David Hudson: Film Studies/Film Culture (Azimuths)

 Hudson, David. "Alex Gibney's Musk." The Current (September 16, 2026) ["In a recent cover story for the Hollywood Reporter, Steven Zeitchik calls documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney “the closest the current film world has to a Bob Woodward.” Gibney won an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), an investigation into the CIA’s use of torture, and he’s won Emmys for Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012), which traces the history of clerical sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, and Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief (2015). In 2022, Gibney and his team began working on a film about Elon Musk for HBO. Within two years, they had what they considered to be a pretty solid account of the South African–born software engineer who developed an uncanny talent for turning money-losing companies into personal cash cows before cofounding PayPal (and then stepping away), founding SpaceX, taking over Tesla and the satellite network Starlink, cofounding OpenAI (and then stepping away), and taking over Twitter and rebranding it as X, where his own account is boosted while others—particularly those expressing views he disagrees with—are throttled. By 2024, though, Musk was actively campaigning for—and to a considerable degree, helping to finance—the reelection of Donald Trump. Dressed in black and describing himself as “dark, gothic MAGA,” Musk joined the second Trump administration as the overseer of the newly launched Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), whose dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is widely believed to have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands around the world."

---. "Kubrick Season." Current (November 2, 2026) ["“Why does Kubrick’s work continue to fascinate, thrill, and move us?” asked Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri when he rolled out his ranking of the thirteen features (and placed Barry Lyndon at #1). “For starters, his mastery of style was never overtly showy or arty or cute: His films draw us in immediately on both a narrative and formal level (they look and sound amazing), which then allows them to gradually reveal their ideas to us. And his great themes are eternal ones. Kubrick made movies about the inevitable failure of humans’ most precise plans; about how our paths to success were often also our paths to ruin; about how the things we sought to control eventually controlled us; and, of course, about the unfeeling carelessness of the powerful toward those beneath them. The reason we’ll never lose interest in his work is because we’re still living in his world.”"]

---. "Luis Buñuel: Desire and Deviance." The Daily (January 28, 2026) ["In 1929, the poster boy of the movement, Salvador Dalí, teamed up with a fellow Spaniard, Luis Buñuel, who at the time was working in France as an assistant director for Jean Epstein, to turn their dreams into a screenplay that became Un chien andalou (1929). From this first, now-classic short through “to his final feature, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977),” wrote Adrian Martin in 2020, “Buñuel always stayed true to those primary surrealist principles with which he most identified: a spirit of revolt; the subversive power of passionate love, both romantic and erotic; a belief in the creativity of the unconscious (dreams and fantasies); a pronounced taste for black humor; and, last but never least, an abiding contempt for institutional religion and its representatives.”"]

---. "Oliver Laxe’s Sirât." Current (November 11, 2025) ["“The resilience of this group,” writes Filmmaker editor Scott Macaulay, “their small-scale collectivism, and the way in which dance, and drugs, are a kind of social and even spiritual practice, as opposed to simple escapism, made me think of the late Mark Fisher’s final unfinished work, ‘Acid Communism,’ and his thinking here is an analogue to the movie’s techno-scored hedonic flow: ‘The crucial defining feature of the psychedelic is the question of consciousness, and its relationship to what is experienced as reality. If the very fundamentals of our experience, such as our sense of space and time, can be altered, does that not mean that the categories by which we live are plastic, mutable?’”"]

---. "We Will Always Love Dolly Parton." The Daily (August 27, 2026) ["“I try not to get into the politics of everything,” Parton told Mesfin Fekadu in the Hollywood Reporter in 2023. “I try to get into the human element of it. I have some of everybody in my own immediate family and in my circle of employees. I’ve got transgender people. I’ve got gays. I’ve got lesbians. I’ve got drunks. I’ve got drug addicts—all within my own family. I know and love them all, and I do not judge . . . If there’s something to be judged, that is God’s business. But we are all God’s children and how we are is who we are.”"]

---. "Werner Herzog's Bucking Fastard." The Daily (September 30, 2026) ["In the early 1980s, the case of Freda and Greta Chaplin, twin sisters from Yorkshire, kicked up a flurry of media attention in the British press. The Chaplins had been obsessing over a local truck driver and were briefly locked up for harassing the man. The story lit a spark in Werner Herzog’s imagination, one that smoldered for decades until he hit upon the brilliant idea of casting Rooney and Kate Mara as Jean and Joan Holbrooke, two sisters in contemporary Ireland—not twins, they insist—who go on trial for taking sneaky revenge on the beau (Orlando Bloom) who has spurned them for another woman."]