Jan 23, 2025
2 min read
David Lynch, master of the surreal, dies at 78.
One of America’s greatest directors leaves behind a legacy of perplexing, unnerving films that pushed the boundaries of narrative cinema and paved the way for others to bring their own experimentation into the mainstream. Both a painter and filmmaker, Lynch burst onto the cinema landscape with his 1977 debut feature Eraserhead, a disturbing, mystifying depiction of fatherhood set in an industrial wasteland inspired by his time in Philadelphia. Lynch continued making cryptic films exploring the darkness lying underneath the placid surface of Americana, focusing on 1950s suburbia in 1986’s Blue Velvet and Hollywood in 2001’s Mulholland Drive. Perhaps his most influential work, though, was the television series Twin Peaks, which Lynch co-created with Mark Frost. Premiering on ABC in 1990, the series revolutionized television with a serialized structure that supported an ongoing mystery and a healthy dose of surrealism that refused easy explanation. The show’s two seasons and 1992 prequel film served as a major inspiration for the shows that would later bring about TV’s golden age, and its 2017 reboot, Lynch’s last cinematic work, was just as boundary-pushing for today’s television. Beyond his films, though, Lynch was also known for his eccentric personality. He was an outspoken advocate for transcendental meditation, refused to explain his work, and for years posted daily weather reports on his YouTube channel. In 2024, he announced he had developed emphysema after a lifetime of smoking. Lynch would have turned 79 on Monday. Read more.
The Brutalist editor defends the film’s use of AI.
Editor Dávid Jancsó of The Brutalist, one of the leading films this award season,
revealed in an interview that the film used AI tools from the company Respeecher to correct the pronunciation of lead actors Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones in some of the film’s Hungarian dialogue. “I am a native Hungarian speaker and I know that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce,” Jancsó said. “If you’re coming from the Anglo-Saxon world certain sounds can be particularly hard to grasp.” Attempting to fix the pronunciations of certain letters in post-production, the filmmakers first tried using ADR with Brody and Jones, then with Hungarian actors, but could not make it work,
and so turned to AI to get the right sounds. The film also uses AI in its epilogue to generate drawings and buildings in the style of László Tóth, the architect played by Brody. The film has faced backlash since the news broke, but Jancsó insists that the AI use was benign. “It is controversial in the industry to talk about AI, but it shouldn’t be,” he said. “We should be having a very open discussion about what tools AI can provide us with. There’s nothing in the film using AI that hasn’t
been done before.” Read more.
Severance gets back to work.
After a nearly three-year wait, Dan Erickson’s brilliant workplace satire meets sci-fi mystery box has finally returned for a second season on Apple TV+. The premiere, “Hello, Ms. Cobel,” reasserts the show’s bravado as both wryly funny and endlessly engrossing, promising much more intrigue on the way. Read Rolling Stone's recap.
