New Frozen II Trailer Reveals a Quest to the Source of Elsa’s Powers
Without Anna (voiced by Kristen Bell), there really can’t be an Elsa (Idina Menzel). Not the Elsa we grew to know and love in the first, game-changing Frozen (2013). Now a new Frozen II trailer released by Disney highlights just how important their sibling bond is, both for the sisters themselves and the larger world they’re a part of it. Elsa is as powerful as ever, but without Anna, she could lose herself to her own abilities...
How Ad Astra’s Sound Team “Weirded Things Up”
When the aural landscape of a film or television series aims to heighten the story the effort is usually dialed in subliminally. The audience doesn’t even realize what’s happening they’re just captivated by what’s in front of them. In Ad Astra, a 20th Century Fox film directed by James Gray (The Lost City of Z), sound looked to do this very thing with an added hook.
“James talked about the sound having a realistic approach but also a psychological one,”...
New El Camino Teaser Tracks Jesse Pinkman After Breaking Bad
So what happened to Jess Pinkman (Aaron Paul) after the brutal, bloody final events in Breaking Bad? For lovers of AMC’s groundbreaking series, you know that Breaking Bad ended with a shootout to end all shootouts. Walter White (Bryan Cranston) in his final act of depraved decency, free his onetime partner/longtime victim Jesse Pinkman from his enslavement at the hands of a bunch of Neo-Nazis. It took a remote-controlled machine gun and Walter’s own life to do it,...
Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Big Night & the Rest of Your 2019 Emmy Winners
The 2019 Primetime Emmy Awards delivered some surprises, so catharsis, and bestowed much-deserved awards on some of the industry’s brightest new stars, and the night did not go entirely as expected. The night was supposed to be dominated by Game of Thrones, which garnered a record-setting 32 Emmy-nominations. It did take home the coveted Best Drama Series but won in only one other major category; Best Supporting Actor to Peter Dinklage (it won 12 Emmys in total for the night)...
Olivia Colman is the Queen in The Crown Trailer
Finally, our first good look at the great Olivia Colman in the role of Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix’s The Crown. Colman steps in for Claire Foy, who portrayed the younger Queen for the first two seasons. Colman is coming off winning an Oscar for Best Actress for her portrayal of another Queen—the occasionally bilious Queen Anne in last year’s fantastic The Favourite. In The Crown, Colman’s playing a much more sedate,...
How the VFX Team Behind Ad Astra Achieved Deep Space
How do you conceptualize a future that feels familiar yet doesn’t exist? For, visual effects supervisor Allen Maris and the entire crew detailing director James Gray’s vision behind Ad Astra, that question became a guiding theme.
The 20th Century Fox sci-fi thriller puts Brad Pitt in a spacesuit and asks him to save mankind. Not from a zombie inducing lethal virus but from a threat deep in our solar system...
Downton Abbey Director Michael Engler on Bringing the Crawleys to the Big Screen
Downton Abbey is a haven. In this starchy refuge, worry whether Tom Branson (Allen Leech) will be able to keep his long out of sight Irish Republicanism in check in front of two guests who have invited themselves to stay the night, King George V (Simon Jones) and Queen Mary (Geraldine James), represents the height of concern. Coming in just behind on the worry scale is the question whether Mary (Michelle Dockery) will act on her impetus to give up on Downton,...
Blake Lively is an Avenging Angel in the Gripping The Rhythm Section Trailer
Director Reed Morano’s is a rising star, and her latest film looks as unnerving and thrilling as her work on The Handmaid’s Tale. The Rhythm Section follows Blake Lively‘s Stephanie Patrick after a horrific accident takes the lives of her entire family. The accident in question is a plane crash, something that everyone fears, 99.9% of people never have to deal with, and one can do nothing about. Unless, of course, you find out the plane crash was no accident,...
The First Teaser for Uncut Gems Reveals Adam Sandler in Safdie Brothers’ Latest Anxiety Attack
A Safdie Brothers movie is not for the faint of heart. Then again, it is for the kind of person who loves bold, original filmmaking—someone okay, perhaps even happy with—having all sorts of conflicted feelings about the protagonist and his aims. Someone who can stand being a little (okay, a lot) anxious during a film.
Their last movie, Good Times, starred Robert Pattinson as Connie Nikas, and troubled young man whose insane journey to free his younger brother from jail was one of 2017’s most ambitious,...
What We Do In the Shadows Cinematographer DJ Stipsen on the Art of Vampire Stupidity
What We Do in the Shadows, based on the feature film of the same name from Taikia Waititi and Jemaine Clement, is unlike any vampire show on TV. Like the film, the show is staged as a documentary of four vampires who have been living together for centuries. In the series, which airs on FX, our vampires live on Staten Island (in the film they were based in Wellington, New Zealand, Waititi and Clement’s home country)...
Production Designer Donal Woods on Settings Old and New in Downton Abbey
Picking up a year and a half after the end of the series’ sixth and final season, the crux around which Downton Abbey the movie turns is right there in the trailer: King George V (Simon Jones) and Queen Mary (Geraldine James) are going to spend a night at Downton during a Yorkshire tour. The news comes in the form of a letter announcing their impending visit — it seems royalty is free to invite themselves to stay in aristocratic homes as necessary — throwing the household into a proportionately starchy frenzy...
Michael B. Jordan’s Superhero Series Raising Dion Releases First Trailer
Executive producer and star Michael B. Jordan is one of the driving forces behind Raising Dion, a new superpowered series on Netflix based on the comic by Dennis Liu (who’s also on board as a director). Raising Dion follows the Warren family, whose son (the titular Dion, played by Ja’Siah Young) is not your average tyke. In fact, Dion’s got some major superpowers, and his mom Nicole (played by Alisha Wainwright) needs to figure out how to protect him...
New Knives Out Trailer Highlights Rian Johnson’s Critically Acclaimed Murder Mystery
Rian Johnson‘s star-studded murder mystery was a big hit at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it had its world premiere. You’ve got your victim, the wealthy crime novelist Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer). You’ve got your suspects (a who’s who of great actors, including Chris Evans, Michael Shannon, Ana de Armas, and Toni Collette), and you’ve got your peculiar detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) on the case. The reviews coming out of TIFF were very enthusiastic...
George R. R. Martin Dishes on the Targaryen-Centered Game of Thrones Prequel
With a new streaming platform seemingly launching every day, and hundreds of content creators flooding the zone with new stories, why couldn’t there be multiple Game of Thrones prequels on air? This is the question George R. R. Martin posed in a recent blog post. Granted, the creator of “A Song of Ice and Fire” fantasy series that started it all can’t claim he’s an objective voice on the subject, but he does have a point...
Spider-Man’s Alter Ego ‘The Night Monkey’ Gets His Own Trailer
One of the more enjoyable jokes at Peter Parker (Tom Holland)’s expense in Spider-Man: Far From Home was when he was called the Night Monkey. He earned the nickname when he donned a new suit to protect his Spidey identity while in Europe. Now that Far From Home is available on digital download today (with the Blu-ray coming on October 1), Sony has released a brand new trailer just for The Night Monkey.
Check out The Night Monkey trailer here:
Ever since the Marvel/Sony spat over Spider-Man became a thing,...
The First Birds of Prey Poster is Gleefully Loco
One of the most exciting newcomers to the world of superheroes and supervillains alike appeared on the big screen way back in 2016 in David Ayer’s Suicide Squad. While we are definitely living in a Marvel Cinematic Universe, this particular character hailed from the pages of DC comics, and later in her animated avatar in cartoons. She was often playing second banana to a better-known lunatic and her nominal main squeeze, who you may have heard of (he goes by the Joker)...
Hustlers Cinematographer on Capturing Glamour, Grime, & J. Lo’s Knockout Performance
Writer/director Lorene Scafaria’s Hustlers, based on a gangbusters piece of reporting from The Cut‘s Jessica Pressler, follows a group of dancers-turned-criminals from New York’s famous strip club Scores. Although “criminals” in the Robin Hood sense—sort of. Sure, the two women at the center of the story don’t give their pilfered riches to the poor, but you’re rooting for them nonetheless. It also helps that they’re embodied by a sensational Jennifer Lopez as Ramona and the rising star Constance Wu as Destiny...
How Mindhunter’s Composer Manipulates Sound to Create an Unexpected Score
What kind of music describes the FBI’s early attempts to understand the mind of a serial killer? According to Mindhunter, the David Fincher-produced Netflix series based on Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit, by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker, the auditory embodiment of this process swings between a creepily high-pitched yet restrained clamor, and quiet, moody intonations, like the rumbling of an ominous wind. The instruments used in these ambient compositions seem impossible for a lay viewer to place,...
It’s a Multitude of Paul Rudds in Netflix’s new Series Living With Yourself
Paul Rudd has been shrunken (Ant-Man). Paul Rudd has been enlarged (Captain America: Civil War, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Avengers: Endgame). But now, Paul Rudd has been multiplied. For those of you who love Rudd—and that’s just about everyone—this embarrassment of riches that is multiple Rudds will suit you just fine. Such is the bounty thanks to the premise for his new Netflix series Living With Yourself, which sees a struggling man named Miles (Rudd) enter into a cutting-edge spa treatment in order to improve his life...
Rey Appears Ready to Fight in new Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Image
When Disney revealed that the title to the 9th and final film in the epic Skywalker saga was Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the speculation began in earnest. Who is this Skywalker being referenced? Is it Rey (Daisy Ridley)? And if so, does that mean what we learned about her parentage in Rian Johnson’s excellent The Last Jedi was false? You’ll recall that in that film, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) told Rey her parents were nobodies,...
