Watch Michael Keaton as McDonalds Honcho Ray Kroc in new The Founder Trailer

Like a McDonald's cheeseburger, it will be hard to resist watching Micheal Keaton as the ubiquitous fast food chain's creator Ray Krock in The Founder.  Directed by John Lee Hancock (Saving Mr. Banks), The Founder delivers the true story of how Ray Kroc, a down-on-his-luck salesman from Illinois, had a fateful meeting with brothers Mac and Dick McDonald, who were running a burger operation in 1950s Southern California that managed to turn out food in astonshingly little time...

HBO’s Timely Carrie Fisher & Debbie Reynolds Doc Bright Lights Premieres Jan 7

Last year ended with the unexpected deaths of both Carrie Fisher (read our obit for her here) and her mother, Debbie Reynolds, just a day later. In a year that included the deaths of many icons, from David Bowie and Prince to Leonard Coen and Gene Wilder, losing both Fisher and Reynolds at the very end of the year felt unduly cruel.

Yet there is also much to celebrate in the lives of these two extremely talented women,...

Watch Fifty Shades Darker‘s Extended Trailer

Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan as Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey and in Fifty Shades Darker, the second chapter based on the worldwide bestselling “Fifty Shades” phenomenon. Anastasia is no longer the demure wallfalower we met in the original film, and she's not about to let Christian call the shots anymore.
 
Christian Grey is an emotionally wounded man in Fifty Shades Darker, but he's committed to get Ana back into his life...

Orange is the New Black Director Lev Spiro Talks Crazy Eyes

Lev Spiro has been behind the camera on some of the most successful shows on television. The impressive list includes Modern Family, Wizards of Waverly Place, Dawson’s Creek, and Arrested Development. In season 4 of Orange is the New Black, he had the high-pressure task of directing the backstory for fan favorite, Crazy Eyes. Thanks to Spiro’s thorough exploration of the character’s mental illness,...

Oscar Watch: Editor Expertly Shreds Time in Manchester By the Sea

Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan famously spent years in the editing suite trying to achieve perfection on his previous movie Margaret. He shot the film in 2005, delivered a much debated cut in 2008 and three years later watched the picture open in two theaters. Lonergan's comeback effort Manchester by the Sea represents an astonishing return to form, widely expected to land a Best Picture Oscar nomination on the strength of Casey Affleck's moving performance as a New England man haunted by his past...

Writer/director Mia Hansen-Løve on Things to Come

French actress Isabelle Huppert is reaping awards from critics’ groups for her roles in two films this year:  Elle, from Dutch provocateur Paul Verhoeven, and the quietly poignant Things to Come, from young French writer/directer Mia Hansen-Løve.

While Huppert’s audacious performance in Elle jut might earn the actress her first Oscar nod, it’s the delicate blend of youth and wisdom, melancholy and joy, in Things to Come that may be the better showcase for her ferocity and vulnerability...

Remembering Carrie Fisher

To a generation that came of age in the ‘70s and ‘80s, she will forever be Princess Leia of the Star Wars films, with her iconic buns-like-headphones hairdo, wielding a blaster as she leads the rebellion against the Galactic Empire. To another, slightly older demographic, Carrie Fisher was synonymous with one of the last great Hollywood scandals. The daughter of actress Debbie Reynolds and pop star Eddie Fisher, Carrie Fisher became tabloid fodder at age three when her father left Reynolds to marry Elizabeth Taylor in 1959 at the height of Taylor’s fame...

Oscar Watch: Love & Friendship Designer’s Delicious Duds for Jane Austen Comedy

Jane Austen's fictional universe takes a turn toward the comedic with Love & Friendship adapted by Whit Stillman from one of her early works. The movie, released in May, is now earning Oscar buzz for Irish costume designer Eimer Ni Mhaoldomhnaigh and the splendid 18th century gowns she crafted for Kate Beckinsale as gorgeous widower Lady Susan.

Prepping in Dublin for the ten-week production, Mhaoldomhnaigh and her team of seamstresses outfitted Beckinsale/Lady Susan in tightly corseted silk dresses color-coded to reflect her progressive seduction of upper crust society...

Watch the First, Deliciously Scary Trailer for Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant Trailer

When Ridley Scott released Prometheus in 2012, there was reason to be excited. The legendary director was returning to the material than had made him a household name, building off the phenomenal Alien franchise he had begun in 1979. While the film wasn't what many had hoped, it still had plenty of intrigue and terror, and it's put Scott on the path to the next film, Alien: Covenant, which recently just dropped its'...

Composer Jake Monaco on Building His Instruments, Scoring for Pixar & More

Composer Jake Monaco has worked on everything from big budget comedies like Keeping up with the Joneses, to children’s animations like Amazon’s The Stinky and Dirty Show and the recent Pixar short Piper. Nothing is off limits to Monaco in his search for the perfect sound- he explains how instruments made from everyday objects like vodka bottles, or a $6 wok from Ikea, help him hit the right notes.

How did you break into film/TV scoring?...

How Hacksaw Ridge‘s Production Designer Transformed Australia into Okinawa

Hacksaw Ridge Production designer Barry Robison has worked on films in Australia so often that he acquired dual-citizenship. Being familiar with the area gave him an advantage when working with Australian director, Mel Gibson. The setting, however, was unforgiving for a period piece set in America and Japan. Robison literally reshaped the land to take audiences back 70 years and thousands of miles away. The film garnered three Golden Globes nominations, and his rigorous research and scrupulous attention to detail earned him an Australian Academy Cinema Television Arts (AACTA) award for Best Production Design...

How Star Wars‘ Editor Prepared Passengers for Lift Off

Oscar-nominated editor Maryann Brandon came straight off Star Wars: The Force Awakens to prepare Passengers for lift off. A frequent J.J. Abrams collaborator — she also edited his Star Trek Into Darkness — Brandon has became Hollywood’s go-to editor for big space epics in part because she brings an exacting eye to action sequences. Her mantra: Make sure the audience understands what’s happening.

"I don’t just cut for the sake of spectacle,...

Arrival‘s Screenwriter on Crafting one of the Year’s Best Films

For sci-fi fans, there was something doubly wonderful about watching director Denis Villeneuve's Arrival; it proved that the most malleable of genres is still alive and well, and, confirmed that Villeneuve was absolutely the right choice to helm the upcoming Blade Runner sequel, Blade Runner 2049. 

Ridley Scott's 1982 Blade Runner is one of sci-fi's most iconic films (coming just a few years after his equally iconic ...

Passengers‘ VFX Supervisor on Creating Zero Gravity Mayhem

A serene, unusual spacecraft drifts through space. The Avalon is on a 120 year course, carrying 5000+ passengers to a new colony, plant-like and twinkling on its exterior, silent and gleaming on the inside. Its well-stocked and highly-designed but empty chambers are reminiscent of another era’s grand hotel, devoid of guests, ready to close for the season, And then a hibernation pod malfunctions, and passenger Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) wakes up 90 years early. He will grow old and die before anyone else on the ship awakes,...

Molly Shannon on her Heartbreaking Role in Other People

For Molly Shannon fans (and we are legion), it's long been known the former SNL standout had acting chops that stretched beyond her iconic contributions to the show. But what contributions! Shannon became a featured player on SNL in 1995 and inhabited a few of the show's most memorable characters, including (of course) oddball Catholic school girly Mary Katherine Gallagher (Shannon took the character onto the big screen with 1999's Superstar), and, a personal favorite, Terry Rialto, the earnest co-host of "The Delicious Dish," who,...

David Lynch Eats a Donut in Twin Peaks Revival Teaser

Here's your first Twin Peaks revival mystery—who's holding the coffee cup near show creator David Lynch, seen here in character as FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole Gordon Cole? 

Whoever is standing just off camera may remain a mystery, but one thing is certain; fans have been waiting a very long time for Lynch to return to this iconic T series. In this very first glimpse, Showtime gives you Lynch, in all his glory, returning as FBI agent Gordon Cole in the Twin Peaks revival,...

Here’s Your First Look at Blade Runner 2049

Director Dennis Villeneuve obliterated any fears about whether he could handle tackling an iconic sci-fi film like the Blade Runner sequel with his deft work on the remarkable Arrival. That film, this year’s best sci-fi film by a wide margin, made it clear that the Sicario director took inspiration from the very best sci-fi directors, most notably Steven Spielberg’s work on Close Encounters of the Third Kind,...

Chopped & Screwed: How Moonlight Composer Morphed Acoustic Music into Rumbling Soundscapes

Composer Nicholas Britell played classical piano as a kid, attended Juilliard School's Pre-College program and studied music at Harvard University. But Britell brought an entirely different skill set to bear when director Barry Jenkins asked him to score coming-of-age Oscar contender Moonlight with "chopped and screwed" southern hip hop in mind.

What, exactly, is 'chopping and screwed'? "Basically, it’s when you slow down tracks so the pitch goes really low and you get these deep-end,...

Rogue One Crushes Box Office, Wins Critical Praise

The first anthology film in the Star Wars saga, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story hit theaters this past weekend to positive reactions from audiences and critics alike, and, as was expected, record breaking box office numbers. As Variety reports, the film's massive weekend "shatters any doubts that the world of Jedi knights, shadowy totalitarian governments, and bug-eyed aliens is much bigger than the saga of the Skywalker clan."...

Amy Schumer & Goldie Hawn Get Snatched in First Trailer

The first trailer for Snatched is here, and it only took a minute to elicit our first LOL this Friday. It's a red band trailer, folks, so if you're going to watch it at work you'll want to put your earbuds in.

Written by Kate Dippold (Ghostbusters, The Heat, Parks & Rec) and directed by Jonathan Levine (50/50, Warm Bodies, The Night Before) the plot details for ...