Pixar’s New Original Film Onward Revealed in Delightful new Trailer
It’s always big news when Disney-Pixar releases a new film. Onward marks the first non-sequel release in a while—three years to be exact, since the gorgeous Coco—and focuses on a pair of teenage elf brothers going off on a journey in search of magic. Monsters University director Dan Scanlon conceived of the project, writing and directing the film. Your stars are Tom Holland and Chris Pratt,...
Behold the Gorgeous Trailer for Netflix’s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
The first trailer for Netflix‘s The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance has lots of folks very excited. For those of us who grew up in the 80s, it offers a near-perfect blend of old school practical effects and today’s modern digital technology. For the millions of people who grew up loving the creations of Jim Henson, the closest we’ve ever come to a modern day Walt Disney, this Age of Resistance trailer is like a clarion call to return to childhood,...
Sly Stallone is Back for one Last Fight in Rambo: Last Blood Trailer
John Rambo is back.
Sylvester Stallone reprises one of his most iconic characters in what we think might be his final turn as John Rambo. If we’re to believe the title, Rambo: Last Blood could mark the conclusion to the emotionally scarred Vietnam vet’s long journey from 1982’s First Blood all the way through 2008’s Rambo. Last Blood is the fifth film in the franchise and sees our titular hero back in America after many deadly years overseas...
How Smart Instincts Led Booksmart Producer to Actress-Turned Director Olivia Wilde
The original Booksmart script started making the rounds in Hollywood ten years ago after writers Emily Halpern and Sarah Haskins imagined two straight-A high school girls gone wild the night before graduation. By the time producer Jennifer Elbaum came on board four years ago, the story had been acquired by producer Annapurna Pictures boss Megan Ellison with Short Term 12 star Kaitlyn Dever attached to co-star as wry, gay, Columbia University-bound Amy. But the project had yet to find a director...
Tolkien Director on Tracing Iconic Author’s Life From War to Middle Earth
The Finnish director Dome Karukoski’s biopic Tolkien traces the future of the “Lord of the Rings” author’s path from his peripatetic tween years through his Oxford attendance, intercut with his nightmarish experience fighting in the Battle of the Somme during World War I. Throughout, Karukoski offers a poetic depiction of the author’s fomenting imagination, seen through Tolkien’s eyes in the shadows of a child’s spinning light globe or marauding in the battlefield as Tolkien, gripped with trench fever,...
Watch The Goldfinch‘s Potent First Trailer
It is no easy feat to take a beloved, 800-plus page novel and adapt it for the big screen. This is what director John Crowley (Brooklyn) and his team, including screenwriter Peter Straughan, have done with Donna Tartt’s 2013 novel The Goldfinch. Tartt’s novel spent more than 30 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Now we’re getting our first look at Crowley’s film,...
The Handmaid’s Tale Makeup Designer on Creating Misery in the Colonies
In Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the radioactive Colonies are more felt than described. We’re told it’s where all Gilead’s undesirables, the childless handmaids, the criminals, the sick and insane, are sent to die. In Hulu’s adaptation of Atwood’s novel, however, the Colonies became one of the show’s most fecund sources of misery in season two. As Maria Elena Fernandez described in a piece for Vulture, The Handmaid’s Tales creators did something brilliant when they set out to create the location—the asked Atwood what she had in mind when she wrote about them...
How the The Simpsons new Composers Took on Springfield
The Simpsons boasts not only the longest run of any scripted primetime series, along with catch-phrases and characters that have been part of popular culture for almost two generations, but theme music recognizable within its first few notes—on a short list with Star Trek, Hawaii Five-O, Batman, Sesame Street, and a handful of others.
And now that series has new composers. Oh, the theme music—with Bart skidding into his family’s living room as they gather to watch TV themselves—remains the same Danny Elfman composition the show has had since arriving in its own evening time slot after leaving its “experimental-animation-this-will-never-last-long” roots as an interstitial cartoon on the Tracey Ullman Show,...
Godzilla vs. Kong Writer on Kong’s Chances in Mismatched Fight
With Godzilla: King of the Monsters opening wide this Friday, folks are already starting to ask the next logical question—how in the world will King Kong last even a single round with his lizard king counterpart in Godzilla vs. Kong? King of the Monsters pits Godzilla against fellow titans like Rodan and the three-headed super-predator King Ghidorah. The early reactions hyped the epic clashes between the Titans,...
It’s a Gnarly Brawl in Final Trailer for Godzilla: King of the Monsters
The early reactions to Godzilla: King of the Monsters were so positive we had some people calling it the event movie of the year, and this is after Avengers: Endgame already stormed into theaters. Comparing this kaiju battle royale to the biggest Marvel movie of all time seems a little unnecessary, but the important point is that folks were fired up about Godzilla’s epic return. Now Warner Bros. has released a final look to tease the central monster-on-monster battles in the movie...
Building Thousands of Years of History in Amazon’s Good Omens
“Corners are where everyone makes decisions. This is the point where you change directions.” And corners are usually located at crossroads, to boot, the very place—especially if you’re a Mississippi bluesman—where it’s said deals with the devil can be struck.
The corner in question, however, concerns an angel, and the London bookshop that he owns—part of Michael Ralph’s production design on the upcoming Amazon/BBC adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens. And the “deals,” in this case,...
Showrunner Lauren Morelli Spins New Tales of the City for Netflix
The interwoven stories of the residents of Barbary Lane are being told again. Introduced in author Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City 40 years ago, and then adapted for television several times since the 1990s, the beloved San Francisco-set saga is being revived by Netflix and starts streaming this June.
Like its predecessors, which were based on Maupin’s nine novels, the 2019 version focuses a lot on the LGBTQ community—but it does so with some new characters and a modern take...
Qualified Director Jenna Ricker on Indy’s Pioneer Janet Guthrie
“This is my first documentary,” says producer/director Jenna Ricker, of Qualified, a look at the life of Janet Guthrie, the first woman—in that pre-Danica Patrick/Pippa Mann era—to ever drive a car at the Indianapolis 500.
The doc is part of ESPN’s 30 For 30 series, in celebration of the cable pioneer’s 30th anniversary. But you have to go farther back than that, to 1977, to find Guthrie in the cockpit of a racer at Indianapolis...
Sir Patrick Stewart Returns in First Star Trek: Picard Trailer
The captain is back.
Sir Patrick Stewart returns to the role that made him famous (in America, at least)—CBS All Access has released the first trailer for their new Star Trek series, Star Trek: Picard. Stewart returns to the role of Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek‘s most cerebral captain, who logged stardates (and much more ) for seven seasons on Star Trek: The Next Generation and four movies—Star Trek: Generations,...
Martin Ruhe on Shooting George Clooney’s Catch-22 Adaptation
“Certain things I don’t think we’d be legally allowed to do now,” observes cinematographer Martin Ruhe, ASC, when reflecting on the prior attempt to bring Joseph Heller’s classic, absurdist, and decidedly non-chronological Catch-22 to the screen.
That would be the 1970 Mike Nichols film version, which was somewhat of a commercial and critical bust at the time but has since come to be regarded in more classic “70’s cinema” terms. But Ruhe was referring to things like how close live B-25 bombers were allowed to come to actors,...
Sarah Connor Returns in First Terminator: Dark Fate Trailer
The sixth installment in one of the most game-changing sci-franchises has arrived. Behold the first trailer for Terminator: Dark Fate, which is taking us back to the last truly great Terminator film and resurrecting some of the most memorable characters to boot.
Dark Fate picks up where James Cameron’s iconic 1991 Terminator 2: Judgment Day ended, with Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger reprising their roles as Sarah Connor and the T-800 respectively...
Fresh Details Emerge About Christopher Nolan’s Mysterious new Film Tenet
So we’ve got a title. Christopher Nolan’s mysterious new film is called Tenet, which should fire up the internet’s vast speculation engine on what the title could possibly mean. Fresh details have emerged revealing a talented cast, including many of Nolan’s long-standing collaborators, for what will be another epic event film from the mastermind behind the Dark Knight trilogy and so much more.
We knew that John David Washington, Elizabeth Debicki and Robert Pattinson were onboard,...
John Wick 3 Costume Designer Conjures Elegance Amid the Carnage
Italian-born costumer Luca Mosca pulled off a major sartorial coup in 2014 when he designed the instantly iconic suit worn by Keanu Reeves in John Wick. The elegant silhouette impacted pop culture to the point where Amazon now sells $139 “John Wick Suit” knock-offs. But to see the real deal, action fans have been flocking to director Chad Stahelski’s John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, which toppled Avengers: Endgame last weekend...
Director Olivia Wilde & Screenwriter Katie Silberman on the Hilarious Booksmart
The creative team behind Booksmart wanted to showcase women being funny. Not one or two women, but many women.
“That’s how it is in our lives. All my female friends are as funny as my male friends. They’re not comedians; they don’t think of themselves as funny,” said screenwriter Katie Silberman, who shares writing credit with Susanna Fogel, Emily Halpern, and Sarah Haskins.
Silberman credited Olivia Wilde, the actress who makes her feature directorial debut on Booksmart,...
Costume Designer Michael Wilkinson on Outfitting the Live-Action Aladdin
In Guy Ritchie’s live-action remake of Aladdin, Disney revisits Agrabah, the fictional Arabian land where a plucky street thief and his incorrigible monkey sidekick cross paths with an unlikely love interest, the local sultan’s daughter, Princess Jasmine. Similar to the 2017 Beauty and the Beast remake, turning a bustling, fictional historic animated township into a three-dimensional place is a colorful, lively affair. In both, labyrinthine city streets give way to the intensity of nature,...
