Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc Goes Dark in First “Wake Up Dead Man” Teaser, a Horror-Tinged “Knives Out” Murder Mystery

“This was dressed as a miracle…it’s just a murder. And I solve murders.”

So says Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) in the middle of a minute-long teaser for his return as the southern detective in Rian Johnson’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, the third film in Johnson’s whodunit franchise. The teaser is a much darker affair than the previous two Knives Out installments, the last of which was a sun-baked mystery set on a Greek Island,

Lighting Alex Cross’s World: DP Brendan Steacy on Creating Cinematic TV for Aldis Hodge’s Determined Detective

Created by Ben Watkins for Amazon Prime, the crime thriller Cross feels more like top-tier cinema than a police procedural. Based on James Patterson’s “Alex Cross” novels, the series’ first season (it’s already been picked up for a second) is taut and moody, following D.C. homicide detective Alex Cross (Aldis Hodge) as he pursues a serial killer on the job while struggling in his personal life with the murder of his wife, Maria (Chauntée Schuler Irving).

Paul Giamatti on Finding Redemption in the Most Human “Black Mirror” Season 7 Episode

Seven seasons in, Charlie Brooker’s anthology series Black Mirror still gets under your skin. Usually, the load is heavy and dark, with characters’ lives driven to unambiguously worse places by technology we don’t yet have, but it feels like it may come frighteningly soon. But there’s one episode in this most recent season, Eulogy, starring Paul Giamatti, that stays in your mind for its emotional rewiring of one lonely man’s core memories.

How Cinematographer & Director Jessica Lee Gagné Shaped “Severance” Season 2’s Most Devastating Episode

After racking up 14 Emmy nominations for its first season in 2022, Severance returned this spring with a much-ballyhooed set of episodes that fortifies the show’s stature as a dread-saturated mind game drama on par with Twin Peaks and Lost. In the Apple TV+ + series, creepy experiments conducted by cult-like Lumon Industries center on split personalities (Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Zach Cherry, and Dichen Lachmann) wrestling with their “innie/outie”

From Converse to Converts: How “The Last of Us” Costume Designer Ann Foley Mapped Ellie’s Dark Journey Toward Vengeance

In a world decimated by zombies, human survivors don’t have much time to worry about fashion, which explains why form follows function in The Last of Us. In the HBO Max drama, which concluded its shocking second season with a May 25 finale, characters primarily focus on staying warm and as dry as possible. Most of our major players in season two had two goals: revenge and killing any of the infected who got in their way.

HBO’s “Harry Potter” Series Casts its Young Harry, Hermione, and Ron

A trio of young wizards has just earned admission to Hogwarts.

HBO’s Harry Potter series has found its Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley in Dominic McLaughlin, Arabella Stanton, and Alastair Scout, respectively. These three newcomers will take the roles made famous by Daniel Radcliffe as Harry, Emma Watson as Hermione, and Rupert Grint as Ron across eight feature films.

“After an extraordinary search led by casting directors Lucy Bevan and Emily Brockmann,

“The Handmaid’s Tale” DP Nicola Daley on Bringing the Story of Elizabeth Moss’s June Home

The sixth and final season of The Handmaid’s Tale picks up where it left off: on a train driving away from Gilead. June (Elisabeth Moss) is aboard, headed for Alaska, and so is her former tormentor, Serena (Yvonne Strahovski), the latter woman’s fortunes in Gilead having tumbled after the death of her husband, Fred (Joseph Fiennes). Each with a child in tow, June and Serena are seeking safety, but neither will keep it once they find it.

Tom Cruise and Christopher McQuarrie’s Final Dive: “The Final Reckoning” Writer/Director Takes Us Inside the Submarine Stunt That Caps a Franchise

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning closes out a behemoth chapter of writer/director Christopher McQuarrie’s career. For over a decade, he’s crafted missions for Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) to accept, starting with an uncredited rewrite on Ghost Protocol. He stepped behind the camera for his first film in the franchise as director, the muscular Rogue Nation, which included Cruise holding onto the side of an Airbus A400M as it took off and rose to 5,000 feet,

From Indie Darling to Action Hero: Katy O’Brian on Her Leap from “Love Lies Bleeding” to “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning”

If there’s a performer well-suited for the world of Mission: Impossible, it’s Katy O’Brian. The films are wildly ambitious technical endeavors – hugely physical and highly creative. Those are just a few of the characteristics that define O’Brian’s work, both on and off screen. On screen, she’s appeared in a galaxy far, far away in the world of Star Wars (The Mandalorian), mixed it up with superheroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania),

Building the First “Black Mirror” Sequel: How Production Designer Miranda Jones Upgraded the USS Callister Universe

Back in Season 4 of Black Mirror, an enthusiastic programmer, Nanette (Cristin Milioti), gets trapped in a virtual-reality game by its creator and her boss, Robert Daly (Jesse Plemons). Shy and self-minimizing in real life, Nanette’s in-game clone is creative and confident enough to lead the rest of her colleagues, also trapped as crew by Daly on the starship USS Callister, out through a wormhole. Black Mirror picks up the thread with a sequel in Season 7,

Fire Drill: “Final Destination Bloodlines” DP Christian Sebaldt & VFX Supervisor Nordin Rahhali on Creating a Scorcher

A quarter of a century after the first Final Destination movie landed in theaters, the beloved franchise is back with a vengeance. Final Destination: Bloodlines leans into two things: using practical effects wherever possible and paying homage to the franchise’s core concept—Death can’t be cheated. 

Final Destination: Bloodlines, now in theaters, follows college student Stefani Reyes (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) as she is plagued by a recurring nightmare that leads her to discover her family on Death’s list.

Crafting Continental Studios: How Julie Berghoff Built Seth Rogen’s Fictional Production Powerhouse in “The Studio”

In The Studio, the fast-talking movie executives who make and sell motion pictures to mass audiences might use “on the nose” as a pejorative. But sometimes, the obvious solution can’t be denied. For show creators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, there was only one place to set their behind-the-scenes look at how cinematic sausage gets made: Warner Bros. Studios.

The Burbank, California backlot serves as headquarters for the fictional Continental Studios.

Austin Butler & Zoë Kravitz Run for Their Lives in First Trailer for Darren Aronofsky’s “Caught Stealing”

The first trailer for Darren Aronofsky’s crime caper Caught Stealing has arrived, and it’s doozy. Austin Butler stars as Hank Thompson, a former high school baseball phenom turned bartender at a New York City dive. But don’t cry for Hank, his life is pretty good—New York is the greatest city on Earth, of course, and he’s got an amazing girlfriend named Yvonne (Zoë Kravitz), so things are going pretty well all things considered.

Ground-Level Galaxy: “Andor” DP Christophe Nuyens on Making the Most Visceral “Star Wars” Story Ever Told

The satisfactions of Tony Gilroy‘s Andor were such that many viewers comforted themselves when the series came to an end on May 13 by immediately turning to Rogue One, the 2016 feature film that Andor served as a prequel series for. Such has been the power of Andor—it’s been hard to let go, and there’s no better way to keep the rebel spirit alive than by following Cassian Andor’s (Diego Luna) story to its bittersweet conclusion.

One-Shot Wonders: How Casting Director Shaheen Baig Assembled the Perfect Cast for “Adolescence”

Co-created by and co-starring Stephen Graham, Netflix’s four-part series Adolescence has been a widely viewed hit for the streaming site. Nothing about casting the show, about an otherwise ordinary boy, Jamie (Owen Cooper), who has been influenced to such a malign degree by his online life that he becomes capable of murdering a classmate, Katie (Emilia Holliday), was standard operating procedure. Each episode is a single take, and finding an actor young enough to play the difficult role of thirteen year old Jamie and do so while shooting repeat one-shots was no small feat.

Rufus Sewell on Playing ‘The Good Guy’s Bad Guy’ in Netflix’s “The Diplomat”

A proper English thespian who originated a role in Tom Stoppard’s Laurence Olivier Award-winning play Arcadia fresh out of acting school, Rufus Sewell has since excelled as a character actor with leading man looks. Over the past few years he’s played a sadistic aristocrat (The Illusionist); a Nazi (The Man in the High Castle); an astrophysicist (Eleventh Hour);

No Escaping Success: “Final Destination Bloodlines” Resurrects Franchise With Scary Good Opening Weekend

Final Destination: Bloodlines has scared up a historic box office this past weekend, reinvigorating the franchise and once against dispatching characters in a series of increasingly ludicrous, brilliantly conceived set pieces.

Following its extremely strong reception from critics, audiences flocked to the theater to see the revival of the horror franchise from directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein, fueling a $51 million box office domestically and another $51 million overseas, settling at a $102 million total.

Designing Dance: Production Designer Bill Groom’s Meticulous Ballet World-Building in “Étoile”

In the world of ballet as dramatized in Étoile, prickly personalities throw tantrums one minute and dance with exquisite grace the next. Created by former dancer Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband Dan Palladino, the Amazon Prime series (now streaming) follows imagines a contentious talent swap between New York and Parisian dance companies desperate to create buzz about their new seasons.   

It doesn’t go well.

The quarrelsome characters include Cheyanne (Lou De Laâge) the world’s best ballet dancer and eco-activist who publicly denounces the company’s billionaire arms-dealer benefactor;

Lighting Love in LA: How “Nobody Wants This” DP Adrian Peng Correia Lit Netflix’s Coziest Rom-Com

The moment Nobody Wants This became one of Netflix’s most beloved romantic comedies comes at the end of the second episode. Rabbi Noah (Adam Brody) and podcaster Joanne (Kristen Bell) have been glancing off one another in an uneasy will-they-or-won’t-they start to their relationship that finally ends in a kiss over ice cream. But it’s not just any kiss, Joanne later tells her sister, Morgan (Justine Lupe), but the greatest kiss of her life.

“Mountainhead” Trailer Reveals “Succession” Creator Jesse Armstrong’s Film Debut

There’s no shortage of rich people acting terribly in the actual world, but for those of you who deeply miss the vile, venal shenanigans of Succession‘s Roy family—and we count ourselves among your number—the arrival of Mountainhead is going to do wonders for your soul.

Succession creator Jesse Armstrong is back with this new feature film, which finds four billionaire friends reuniting in a palatial mountain retreat to kick back and enjoy the orchards (upon orchards) of their “labor.”