David France on the Terror Facing the LGBTQ+ Community in Welcome to Chechnya

Oscar-nominated filmmaker and former investigative journalist David France has a new documentary, Welcome To Chechnya, debuting on HBO June 30th, which has already won multiple awards on the film festival circuit. His film reveals the ongoing danger to LGBTQ Chechens targeted for persecution and death in a campaign to ‘cleanse’ the republic. France follows the activities of heroic activists, and profiles the people they hope to rescue out of harm’s way,

Director Ivy Meeropol on Her Deeply Personal HBO Documentary About Roy Cohn

After Ivy Meeropol directed her powerful and deeply personal HBO documentary Heir to an Execution (2004) about her grandparents Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who were executed for alleged espionage in 1953 with prosecutor Roy Cohn leading the charge, she felt she’d finally put the subject behind her.

“I thought for years that a film about Roy Cohn was in order, that it should be done and I couldn’t believe no one had done it.

Sam Feder Takes a Revealing Look at Transgender Depiction in Hollywood in Disclosure

Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen offers an eye-opening look at the history of transgender depiction in two universal media: film and television. The story is told through the perspectives and memories of trans people in the entertainment industry — Laverne Cox (also an executive producer of Disclosure), Lilly Wachowski and Jen Richards among them — and features clips and images that shed light on how American culture has dehumanized and made assumptions about the transgender community.

Cinematographer Newton Thomas Sigel on Shooting Spike Lee’s Epic Da 5 Bloods

On its surface, Spike Lee’s latest joint, Da 5 Bloods, is about four Black Vietnam war veterans who return to the country decades later to bring home the remains of their leader, Stormin’ Norman (Chadwick Boseman), who was killed in action. Secondary to this mission, the remaining four of the five Bloods (played by Delroy Lindo, Clarke Peters, Isiah Whitlock Jr., and Norm Lewis) also plan to locate and dig up a chest of gold bars they’d buried in battle.

Composer Sherri Chung on Batwoman, Riverdale & More

Composer Sherri Chung faced the production freeze due to COVID-19 with equal parts equanimity and patience. Because her work is often done alone, the self-quarantine aspect of the pandemic hasn’t changed her process all that much. Chung has a studio where she has her own recording stage that can fit about 15 players, so that part of her process has been shuttered, but the fact that she was already on a natural hiatus, as she described it,

Training The Pups in Think Like A Dog

Gil Junger, writer/director of Think Like a Dog, gave animal trainer Sarah Clifford a tough assignment. First, she had to train the title character, a shaggy dog named Henry, to do a variety of stunts that would allow the viewer to suspend disbelief that this dog was communicating telepathically with a kid. Second, find a way to make the dog and said kid, played by Gabriel Bateman, comfortable enough that we would believe they had been together for years.

Writer/Director JD Chua & Producer Juan Foo on Singapore’s First Creature Feature Circle Line

JD Chua had the distinction of being director Michael Mann’s only intern when he was in Hollywood, the man who made, in a seven-year period, three of the best films of the 1990s—The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), and The Insider (1999). As a child, one of Chua’s favorite films was Mann’s The Last of the Mohicans. “I remember immersing myself in the laserdisc,”

Think Like a Dog Writer/Director Gil Junger on his Family Friendly Canine Comedy

Think Like a Dog is a warm-hearted fantasy adventure about a boy who invents a contraption that enables him to read his dog’s mind. It is reminiscent of Disney live-action classics like The Absent-Minded Professor and The Shaggy Dog. In an interview, writer/director Gil Junger talked about the pleasures of ignoring the show business adage about never working with children or dogs and how the film is a love letter inspired by his own experience of re-connection to his family.

#blackAF Costume Designer Michelle Cole on Re-Teaming With Kenya Barris

The creator of the hugely successful sitcom Black-ish, and its spin-offs Grown-ish and Mixed-ish, chose to step in front of the camera for #blackAF. The mockumentary series is Kenya Barris’ first project for Netflix. Based on his own life, Barris plays himself, alongside Rashida Jones as his wife Joya, in the show, which is now streaming. He’s an extremely wealthy TV showrunner with six kids,

Oscar-Winning Writer Kevin Willmott on Re-Teaming With Spike Lee For Da 5 Bloods

What happens when four Black Vietnam vets re-unit in present-day Ho Chi Minh City to retrieve a CIA shipment of gold left behind in the jungle forty years earlier? As imagined by Spike Lee in his new Netflix film Da 5 Bloods, the old soldiers’ quest leads to carnage, flashbacks, greed, and nervous breakdowns. As with every Spike Lee film, Da 5 Bloods manages to be timely, too,

Composer Terence Blanchard on Scoring Spike Lee’s Must-See New Epic Da 5 Bloods

Spike Lee’s films’ timeliness speaks to his prescience, and to his fearless, decades-long willingness to examine the continued and persistent injustice experienced by Black Americans. His new film Da 5 Bloods lands in the midst of a pandemic disproportionately affecting Black, Hispanic, Latino and Indigenous communities, and a wave of demonstrations protesting police brutality and systemic racism against Black people by those who are sworn to protect all Americans following the murder of George Floyd.

Director Daniel Karslake on the Shifting Battle for LGBTQ Equality in For They Know Not What They Do

Documenting the contemporary gay and transgender experience of young Americans and their families through the lens of religion isn’t easy. First, there’s the matter of finding interview subjects. For the follow-up to his Oscar-shortlisted documentary For the Bible Tells Me So, which focused on the homophobia of the religious right, filmmaker Daniel Karslake met with about thirty different families before matching with the four subjects and their parents at the center of For They Know Not What They Do,

The Many Lives of Indonesian Director Kamila Andini

Talking with multi-award-winning Indonesian filmmaker Kamila Andini might lead one to believe that she either possesses the power of time travel or that she’s in some way leading parallel lives, such is her unbelievably heavy workload.

When Indonesia imposed stay at home restrictions, Andini had just arrived back from Melbourne, Australia, where she had staged a theatrical performance, rich in local Indonesian traditional dance, of her 2017 film The Seen and Unseen (Sekala Niskala).

How Makeup Artist Louise McCarthy Helped Tattoo The King of Staten Island

As the makeup department head for The King of Staten Island, Louise McCarthy faced a unique challenge that she had never encountered before — creating laughs with tattoos.

Directed by Judd Apatow, the film stars Saturday Night Live alum Pete Davidson as Scott Carlin, a twenty-something slacker who has been struggling emotionally with the death of his father — a firefighter who lost his life in the line of duty when Scott was a child.

Arielle Kilker On Assembling a Largely Female Crew to Create Her Netflix Series Cheer

Arielle Kilker brings pretty much everything she’s learned in her career to bear in her Netflix‘s Cheer, the series she co-created, co-directed, edited, and produced. That includes the Emmy-nominated work she put in as editor on Chef’s Table and a supervising editor on the Peabody nominated Last Chance U. She’s also edited and written crime docuseries on projects for MSNBC, A&E, and PBS. For Cheer, 

Director Josephine Decker on Capturing American Gothic Writer Shirley Jackson’s Complex World

Layers of creative output communicate the enthrallingly choleric New England household and inner world belonging to mid-century American gothic and horror writer Shirley Jackson in Shirley, which screened at Sundance and the Berlinale prior to its streaming release on June 5. Working with Sarah Gubbins’ script based on Susan Scarf Merrell’s novel of the same name, the filmmaker Josephine Decker (Madeline’s Madeline, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely) catapults her audience into the dark Vermont home shared by Shirley (Elisabeth Moss) and her philandering professor husband Stanley Hyman (Michael Stuhlbarg) and two young lodgers,

How Space Force Production Designer Susie Mancini Channeled Stanley Kubrick

Steve Carell is at the center of the new 10-episode Netflix series Space Force, which he co-created with Greg Daniels (The Office) and is streaming now. The inspiration for the show is the real US Space Force that was formed last year to ensure American military supremacy in space and was the brainchild of Donald Trump. The series, which also stars John Malkovich, Lisa Kudrow,

Judy & Punch Writer/Director Mirrah Foulkes Turns the Tables on Her Infamous Puppets

Judy & Punch kicks off with a male marionette thrashing a female doll-on-strings as a crowd of 17th-century tavern goers roars with delight. The camera soon shifts to witches, hangings, infanticide, beatings, magic brews, and lies as filmmaker Mirrah Foulkes bloodily re-imagines how the western world’s most famous pair of hand puppets got their start.

Set in and around an English village shortly after the Bubonic Plague, Judy & Punch (June 5,

Josh Gad & Kristen Bell on Their New Animated Musical Series Central Park

Before he was an adorable singing snowman named Olaf, Josh Gad was a Tony-nominated Broadway star (“The Book of Mormon”) and before that, he was a devoted fan of old-fashioned Broadway musicals, you know, the kind that begin with a big “I wish” song and use the music to reveal character and move the story along. He was also a fan of New York’s Central Park. And the animated TV series Bob’s Burgers.

Joe Bob Briggs Declares This the Summer of the Drive-In

Two summers before a nightmarish virus began sweeping across the globe and altering our reality like a horror B movie, Joe Bob Briggs revived his long-running campaign to keep the drive-in alive. The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs premiered in July of 2018 on AMC’s horror streaming service Shudder. The special was so popular, it crashed the site. Briggs said he was initially skeptical and envisioned the show airing once “for nostalgia sake.” Yet,