initially backed by his son-in-law’s Affinity Partners investment firm). Tune in later this year to find out whether other massive consolidations of media, including social media, by regime-friendly or supine billionaires who are willing to kill critical stories will reaffirm the old lessons of Citizen Kane. For a supposedly moribund business whose death has been announced and rehearsed so many times before, film, in its most expanded sense, remains a surprisingly potent force in the public sphere.Meanwhile, the mainstream films released to the public between Halloween and Christmas of last year provided, as usual, a good bellwether for the awards season to come. These movies also held a mirror to a fragmented film-distribution system in which nobody knows which end is up and in which everyone is still throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what will stick. But, over the last century, cinema has developed a knack for outliving its own deaths, whether technological, commercial, or artistic, although these now seem to recur with increasing frequency as catastrophe gives way to utter chaos: legalized vertical integration, COVID, the LA fires, AI hype/catastrophism, monopolistic streamers, predatory megamergers, and McCarthyesque political bullying.Among other things, awards season so far has reinforced the point that straight-to-streaming strategies don’t serve feature films very well. MGM (“An Amazon Company”) fed Nia DaCosta’s subversive Hedda into the woodchipper of Prime Video with little fanfare, while, by contrast, Focus Features (“A Comcast Company” owned by NBC Universal whose films stream on Peacock) staked its claim on a wider Thanksgiving-weekend release of Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet. Hamnet is a Best Picture picture that banks on the classic awards formulas of the tearjerker literary adaptations of yesteryear. Hamnet lacks Hedda’s sharp dramaturgical claws and perverse cool, instead drowning its viewers in William Shakespeare’s sorrows as a grieving father, but it is intriguing that both of these pioneering filmmakers opted to adapt from literature and theater after their stints in Marvel’s salt mines.Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite and Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams were not well supported by Netflix’s extremely limited theatrical releases, while Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein held on at the box office through a sheer visual sumptuousness that demanded a trip to the multiplex (with 35 mm screenings in selected markets like mine). On the podcast The Town with Matthew Belloni, James Cameron described Netflix’s awards strategy as “rotten to the core.” Although Apple has been even worse at supporting its features (cf. Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest), its producers and stars managed to sneak F1 into the Best Picture shortlist. The streamers require new features by important filmmakers to drop regularly on their platforms in order to drive subscriptions and customer retention, but they don’t need anybody to watch them in large numbers since box-office receipts and even Oscars have a very limited impact on their business models. Cameron argued that Oscars should be reserved for films that play in theaters for a month, although that would skew too far in favor of big-budget blockbusters. But ultimately, regulation in the interest of artists and audiences might be the only path to preserving theatrical film exhibition as a large-scale enterprise. Feature films are too interesting an artform to be relegated to the function of avoiding “churn” that affects the stock market prices of a few streaming giants.In the retrospective light of its planned acquisition by Netflix (which is yet to be approved by the regime’s handpicked regulators), it’s interesting to note that Warner Bros. bet the farm on IMAX curtain-call screenings to hype the awards prospects for Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Netflix has pledged to keep Warner Bros. pictures in theaters, but its CEO is on record proclaiming that theaters are obsolete, so this promise might not hold. Paramount’s follow-up hostile bid set up an Alien vs. Predator situation for viewers: as the 2004 film’s tagline went, “Whoever wins … we lose.” (The machinations of Paramount Skydance continue apace, while the success of Netflix would require spinning off CNN, which then could be acquired by a loyal oligarch.) By contrast, a notable business partnership emerged between the beleaguered theater chain AMC and the streamer/distributor MUBI, with the result that two of 2025’s most memorable American-produced films, Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind, both also shot on analog film, were given the theatrical releases they deserved. Whether or not this strategy pays off commercially or in terms of awards, this seems a slightly more artist-friendly avenue, but it also signals a Hail Mary throw from AMC to revive its flagging fortunes by offering entertainment for grown-ups. AMC also joined up with Netflix on the theatrical release of the Stranger Things finale, suggesting future possibilities for such event-based cinema screenings for series with large fan bases.Most heartening was NEON’s year-end all-in bet on global auteur cinema, with Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent, and Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value playing in theaters after Thanksgiving, and Park Chan-wook’s No Other Choice following as drolly timed Christmas Day counterprogramming. Anxiety around the threat to cinema posed by streaming is itself woven into the storyline of Sentimental Value, in which Netflix has too much say over the production of filmmaker Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård). No Other Choice, already notorious due to its rejection for funding by Hollywood studios, invokes AI directly as its final-boss antagonist (as does Tom Cruise’s swan song as secret agent Ethan Hunt in last summer’s Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, which pointedly champions old-school stunts and silent-era wing walking as a remedy for cinematic senses dulled by small screens). No Other Choice contains a mockery of the Netflix intro sound within its story, while the film’s Oscar snubs only serve to remind me that it was the film I enjoyed most in what was, despite everything, an unexpectedly good year for cinema, in which international pictures outstripped Hollywood.A more radical American vision of film’s analog joys emerged in Ira Sachs’s Peter Hujar’s Day, which was nominated for multiple Independent Spirit Awards. Telescoping into seventy-six minutes an hours-long conversation in 1974 between the famed photographer (played by Ben Whishaw) and the writer Linda Rosenkrantz (Rebecca Hall), Sachs’s poignant film, shot on Super 16 mm, is about two old friends just hanging out, sharing smokes, and listening to one another as Hujar recounts his adventures from the previous day. In the process, the film requires audiences to recalibrate their attention spans, asking pertinent questions about the nature of cinematic attention—how to listen, how to regard one’s interlocutor, what constitutes the stuff of life, and what to do with one’s limited time here on earth. I didn’t require the film’s Mozart Requiem in D Minor score to feel the force of Sachs’s memento mori, but maybe this music appeared on Rosenkrantz’s archival recordings for her book. I would have suggested the opening bars and lyrics of David Bowie’s more contemporaneous 1972 “Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide.”Turning focus to 2026 releases, Radu Jude’s Kontinental ’25 was a standout in this year’s AFI European Union Film Showcase. Jude’s refreshing lo-fi filmography limns the unspeakable, swinging wildly between hilariously offensive pornographic B-movie aesthetics (Dracula [2025]) and deeply poignant portrayals of everyday working life for Romanian women (Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn [2021] and Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World [2023]). Kontinental ’25’s protagonist, Orsolya (Eszter Tompa), is coping with the death of a man (Ion, played by Gabriel Spahiu) whom she helped evict from his shabby room in order to make way for the construction of a boutique hotel. (It’s typical of Jude, and also very funny, that his film will have the ‘wrong’ date when it finally gets its planned U.S. theatrical release in March 2026, and that its throwback title presents a formatting headache for AI autocorrect functions.) Jude’s recent films somehow make virtues of their microscopic budgets and technical limitations and flaws, in the process presciently mocking the avalanche of garbage flowing from AI and social media corporations and deliberatively looting the archives of film and literary history. Meanwhile, they dialectically rip up the playbook of neorealism in exploring the lives of working people facing the impossible and contradictory demands of neoliberal subjectivity imposed upon the flexible labor force required to support the revanchist and vampiric techno-feudalism of the gig economy. Jude always offers more than trashy abyss-gazing, however, aiming to make audiences laugh and cry simultaneously, while also recognizing their own collective complicity in the nightmares currently unfolding—and holding space open for glimmers of alternative futures, societal and cinematic.Two of the films mentioned above get deep dives in FQ 79.3. Peter Coviello, the author of a book on Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, registers the positive shock of watching Anderson’s One Battle After Another (inspired by Pynchon’s novel) during the military occupation of Chicago, while Gerd Gemünden interviews Mendonça Filho about The Secret Agent’s connections between 1980s Brazil under the military junta and more-recent events. Both films resonate with questions bubbling away in contemporary American settings (in both North and South America) while deftly avoiding the self-seriousness that often afflicts political art, and both invoke clear analogies between past and present. It’s pleasing that they remain in the Oscar conversation at the time of writing. Continuing this focus on international cinema, Jennifer Coates revisits two films set in Tokyo that have earned more critical attention after their 2023 releases: Wim Wenders’s Perfect Days and Chihara Tetsuya’s Ice Cream Fever.Crime and horror releases from 2025 that fascinated this issue’s FQ columnists included David Osit’s Predators (discussed in depth by Laurie Ouelette) and the “New Witch Triad” of Zach Cregger’s Weapons, Osgood Perkins’s Longlegs, and Danny and Michael Philippou’s Bring Her Back (studied in detail by Anthony Michael D’Agostino). This theme continues in FQ’s features, retrospectives, and festival reports, with Elinor Dolliver’s feature on analog horror (marking just over a decade since the 2015 release of Kris Straub’s “Weather Service” on YouTube), Mina Radović’s retrospective article on Yugoslavian horror (including the fiftieth anniversary of Krsto Papić’s 1976 The Rat Savior), and Nida Sophasarun’s report on fairy tales designed for grown-ups from the Athens Film Festival (including Lucile Hadžihalilović’s anti-Frozen nightmare, The Ice Tower). Two other reports—by Will DiGravio, from Baltimore’s indie-cinema-focused New/Next, and Giovanni Vimercati, from MoMA’s João César Monteiro screening series—illuminate significant cinematic futures and archival explorations, respectively.With this issue, FQ wishes to thank its new production manager at UC Press, David Staloch; its associate editor, Ben Walters; its editorial assistant, Sophia Schrock; and its copy editor, Carl Walesa. —JMT