“Avatar 3” Will Introduce Evil Fire Na’vi
Avatar: The Way of Water greatly expanded the world of the alien planet of Pandora (technically, it’s an extrasolar moon) and its native inhabitants, the Na’vi. In the first film, James Cameron introduced us to the Omaticaya, the Na’vi forest tribe. In The Way of Water, with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), and their family having to flee the forest for the coast, we met the ocean-based Metkayina tribe. Both the Omaticaya and Metkayina tribes are peace-loving and noble,...
“M3GAN” Featurette Introduces You to The Scariest Toy Since Chucky
Let’s take a moment to listen to the way the cast and director Gerard Johnstone describe the titular robot toy in M3GAN. “Best friend,” says star Violet McGraw. “Homeschool teacher,” describes Johnstone. “The ideal companion,” says star Allison Williams. Producer James Wan says, “she has so much personality.” Co-star Jen Van Epps enthuses, “She’s just this effervescent beaming ray of light.” And then, after a beat, Epps adds, “until she goes batsh*t crazy.”
M3GAN is a robot built by Gemma (Williams),...
“Evil Dead Rise” Teaser Reveals Return to Iconic Horror Franchise
“Mommy loves you to death.” This is the hard-to-beat tagline for writer/director Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, a return to the horror franchise started by Sam Raimi. A new teaser for Cronin’s film reveals a little girl named Kassie (Nell Fisher) tip-toeing to the front door in the middle of the night. Who does she spy on the other side through the peephole? Her own mother, splattered in blood, looking quite unwell. “You don’t look so good, mom,”...
Marvel’s Stan Lee Documentary Will Explore the Life & Legacy of a Legend
For all you Marvel fans, you might have missed this announcement over the holidays, and it’s a big one—there’s a Stan Lee documentary coming to Disney+ in 2023. Marvel revealed the news on what would have been Lee’s 100th birthday on December 28. Stan Lee will explore the legendary comic book writer, editor, publisher, and producer’s life and legacy, which includes some of the most iconic characters of all time. Just think about the superheroes Lee co-created; Spider-Man,...
“Babylon” Production Designer Florencia Martin Conjures Hollywood’s Decadent Early Days
She designed Paul Thomas Anderson’s flashback to 1970s-era L.A. in Licorice Pizza and shaped the fifties look inhabited by Marilyn Monroe in Blonde. Now, production designer Florencia Martin takes viewers back to 1920s Hollywood in Oscar-winning writer/director Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, which immerses Margot Robbie’s Nellie LaRoy and Brad Pitt’s Jack Conrad in the gloriously decadent early days of silent film. Chazelle, a stickler for authenticity, shot at Old Hollywood locations, including Busby Berkeley’s former home,...
“I Wanna Dance with Somebody” Composer Chanda Dancy on Scoring Whitney Houston’s Complex Life
When the shortlist for the 2023 Oscars was announced, composer Chanda Dancy was included for her work on the film Devotion. If she is nominated, she’ll make history as the first Black female composer to be nominated for an Academy Award. Dancy brings that winning streak into 2023 with her score for the new film Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance with Somebody, directed by Kasi Lemmons and starring Naomi Ackie as Houston...
Why Every Digital Costume in “Avatar: The Way of Water” Really Exists
Daring adventures, illuminating discoveries, and unbelievable wonders are hallmarks of James Cameron’s blockbuster films. In trademark fashion, Avatar: The Way of Water is a technological feat that developed new filmmaking tools in production. Yet, costume designer Deborah L. Scott (Titanic, Back to the Future, Avatar, E.T.) said that is all secondary to Cameron’s driving force. “Jim doesn’t like sci-fi that much,” she noted. “You can see it even in Aliens...
Best of 2022: “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” Hair Department Head Camille Friend on The Sequel’s Stunning Looks
Both 2018’s Black Panther and this year’s Wakanda Forever have hugely impacted popular culture, not least by expanding the acceptance and expression of Afro-Futurism in everything from fashion and hairstyles to architecture. Both production designer Hannah Beachler and costume designer Ruth E. Carter won Oscars for their work on the first film and are in the running for a return to the podium with Wakanda Forever.
For Black Panther,...
Best of 2022: How The “Babylon” Sound Team Built a Sonic Bacchanal
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
The opening sequence to Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (in theaters today) hits you like one of the many lines of powder its characters will ingest. It’s eye-opening, choreographed chaos, leaving you with an intensely euphoric feeling – quite fitting for a story that revisits Hollywood’s infancy of the 1920s and ‘30s when La La Land was a sandbox of drugs,...
Best of 2022: “The Woman King” Director Gina Prince-Bythewood on Her Singular, Sweeping Historical Epic
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
When director Gina Prince-Bythewood’s most recent film, The Old Guard, premiered on Netflix in July of 2020, the critically acclaimed action drama became one of the top 10 original launches in the platform’s history. Prince-Bythewood is following that with one of the most anticipated films of 2022, the historical epic The Woman King,...
Best of 2022:”Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” Animation Supervisor Brian Leif Hansen Packs Puppets With Emotion
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
Inside a nondescript warehouse on the outskirts of Portland, a little boy made of wood galvanized efforts by stop motion filmmakers for three years before emerging now to wow moviegoers in Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. This dark stop-motion iteration of Carlo Collodi’s 1882 tale, in theaters and streaming on Netflix, takes place in 1930’s Italy,...
Best of 2022: “Nope” Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema on Capturing the Epic Scope of Jordan Peele’s Latest
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
Cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema failed to get into two Dutch film schools, so he worked in a soap factory, played in a band, and survived unemployment as a self-described “slacker” before finding his creative footing at a renowned cinema academy in Lodz, Poland. Since then, he’s made up for lost time through collaborations with A-list auteurs,...
Best of 2022: “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” Production Designer Hannah Beachler Reveals Her Guide to Talokan
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
When Chadwick Boseman died unexpectedly after leading the cast as the title character in 2018’s Black Panther, it shocked and saddened the world. There was, understandably, some doubt as to whether a sequel could succeed without him. What director and co-screenwriter Ryan Coogler did with Wakanda Forever, however, honored the actor’s legacy while balancing the excitement of a Marvel superhero-driven adventure with a story centered on resilience in the face of loss. ...
Best of 2022: “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” Writer/Director Rian Johnson Unpeels His Whodunit
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
When released in 2019, Rian Johnson’s star-studded, deliciously delightful who-done-it Knives Out was met with universal acclaim and became a smash hit. In it, star Daniel Craig shed all remnants of his Bond persona to play the quirky Southern genius detective Benoit Blanc in a performance so winning and a film so enjoyable even a character’s sweater became a sensation...
Best of 2022: How the “Top Gun: Maverick” Sound Team Ingeniously Captured Raw Emotion Mid-Flight
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
Mark Weingarten is no stranger to navigating the challenges of a production sound mixer. Over his accomplished career, Weingarten’s mixed on Christopher Nolan’s WWII epic Dunkirk, traveled to another dimension in Interstellar, captured the spirit of Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, and tracked the drama behind The Social Network and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button...
Best of 2022: “The Batman” Cinematographer Greig Fraser on Finding Light in the Darkness
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
At a gripping three hours, The Batman isn’t so much an endurance test as it is a lengthy visual puzzle, one that takes place primarily after hours. Director Matt Reeves’s take on Batman (Robert Pattinson) may be the franchise’s most disaffected nocturnal not-so-superhero yet. Working, brooding, and convening with Alfred (Andy Serkis) from dusk ’til dawn,...
Best of 2022: “Everything Everywhere All At Once” Actress Stephanie Hsu on Landing the Role of a Lifetime
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
It’s very difficult to describe Everything Everywhere All At Once, the new genre-busting indie from writer/directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, collectively known as Daniels. It’s a multiverse sci-fi brain twister, an action movie with Hong Kong-style fighting, and a moving family drama about a mother and daughter. It’s about existential dread,...
Best of 2022: MPA Creator Award Recipient Writer/Director Nikyatu Jusu on her Stunning Debut Feature “Nanny”
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
Deploying West African folklore to interrogate the myth of the American dream, writer/director Nikyatu Jusu‘s debut feature Nanny is a remarkably assured genre-melding experience. Nanny also gives viewers something that’s sadly still quite rare—it evocatively places us inside the head, heart, and aching soul of Aisha (Anna Diop), an undocumented Senegalese immigrant trying to navigate the mystifying codes of the United States to create a stable place to bring her son,...
Best of 2022: “The Woman King” DP Polly Morgan on Lensing Viola Davis in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Thrilling Epic
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
A sweeping historical epic that blends intimacy and adventure is the kind of movie that The Woman King cinematographer Polly Morgan dreamed about making while growing up in West Sussex, England.
“My earliest memories were Close Encounters and Empire of the Sun. Spielberg captured my imagination like many of my generation,” said Morgan over the phone from the Toronto International Film Festival,...
Best of 2022: Getting Sea Sick With “Triangle of Sadness” Production Designer Josefin Åsberg
It’s that time of year—we look back on a few of our favorite interviews from 2022 in our annual year-end list.
Satirical black comedy Triangle of Sadness, writer/director Ruben Östlund’s first English-language feature, debuted at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or. The Swedish auteur is known for 2014’s Force Majeure and The Square, which in 2017 also won the Palme d’Or and was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar. ...
