Hamilton Trailer Brings Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway Smash Into Your Home

If there is one good thing to come of what COVID-19 has done to the entertainment industry, it’s the fast-tracking of the film version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Miranda’s Broadway juggernaut is arriving on Disney + a full year ahead of schedule, and now we’ve got the first official trailer. Miranda’s miraculous musical, which began its’ run on Broadway in 2015, has been a very hard ticket to get (not that there are tickets to be had these days).

Sam Feder Takes a Revealing Look at Transgender Depiction in Hollywood in Disclosure

Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen offers an eye-opening look at the history of transgender depiction in two universal media: film and television. The story is told through the perspectives and memories of trans people in the entertainment industry — Laverne Cox (also an executive producer of Disclosure), Lilly Wachowski and Jen Richards among them — and features clips and images that shed light on how American culture has dehumanized and made assumptions about the transgender community.

Celebrating Black Artists on Juneteenth

Today we celebrate Juneteenth, commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States on June 19, 1865. This was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and two months after the Civil War ended. It was on June 19, 1865, that Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, galloped into Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were free. Their delayed emancipation had finally come.

Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel on Shooting Spike Lee’s Epic Da 5 Bloods

On its surface, Spike Lee’s latest joint, Da 5 Bloods, is about four Black Vietnam war veterans who return to the country decades later to bring home the remains of their leader, Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman), who was killed in action. Secondary to this mission, the remaining four of the five Bloods (played by Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr., and Norm Lewis) also plan to locate and dig up a chest of gold bars they’d buried in battle.

Zack Snyder Reveals The First Look at His Snyder Cut Justice League

And there you have it, the first glimpse—and we do mean glimpse—of Zack Snyder’s vision for the “Snyder Cut” of Justice League. Snyder has revealed the teaser via tweet, and we’ve got it for you below. Snyder was, of course, the original director of Justice League before he had to exit the production due to a family tragedy. The result was that the Justice League everyone saw in 2017 was partially Snyder’s,

Candyman Director Nia DaCosta Reveals The Film’s Incredible Prologue

It’s safe to say that even without everything that has happened in the United States this year, this haunting prologue to co-writer and director Nia DaCosta‘s Candyman would still be incredibly potent. Yet DaCosta shared this two-and-a-half-minute work of shadow puppet wizardry in a country that has seen protests against police brutality and systemic racism in all 50 states (the protests have gone global, too) after the murder of George Floyd,

Cinematic Soul Food Movies Where Black Lives Do Matter

The tsunami-like effect of the Black Lives Matter movement is not only sweeping us forward towards an uncertain future but, like a riptide, pulling us backward through ignored history. It is a time to look forward as constructively as we reassess the trajectory of the journey that stretches behind us. One of the ways where we can do both is by revisiting the movies made over the years, some of which we may have seen,

Training The Pups in Think Like A Dog

Gil Junger, writer/director of Think Like a Dog, gave animal trainer Sarah Clifford a tough assignment. First, she had to train the title character, a shaggy dog named Henry, to do a variety of stunts that would allow the viewer to suspend disbelief that this dog was communicating telepathically with a kid. Second, find a way to make the dog and said kid, played by Gabriel Bateman, comfortable enough that we would believe they had been together for years.

See the Trailer For Andy Samberg’s Sundance Record-Setter Palm Springs

Way back four millennia ago, Palm Springs, a film directed by Max Barbakow and starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti, broke a Sundance sales record when it sold to Hulu and Neon for $17.5 million this past January. Now, you can check out the first trailer and see what all the buzz was about. Palm Springs finds Samberg and Milioti in an existential comedy set in the California desert that takes a beloved film conceit (more on that in a second) and adds a dash of irreverence and a slew of excellent performances.

The Batman & More Set For Warner Bros.’ Huge Virtual Event in August

“The world only makes sense if you force it to,” Batman says in one of his more famous quotes, this from Frank Miller’s beloved miniseries “The Dark Knight Rises” (the quote was then used in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice). With that in mind, Warner Bros. has announced they’re launching a Comic Con-like mega-event—albeit virtual, this year—called DC FanDome, in an effort to force a little sense onto a non-sensical world.

Writer/Director JD Chua & Producer Juan Foo on Singapore’s First Creature Feature Circle Line

JD Chua had the distinction of being director Michael Mann’s only intern when he was in Hollywood, the man who made, in a seven-year period, three of the best films of the 1990s—The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), and The Insider (1999). As a child, one of Chua’s favorite films was Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. “I remember immersing myself in the laserdisc,”

Think Like a Dog Writer/Director Gil Junger on his Family Friendly Canine Comedy

Think Like a Dog is a warm-hearted fantasy adventure about a boy who invents a contraption that enables him to read his dog’s mind. It is reminiscent of Disney live-action classics like The Absent-Minded Professor and The Shaggy Dog. In an interview, writer/director Gil Junger talked about the pleasures of ignoring the show business adage about never working with children or dogs and how the film is a love letter inspired by his own experience of re-connection to his family.

Bond is Back as No Time To Die Reveals Earlier-Than-Expected Release Date

It looks like 007 will be returning for duty a little earlier than expected. Universal and MGM’s hotly-anticipated No Tim To Die has a brand new release date—again—and this time it’s good news. Director Cary Fukunaga and star Daniel Craig will get to reveal Craig’s last turn as her Majesty’s most lethal spy on November 20, 2020, here in the United States. This comes after the original release date of April 10 was put on hold due to the spread of COVID-19.

Oscar-Winning Writer Kevin Willmott on Re-Teaming With Spike Lee For Da 5 Bloods

What happens when four Black Vietnam vets re-unit in present-day Ho Chi Minh City to retrieve a CIA shipment of gold left behind in the jungle forty years earlier? As imagined by Spike Lee in his new Netflix film Da 5 Bloods, the old soldiers’ quest leads to carnage, flashbacks, greed, and nervous breakdowns. As with every Spike Lee film, Da 5 Bloods manages to be timely, too,

Composer Terence Blanchard on Scoring Spike Lee’s Must-See New Epic Da 5 Bloods

Spike Lee’s films’ timeliness speaks to his prescience, and to his fearless, decades-long willingness to examine the continued and persistent injustice experienced by Black Americans. His new film Da 5 Bloods lands in the midst of a pandemic disproportionately affecting Black, Hispanic, Latino and Indigenous communities, and a wave of demonstrations protesting police brutality and systemic racism against Black people by those who are sworn to protect all Americans following the murder of George Floyd.

Director Daniel Karslake on the Shifting Battle for LGBTQ Equality in For They Know Not What They Do

Documenting the contemporary gay and transgender experience of young Americans and their families through the lens of religion isn’t easy. First, there’s the matter of finding interview subjects. For the follow-up to his Oscar-shortlisted documentary For the Bible Tells Me So, which focused on the homophobia of the religious right, filmmaker Daniel Karslake met with about thirty different families before matching with the four subjects and their parents at the center of For They Know Not What They Do,

Review Roundup: Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods is a Timely, Must-See Epic

“Da 5 Bloods feels as timely as a minute ago,” writes the San Jose Mercury News‘s Randy Myers in his review. That often seems true of a Spike Lee joint. He has an uncanny ability to capture the moment in films that are often set in the past. He did as much with his stellar, Oscar-winning BlacKkKlansman, and now it appears he’s made another stunningly relevant film in Da 5 Bloods,

Watch The Final Face-Off in Jaws Ahead of the 45th Anniversary

We’re rapidly approaching the 45th anniversary of the film that turned summer into blockbuster season—Steven Spielberg‘s seminal Jaws. Before Jaws, summer was not synonymous with not Hollywood’s biggest, brashest blockbusters. Then on June 20, 1975, a 28-year old Spielberg delivered a film that changed the calculus of how movies are distributed. Adapted from Peter Benchley’s novel by Carl Gottlieb, Spielberg’s game-changing thriller about a rogue great white with a taste for human flesh marks the moment the industry changed.

A Fun GIF Reveals Into The Spider-Verse 2 Has Begun Production

For fans of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse—and there are millions of us—some good news almost snuck by us on Monday. The lead animator on the film’s highly anticipated sequel, Nick Kondo, quietly sent out a tweet alerting the world to the fact that Into the Spider-Verse 2 had begun production. We’ve known for quite a while now that the sequel to Sony’s Oscar-winning film was slated for an April 2022 release date,

The Many Lives of Indonesian Director Kamila Andini

Talking with multi-award-winning Indonesian filmmaker Kamila Andini might lead one to believe that she either possesses the power of time travel or that she’s in some way leading parallel lives, such is her unbelievably heavy workload.

When Indonesia imposed stay at home restrictions, Andini had just arrived back from Melbourne, Australia, where she had staged a theatrical performance, rich in local Indonesian traditional dance, of her 2017 film The Seen and Unseen (Sekala Niskala).