How Costume Designer Ruth E. Carter Detailed the Look of Dolemite is My Name
If you ever meet Ruth E. Carter you’ll be enamored by her kindness. Her humbleness. The costume designer has seen her name pinned on multiple Spike Lee films like Malcolm X, Summer of Sam and Chi-Raq. She detailed Spielberg’s Amistad and Martin Luther King Jr. in Ava DuVernay’s Selma. In February of this year, she won the Academy Award in costume design for her meticulous efforts in Black Panther,...
Composer Alan Silvestri on Going Big in Avengers: Endgame
There’s hardly a movie-goer alive who hasn’t heard at least something of Alan Silvestri’s body of work. The composer started making music in Hollywood in the early 1970s, he’s scored all 17 of Robert Zemicki’s films—including the Back to the Future trilogy—and in 2011, he entered the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with Captain America: The First Avenger. The following year, he scored The Avengers, and strains of that theme music can be heard in his newer work in the back-to-back epics capping off this superhero saga,...
Behold the Epic new Trailer for The Witcher
Now this should get folks excited. For all you awaiting a closer look at The Witcher, Netflix has released a new trailer that dives way deeper into the mythology of this story than the previous trailer. One of the buzziest projects at this past Comic-Con, The Witcher is based on the popular fantasy books by Andrzej Sapkowski and centers on Geralt of Rivia (Henry Cavill), a monster hunter more comfortable with the beasts he slays than the people he meets...
Doctor Sleep Earning Praise as Excellent Follow-up to The Shining
While Andy Muschietti’s IT: Chapter Two understandably was dominating the Stephen King adaptation conversation, writer/director Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House)’s Doctor Sleep is earning some rave reviews now that critics have seen the film.
Doctor Sleep catches up with Danny Torrance (played here by Ewan McGregor) some forty years after the events of The Shining, in which,...
Motherless Brooklyn Production Designer Beth Mickle on Bringing Back Old New York
Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn is a hugely ambitious adaptation of the seminal 1999 novel by Jonathan Lethem. While it borrows heavily from Lethem’s huge cast of characters—a gumshoe with Tourette’s named Lionel (played by Norton himself) and the folks he calls friends and foes alike—it charts its own path with a more or less completely original story. The era is no longer the late 90s but rather the 1950s New York. Lionel becomes ensnared in a web of corruption,...
How Us Costume Designer Kym Barrett Spooked Audiences With Jumpsuits
Happy Halloween! Quick, how many of you are donning red overalls and going as the deadly doppelgangers from Us? Even if writer/director Jordan Peele isn’t really into the idea, there’s no denying the power of this simple garb to instill terror. The monsters in Us are hatched not from labs or lagoons or outer space, but from all-American inequities, so it’s only fitting that they wear all-American denim. At least that’s how costume designer Kym Barrett figured it,...
It’s Official—the Game of Thrones Prequel House of the Dragon Coming to HBO
HBO has made it official in a tweet heard around the world (and Westeros)—they’ve ordered House of the Dragon, a Game of Thrones prequel dealing with the Targaryens, straight to series.
#HouseOfTheDragon, a #GameofThrones prequel is coming to @HBO.
The series is co-created by @GRRMSpeaking and Ryan Condal. Miguel Sapochnik will partner with Condal as showrunner and will direct the pilot and additional episodes...
How Joker’s Production Designer Brought New York Back to Its Past
If one thing is certain about Joker, director Todd Phillips’ half-billion-dollars-and-growing grossing dark take on the origin story of Batman’s chief supervillain, it’s that the film means about as many different things to its audience as there are people who’ve seen it. Is the Joker a compelling vigilante or simply a have-not gone mad? Are Arthur Fleck and Batman actually half-brothers? Does Fleck’s never-ending downward spiral speak for incels everywhere? (Absolutely not.) What’s certain is that Arthur is a more than down on his luck middle-aged stand-up comic wannabe working a miserable day job as a clown for hire in a particularly gritty take on Gotham City,...
Here’s Everything You Should Know Before Seeing Terminator: Dark Fate
A new clip from Paramount shows us two old frenemies back together again. We’re talking about Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) getting back to Terminator-killing business in this new Terminator: Dark Fate clip. Perhaps you’ve heard that Dark Fate is the best installment in the Terminator franchise since James Cameron’s game-changing 1991 hit T2: Judgement Day? Perhaps you’re also wondering what you should know before you go see Dark Fate,...
Universal Archivist Jeff Pirtle Knows his Monsters
The world of the Hollywood studio archivist is one in which you must keep one eye towards the future and one eye back to the past. You’re responsible for some of the most coveted assets in the film world, but you are always looking ahead—to upcoming productions and fresh opportunities—for those assets to once again become the stuff of movie magic. Jeff Pirtle, Director, Archives & Collections at NBCUniversal, in both temperament and training, is uniquely suited for this role...
Creating the Landscape & Soundscape of Harriet‘s World
Although her appearance on the $20 bill has been predictably delayed by the current administration, Harriet Tubman is still a recurring presence in American culture. An escaped slave herself, she became, as the New Yorker noted a couple of years back, “the most famous conductor” on the Underground Railroad, which itself became the stuff of Pulitzer Prizes in Colson Whitehead’s alternate history novel of the same name.
Now Tubman arrives in theaters (on November 1), with Cynthia Erivo playing the American heroine in the eponymously titled Harriet,...
The Mandalorian‘s Second Trailer Highlights Intense Action, Awesome Creatures
If you’re looking to punch up the second trailer to your hotly anticipated new Star Wars show (the first live-action series from the franchise, by the by), you can’t do any better than with dialogue from Werner Herzog. His inimitable German-accented English is the first thing we hear in The Mandalorian‘s second full trailer. He asks whether or not the galaxy is a safer place since the revolution. The question is posed over the image of Stormtrooper helmets on pikes...
Chance the Rapper Highlights Hilarious SNL Short Space Mistakes
When SNL wants to skewer a film genre, they often do so with one of their brilliant, expertly crafted digital shorts. This is what they did with their recent short Grouch, which had some fun with Todd Phillips’ Joker by imagining a dark and gritty origin story for Sesame Street‘s Oscar the Grouch. If you haven’t watched it yet, we highly suggest you do—you’ll never look at Sesame Street the same way again...
How Us Cinematographer Michael Gioulakis Captured Doppelgangers in the Dark
“I have an aversion to moonlight, at least in movies.” So says cinematographer Michael Gioulakis, who had ample opportunity to capture dark spaces in Jordan Peele‘s critically acclaimed horror film Us. Peele’s follow-up to Oscar-nominated thriller Get Out casts Lupita Nyog’o as a high-strung mother who’s being stalked, along with her husband (Winston Duke) and kids (Shahadi Wright Joseph and Evan Alex), by homicidal doppelgangers. In one of the movie’s spookiest night-time shots,...
Costume Designer Judianna Makovsky on Ending Avengers: Endgame on a Muted Note
What do you wear when your schedule includes traveling through the quantum realm, reversing half of humanity being killed off, and attending the funeral of one of your most iconic comrades? In Avengers: Endgame, all the remaining characters from the Marvel universe get together to undo super-villain Thanos‘s work in the preceding Infinity War when his successful collection of five infinity stones let him wipe out half of life on Earth...
Jojo Rabbit Costume Designer Mayes Rubeo on Outfitting Taika Waititi’s Vision
Writer/director Taika Waititi, who is half Polynesian, half Jewish, had a very clear vision for his new film Jojo Rabbit. Inspired by the novel “Caging Skies” by Christine Leunens, this coming-of-age satire follows German boy Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) during the later part of World War II, as he shifts the opinions and beliefs with which the Nazi party has indoctrinated him. This happens through the careful, loving guidance of his mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson), and the developing friendship with the Jewish girl Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie) he discovers his mom has hidden in their house...
Maleficent: Mistress of Evil Screenwriter Linda Woolverton on Shaping Strong Female Leads
She’s back! Maleficent, the great horned fairy, is lighting up the screen once again in Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, the sequel to the 2014 Disney hit. Angelina Jolie and Elle Fanning return as Maleficent and Aurora, respectively, and are joined on this journey by Michelle Pfeiffer, who portrays the villainous Queen Ingrith. When Aurora becomes engaged to the queen’s son, Ingrith sets in motion a diabolical plan to take the Moors, the fairylands Aurora rules,...
Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood Returning to Theaters With Bonus Footage
It seems like a million years ago because time hasn’t behaved normally since around 2016, but, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood was a really interesting, fun film that came out this summer. “Fun” in the Tarantino sense; which means intense, complicated, and curious. Tarantino once again played with actual history—this time Hollywood in 1969 and the murder of Sharon Tate and her friends by the Manson family—and created something indelible. Now, Sony Pictures has revealed that the auteur’s love letter to a bygone Hollywood is being re-released,...
The Final Antlers Trailer is a Freaky, Near Wordless Horror Masterpiece
Look, we’re not saying co-writer and director Scott Cooper’s Antlers is a masterpiece, but we are saying this trailer is fairly perfect. Nearly wordless (there’s a single, crucial utterance towards the very end) and fully riveting, the new, official trailer for Cooper’s atmospheric horror flick, which takes two great actors (Keri Russell and Jesse Plemmons) and places them in a deeply disturbing small-town Oregon nightmare, is simply fantastic.
Cooper (Hostiles) not only has those two excellent actors to work with,...
Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker’s Final Trailer is all About Scale
There was a lot to parse in the final trailer for J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. We did a bit of dissection work when we broke down the new images that Disney released shortly thereafter. We were mostly wrapping our heads around Rey (Daisy Ridley) and Kylo Ren (Adam Driver)’s complicated relationship, which has included brutal lightsaber duels and fighting side-by-side. In the final trailer,...
