Director Michelle MacLaren’s a Wonder Woman
It’s time to get excited about a comic-book movie that’s not directed by Christopher Nolan or Joss Whedon, that doesn’t star or co-star or have a cameo by Robert Downey Jr., and that's not centered on a brooding dude, or a rich, conflicted dude, or a bunch of dudes with various powers. We're talking about a film that’s poised to make a household name of not one woman but two. Your excitement will be warranted, as it looks increasingly likely that the prolific,...
Top Flight Stunt & Effects Team Jacks Up Horrible Bosses 2
Horrible Bosses 2 is both a comedy and an action movie; its' protagonists spectacularly idiotic schemes lead to all manner of mayhem. The first Horrible Bosses, bowing in 2011, was a hit, follwing a rich cinematic tradition of pitting hopelessly maligned employees against their superiors. Some of the more memorable horrible bosses in film history include Meryl Streep's humiliator-in-chief Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada, Gary Cole's all to real turn as supervisor Bill Lumbergh in Office Space, ...
At Long Last Filmgoers Will Head Into the Woods
Into the Woods began its life as a musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, debuting on Broadway on November 5, 1987 at the Martin Beck Theater. Former New York Times' theater critic Frank Rich (later an Op-Ed writer, now an editor-at-large at New York Magazine) wrote in his review, "The characters of ''Into the Woods" may be figures from children's literature, but their journey is the same painful, existential one taken by so many adults in Sondheim musicals past."...
Disney Animation Pushes the Boundaries of Technology With Big Hero 6
Fighting an evil villain and saving the day are probably not very high on an average teenager’s daily to-do list. But for robotics prodigy Hiro Hamada, star of Walt Disney Animation Studios’ animated feature Big Hero 6, those tasks just happen to pop up on a typical weekday. With the film opening in domestic theaters this past Friday, audiences are now joining the mini mastermind and his inflatable robot sidekick, Baymax, on an action-packed adventure as they get entangled in a dangerous plot unfolding in the bustling,...
Beyond Interstellar: 12 Films to Put On Your Calendar
After months and months of speculation that Christopher Nolan alone seems able to create around his films, the general public will get a chance to weigh in on his most passionate project yet, Interstellar. You’ve already heard about Interstellar. Everyone has. What we thought we’d do is give you a quick cheat sheet on some upcoming films, leading you right to Christmas day.
November 14
It’ll be a very strong week for serious film,...
Harsh Conditions Bring out the Best in The Homesman‘s Crew
When we interviewed Marco Beltrami, he was particularly jazzed up about the work he did for Tommy Lee Jones’ upcoming film The Homesman. Beltrami is the type of composer who seeks out directors (as he did with Joon-ho Bong for Snowpiercer) and he was excited about Jones’ second directorial effort. The film’s set in the punishing Nebraska frontier in the middle of the 19th century. This inspired Beltrami to record a lot of his score outdoors,...
From Scream to Snowpiercer: Composer Marco Beltrami
At the age of 30, composer Marco Beltrami was the composer on a little film by horror master Wes Craven called Scream. It was 1996, and it was the first horror film he had ever worked on. It was also the first horror film he had ever seen.
This might explain why his approach to the score didn't follow the typical conventions of horror, and might go some way to explaining how he's built his impressive career on his thoughtful, searching approach to a film without worrying about its'...
Three-time Academy Award Winning Costume Designer Colleen Atwood Talks Shop
Colleen Atwood is one of the most prolific costume designers of her generation. She has never gone more than four years without a Oscar nomination, beginning with her work on Little Women in 1994 and leading up to her nomination for Snow White and the Huntsman in 2012. Atwood is responsible for one of the most iconic pieces of a costume in film history (more on this later), and has had her hand in some of Tim Burton’s greatest creations...
The Middleburg Film Festival to Honor Two Below-the-Line Giants
The Middleburg Film Festival, at just two years old, offers a strong program of films and an appreciation for the many talented craftsmen and women who make them. This year, the festival is honoring two below-the-line filmmakers, our raison d'être, who are both giants in their field. The Credits is heading down to Virginia today to get in on the action.
The honorees are costume designer Colleen Atwood and composer Marco Beltrami. The Distinguished Costume Designer Award will be presented to Atwood on Friday night with a retrospective of her most memorable costumes, followed by a masquerade ball in her honor...
Win Your Halloween Costume Contest With Duds From Actual Films
Not only can you do as the title suggests, you can also help save the planet. All you have to do is live in New York. Here's how.
Head to an 11,000 foot warehouse in Gowanus, Brooklyn, on 540 President Street, and sample from a gargantuan collection of costumes, props, and more. The bonus? All of these articles come from film and television productions, commercials and theatrical plays. Whether you need a period piece dress,...
Piecing Together The Imitation Game
The only thing more astonishing than Alan Turing’s efforts during World War II was the way his own government treated him after. Turing was, by all measures, a war hero, and his and his team's efforts were partly responsible for saving, by some estimates, 14 million lives.
One of the fathers of computing, he led a group of linguists, scholars, chess champions and intelligence officers in an effort to crack the “unbreakable” codes of Germany’s Enigma machine. Before Turing was summoned for an interview at England’s codebreaking center in Bletchley Park,...
Final Tour of Hollywood Costume Exhibit a Must-see
"Nearly every costume designed for a film has a story behind its creation…Martin Scorsese once gave me an entire film to watch just to see the stripe on a collar." -Costume designer Sandy Powell.
When David Fincher was shooting The Social Network, a momentous scene had it that Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) had to sprint back to his dorms at Harvard. Only the crew couldn't secure the Cambridge location that they had used, so Fincher and his team designed a series of mirrors that would help replicate the actual location...
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,...
Did You Move it Or did I? Get Creepy With Oujia
The genius of the Ouija board is that it really is hard to tell who moved the piece. Did you? Did I? I think I might have, but why can't I remember? The bizarre fact that this patently ridiculous game, in which two players pretend not to move a planchet around on a board that spells out messages from the spirit world, really did creep you out as a child, and it speaks to its 125-year longevity and our collective wish to maybe,...
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, filling her up, when a weirdo asks him “how much?”...
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,...
Paramount Hosts Interstellar Oculus Rift Experience
I went to space. I've seen the stars and the distant worlds that occupy the endless, mysterious vacuum above us. I went where few have gone before, leaving behind everything I knew as "home."
Well, actually, let me clarify. My mind went to space, and not in a way that intends "I've finally gone insane." My physical self sat in a chair (quite comfortable if I may add) at the AMC Lowes in Lincoln Square and strapped on an Oculus Rift to take part in an experience based around Christopher Nolan's upcoming film Interstellar...
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...
