#blackAF Costume Designer Michelle Cole on Re-Teaming With Kenya Barris
The creator of the hugely successful sitcom Black-ish, and its spin-offs Grown-ish and Mixed-ish, chose to step in front of the camera for #blackAF. The mockumentary series is Kenya Barris’ first project for Netflix. Based on his own life, Barris plays himself, alongside Rashida Jones as his wife Joya, in the show, which is now streaming. He’s an extremely wealthy TV showrunner with six kids,
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.
Watch Regina King & Damon Lindelof’s Peabody Award Acceptance Speech for Watchmen
HBO received four Peabody Awards this year, which tied it for the most of any cable network or streaming platform. The awards went to three of their very best series—Chernobyl, Succession, and Watchmen—and the documentary True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality. For Watchmen, one of 2019’s best shows, period (remember 2019?), creator Damon Lindelof and his star Regina King accepted the award in a charming video from their homes that we’ve embedded below for your viewing pleasure.
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).
HBO Reveals the Trailer for Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn
HBO has revealed the first look at Director Ivy Meeropol’s Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn, which focuses on the infamously callous, cruel attorney and hails from a director whose life was impacted by Cohn’s relentless drive for power at all costs. Meerpol’s grandparents were Jules and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of spying on behalf of the Soviet Union and were ultimately put to death at Sing Sing Correction Facility in New York in 1953.
Excellent! The First Trailer for Bill & Ted Face the Music is Finally Here
Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter are finally back together again in the first trailer for Bill & Ted Face the Music. The third film in the excellent trilogy, Bill & Ted Face the Music comes from a script from original screenwriters Ed Solomon and Chris Matheson, which sees our dynamic duo learning that only one of their songs holds the key to saving all life as we know it.
How Makeup Artist Louise McCarthy Helped Tattoo The King of Staten Island
As the makeup department head for The King of Staten Island, Louise McCarthy faced a unique challenge that she had never encountered before — creating laughs with tattoos.
Directed by Judd Apatow, the film stars Saturday Night Live alum Pete Davidson as Scott Carlin, a twenty-something slacker who has been struggling emotionally with the death of his father — a firefighter who lost his life in the line of duty when Scott was a child.
Expect the Unexpected in Christopher Nolan’s Tenet
It’s looking increasingly possible that movie theaters will re-open—with new codes of conduct in place for dealing with the still-present coronavirus—in time for Christopher Nolan’s Tenet to hit its July 17 release date. A Nolan film is always an event, but a Nolan film serving as the first major blockbuster to screen since the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered productions across the globe? That’s wild. And as we’ve written here before, the blessedly little we do know about Tenet has reinforced the notion that Nolan is going for something in the spirit of his 2010 sci-fi epic Inception,
Keanu Reeves & Carrie-Anne Moss on The Matrix 4
It was in mid-May when we heard the hopeful news that the cast of The Matrix 4 had signed 8-week extensions, suggesting that Warner Bros. was feeling optimistic that the cast and crew could get back to filming in the near future. Principal photography had begun on Lana Wachowski’s fourth installment in her groundbreaking sci-fi saga back in February, starting in San Francisco and then moving to Berlin in mid-March.
Arielle Kilker On Assembling a Largely Female Crew to Create Her Netflix Series Cheer
Arielle Kilker brings pretty much everything she’s learned in her career to bear in her Netflix‘s Cheer, the series she co-created, co-directed, edited, and produced. That includes the Emmy-nominated work she put in as editor on Chef’s Table and a supervising editor on the Peabody nominated Last Chance U. She’s also edited and written crime docuseries on projects for MSNBC, A&E, and PBS. For Cheer,
Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Ferguson Documentaries Will be Made Available for Free
If ever there was a time for American citizens—specifically white Americans—to learn about the history of racial segregation, oppression, and the reasons and uses for protest, that time is now. Actually, that time was decades ago, but for the purposes of this post, let’s focus on today. Tens of thousands of people all across the country have been in the streets protesting police brutality and systemic racism after the murder of George Floyd,
The Trailer For HBO’s Lovecraft Country Reveals a Series That’s Sadly Perfectly Timed
We all can see with our own eyes what’s happening in America right now. In the middle of a global pandemic that has devastated the world and the country, taking the lives of more than 100,000 Americans and disproportionately affecting Black, Hispanic, Latino and Indigenous communities, we are also witnessing protests against police brutality in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by members of the Minneapolis Police Department. In the entertainment industry,
Director Josephine Decker on Capturing American Gothic Writer Shirley Jackson’s Complex World
Layers of creative output communicate the enthrallingly choleric New England household and inner world belonging to mid-century American gothic and horror writer Shirley Jackson in Shirley, which screened at Sundance and the Berlinale prior to its streaming release on June 5. Working with Sarah Gubbins’ script based on Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel of the same name, the filmmaker Josephine Decker (Madeline’s Madeline, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely) catapults her audience into the dark Vermont home shared by Shirley (Elisabeth Moss) and her philandering professor husband Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) and two young lodgers,
Warner Bros. Has Made Just Mercy Available to Rent For Free
When we interviewed Just Mercy director Destin Daniel Cretton back in January, we, of course, had no idea that the world was going to change so drastically shortly after the film’s January 10 release. First, it was the spread of COVID-19, which has taken the lives of more than 100,000 Americans, disproportionately affecting Black, Hispanic, Latino and Indigenous communities. Then, it was the murder of an unarmed Black man, George Floyd,
