“Marty Supreme” First Reactions: Josh Safdie Delivers an Overhand Smash With a Career Best From Timothée Chalamet
The synopsis for co-writer/director Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme is sublimely simple: “Marty Mauser, a young man with a dream no one respects, goes to hell and back in pursuit of greatness.” In the film, Timothée Chalamet plays Marty, an up-and-coming ping pong prodigy whose ambition and pluck will drive him no matter how hard the world pushes back, and push back it will. Safdie’s film, his first solo directorial work since his 2008 debut,
Happy Accidents, Revolutionary Moments, & Killer Improv: Inside “One Battle After Another” With DP Michael Bauman
Spoilers below.
“That dude is unbelievable,” admits One Battle After Another cinematographer Michael Bauman to The Credits about Leonardo DiCaprio. “I mean, he’s a star and he brings people in [theaters] but his ability to expand the character is unreal.” Bauman has worked with Paul Thomas Anderson on five different features in one capacity or another, but it was the first time on set with DiCaprio on the acclaimed film,
How “The Smashing Machine” Makeup Designer Kazu Hiro Transformed Dwayne Johnson into MMA Legend Mark Kerr
Veteran prosthetic makeup designer Kazu Hiro has garnered two Oscars for his outstanding work: one for transforming actor Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill for Darkest Hour, and the other for transforming Charlize Theron into Megyn Kelly for Bombshell. More recently, he was nominated for sculpting Bradley Cooper’s visage as legendary composer Leonard Bernstein in Maestro.
But for writer/director Benny Safdie’s biographical drama about the beginnings of mixed martial arts (“MMA”) and what would eventually become the UFC,
From “Ice Age” to AI: Filmmakers at Busan Weigh Opportunities and Concerns for Creative Industries
Carlos Saldanha could well have been speaking for many of those gathered on the sidelines of this year’s 30th Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) when the filmmaker behind such cutting-edge animated hits as Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006), Rio (2011), and the Oscar-nominated Ferdinand (2017) turned his attention to the growing influence of Artificial Intelligence across the creative industries.
The Brazilian, among the generation of animators who were among the first to adapt CGI techniques to their creations,
Jacob Elordi’s Creature Unmasked in “Frankenstein” Official Trailer, + New Images of Guillermo del Toro’s Adaptation
The official trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein finally revealed the stunning transformation of Jacob Elordi into Frankenstein’s Monster. This is the longest look yet at Del Toro’s passion project, which is firmly told from the Monster’s perspective, as he openly wrestles with the torture of having the memories of multiple people in his head and the general confusion and horror at having been stitched together and electrocuted back into a fractured life.
The Heart of the Story: How Carlos Saldanha Went from Film Student to Animation Legend
Carlos Saldanha came to Busan with one chief piece of advice for the 24 emerging filmmakers gathered from across Asia for this year’s edition of the CHANEL X BIFF Asian Film Academy.
“Every minute counts on the journey towards your objective,” was the message, and the Brazilian filmmaker has crafted a remarkable career out of following that to the letter.
The driving force behind such global hits as Ice Age: The Meltdown (2006),
“Anemone”: A Surreal, Haunting Return to the Screen for Daniel Day-Lewis in Son Ronan Day-Lewis’s Directorial Debut
There is something electric in Anemone, the new film that marks the long‑awaited return of Daniel Day‑Lewis to acting after an eight-year absence in the first feature film directed by his son, Ronan Day‑Lewis. It feels like a threshold movie, one that straddles multiple worlds. Past and present, real and surreal, familial love and bitter legacy, memory and myth, all come to the forefront in this cinematic experience.
Ronan Day‑Lewis,
“The Conjuring: Last Rites” Production Designer John Frankish on Creating the Hellish Smurl House
Production designer John Frankish knew instantly that making the homes the dark heart of The Conjuring: Last Rites was the way to go. From there, everything else would fall into place.
Directed by Michael Chaves, the ninth installment in The Conjuring Universe finds Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga’s paranormal investigators, Ed and Lorraine Warren, taking on what could be their most insanely terrifying case yet—and that’s saying something.
From Tragedy to Art: How Director Olivier Sarbil’s War Injury Inspired the Deeply Personal “Viktor”
At first glance, Olivier Sarbil doesn’t look like someone who’s danced with death, but once you hear his story, you’ll wonder how he’s still here to tell it.
Born on the French island of Corsica, at 21, he joined the military as a paratrooper. Stationed in Rwanda, he witnessed the genocide of the Tutsi people, where more than 800,000 people lost their lives. The experience set Sarbil on a path documenting social conflicts,
Inside the Breakneck Cut of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” With Editor Andy Jurgensen
The best-reviewed movie of the season is also the most relentless. Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Oscar front-runner One Battle After Another races through its two-hour fifty-minute run time propelled by adrenalized performances from Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, Chase Infiniti, Teyana Taylor, Benicio Del Toro, and Regina Hall as revolutionaries in the French 75 (in the case of DiCaprio’s Bob, Teyanna Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills, and Hall’s Deandra),
“One Battle After Another”: How a Single California Road Became The Year’s Most Hallucinatory Effect
Spoilers below.
Let’s try to ditch hyperbole for a second and get to the heart of the matter, to something we might even call objective: Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is a movie that meets its moment head-on. The visionary writer/director doesn’t make uninteresting movies—this, too, feels like an objective statement—yet he has rarely worked in the present day. For a 19-year period, between 2002 and 2021,
Inside “Weapons”: Zach Cregger on Atlanta Crews, Practical Effects, and That Haunting Opening
Weapons became one of the year’s most acclaimed box office hits, and while the film’s success was certainly by design, it still surprised writer/director Zach Cregger. Cregger knows how to craft a movie that gets under your skin—his last film, Barbarian, was one of 2022’s most unsettling and surprising films, not even he could have predicted that Weapons would become a pop culture phenomenon.
The story Cregger presents in his new film is deceptively simple;
Stripped Bare: A Few of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Most Devastating Portraits of Human Nature
Warning: This article contains spoilers
From the furious ambition of oil magnates to the quiet desperation of lonely souls, Paul Thomas Anderson’s films plunge into the dissonant symphony of the human experience with unflinching intensity. Across his eclectic filmography, Anderson crafts narratives that orbit around deep emotional truths, both exhilarating and unsettling. The hunger for connection, the burden of legacy, and the corrosive pull of obsession — whether in the drug-fueled haze of Boogie Nights,
How “Nino” Producer Sandra da Fonseca Turned a First Time Director’s Story Into Global Festival Gold
As producer Sandra da Fonseca is telling The Credits about the theatrical release of her newest film, Nino, serendipity strikes. “Oh, I just saw a bus go by with the film’s poster on it,” she says. “That makes me happy — it’s the first one I’ve seen!”
The poster may have been on the bus side, but Nino is gaining acclaim at rocket speed.
Scarlett Johansson on Her Directorial Debut “Eleanor the Great”: “I Don’t Think I Could Have Done It 10 Years Ago”
Grief makes people do crazy things.
And sometimes that includes moving across the country after the death of your closest friend, befriending a 19-year-old college student, and lying about your identity.
Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, Eleanor the Great, stars June Squibb as Eleanor, a 95-year-old woman who moves to New York after the passing of her dear friend. The film explores how grief spans generations,
Final “Wicked: For Good” Trailer Brings Dorothy to Oz
When we spoke with Wicked and Wicked: For Good co-writer Dana Fox, they were just at the very end of the years-long process of bringing the colossal Broadway smash hit to its cinematic conclusion. Fox told us that she’d recently watched both the films, which were shot back-to-back, back-to-back herself, and had this to say, “By the end of the day, I was like a shell of a person who had to be swept off the floor – makeup all over,
Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” Rises: Christian Bale is Frankenstein’s Monster & Jessie Buckley is his Resurrected Companion
The first trailer for Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! has officially risen.
“Was I just the same before the accident?” asks Jessie Buckley’s The Bride in the opening seconds of the trailer for writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Bride! The response comes from none other than Frankenstein’s Monster, played by Christian Bale. “There wasn’t any accident,” he says. “Everything we did, we did it on purpose.”
We see Buckley’s Bride murder,
Caged Dynamics: How DP Ula Pontikos Frames Willem Dafoe & Corey Hawkins in “The Man in My Basement”
The Man in My Basement marks Nadia Latif’s feature directing debut, and it’s a doozy. Latif adapted author Walter Mosely’s acclaimed 2004 novel of the same name, from a script she co-wrote with Mosely. The film is set in the quiet village of Sag Harbor, New York, where Charles Blakely (Corey Hawkins) is a man adrift until he gets a strange offer from an even stranger businessman, Anniston Bennet (Willem Dafoe), to rent out his basement.
New “Mandalorian and Grogu” Images Reveal AT-ATs, Alien Creatures & Sigourney Weaver
We just got a look at the first trailer for director Jon Favreau’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu, and now it’s time to parse a slew of new images from Favreau’s film. What we know about what Favreau, his co-writer Dave Filoni, and the rest of the stellar cast and crew have cooked up is scant, but the trailer is nonetheless revealing. There are creatures aplenty—mainly of the classic Star Wars type,
Baby Yoda Speaks in the First “The Mandalorian and Grogu” Trailer
The first trailer for director Jon Favreau’s Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu opens on Din Djarin’s (Pedro Pascal) spaceship the Razor Crest curising over a coastline. The next thing we see is one of those images that has made the Disney+ series The Mandalorian such a hit—we’ve got Mando and Baby Yoda doing some recon in a desert landscape, with the little guy sporting a little single-lens pair of binoculars to aid him.
