Bert Marcus on his Knockout Documentary Champs

As star-studded as the front row of any primetime heavyweight fight, the boxing doc Champs calls on A-listers from Mark Wahlberg and Ron Howard to Denzel Washington and Mary J. Blige to weigh in on one of the most brutal sports in history. Beautifully shot reenactments and first-hand stories are interspersed with real footage of some of the most famous brawls of all-time, making for a riveting ride. But this isn't just any sports documentary —

The Return of Cinderella

Disney’s original animated Cinderella, an inescapable fact of most Western childhoods, won the Golden Bear in the musical film category at the very first Berlinale in 1951. A live-action contemporary version, nearly singing-free and also produced under Disney’s auspices, premiered at the most recent Berlinale, some 64-years after the original. Directed by Kenneth Branagh and starring Lily James (best known as Rose in Downton Abbey) in the titular role,

VFX Supervisor Chris Harvey On Bringing Chappie to Life

For Chappie, the visual effects weren’t there to complement the story. They made the story.

“There are huge visual effects movies out there that have lots of explosions. That isn’t this movie,” said Chris Harvey, visual effects supervisor. “[Director] Neill [Blomkamp] shot it all on location without any kind of stage work, so we didn’t do environment [creation] work on this movie. There are no big explosions or destruction scenes. The visual effects work was focused on the creation of those robots.”

Patricia Clarkson on October Gale, Finding the Right Roles & More

If she’s not the hardest working woman in show business, she’s certainly one of the most visible. Patricia Clarkson, with her trademark sultry voice and a smile that could crack stone, has a new film out tomorrow and recently starred in the hit Broadway play “The Elephant Man” opposite Bradley Cooper. One of the most respected and versatile of contemporary actresses, Clarkson over the years has made important films with first-time directors (Lisa Cholodenko, Tom McCarthy, Peter Hedges) as well as iconic veterans (Martin Scorsese,

Director Michele Josue’s Matt Shepard is A Friend of Mine

The documentary Matt Shepard is A Friend of Mine puts a human face on the young man who paid the ultimate price for homophobia. Michele Josue’s accomplished debut film — poignant, revealing, powerful in its anger, grief and humanity — reminds us 15 years later what his friends, family and the world lost when Shepard was beaten to death in a notorious hate crime.

“There was a long list of motivations for me to make this film,”

Inside The Americans Costume Shop

"I knew going in that when people heard 1980s they’d automatically think neon, big hair, shoulder pads, and I also knew that was actually not true," costume designer Jenny Gering told us when we interviewed her about her work on The Americans. "1981 looks much more like the late 70s than what people associate with the 1980s. I knew it would be fun for me to reeducate the viewer to the way that time period actually looked.

The American’s Costume Designer Jenny Gering

If you haven’t seen FX’s hit series The Americans yet, you are missing out on the one of the most relentlessly entertaining, thoughtfully produced dramas on television. What’s more, for those of you who have any memory of the 1980s, The Americans is also one of the most gorgeously shot and costumed shows on TV, at once nailing it’s era and milieu and simultaneously subverting what you think the 80s looked like.

A Q&A With Maps to the Stars Screenwriter Bruce Wagner

Screenwriter Bruce Wagner knows Hollywood. At an early age, he witnessed the lives and lifestyles of the rich and famous firsthand. Growing up in Beverly Hills, he attended school with celebrities and later on, when he was working as a limousine driver, he drove countless members of the A-list around the city.

It’s no surprise then that Wagner enjoys writing about the Hollywood culture in novels like Force Majuer and Dead Stars and in screenplays like the one he wrote for Maps to the Stars.

Director Henry Corra on his Heartbreaking, Beautiful Farewell to Hollywood

When director Henry Corra met aspiring young filmmaker Regina Nicholson at a film festival, neither knew they would be embarking on a journey that would become literally about life and death.

The result of their collaboration is Farewell to Hollywood: The Life and Death of Reggie Nicholson, an intimate documentary that emerges as a powerful portrait of the spunky Nicholson as she goes through cancer treatment and estrangement from her parents to realizing her dream of making a personal,

Director Niki Caro Finds her Place in McFarland, USA

Niki Caro is one of the more astute, thoughtful directors working today. Whether she’s adapting a novel about a peasant winemaker in 19th century France (A Heavenly Vintage, 2009), or fictionalizing the account of the first major successful sexual harassment case in the U.S. (North Country, 2005), Caro’s ability to get inside the lives of very different people and to contextualize their plights with just the right amount (and the exactly right kind) of detail is obvious to anyone who watches her films.

Oscar-Nominee Richard Linklater on Playing With Time in Boyhood

There are few filmmakers who have the dedication and patience of Richard Linklater. Boyhood proved that. For those of you who might just be emerging from a cinematic hibernation, here is what you missed; for twelve years, the writer/director returned to the same actors and script to chronicle the fictional story of a boy growing up in Texas. Little-known actor Ellar Coltrane was hired over a decade ago, at the age of six,

Oscar-Nominated Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson on The Theory of Everything

When we spoke with composer Jóhann Jóhannson, he had just returned from performing a few pieces from his Oscar-nominated score for The Theory of Everything in a video interview published by USA Today. He was famished (he hadn’t eaten all day) and he was no doubt tired (he’d flown from Los Angeles to New York the day before, and was off to London the following day for the BAFTA awards,

Oscar Nominees E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman on Writing Foxcatcher

Writing any screenplay based on an actual incident is a daunting task, what with staying true to your real characters and settings without compromising your narrative. And when your story is as stirring, disturbing and shocking as the one depicted in Foxcatcher—which explores the aberrant and ultimately deadly relationship between millionaire John du Pont and wrestlers and brothers Mark and Dave Schultz—the job to tell the tale in just 134 minutes is especially formidable.

Inherent Risk: Editor and Producer Mathilde Bonnefoy on Making Citizenfour

When documentarian Laura Poitras asked Edward Snowden why he had chosen her, out of all the potential people to disclose his information to, he replied, “I didn’t. You chose yourself.” At the time Snowden was writing to her as “citizen four,” and for months Poitras alone knew about his trove of information on the N.S.A.'s surveillance program.

Eventually, as we learn in Citizenfour, the Oscar-nominated documentary that culminated from her relationship with Snowden,

Berlinale 2015: Christian Bale & Natalie Portman Discuss Knight of Cups

Watching Terence Malick’s Knight of Cups, set in a glowing, static Los Angeles, was reminiscent of the summation of my father’s arguments against me going to college there — there’s just no there, there. Rick (Christian Bale), a peaking screenwriter, wondering how he arrived exactly where he wanted to be, wanders the city and the nearby desert, passing through condos and mansions and decadent fêtes. This metaphorical prince — he is such because the narration at the beginning of the movie tells us so —

Berlinale 2015: A Q&A With The Filmmakers & Star of Koza

A bleak, beautiful entry from Slovakia in the year’s Berlinale, Koza starts off slow and static and stays that way, even as worlds heap themselves on the titular main character. An uncommon blend of reality and fiction, the film stars the real life Koza, birth name Peter Baláž, more or less as himself. The Roma boxer competed in the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games for Slovakia, returned home, and over the ensuing years, slipped back into the chronic poverty that’s typical of what many Roma face across Europe.

Berlinale 2015: Werner Herzog’s Queen of the Desert

Werner Herzog’s portrait of Gertrude Bell (Nicole Kidman), the early 20th century British adventurer who was instrumental in creating the boundaries of much of the modern Middle East in Queen of the Desert , omits her real-life role as a clandestine intelligence agent for the British Empire to explore her interior life, as Herzog put it. In Herzog’s version of events, Kidman’s luminous, head-scarf wearing Bell swears up and down to trusting sheiks that she is not a spy —

Berlinale 2015: Jack Pettibone Riccobono’s Phenomenal The Seventh Fire

The first time the director Jack Pettibone Riccobono filmed the Ojibwe tribe at northern Minnesota’s White Earth Indian Reservation, it was to document the tribe’s efforts to preserve their local wild rice, considered sacred for centuries. Riccobono returned to the reservation in 2010 to show the short documentary about their efforts, The Sacred Food, but also to find someone to talk to him about a different, quietly growing problem at the reservation.

VFX Supervisor Dan Glass on the Vast World Of Jupiter Ascending

When Andy and Lana Wachowski release a picture, moviegoers can rely on it to be a visual experience. In large part, that is because of the talent of their visual effects team, which has been supervised since The Matrix Reloaded by Dan Glass. Glass, who has worked with the Wachowskis on two Matrix films, Speed Racer, and Cloud Atlas, is also credited as the visual effects supervisor for Jupiter Ascending,

Made in Maryland: Hanging With the Crew on the Set of Veep

It was a cold, blustery Tuesday in December when we were on the set of HBO’s Veep in downtown Baltimore. On the production front, however, It was a relatively calm day of filming by Veep standards, but a calm day on the set of this show still requires dozens of crew members to work their butts off. Whether it was Kim Bogues in craft services, costumer Constance Harris or assistant property managers Jamie Bishop and John Bert,