Kristen Stewart

One day after the presidential inauguration, SNL host Aziz Ansari followed Dave Chappelle’s example to deliver a thoughtful and ultimately optimistic monologue about America’s future, but it wasn’t the night’s only news. Kristen Stewart has signed on as 2017’s third SNL host, due in early February.

Film and technology have always been closely linked, but these days they’re beginning to influence each other in ways we can’t even foresee. Take Kristen Stewart’s first directorial effort Come Swim, for instance, which will be premiering at the Sundance Film Festival: Stewart, her producer, and an engineer teamed up to use her movie to author a research paper about artificial intelligence. Why not?

Did you think the 2017 Sundance Film Festival announcements were over? Silly you! We still have the short film category ahead of us, and today’s announcement from the festival gives us a look at what we can expect to see.

Imagine landing your first role in an Oscar-winning director’s film. Now imagine that film is being shot with a technology that’s never before been attempted. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, the latest visual experiment from Ang Lee, stars newcomer Joe Alywn, a 25-year-old who left his London drama school early to make a boundary-pushing film.

Ang Lee is am ambitious filmmaker, but ambition doesn’t always pay off. With Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon he fused emotional relationships with the dazzle of wuxia action, and in Life of Pi he told a story about spirituality and survival through an innovative use of CG and motion-capture performance. In Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk Lee is once again pushing the boundaries of filmmaking shooting the film in 120 frames per second (five times the normal rate of your average movie). What results is a stunning and unique viewing experience, but ultimately a failed experiment.

We know more about Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk today than we did when the first trailer debuted back in May. Our own Erin Whitney was present for the film’s world premiere at the New York Film Festival earlier this month, and relayed their full scoop back to us through their review: Ang Lee gets a lot of points for sheer chutzpah, having shot the first feature-length film using highly sophisticated 4K 120 frames-per-second technology, but his gambit ultimately fails. The realistic look of the film is almost too real, its crisp movements too unnaturally fluid for their own good.

I didn’t get to review Personal Shopper out of the Toronto Film Festival, so here’s the short short version: I liked it! Quite a bit actually; Kristen Stewart gives an outstanding performance as a young American living in Paris, who’s desperate to make contact with a ghost, and specifically with the ghost of her dead twin brother. To fund her quest, Stewart also works as the personal shopper for a fashion icon and socialite. It’s an unusual mix of elements, but a deeply engrossing one, with Stewart nodding at her celebrity status (and perhaps the loneliness of a certain kind of isolating fame) in interesting ways.

ScreenCrush’s Matt Singer and Erin Whitney are back from the 2016 Toronto International Film Festival. You can read all of their coverage so far here, but if you want the digest version, they compiled this list of some of the fest’s highlights: the best performances, the biggest surprises, and the worst disappointments. What are the movies people are going to be talking about this fall? These. (Except the ones they didn’t like, of course.)

Certain Women, Kelly Reichardt’s drama of four independent women making their way in the American northwest, finally has a trailer.

The 2016 New York Film Festival is shaping up to have one of the most ambitious lineups in years. On top of opening with the very first documentary in the festival’s history with Ava DuVernay‘s ‘The 13th,’ this year’s fest will also host the world premiere of a big innovation in cinema technology.