Writer Ed Solomon Puts the Pieces Together for HBO Thriller Mosaic

As the guy who broke rules to mesh comedy and sci-fi with his now-classic Men in Black script, Ed Solomon knows how to pull off experiments in entertainment. Still, when he and Steven Soderbergh co-created Mosaic, Solomon had to wrap his head around a lot of unknown variables. The murder mystery debuted this past Monday on HBO for five consecutive nights in tandem with a free app that re-structures the same whodunit in interactive flow chart form for smart phones.

Sundance 2018: American Animals Composer Captures Four Students’ Wild Alter Egos

A tribal orchestration sprinkled with sounds of the wild opens American Animals to the contrasting sight of establishing shots of Lexington, Kentucky. Composer Anne Nikitin immediately sets the tone for the rambunctious docudrama about a daydream gone too far. A group of college aged men concoct a movie style plan to steal valuables from a university, to initially hilarious result. As the events grow more sobering, Nikitin dials up the drama and brings us back to reality where the scheme collides with consequences.

Sundance 2018: The Tale Composer Delicately Threads a Fragile Story of Adolescent Abuse

For decades, documentarian Jennifer Fox had convinced herself that the sexual abuse she’d suffered as a child was consensual. In revisiting her memories and the events under the light of adulthood, Fox had a reckoning with the true nature of the events. Her memoir, starring Laura Dern as Jennifer, is laid bare in Sundance premiere The Tale. After decades of employing coping mechanisms to avoid the atrocities of sexual abuse she experienced as a child,

Watch How They Made an Amphibious Creature a Credible Romantic Lead in Awesome The Shape of Water Video

You don’t get 13 Oscar nominations for nothing, folks. Guillermo del Toro’s lovingly made, gorgeously realized The Shape of Water is that rare film—both a technical and emotional triumph. You don’t have much time to marvel at the technical stuff because you’re pretty much immediately swept away by the emotions of the story, by the radiant performance of Sally Hawkins, as the mute heroine, Elisa Esposito, and her utterly believable, ultimately incandescent love for the Asset,

Sundance 2018: Writer/Director Babis Makridis on Exploring an Addiction to Sadness in his Surprisingly Funny Pity

Chatting with Greek filmmaker Babis Makridis is a little like being in one of his films. He’s dry, soft spoken, casually funny, and very smart. In his latest film, Pity, about a man who can only experience happiness by being unhappy, Makridis has delivered that rare treat—a story that doesn’t flinch at life’s paradoxes, absurdities and miseries, yet still manages to get a theater full of people laughing. No small feat there.

Makridis has the distinction of having his last feature, 

Sundance 2018: Cinematographer Ashley Connor on Lensing Madeline’s Madline & The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Cinematographer Ashley Connor has had an incredible run since graduating from Ithaca College’s film program. You know your work is special when the New Yorker‘s film critic, the brilliant Richard Brody, singles out your technique in a review.  Connor has already built an impressive relationship with writer/director Josephine Decker, lensing both Butter on the Latch and Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (the film that got Brody’s attention),

Trudie Styler on Directing Her First Feature Film Freak Show About a Cross-Dressing Teenager

Trudie Styler is an actress, a documentarian, a producer and, now, a feature film director. Her debut, Freak Show, tells the story of gender-bending, cross-dressing teenager Billy Bloom, who must navigate the unwelcoming waters of his new ultra-conservative high school. Determined to stay true to himself, despite the belles and bullies who taunt him, he decides to challenge the status quo by running for homecoming queen. Alex Lawther (The Imitation Game,

Sundance 2018: This Close Director on Shoshannah Stern & Josh Feldman’s Groundbreaking Series, the First by two Deaf Creators

Director Andrew Ahn made at splash at Sundance in 2016 with his feature Spa Night, which focused on a closeted Korean-American teenager who takes a job at a Korean spa to help his struggling family, and ends up discovering a underground world of gay sex that terrifies and thrills him. Ahn was back at Sundance this year for another intriguing project, This Close, a groundbreaking new series on Sundance Now created by Josh Feldman and Shoshannah Stern,

Real Life Special Forces Heroes Helped Keep 12 Strong True To Life

Star Chris Hemsworth got some guidance from the man he portrays in the movie 12 Strong (released Jan. 19). Hemsworth plays Capt. Mitch Nelson in the film about a team of Green Berets on a strategic mission in Afghanistan in the days immediately following 9/11. The real-life Special Forces officer he represents is Mark Nutsch, who asked that his name be fictionalized in the movie.

Nutsch and one of his Green Beret teammates visited the production on location in Albuquerque,

Oscar Watch: Baby Driver’s Supervising Sound Editor Dissects the Movie’s Unique Syncopated Style

As a contingency for speaking with me about his work on Baby Driver, supervising sound editor, sound designer, and re-recording mixer, Julian Slater, made me promise two things: watch it on a really good system and turn up the volume. After running a check on my speakers and ensuring my neighbors were out for the day, I cranked it up and was blown away. It would take dozens of viewings to begin to appreciate the layers of audio that Slater has choreographed for Baby Driver,

Sundance 2018: Trans Filmmaker Luis De Filippis on Their Bracing Directorial Debut For Nonna Anna

Toronto-based filmmaker Luis De Filippis’ short film For Nonna Anna focuses on the intergenerational relationship between a trans grandchild and their aging, ailing grandmother.  Selected for Sundance’s Shorts Program, For Nonna Anna is a tender, achingly wrought stunner in miniature, one told by a filmmaker of remarkable skill and compassion.

“It is imperative as Trans people that we tell our own stories on screen,” De Filippis explained in For Nonna Anna‘s press materials.

Director Greg Barker & Obama Advisor Ben Rhodes on the President Obama Documentary The Final Year

Well into Barack Obama’s second term, filmmaker Greg Barker began chronicling the actions of the president’s foreign policy team. The result is The Final Year, which spotlights Secretary of State John Kerry, U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power and speechwriter and adviser Ben Rhodes, along with a few powerhouse cameos by Obama himself. The documentary observes policy discussions, but turns more on poignant moments. These include an election night in which the Obama camp’s hopes for its legacy are dashed.

How The Commuter DP Replicated a New York Train on a UK Soundstage

When cinematographer Paul Cameron got the call from Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra to film The Commuter with Liam Neesom, the Los Angeles-based director of photography faced a daunting question: How do you spend an hour of screen time in the cramped confines of a train and make it look exciting? The answer came to Cameron in the middle of the night, he says. “I envisioned this rig, drew it out and sent it to pre production saying ‘Here’s what I think we should do.”

Sundance 2018: Burden Cinematographer on Lensing a Timely Look at Racism in America

Australian cinematographer Jeremy Rouse moved his wife and two children to a small town in rural Georgia in order to join director Andrew Heckler’s debut drama Burden. The film, based on an astonishing true story, is a part of this year’s Sundance Film Festival’s U.S. Dramatic Competition, and is one of the most timely films screening here—in a year in which many of the entries deal with, either directly or indirectly,

Sundance 2018: Talking to The King Composer About How Elvis’s Life Mirrors Modern America

If you were going to try and diagnose America’s current overall political and social health through the lens of Elvis Presley’s life, you’d want documentarian Eugene Jarecki as your filmmaker. And for Jarecki, composer Robert Miller was the man he tapped when he thought about how to create a score that would help elucidate the connections he was trying to make, while also living comfortably in a film that would be filled with indelible music,

How Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams Producer Envisioned Sci-Fi Reboot

Paranoid, brilliant and prolific, sci-fi visionary Philip K. Dick not only wrote the source material for Minority Report and Blade Runner; he also churned out 130 short stories half a century ago that anticipated with eerie precision many of today’s man-versus-technology conundrums. Anthology series Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams, now streaming on Amazon Prime, adapts Dick’s fiction as foundation for 10 episodes populated with robots, holograms, smart watches,

How the VFX Team Created Rotting, Terrifying Ghost Sharks for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

What does it take to create the visual effects for a film as massive as Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales? Try hundreds of dedicated artists working on set and in locations around the globe. Moving Picture Company deployed some 700 visual effects artists, as well as an on-set crew, to create some 1,200 shots for the film. One of the most inspired creations in Dead Men Tell No Tales were the skeletal great white and hammerhead sharks that menace our beloved pirates.

How Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri‘s Production Designer Fire-Proofed an Entire Location

By the time Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri production designer Inbal Weinberg joined up with Martin McDonagh, the writer-director had already spent months traveling the south in search of a title town. He found it in Sylva, North Carolina. Hired over Skype on the strength of her Americana-themed designs for Frozen River and The Place Beyond the Pines, Weinberg met McDonagh in person for the first time at the Asheville airport,

How I, Tonya‘s Makeup Department Head Helped Craft one of the Best Scenes in 2017

Arguably the most emotionally riveting moment in the hit film I, Tonya, happens in front of a makeup mirror.

The movie chronicles the life of figure skater Tonya Harding, who was implicated in a vicious assault on her rival skater Nancy Kerrigan shortly before the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway.

In the scene, Harding, played by Margot Robbie, sits alone in a darkened, silent room staring grimly at her reflection.

Oscar Watch: How The Post‘s Sound Designer Re-created 1971 Newsroom Hustle & Bustle

Gary Rydstrom has won four Oscar awards with his ingenious sound design, but none of that expertise prepared the veteran audio expert for the mundane obstacle he overcame to re-create the sonic tumult of the Washington Post newsroom circa 1971. Steven Spielberg’s The Post casts Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks as publisher Kay Graham and editor Ben Bradlee, who risk treason charges from the White House by releasing portions of the Pentagon Papers.