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).
She’s now mid-edit on her latest feature film Yuni,...
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. Gnarly...
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. You know what happened next—production was halted on this and essentially every other film due to the coronavirus pandemic...
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, Kilker decided to move away from stories about women who had been victims of crimes—with the focus often on the men who’d harmed them—to focus on a series that put women front and center...
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, an unarmed Black man who was asphyxiated,...
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, it’s for this reason that Warner Bros...
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, by members of the Minneapolis Police Force,...
How Space Force Production Designer Susie Mancini Channeled Stanley Kubrick
Steve Carell is at the center of the new 10-episode Netflix series Space Force, which he co-created with Greg Daniels (The Office) and is streaming now. The inspiration for the show is the real US Space Force that was formed last year to ensure American military supremacy in space and was the brainchild of Donald Trump. The series, which also stars John Malkovich, Lisa Kudrow, and Ben Schwartz, is part political satire and part workplace comedy...
Judy & Punch Writer/Director Mirrah Foulkes Turns the Tables on Her Infamous Puppets
Judy & Punch kicks off with a male marionette thrashing a female doll-on-strings as a crowd of 17th-century tavern goers roars with delight. The camera soon shifts to witches, hangings, infanticide, beatings, magic brews, and lies as filmmaker Mirrah Foulkes bloodily re-imagines how the western world’s most famous pair of hand puppets got their start.
Set in and around an English village shortly after the Bubonic Plague, Judy & Punch (June 5, digital download available here) casts Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland,...
Josh Gad & Kristen Bell on Their New Animated Musical Series Central Park
Before he was an adorable singing snowman named Olaf, Josh Gad was a Tony-nominated Broadway star (“The Book of Mormon”) and before that, he was a devoted fan of old-fashioned Broadway musicals, you know, the kind that begin with a big “I wish” song and use the music to reveal character and move the story along. He was also a fan of New York’s Central Park. And the animated TV series Bob’s Burgers...
Mission: Impossible 7 Eyeing a Return to Filming in September
The cast and crew of Mission: Impossible 7 have their own difficult mission ahead of them; restarting their massive, complicated shoot after production was shuttered due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Speaking with the BBC (via Deadline), first assistant director Tommy Gormley said he believed that filming would begin again in September, and be wrapped by May 2021. The film is directed once again by Christopher McQuarrie, and stars, of course,...
Paul Dano Praises Matt Reeves Script for The Batman
One of the (many) unusual byproducts of the COVID-19 pandemic suspending productions all across the globe is how it’s allowed the cast and crew to reflect on their projects before they’re even halfway done principal photography. This ability to assess a work-in-progress is not something filmmakers usually do publicly. This is what’s happened on Matt Reeves The Batman, and it’s led to some pretty intriguing quotes from Reeves himself, as well as members of his cast...
Joe Bob Briggs Declares This the Summer of the Drive-In
Two summers before a nightmarish virus began sweeping across the globe and altering our reality like a horror B movie, Joe Bob Briggs revived his long-running campaign to keep the drive-in alive. The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs premiered in July of 2018 on AMC’s horror streaming service Shudder. The special was so popular, it crashed the site. Briggs said he was initially skeptical and envisioned the show airing once “for nostalgia sake.” Yet,...
