David France on the Terror Facing the LGBTQ+ Community in Welcome to Chechnya

Oscar-nominated filmmaker and former investigative journalist David France has a new documentary, Welcome To Chechnya, debuting on HBO June 30th, which has already won multiple awards on the film festival circuit. His film reveals the ongoing danger to LGBTQ Chechens targeted for persecution and death in a campaign to ‘cleanse’ the republic. France follows the activities of heroic activists, and profiles the people they hope to rescue out of harm’s way,

New Book Will Reveal How Christopher Nolan Created The Mysterious Tenet

You have to hand it to Christopher Nolan. His films are so consistently epic, so gleefully ambitious, that even before his films premiere they have us all asking how’d he do it? Whether it was rebooting the Batman franchise with his beloved Dark Knight trilogy, creating a heist movie like no other in his dreamy sci-fi masterpiece Inception, or taking us beyond the stars in his space drama Interstellar, 

Composer Hans Zimmer is Crafting Something Really Special For Dune

Hans Zimmer is a joyous man. We learned that when we interviewed him at the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. He was there to talk about scoring Steve McQueen’s heist remake Widows, yet we ended up talking about a lot more, including his ever-shifting methods, depending on the director he’s working with. He was exceedingly humble for being one of the world’s most famous film composers. He was,

Netflix Releases Ravishing First Trailer For Their Animated Musical Over The Moon

There are trailers, and then there are trailers. The first glimpse at Netflix’s Over the Moon definitely falls into the latter category. While one can never be totally certain about these things, it sure does feel like the streaming giant has an absolute smash on its hands here.

Directed by animation legend and Oscar-winner Glen Keane (you can read our two-part interview from a few years back with Keane here and here), 

Into the Unknown: Making Frozen 2 Trailer Reveals Disney+’s New Docu-Series

It’s not so often we get a proper documentary on the making of an animated film, which makes Disney+’s Into the Unknown: Making Frozen 2 an intriguing new entrant. Now we get to see how the most successful animated film of all time was crafted, which, at The Credits, is what we do every day. It’s why we interview folks like Frozen 2 composer Christophe Beck and head of special effects Marlon West.

Foundation Trailer Reveals Apple TV+’s Hugely Ambitious Sci-Fi Epic

If you’re a fairly new streaming service and you’re prepared to go all-in on an epic sci-fi series, you could hardly pick better source material than legendary sci-fi author Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series. In fact, many consider it the greatest work of science fiction ever produced. This is precisely what Apple TV+ has done, and the first trailer for their adaptation reveals a hugely ambitious new show with excellent performers and the kind of big-budget production design and visual effects we now want and expect from our television series.

Director Ivy Meeropol on Her Deeply Personal HBO Documentary About Roy Cohn

After Ivy Meeropol directed her powerful and deeply personal HBO documentary Heir to an Execution (2004) about her grandparents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed for alleged espionage in 1953 with prosecutor Roy Cohn leading the charge, she felt she’d finally put the subject behind her.

“I thought for years that a film about Roy Cohn was in order, that it should be done and I couldn’t believe no one had done it.

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,

Composer Sherri Chung on Batwoman, Riverdale & More

Composer Sherri Chung faced the production freeze due to COVID-19 with equal parts equanimity and patience. Because her work is often done alone, the self-quarantine aspect of the pandemic hasn’t changed her process all that much. Chung has a studio where she has her own recording stage that can fit about 15 players, so that part of her process has been shuttered, but the fact that she was already on a natural hiatus, as she described it,

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.