Director & Cinematographer Warwick Thornton on his Outback Western Sweet Country

Growing up in the Australian outback, director and cinematographer Warwick Thornton wasn’t exposed to many big screen movies.

“We had a drive-in on Friday and Saturday nights. I remember Star Wars four or five years after was released; that’s how long it took that print [to travel to the outback],” says Thornton, 48. “So that’s the Hollywood cinema I grew up on. I never watched westerns in cinemas because [the cinemas played] just big,

Super Troopers 2 Star Kevin Heffernan Discusses The Gleefully Insane Sequel

If for no other reason than sheer longevity, comedy collective Broken Lizard deserves a shout-out for sticking together. The five guys who specialize in “low brow humor for high-brow people,” as ensemble member Kevin Heffernan puts it, started cracking each other up around 1990 as undergrads at Colgate University. Twenty-eight years later, they’ve created R-rated Super Troopers 2 (opening today), which aims to outdo the raunchy slapstick featured in their 2001 sleeper hit.

Mudbound & Come Sunday Composer Tamar-kali’s Singular Path

At less than 2% of all composers, the percentage of female scoring artists working in the film industry is the lowest and most out of balance with the number of men getting hired. There isn’t any official data on how many of those are women of color, but it’s an even smaller fraction. With her critically acclaimed score for Mudbound, and now with her new work for the film Come Sunday,

Kay Cannon on her Hilarious Directorial Debut Blockers

If you’ve ever been a Teen Movie fan, the last several years haven’t really been for you. While the late 90s and early aughts had more than their fair share of teen movies (many now classics), it’s been few and far between for a studio coming-of-age flick. But in the last month, we’ve been blessed with not one, but two studio teen films: Greg Berlanti’s Love, Simon and Kay Cannon’s Blockers—both that have made progressive new changes to the teen film formula.

The Good Wife Costume Designer Dan Lawson Brings his Skill to New Detective Series Instinct

Dan Lawson certainly possesses the gift of garb. The established costume designer is an Emmy nominee for his work on CBS’s The Good Wife, and now brings his winning style to that show’s spinoff The Good Fight. He also is a recipient of the Theater Development Fund’s Irene Sharaff Young Master Award for excellence in costume design — the first to be honored for television.

Because wardrobe is so essential to character and story,

Writer/Director Chloe Zhao on Her Tender Look at a Real American Indian Cowboy in The Rider

The Rider, a meditative half-fictional drama set on the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation in South Dakota, first premiered at Cannes last year, where it won the Art Cinema Award. The second feature film from the Chinese director Chloe Zhao, it opened in wide release this past Friday. Zhao, who attended undergraduate and film school in the U.S., was living in New York before she decamped to South Dakota, where she made Songs My Brother Taught Me,

Director Brad Silberling’s An Ordinary Man Takes on a Notorious Bosnian War Criminal

Filmmaker Brad Silberling first became fascinated with natural-born monsters in 2008 when he learned about Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić. Known as “The Butcher of Bosnia,” General Mladić commanded the massacre of some 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the Yugoslav civil wars. Following the atrocities, Maleic and politician Karadžić, aided by loyalists, hid from Hague-based International Criminal Court prosecutors for 14 years, shuffled about by loyalists through a succession of low-rent Belgrade safe houses. After reading testimony from Mladić‘s former body guards,

Blockers Actor Jimmy Bellinger Promises This Isn’t the Prom Night You Remember

Parents have long agonized over the question of when their child is old enough to make mature decisions. The real answer is that it’s different for everybody, but that doesn’t make parenting any easier. There is a lot of worrying and well-intended intervention that happens when kids come of age. And if your parents are Leslie Mann, John Cena, or Ike Barinholtz, there are also a lot of laughs. Jimmy Bellinger stars in the wild new comedy Blockers as high school senior,

How A Quiet Place Sound Designers Made Audiences Afraid of Their Own Noise

There are rules to the monster invasion in A Quiet Place and you must learn them quickly to survive. The movie’s characters have had over a year to observe the creatures, but the audience is gifted only a few precious minutes to learn before the first attack. The predators are blind, but they hear everything. Barefoot steps on a soft sand path is permissible. Screaming is not. Supervising sound editors Ethan Van der Ryn and Erik Aadahl,

Chatting With I Feel Pretty Stars Amy Schumer & Rory Scovel About Chemistry, Confidence & More

In I Feel Pretty, Amy Schumer plays Renee, a young woman who works for a cosmetic company and dreams of being “undeniably beautiful.” In a twist on the long-time movie tradition of a hit on the head that triggers – or cures – amnesia (see: I Love You Again, Overboard, Desperately Seeking Susan, and many more), Renee has an accident on a SoulCycle and somehow sees herself as the beauty she has always longed to be. 

The Beyond Skyline Composer on Making Aliens Sound as Big as They Look

Captain America: Civil War star Frank Grillo will not be appearing in the Avengers’ showdown against Thanos later this month, but he’s been busy battling aliens of his own. Grillo leads the human fight against an intergalactic invasion in Beyond Skyline. The film is something of a family drama with Mark (Grillo) trying to reconnect with his son Trent (Jonny Weston) during the chaos. Composer Nathan Whitehead wrote the eerie and epic score that weaves together a tense father-son dynamic with colossal creatures.

Jessica Jones Costume Designer on Losing the Cape in Favor of Leather & Denim

Krysten Ritter wears jeans for every scene she plays as the star of Netflix series Jessica Jones. Technically a super-hero capable of jumping off skyscrapers and landing on the sidewalk without a scratch, the hard-drinking private eye from Hell’s Kitchen has no patience for the tights/cape/mask routine. Instead, Ritter’s character is dressed by costume designer Elisabeth Vastola in boots, jeans and motorcycle jackets that owe more to Marlon Brando’s iconic Wild One rebel couture than cartoony costumes.

Cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen on Breathing Life Into A Quiet Place‘s Terrifying Apocalypse

In a landscape dominated by whizz-bang actioners, A Quiet Place stands alone. Directed by John Krasinski and starring Emily Blunt, it’s a nearly dialogue-free, smartly subtle genre exercise that’s as much creature feature as it is a stirring family drama, a post-apocalyptic thriller centered on a family beset by malevolent monsters that use sound to track their prey. But in a landscape of utter quiet, it’s the film’s gorgeous look – executed by cinematographer Charlotte Bruus Christensen – that ultimately fills out the lush world in which the monster movie peril plays out.

The Amazing & Unconventional Creations of the Black Panther Makeup Designer

If Wakanda were a real place, its tourism would be booming right now. Black Panther is a visual feast that celebrates the best of Africa in bold and colorful ways through a fantasy utopia. Visiting the theater is the closest fans can come to seeing Wakanda up close, and they were rewarded with well researched and stunning designs. The makeup design, production design, and costume design were so enveloping that people were actually searching for flights to Wakanda.

Graphic Designer Erica Dorn Sweats the Details for Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs

When Erica Dorn heard Wes Anderson needed a London-based, Japanese-speaking graphic designer for his new stop-motion movie, she jumped from the world of advertising into her first feature film and helped produce the precision-tooled typography, signage, documents and product packaging now on display in Isle of Dogs. Born and raised in Japan, Dorn moved at age 18 to England to study illustration, then worked on branding campaigns. Passing a two-week Isle of Dogs audition,

Broken Down, Dirtied, and Greased Up: Designing the Costumes of A Series of Unfortunate Events

Evil has never had a more sumptuous wardrobe than in Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Count Olaf (Neil Patrick Harris), who fancies himself a great actor, utilizes thinly veiled, yet tremendously detailed costumes to fool the show’s dimwitted adults. Costume designer Cynthia Summers created Olaf’s many aliases, as well as the clothing for the rest of the cast, in season two.

“I think it’s wackier,” Summers said of the new episodes.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel‘s Production Designer Recreates 1958-era Manhattan

Production designer Bill Groom doesn’t remember much about 1958. After all, he was just eight years old when the feisty and fictitious Midge Maisel roamed the streets of New York. So when Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband Dan Palladino asked him to conjure mid-century Manhattan for their Amazon period piece comedy The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which started streaming on Amazon earlier this month, Groom did what he always does: research. Lots of research.

Unsane‘s Production Designer & Set Decorator on Perfecting Paranoia

On the surface, the most notable thing about Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane is that the ever-experimental filmmaker captured the frenzied 90-minutes with the assistance of a handful of iPhones, a down and dirty technique that nevertheless gives the film what Soderbergh calls a “velvet” smoothness. It’s a daring choice from an ever evolving filmmaker, but Usane’s greatest strength isn’t all in its technical wizardry. It’s the film’s ability to send any viewer veering off kilter nearly as soon as the action onscreen begins – it’s all unsettling angles,

Watch VFX Artists Help Create Thousands of Stop-Motion Animation Sports Fans in Early Man

Stop-motion animation is a form of movie magic that has astounded audiences for years. Just last week, we spoke to Isle of Dogs production designer Paul Harrod about the incredible level of detail, and ingenuity, required to pull of Wes Anderson’s latest stop-motion masterpiece (he already has The Fantastic Mr. Fox under his belt).

Stop-motion animation involves physically moving the objects in the film, usually clay made,

Ayşe Toprak on her Groundbreaking Documentary Mr. Gay Syria

The devastating Syrian civil war has made an impact on international film audiences largely thanks to two powerful documentaries: the Oscar-winning The White Helmets (2016) and the Oscar nominee Last Men in Aleppo (2017). Although director Ayşe Toprak’s new documentary Mr. Gay Syria tells its story against the backdrop of the civil war that’s killed 300,000 people since it began in 2011 and caused five million to flee and become refugees,