Interstellar’s Out of This World Crew

In a little over two weeks, on November 7, Christopher Nolan’s long awaited Interstellar will finally hit screens across the country. Jeff Jensen’s cover story for Entertainment Weekly uncovered a lot of juicy details which add up to what sounds like the director's most personal, and possibly ambitious, film yet. When Jensen was on set in October of 2013, the film's code name was Flora's Letter. As Jessica Chastain told Jensen at the time,

Stuntmen Turned Directors Light Up Screen With John Wick

So you’ve got a protagonist named John Wick who’s a widower with a puppy. The puppy's named Daisy. Daisy’s pretty much all this guy has and cares about in this world, a gift from his late wife. John Wick’s a retired freelance consultant living quietly and sadly, just he and Daisy all alone.

One day John goes to buy some gas. He’s got a sweet ride, a 1969 Boss Mustang. He’s minding his own business,

The Sundance of Horror: L.A.’s Screamfest is Freakish Fun

L.A.’s Screamfest is assured of two things this year: it will once again be the biggest horror film festival in the United States, and it won’t draw the ire of the Professional Clown Club. There appear to be no murderous clowns in this year’s festival lineup.

If you’ve been following entertainment news over the past few days, you might have noticed the kerfuffle between the Professional Clown Club and FX’s American Horror Story,

The Life of the Mind: Making The Theory of Everything

In an introduction to a first edition of Stephen Hawking’s groundbreaking popular science book A Brief History of Time, Carl Sagan tells a story about how he happened to wander into the ancient ceremony of the investiture of new fellows into the Royal Society. On that day, Sagan noticed in the front row a young man in a wheelchair very slowly signing his name in a book. “A book that bore on its earliest pages the signature of Isaac Newton.

Spirits & Passion Collide in The Book of Life

Animator, painter, writer and director Jorge R. Gutiérrez has won Annies and Emmys for his animated television series El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera for Nickelodeon. His work caught the eye of another Mexican polymath, writer, director, producer and novelist Guillermo del Toro (Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim), who’s producing Gutiérrez ‘s feature debut The Book of Life, which bows this Friday, October 17. The Book of Life is an enchanting story of friendship,

The Timely Kill the Messenger Looks at the Price of Truth

On August 18, 1996 Gary Webb, then a San Jose Mercury News Staff Writer, reported that, “For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.” That line opened Webb’s three-part series “Dark Alliance,” a report that would ultimately define the rest of his life and spark years of debate.

World War II Veterans Helped Fuel Fury‘s Realism

The most all encompassing war in history has been depicted on screen countless times. Filmmakers have been portraying the horrors, and heroes, of the "good" war, from D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge to Pearl Harbor, from every conceivable angle. In just six years, from 1939 to 1945, World War II took the lives of more than sixty million people, some 2.5% of the global population, and filmmakers have been grappling with the immensity of the war ever since.

Erik Parker & One9 Discuss Nas: Time Is Illmatic – Part II

Click here for Part I of our conversation with music journalist/producer Erik Parker and multimedia artist/director One9.

Erik Parker and One9’s Nas: Time is Illmatic clocks in at a brisk 75-minutes, as compact and filled with detail as a Nas song. The documentary manages to examine nearly every credible element in the making of Nas's groundbreaking album, and really, the making of an artist and a man in a little over an hour.

Erik Parker & One9 on Their Doc Nas: Time is Illmatic – Part I

“I’m an eighth grade dropout…I didn’t know what the future was going to hold,” says Nasir Jones at the outset of journalist Erik Parker and multimedia artist One9’s documentary, Nas: Time is Illmatic. For the uninitiated, the future held one of the most groundbreaking hip hop albums of all time (the titular “Illmatic”), a legendary career, and its creator becoming the namesake of a fellowship at Harvard University’s Hip Hop Archive.

Longtime Collaborators Helped David Fincher Find Gone Girl

The New York Film Festival kicked off with the world premiere of David Fincher’s Gone Girl last Friday, and boy, did it deliver. Fincher’s directing chops are never in question, and Gillian Flynn’s novel is perhaps perfectly suited for his particular skill set. Gone Girl combines his instinctual way around pitch-black thrillers (Se7en, Zodiac, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), and offbeat, grimy comedies (Fight Club) and delivers 148 compelling minutes without any evident lull.

Gone Girl at the New York Film Festival

The early reviews have already begun flooding in, and tonight, at 5pm, those of us in the press who haven’t attended a 20th Century Fox screening will be lining up outside Walter Reade Theater at the New York Film Festival for Gone Girl.

Director David Fincher has become one of the most reliably inventive filmmakers of his generation, and perhaps one of the best at adapting novels and short stories for the screen.

The Ambitious, Beguiling The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to see your life through someone else’s eyes? In his ambitious feature debut, writer/director Ned Benson gives his characters this unique chance in the emotionally charged tale of love, loss and rediscovery that is The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby. The film follows the relationship of estranged couple Conor (James McAvoy) and Eleanor (Jessica Chastain) from first blush to final breath as they try to regain the connection they once had.

Creating The Boxtrolls by Hand

The Boxtrolls is a stop-animation fable directed by Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable about the foul monsters who live beneath the cobblestone streets of Cheesebridge. The deal with this Victorian-era hamlet is that it’s obsessed by money and class, a posh place where the air is redolent with the stench of fine cheese. Chesebridgeians love their cheese, so this is exactly what the villainous Boxtrolls prey on—at night, they crawl out from their dank, fetid sewer homes and steal the residents of Cheesebridge’s precious cheese!

The 52nd New York Film Festival

Major film premieres from three of cinema’s most iconoclastic directors, a documentary about one of the most controversial figures in recent American history and some of the best of world cinema highlight the 52nd New York Film Festival, which runs from September 26 to October 12.

As the last major festival of the year, you might think NYFF’s main slate would be filled with films that have already played in any one of the fests that came before,

Building the Sensational Sets of The Maze Runner

One way to jumpstart your film career is to create your own mini-masterpiece, have it blow up on YouTube, and force Hollywood to come knocking. This was the case for animator/director Wes Ball, whose 2012 short film Ruin grabbed the attention of 20th Century Fox. Ball was called to a meeting where the longtime animator was asked to take the reigns on an adaptation of a popular 2009 sci-fi YA novel. While there, he successfully pitched them to turn 

Working Through Birdman’s Brilliant Contradictions

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman, out October 17th, marks his first formal foray into the comedy world, but this film only strengthens his reputation for touching, intricately woven narratives. A little too intricate, perhaps, as Iñárritu’s focus on contradiction, validation, and all things meta blend into a swirling mass of crises for both viewers and characters alike. But worry not – Iñárritu has a plan, and Birdman proves to be a film that brings an audience closer to the story than they might expect.

The Drop Director Michaël R. Roskam on Filming the Brooklyn Way

How did a Belgian director, most well known for his fantastic, Oscar-nominated foreign language film Bullhead, about a young cattle farmer’s deal with a notorious beef trader, end up filming one of the best New York crime thrillers in recent years with a predominately international cast and crew? Michaël R. Roskam's The Drop is based on crime novelist Dennis Lehane's short story "Animal Rescue," adapted by Lehane himself for his first feature film script. 

Native 3D: The Future of Spatial Movie Production

What do the 3D epics Guardians of the Galaxy, Godzilla, and Gravity have in common save for being huge hits and starting with the letter 'G'? None of them were shot in 3D.

If you’re going to make a 3D movie, you can either shoot it that way, sometimes referred to as native 3D and the preferred method for filmmakers like James Cameron,

Hope Floats: The True Story Behind Dolphin Tale 2

There was almost no reason to expect that there could have been a sequel to Dolphin Tale, considering it was based on a true story and a sequel would invariably have to be fiction. Not that Hollywood is averse to sequels (or prequels, or trilogies, or origin stories, or re-imaginings), but the original Dolphin Tale was a special case.

Dolphin Tale was released in September, 2011, and told the story of Winter,

The Bold Adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild for the Screen

There is a moment in Cheryl Strayed’s memoir “Wild” where she has it out with her mother while hiking in Crater Lake National Park, Oregon—only by this point, her mother is dead, and the reckoning is with Strayed's own grief and anger on what would have been her mother's fiftieth birthday. Strayed catalogued some of the worsts things her mother had done, with dying at forty-five being the worst of the worst. These included occasionally smoking pot in front of her and her siblings,