How “Severance” Cinematographer David Lanzenberg Captured a Chilling Corporate Nightmare
Severance earned 14 Emmy nominations the first time around, and after a three-year hiatus, the show has reignited fan frenzy as it builds toward the Season 2 finale streaming Friday [March 21] on Apple TV +. Again, bifurcated employees and their bosses (Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, Zach Cherry, Tramell Tillman and ...
Colin Farrell in Talks to Enlist in “Sgt. Rock,” Luca Guadagnino’s DC Studios Film
Colin Farrell is no stranger to DC Studios—he has delivered hours and hours of scene-stealing work as Oz Cobb, first in Matt Reeves’ The Batman and then in Max’s critically acclaimed spinoff series The Penguin. His performance as Gotham’s most cunning criminal in The Penguin delivered Farrell a SAG Award, Golden Globe, Critics Choice Award, and Saturn Award. Now, he’s ...
“Mickey 17” Production Designer Fiona Crombie Creates a Playful Pattinson-Verse for Bong Joon Ho’s Black Comedy Space Epic
The underdog hero of Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 is sweetly naive everyman Mickey (Robert Pattinson), a failed macaron shop owner on the run from a bloodthirsty creditor in the year 2054. Mickey finds a way out of his predicament, but it’s bleak—he signs up as an Expendable, a human test subject for a space ...
“Snow White” Early Reactions: One of the Best Live-Action Remakes to Date
The first reactions to Disney’s Snow White are here, and the scuttlebutt is that director Marc Webb and his stars Rachel Zegler (Snow White) and Gal Gadot (the Evil Queen) have delivered one of the best live-action remakes to date. This is quite the turnaround after a few shaky weeks leading to the film’s premiere, with the online ...
SXSW 2025: Tapping Into Texas’s Vast Potential to Become the Next Cinematic Frontier
This year’s SXSW film festival in Austin blew into town with a considerable tailwind of enthusiasm for the Lone Star state’s film and TV future. Every state in the union can claim unique cultures, geographies, and mythologies, but there’s no disputing that Texas looms very large in our collective cultural imagination. It’s a state that ...
No Cuts, Pure Tension: “Adolescence” Director Philip Barantini on Crafting Netflix Thriller in Unbroken Single Takes
British actor Stephen Graham is so reliably intense he played Al Capone for Martin Scorsese in Boardwalk Empire, stared down Al Pacino in The Irishman, executive producer and co-starred in the bare knuckle boxing drama A Thousand Blows, and earned the prestigious Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) award for his contributions to UK ...
From the Upside Down to the MCU: “Stranger Things” Star Sadie Sink Joining Tom Holland in “Spider-Man 4”
It’s official—Spider-Man 4 is in full swing. In a big bit of casting news, Stranger Things star Sadie Sink is joining Tom Holland in the fourth installment of Holland’s run as Peter Parker. Deadline reports that while Sink’s role is not yet known to the public, they’ve gone ahead and posited an intriguing possibility—that she will play legendary X-Men mutant Jean ...
Following “Ballerina,” a Fifth “John Wick” Movie Has Been Confirmed
John Wick will never die. And by “John Wick,” we might not necessarily be referring to the man himself, as played by Keanu Reeves in the first four films. By all accounts, Reeves’ nearly indestructible assassin died a noble death at the end of the last installment, John Wick: Chapter 4. We knew we’d be given another ...
The Weight of Survival: Relive Ellie’s Journey in “The Last of Us” Before Season 2 Premiere
For all intents and purposes, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is a normal kid. She likes comic books. She’s bright but mischievous. She’s learning how to stand up for herself, but she also craves guidance and mentorship. She’s tougher than she looks, but she’s still just a kid. That’s about where normalcy ends for Ellie, who has ...
“Hacks” Attack: HBO’s Award-Winning Comedy Drops Trailer Ahead of Season 4 Premiere
The self-destructive but oh-so lovable comedy team are back for season 4. Max’s Emmy-award winning series Hacks has dropped its official trailer ahead of its April 10 premiere, with Jean Smart’s Deborah and Hannah Einbinder’s Ava finding themselves at a crossroads, and, to Ava’s detriment, no doubt, in each other’s crosshairs as they try to pull ...
SXSW 2025: Dan Farah’s “The Age of Disclosure” Stuns Crowd With Shocking Alien Doc
Festival crowds are notoriously exuberant—it can be hard to get a real read on a film’s potential for broader success or acclaim even if the first time it plays for a crowd at a film festival results in cheers and guffaws. Yet sometimes, for some films, a festival crowd’s excitement is as precise an indicator ...
Best of 2024: “Inside Out 2” Writer Meg LeFauve on the Power of Adolescent Anxiety
*This interview was selected by measures having nothing to do with science as one of our standouts from 2024. Inside Out 2 co-writer Meg LeFavue, along with scribe Dave Holstein, managed to deliver an immensely satisfying, often surprising sequel to one of the most unique animated films in Pixar’s long, rich history. Inside Out earned ...
Cam’s Back: New “Back in Action” Trailer Boasts Cameron Diaz’s Return to Big Screen Alongside Jamie Foxx
The family pulls into a gas station for a quick fill-up and some snacks, a very common vignette for millions of people across the world. The difference here is that the parents, Cameron Diaz’s Emily and Jamie Foxx’s Matt, are not your usual PTA-attending, Girl Scout Cookie-drive leading ma and pa, and when they dispatch ...
Best of 2024: “My Old Ass” Writer/Director Megan Park on Magic, Mushrooms, and Meeting Yourself
In Megan Park’s wide-eyed, warm-as-the-waning-summer-evenings sophomore feature, My Old Ass, time itself is a trip. When Elliott (Maisy Stella) ushers in her 18th birthday with a camping excursion à la psilocybin-laced mushrooms, the last thing she expects is her psyche to conjure up an “old ass” version of herself (at 39 years old), portrayed by ...
Best of 2024: Maximus Effort: “Gladiator II” Production Designer Arthur Max on Creating Colossal Constructions
This interview was selected by measures having nothing to do with science as one of our standouts from 2024. Arthur Max was absolutely crucial to Ridley Scott’s vision of creating a completely unhinged, dementedly decadent Rome. To that end, Max delivered, creating not one but two Colosseums for Scott’s epic. Oscar-nominated production designer Arthur Max ...
Best of 2024: How “The Penguin” Production Designer Kalina Ivanov Helped Bring Gotham Back to New York City
*This interview was selected by measures having nothing to do with science as one of our standouts from 2024. The creation of Gotham for HBO’s shockingly good series The Penguin fell, in large part, to ace production designer Kalina Ivanov. Here’s how she pulled it off. Production designer Kalina Ivanov was destined to be part ...
Best of 2024: “Furiosa” Art Director Jacinta Leong on That Breathtaking 15-Minute Action Sequence
Nine years after Mad Max: Fury Road star Charlize Theron wreaked havoc as bad-ass adult Furiosa, director George Miller revisits his post-apocalyptic nightmare with Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (in theaters now). The prequel, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Hemsworth, and the mighty first-generation War Rig truck, features one of the year’s most spellbinding action sequences, ...
Best of 2024: Richard Linklater on the Killer Chemistry in his Romantic Comedy “Hit Man”
In Richard Linklater‘s latest film, an irresistibly sexy romantic comedy that’s also a bit of a noir, a giddy satire on the hitman genre, and a screwball quasi-whodunit, the one constant is a vibe that is decidedly and effusively all Linklater. Glen Powell, a rising star who has been Linklater’s longtime collaborator through a string of ...
How Director Mohammad Rasoulof Shot his Oscar-Nominated “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” in Secret
Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof wanted to tell a big story — so he went small. The Seed of the Sacred Fig explores his country’s authoritarian rule, repressive justice, patriarchal dominance, and women’s rights through its impact on one family. Taking place during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement, a nationwide protest sparked by the arrest of ...
“Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning” Launches Tom Cruise Into the Super Bowl
If this is Tom Cruise’s last mission as IMF Agent Ethan Hunt, he chose an auspicious time to unleash a furious new look—in the midst of the Philadelphia Eagles prime time demolition of the reigning champs in the Kansas City Chiefs during the Super Bowl. The game wasn’t close, but Ethan’s hunt (pun intended) to ...
Colin Farrell in Talks to Enlist in “Sgt. Rock,” Luca Guadagnino’s DC Studios Film
Colin Farrell is no stranger to DC Studios—he has delivered hours and hours of scene-stealing work as Oz Cobb, first in Matt Reeves’ The Batman and then in Max’s critically acclaimed spinoff series The Penguin. His performance as Gotham’s most cunning criminal in The Penguin delivered Farrell a SAG Award, Golden Globe, Critics Choice Award, and Saturn Award. Now, he’s ...
“Mickey 17” Production Designer Fiona Crombie Creates a Playful Pattinson-Verse for Bong Joon Ho’s Black Comedy Space Epic
The underdog hero of Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17 is sweetly naive everyman Mickey (Robert Pattinson), a failed macaron shop owner on the run from a bloodthirsty creditor in the year 2054. Mickey finds a way out of his predicament, but it’s bleak—he signs up as an Expendable, a human test subject for a space ...
“Snow White” Early Reactions: One of the Best Live-Action Remakes to Date
The first reactions to Disney’s Snow White are here, and the scuttlebutt is that director Marc Webb and his stars Rachel Zegler (Snow White) and Gal Gadot (the Evil Queen) have delivered one of the best live-action remakes to date. This is quite the turnaround after a few shaky weeks leading to the film’s premiere, with the online ...
SXSW 2025: Tapping Into Texas’s Vast Potential to Become the Next Cinematic Frontier
This year’s SXSW film festival in Austin blew into town with a considerable tailwind of enthusiasm for the Lone Star state’s film and TV future. Every state in the union can claim unique cultures, geographies, and mythologies, but there’s no disputing that Texas looms very large in our collective cultural imagination. It’s a state that ...
From the Upside Down to the MCU: “Stranger Things” Star Sadie Sink Joining Tom Holland in “Spider-Man 4”
It’s official—Spider-Man 4 is in full swing. In a big bit of casting news, Stranger Things star Sadie Sink is joining Tom Holland in the fourth installment of Holland’s run as Peter Parker. Deadline reports that while Sink’s role is not yet known to the public, they’ve gone ahead and posited an intriguing possibility—that she will play legendary X-Men mutant Jean ...
Following “Ballerina,” a Fifth “John Wick” Movie Has Been Confirmed
John Wick will never die. And by “John Wick,” we might not necessarily be referring to the man himself, as played by Keanu Reeves in the first four films. By all accounts, Reeves’ nearly indestructible assassin died a noble death at the end of the last installment, John Wick: Chapter 4. We knew we’d be given another ...
“Thunderbolts”: Marvel’s Wild Card Mixes Antiheroes and Indie Talent From A24 & More
Recently, Florence Pugh, one of the stars of Marvel’s upcoming antihero epic Thunderbolts, said the Marvel Cinematic Universe installment was very unlike your average MCU addition. In fact, Pugh told Empire that Thunderbolts feels much more like an indie film. “It ended up becoming this quite badass indie, A24-feeling assassin movie with Marvel superheroes,” Pugh told Empire. This ...
SXSW 2025: Dan Farah’s “The Age of Disclosure” Stuns Crowd With Shocking Alien Doc
Festival crowds are notoriously exuberant—it can be hard to get a real read on a film’s potential for broader success or acclaim even if the first time it plays for a crowd at a film festival results in cheers and guffaws. Yet sometimes, for some films, a festival crowd’s excitement is as precise an indicator ...
SXSW 2025: 11 Intriguing Film & TV Premieres Highlight a Big Time Festival Lineup
Hello from Austin! This year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival is extra star-studded and jam-packed with exciting titles. This is due, in large part, to the fest not coinciding with the Oscars, as it has for the past few years. As always, SXSW is chock-a-block with screenings—an adventurous and inexhaustible attendee has 111 films and ...
From Wings to Stars: Costume Designer Gersha Phillips on Redesigning Captain America
Gersha Phillips is no stranger to the kind of immediately recognizable costumes that tell a viewer immediately what world she’s in, like the intergalactic looks and Starfleet designs she crafted for the recent Star Trek feature Section 31 and the Star Trek series Discovery and Strange New Worlds. Skewing to the realism side of the closet, Phillips ...
How “Severance” Cinematographer David Lanzenberg Captured a Chilling Corporate Nightmare
Severance earned 14 Emmy nominations the first time around, and after a three-year hiatus, the show has reignited fan frenzy as it builds toward the Season 2 finale streaming Friday [March 21] on Apple TV +. Again, bifurcated employees and their bosses (Adam Scott, Britt Lower, Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, Zach Cherry, Tramell Tillman and ...
SXSW 2025: Tapping Into Texas’s Vast Potential to Become the Next Cinematic Frontier
This year’s SXSW film festival in Austin blew into town with a considerable tailwind of enthusiasm for the Lone Star state’s film and TV future. Every state in the union can claim unique cultures, geographies, and mythologies, but there’s no disputing that Texas looms very large in our collective cultural imagination. It’s a state that ...
No Cuts, Pure Tension: “Adolescence” Director Philip Barantini on Crafting Netflix Thriller in Unbroken Single Takes
British actor Stephen Graham is so reliably intense he played Al Capone for Martin Scorsese in Boardwalk Empire, stared down Al Pacino in The Irishman, executive producer and co-starred in the bare knuckle boxing drama A Thousand Blows, and earned the prestigious Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) award for his contributions to UK ...
The Weight of Survival: Relive Ellie’s Journey in “The Last of Us” Before Season 2 Premiere
For all intents and purposes, Ellie (Bella Ramsey) is a normal kid. She likes comic books. She’s bright but mischievous. She’s learning how to stand up for herself, but she also craves guidance and mentorship. She’s tougher than she looks, but she’s still just a kid. That’s about where normalcy ends for Ellie, who has ...
“Hacks” Attack: HBO’s Award-Winning Comedy Drops Trailer Ahead of Season 4 Premiere
The self-destructive but oh-so lovable comedy team are back for season 4. Max’s Emmy-award winning series Hacks has dropped its official trailer ahead of its April 10 premiere, with Jean Smart’s Deborah and Hannah Einbinder’s Ava finding themselves at a crossroads, and, to Ava’s detriment, no doubt, in each other’s crosshairs as they try to pull ...
Dream Team Reunite: Tina Fey & Tracy Morgan to Collaborate Again on NBC Comedy
“Here’s some advice I wish I would’ve got when I was your age. Live every week like it’s Shark Week.” This was one of the immortal lessons delivered by Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan) on Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s 30 Rock, a show now firmly situated in the firmament of great comedy series. Do you have ...
From “Elf” to “Blue Bloods”: Veteran Producer Santiago Quiñones on the Unique Advantages of Filming in New York
Santiago Quiñones was a co-executive producer on Blue Bloods, CBS’s long-running police procedural that followed the Reagan family through their dynastic run within the NYPD. Quiñones, a born and bred New Yorker, joined the show assuming that, like previous projects, he might be moving on after a little while for another opportunity. Instead, he stayed ...
Bare-Knuckle Couture: “A Thousand Blows” Costume Designer Maja Meschede’s Knockout Designs
Editor’s note: Spoiler alert! This story discusses plot lines of A Thousand Blows Season 1. The subtle storytelling of Maja Meschede’s costume designs is hiding in plain sight if you’re able to look away from the simmering drama of A Thousand Blows, a six-part series from Peaky Blinders scribe Steven Knight that follows Hezekiah Moscow ...
Jon Bernthal Set to Return in a “Punisher” Standalone for Disney+
Jon Bernthal is ready to punish Disney+ (in a good way, folks) with more than just his upcoming role in Daredevil: Born Again. Bernthal’s inclusion in Marvel’s upcoming Daredevil series was manna from heaven for fans of his take on Frank Castle, the brutal antihero who exploded onto the scene in the second-season premiere of Netflix’s Daredevil, which ...
The Heart of Hell’s Kitchen: New “Daredevil: Born Again” Video Celebrates NYC Setting
“Daredevil is a New York superhero” are the first words we hear at the top of a new look at Daredevil: Born Again, which proudly (as any good New Yorker would) boasts about its Big Apple bonafides. “You have this picaturesque view of the city; the backgrounds are the backgrounds…there are no green screens,” says executive ...
Be Still My Bursting Chest: “Alien: Romulus’s” Oscar-Nominated VFX Team on Finding Fresh Horror for the Franchise
Alien: Romulus Visual Effects Supervisor Eric Barba and FX Designer Alec Gillis bring the past and future together. Set between the events of Ridley Scott’s ferocious opener Alien and James Cameron’s muscular sequel Aliens, Barba, Gillis, and their team fused the tangible, practical horror and decay of the original films with a more modern, rock-and-roll sensibility. The ...
“The Substance” of Nightmares: Oscar-Nominated Makeup Effects Master Pierre Olivier Persin on His Terrifying Transformations
Since its release last fall, writer/director Coralie Fargeat’s body horror thriller The Substance has artfully shocked Academy Award voters to the tune of five Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay. Outstanding Actress nominee Demi Moore portrays aging actress Elisabeth, who gets way more than she bargained for after injecting herself with ...
“A Complete Unknown”: Orchestrating 60+ Live Performances for Oscar-Worthy Sound
In one of this year’s tour de force performances, Timothée Chalamet’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of one of America’s greatest singer-songwriters took almost six years to perfect (partly thanks to COVD-19 delays in production). For director James Mangold’s music biopic, A Complete Unknown, Chalamet not only learned to play the guitar and harmonica for the film, but ...
No More Games: “September 5’s” Oscar-Nominated Writers on the Day Terror Took Center Stage
The thriller September 5, directed and co-written by Tim Fehlbaum, revisits the day the Palestinian militant group Black September took nine Israeli athletes hostage during the 1972 Munich Olympics. Nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, the script, which Fehlbaum wrote with Moritz Binder, is a tightly-paced journalism procedural centered on the ABC Sports ...
How Director Mohammad Rasoulof Shot his Oscar-Nominated “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” in Secret
Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof wanted to tell a big story — so he went small. The Seed of the Sacred Fig explores his country’s authoritarian rule, repressive justice, patriarchal dominance, and women’s rights through its impact on one family. Taking place during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom movement, a nationwide protest sparked by the arrest of ...
“Conclave” Oscar Nominee Peter Straughan on Scripting a Devilishly Good Vatican Thriller
Conclave is great, gripping entertainment from the first shot to the last. It’s a drama, both honest and escapist, deftly shot, performed, and staged by artists at the top of their respective games. In the hands of Academy Award-nominated screenwriter Peter Straughan, Edward Berger’s contemplative film moves briskly within the Vatican walls. A movie that ...
Julian Brave NoiseCat & Emily Kassie’s on “Sugarcane”: Their Oscar-Nominated Exploration of Trauma and Truth
Toronto-born filmmaker and investigative journalist Emily Kassie has covered conflict around the globe, from the Taliban’s crackdown on women to child labor in Turkey. “But I had never turned the lens on my own country,” says Kassie. That’s changed with Sugarcane, which mixes a grassroots investigation with personal and collective reckoning of years of forced ...
Oscar-Nominated Producer Maria Carlota Bruno on Recreating a Transcendent Heroine in “I’m Still Here”
In 1964, a coup d’état overthrew Brazilian president João Goulart, initiating a military dictatorship that lasted until 1985. The former congressman Rubens Paiva went into self-exile at the time of the coup but returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1970, where he settled into a pleasant household near Leblon Beach with his wife, Eunice Paiva, ...
“Nickel Boys” Writer/Director RaMell Ross on Camera as Consciousness in His Oscar-Nominated Film
An introspective, promising teenager hitchhiking to college gets a ride in a car that turns out to be stolen. The driver is Black, and so is the boy. Deemed an accomplice despite his innocence, Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is remanded to Nickel Academy, a segregated Florida reform school. Nickel Boys, the Oscar-nominated film based on Colson ...
“Conclave’s” Oscar-Nominated Costume Designer Lisy Christl on the Fashion of Faith
Following his Oscar-winning WWI epic, All Quiet on the Western Front, Edward Berger’s latest, Conclave, focuses on a different kind of battle, dropping us into the Vatican in his twisty ecclesiastical thriller. After the death of the current Pontiff, the honorable and evenhanded Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is charged with convening one of the most ...
