New The Mandalorian Clip + Premiere Reviews Hype Disney +’s Marquee Series
The Mandalorian is here. The first-ever live-action Star Wars series began streaming yesterday on Disney +. This means the reactions are in, and if you’ve been waiting to decide whether to fork over cash for another streaming service, you might be doing just that—especially if you’re a Star Wars fan. The Mandalorian is one of the big, marquee series that Disney has been working on, and the effort seems to have paid off in a big way...
Going Big Down Under: The 13th Annual Asia Pacific Screen Awards
Entering its 13th year, the Asia Pacific Screen Awards (APSA) is becoming one of the best places to capture some of the most unique voices in filmmaking today. The filmmakers whose work is selected and honored by APSA each year reflect the diversity of the vast region (spanning 70 countries) and the astonishing breadth of stories being told. Take last year’s winner for best director, Lebanese filmmaker Nadine Labaki (and read our interview with Labaki here), whose captivating feature Capernaum went on to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film...
Behold the Insane Fantasy Island Trailer
For a certain generation, when you hear Fantasy Island you immediately conjure up images of ABC’s hit show from the late 70s through 1984, and specifically, of Hervé Villechaize’s Tattoo and Ricardo Montalbán’s Mr. Roarke offering visitors to their remote Pacific idyll whatever fantasy they could possibly imagine. The catch was that those fantasies rarely turned out the way visitors expected them too. That Fantasy Island might be a part of the pop-culture pantheon, but what we have now,...
Producer Daniela Taplin Lundberg on Pushing Boundaries With Harriet and Honey Boy
She has produced more than 25 feature films that have moved audiences and in many cases also earned industry accolades. Indeed, Daniela Taplin Lundberg has demonstrated a knack for bringing to the screen soulful stories that deftly explore the human condition — all while keeping budgets in check and quality high.
Armed with filmmaking insights gleaned early on from her parents, producer Jonathan Taplin (Mean Streets) and actress Rosanna DeSoto (Stand and Deliver),...
How Last Christmas Production Designer Gary Freeman Got the Rom-Com Look Right
It’s fitting that the season’s first big holiday rom-com, a love letter to a George Michael Christmas song, is as much a testament to London’s enduring charms as it is to holiday-inspired selflessness, love, and cheer. Written by Emma Thompson and directed by Paul Feig, Last Christmas follows shambolic party girl Kate (Emilia Clarke) as she besmirches various charming London corners in permanently smudged eye makeup, dragging around her suitcase (having prevailed too much on exhausted friends,...
First Soul Trailer Reveals Next Pixar Film That’ll Likely Break Your Heart
In Pixar’s vast stable of excellent writers and directors, few so reliably break your heart as Pete Docter. The man behind Monsters, Inc., Up and Inside Out is now back with a new feature, Soul, and it looks like it has Docter’s winning formula of humor, heart, and intelligence.
Soul is centered on middle school band teacher and jazz lover Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx) whose dream has long been to become a real jazz musician...
Here Are All the Marvel Films and Disney + Series Coming Your Way
Marvel Studios president and chief creative officer Kevin Feige recently told Bloomberg that the upcoming Disney + series Loki absolutely does connect to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. “I’m not sure we’ve actually acknowledged that before. But it does [connect],” he said.
This isn’t surprising considering Feige has already gone on record to say that the Marvel series that will be exclusively on Disney’s new streaming service Disney + will all connect to the Marvel Cinematic Universe...
Elisabeth Moss vs See-Through Sociopath in Creepy The Invisible Man Trailer
Writer/director Leigh Whannell’s got a modern update on the H.W. Wells classic The Invisible Man, and it comes from powerhouse horror studios Blumhouse and Universal Studios. Universal has dropped the first trailer, which gives us the set-up and a few effective vignettes that make The Invisible Man one to watch. Who knew being hunted by an invisible sociopath could be so terrifying? Okay, that’s an obviously scary set-up, but this first glimpse at The Invisible Man is still surprisingly creepy...
Watch Mark Hamill React to his Original Star Wars Audition Tape
Watching the always game Mark Hamill watching himself is a uniquely delightful experience. The talented veteran of screens big and small knows full well that he’ll always be best known as Luke Skywalker, and here we get to watch Hamill watching himself—in what feels like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away—in his original audition tape for Star Wars: IV – A New Hope.
The year was 1976. Star Wars was but a glimmer in George Lucas’s eye,...
These Rescue Dogs Will Steal Your Heart in new Lady and the Tramp Featurette
While Disney’s upcoming live-action remake of Lady and the Tramp for their brand new streaming service Disney + features the voice work of a lot of famous actors—Tessa Thompson, Janelle Monáe, Sam Elliot, and Justin Theroux to name a few—yet the real stars of this new featurette are the rescue dogs that were a big part of the cast. It turns out that finding the right dogs to play your two leads, let alone the rest of the canine cast,...
Avengers: Endgame Executive Producer Trinh Tran on Capping Off a Decade’s Worth of Work
Last spring, Avengers: Endgame wrapped up Marvel’s Infinity War saga. The three-hour epic spanning space to Wakanda and back again impressed the critics, exceeded audience expectations, and raked in $2.78 billion in gross global earnings. The movie’s length was only one unusual development within the world of superhero fare, with Endgame representing the culmination of 11 years’ worth of work, bringing about the deaths of Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.),...
Colin Farrell Could be Your New Penguin in The Batman
No one said the Penguin had to look, well, like an actual penguin. For most of us (of a certain age), when we think of someone portraying the Penguin in a Batman movie, we see Danny DeVito in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns way back in 1992. Under Penguin-like prosthetics including a beakish nose, and making the most of his short stature, DeVito’s excellent take on one of Batman’s most iconic villains owed quite a bit to his flightless polar bird namesake...
The Irishman Cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto on Crafting Scorsese’s Masterpiece
Beloved auteur Martin Scorsese’s new film The Irishman has brought Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci together onscreen for the first time in 24 years and added Al Pacino, whom he’d never worked with before, building a cast that sounds truly compelling to lovers of great acting and great film. Based on “I Heard You Paint Houses,” the narrative nonfiction book by homicide detective Charles Brandt, the story centers on Frank Sheeran (De Niro) who,...
From Sunset Boulevard to Gemini Man With Paramount Archivist Andrea Kalas
Say you’re in charge of Paramount Pictures archives, and someone on your team unearths some unsigned sheet music from the era of silent films (yes, silent films included sheet music, more on that in a minute), what would you do? If you’re Andrea Kalas, Senior Vice President of Paramount’s Archives, you simply hand it over to your music archivist and ask her to play it.
“My music archivist has a piano in her office because she sometimes has to pick up a piece of sheet music to identify something,”...
Writer/Director Rian Johnson on Going From Star Wars to Knives Out
Director Rian Johnson wanted to do something “completely different” from Star Wars with his new movie, Knives Out (released Nov. 27).
“It’s not a heavy movie, it’s not like an incredibly dark movie or anything, it’s kind of going for just giving you a blast of fun,” he told The Credits at the Denver Film Festival screening. “So that was kind of refreshing honestly, to make and work on.”
Knives Out is a “whodunit” murder mystery starring a host of well-known actors including Jamie Lee Curtis,...
Motherless Brooklyn Costume Designer Amy Roth’s Period Perfect Detail
Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn takes the spirit, and many of the characters, from Jonathan Lethem’s excellent 1999 novel of the same name, but from there goes in an entirely new direction. That direction included setting the film some 45-years earlier, in the mid-1950s New York.
Lethem’s most indelible character, a gumshoe with Tourette’s named Lionel, remains (played by Norton), but the setting, story, and stakes are all different. In Norton’s telling, Lionel’s case involves a man so powerful,...
Ed Skrein & Luke Kleintank on Playing Legendary Fighter Pilots in Midway
Midway is a stirring tribute to the immeasurable courage of the men we now call part of the Greatest Generation. Premiering on November 8, Veteran’s Day weekend, it is the story of the early days of WWII, from Japan’s surprise attack on Pearl Harbor to America’s first major battle victory in the Pacific, the battle of Midway. The all-star cast includes Woody Harrelson as Admiral Chester Nimitz, Dennis Quaid as Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, and Aaron Eckhart as Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle...
How Costume Designer Ruth E. Carter Detailed the Look of Dolemite is My Name
If you ever meet Ruth E. Carter you’ll be enamored by her kindness. Her humbleness. The costume designer has seen her name pinned on multiple Spike Lee films like Malcolm X, Summer of Sam and Chi-Raq. She detailed Spielberg’s Amistad and Martin Luther King Jr. in Ava DuVernay’s Selma. In February of this year, she won the Academy Award in costume design for her meticulous efforts in Black Panther,...
Composer Alan Silvestri on Going Big in Avengers: Endgame
There’s hardly a movie-goer alive who hasn’t heard at least something of Alan Silvestri’s body of work. The composer started making music in Hollywood in the early 1970s, he’s scored all 17 of Robert Zemicki’s films—including the Back to the Future trilogy—and in 2011, he entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Captain America: The First Avenger. The following year, he scored The Avengers, and strains of that theme music can be heard in his newer work in the back-to-back epics capping off this superhero saga,...
Doctor Sleep Earning Praise as Excellent Follow-up to The Shining
While Andy Muschietti’s IT: Chapter Two understandably was dominating the Stephen King adaptation conversation, writer/director Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House)’s Doctor Sleep is earning some rave reviews now that critics have seen the film.
Doctor Sleep catches up with Danny Torrance (played here by Ewan McGregor) some forty years after the events of The Shining, in which,...
