There was a slight prayer that Ink might possibly premiere next month in Cannes, and then that went south. Then it was speculated that Boyle’s period journalism drama might debut at the Venice Film Festival five months hence. Nope! Now comes a report that Ink has been bumped into 2027. Translation: Boyle probably doesn’t feel confident about the way Ink has been shaping up in editing, and is probably planning upon much more editing, possibly some extra shooting…something in that vein.

A teaser for Aaron Sorkin‘s The Social Reckoning (Sony, 10.6) was screened yesterday at Cinemacon. Are you telling me this Sony release won’t debut at the 2026 Venice Film Festival? Of course it will.

Boilerplate: “The footage opens on Mikey Madison as Facebook engineer Frances Haugen and Jeremy Allen White as Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz, discussing a potential story exposing Facebook’s commitment to profit over negative social harm.

“The trailer then cuts to the first look at CEO Mark Zuckerberg, transformatively played by Jeremy Strong in convincing makeup, defending his role in the company and dubbing himself a leader of free speech. [A serving of] Sorkin’s sharp dialogue, hearings, scandals, and an examination of Zuckerberg’s impact on the changing modern world since the original film.”

At Sundance ’13 (13 years ago) I became a David Lowery de votee after catching Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, a descendant of Robert Altman‘s Thieves Like Us…basically a film about young love, guns, outlaws, rural flavor.

Three years later I got off the Lowery bus after totally hating Pete’s Dragon — a bone-headed, nonsensical, friendly dragon film, from Lowery and Disney and costarring Robert Redford.

But during Sundance ’17 I fell head over heels for Lowery’s minimalist Ghost Story (silent, watchful ghost under a plain bedsheet).

In ’18 came Lowery’s decent, modestly approvable Old Man & The Gun (Redford as gentleman bank robber).

And then in 2021 Lowery’s horrific The Green Knight, a sodden medieval dreamscape thing, arrived…a trippy, bizarre, hallucinatory quicksand movie that moves like a snail and will make you weep with frustration and perhaps even lead to pondering (not my idea but the film’s) the idea of your own decapitation.

After The Green Knight I said to myself, “okay, that’s it…Lowery is clearly Satan, a banshee, a vile goblin.”

From Owen Gleiberman’s review of Mother Mary:

“This is the David Lowery-est David Lowery movie ever made. Which is to say that by the end of it, you may be scratching your head to the point of wanting your money back.

“Mother Mary dances on the barn floorboards, and Sam says things like ‘You give people the gift of giving a shit about you.’ But what the movie really comes down to is a séance. And the stabbing of flesh. And a ghost.

“Yes, a ghost. In the form of a floating piece of red material that looks like a blanket made of organza. Is this the ghost of their relationship? Or a real ghost? That’s a question that will be debated by moviegoers for maybe four seconds. Because Mother Mary, as it takes the leap into Gothic metaphysical fantasy, becomes almost completely incoherent, and stays that way. It’s like an exorcist movie where the devil is a piece of bolt fabric.

“Mother Mary eventually turns into the most befuddlingly pretentious movie about a pop star since Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux. It heads down a blind alley of cosmic meaning that, in the end, means nothing.”

From HE’s July 2021 review of Lowery’s The Green Knight:

“I will never forget The Green Knight, and I will never, ever watch it again. It’s an exacting, carefully crafted, ‘first-rate’ creation by a director of serious merit, and I was moaning and writhing all through it. I can’t believe I watched the whole thing, but I toughed it out and that — in my eyes, at least — is worth serious man points.

“What would I rather do, I was asking myself — watch the rest of The Green Knight or bend over and allow my head to be cut off? Both would be terrible things to endure, I reasoned, but at least decapitation would be quick and then I’d be at peace. Watching The Green Knight for 130 minutes, on the other hand…”

A woman named Lonna Drewes at a news conference just now accused Eric Swalwell of drugging her drink and sexually assaulting her. Here's part of her statement. pic.twitter.com/6A2gTmtA3S

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 14, 2026

Yesterday I was knocked out by a nocturnal photo of the Brooklyn Bridge, which had been posted on Facebook by Reid Rosefelt. It has a fantasy-world quality…pinpoints of golden amber enshrouded by fog clouds, like an image of nighttime London out of Disney’s Péter Pan (‘53).

“It doesn’t seem real”, I thought, “but congrats to Reid all the same.”

Reid later clarified that the photo has been snapped by event photographer Jane Kratochvil, who lives in Reid’s building but has a better view of the bridge.

Kratochvil’s photos, which capture corporate events and shows and big celebrations, are all postcard pretty — bursting with color, perfectly balanced, full of joy and spirit, etc. Which is what her clients want.

Look at her professional website and you immediately think of that lyric from Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome”…”gives you the nice bright colors, gives you the greens of summer…makes you think all the world’s a sunny day.”

Alas, Jane’s magnificently foggy Brooklyn Bridge-at-night snap is apparently an anomaly — I found no other images on her website that seem to even aspire to its moody complexity, much less vaguely resemble it.

HE’s 2026 Cannes Film Festival crash pad (shared) is significantly larger than last year’s hellishly small studio (i.e., the one that lost electric power…black as night, black as coal… when I delicately tried to retrieve a piece of pita bread from a toaster). Living room + bedroom, etc. It’s also more expensive, of course. In the Old Town section, up a hill.

Margot’s Got Money Troubles (Apple TV, 4.15) is basically about Elle Fanning‘s lead character using OnlyFans to generate much-needed extra income. Costarring Nicole Kidman, Michelle Pfeiffer, Nick Offerman (I’ll never, ever recover from that upstairs bedroom scene in The Last Of Us…don’t ask), Marcia Gay Harden, Michael Angarano, Greg Kinnear. OnlyFans subscribers are a fairly primitive bunch, no? They don’t respond to coy, costumey, role-playing presentations — they generally want basic stuff.

Luca Guadagnino on Timothee Chalamet’s ballet-and-opera-related faux pax: “I am not on social media and don’t understand how one [single] comment can become a planetary polemic. Maybe Timothée could have spared himself, but he’s young, smart and sensitive, and he fears that cinema could become marginal. And that’s exactly why every form of imagination should be nurtured. We must unite the arts, not separate them.”

I’ve always hated this photo because it makes me look like Richard “Jaws” Kiel.

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Ezra Klein, founder and former editor in chief of Vox, is a prominent N.Y. Times opinion columnist and podcaster. His basic political-philosophical inclination is left-progressive. He’s certainly not a moderate or a “sensible centrist” in the HE mode — he’s an effing lefty. So it’s highly significant, I feel, that he included the following paragraph in a 4.12.26 essay called “Why There Is No Liberal Joe Rogan“:

HE translation: The woke cancel-culture brigade, which, during the height of woke lunacy (2018-2024), was primarily driven by the white-male-hating punishment instincts of urban Millennial and Zoomer women along with generally supportive sentiments from the trans community, wealthy suburban liberals and kowtowing corporate culture, has all but ruined the Democratic party brand.

Election-wise, 2024-wise amd Kamala Harris-wise in particular, wokeys have become the bane of Democrats’ existence. Many of them have been turning down the gas flame since the woke thing began to lose steam a couple of years ago, but the sooner these maniacs can be expelled from the Democratic community altogether, the better it’ll be all around. Joe Schmoe thinks they’re electoral poison, and so do I.

A divine and merciful Donald Trump blessing a resting (ailing? dying?) Paul Newman as Judge Roy Bean…what does this have to do with Trump’s criticism of Pope Leo?

And what’s with the winged, shadowy, flying monkey demon floating in the golden clouds behind Jesus H. Trump…the figure with the Statue of Liberty crown and flanked by two U.S. soldiers?

“To be happy, you must eliminate two things in your head. The fear of a bad future and the memory of a bad past.” — Seneca the younger.

I try to live with a loose-shoe, “everything’s everything”, be-here-now, zen-hepcat attitude, but I will never be free of the above. They will always haunt me. The only things that keep the HE boat afloat are (a) the love of great or very good or hugely enjoyable movies from the past and (b) unquenchable excitement about great movies yet to come.

Monday, 4.13 update: Rep. Eric Swalwell, under seige since last Friday over alllegations of sexual assault, has announced that he’ll be resigning from his Congressional seat.

Earlier: This isn’t about Eric Swalwell‘s presumed guilt or predatory self-destruction…this is about “who fingered him?”

I think there was a real concern among Calfornia Democrats that if Swalwell landed a nomination for governor against one of the Republicans (Chad Bianco or Steve Hilton) that it was possible that rightie operatives might uncover and then push those sexual harassment claims, thus causing Swalwell’s campaign to collapse. Which would leave either Bianco or Hilton as governor.

I think the Dems wanted Swalwell torpedoed for this reason. Safer for their own interests to take him down now rather than allow the possibility of those rightwing wolves finishing him off in the fall.

With Swalwell having just suspended his campaign, the last two standing Dems are U.S. Rep. Katie Porter vs. sensible billionaire philanthropist Tom Steyer. I think Steyer will prevail.