Latest Movie Features
‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’ Writer-Director Raven Jackson Brings Poetry to Motion With First Film
Watching Raven Jackson’s audacious debut feature, All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, is like participating in an intimate ritual. The film follows Mack (played by Kaylee Nicole Johnson as a child and Charleen McClure as an adult) as she comes of age in Mississippi, tracking the emotional arc of her life from girlhood to maturity. […]
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Oscar Sound Contenders Bring the Chaos of Battle, the Tones of Unseen Strategy to the Screen
Killers of the Flower Moon “I’m the first [listener], so I always pay attention to how the performances, the transitions, the arc will be experienced by the audience,” says veteran production sound mixer Mark Ulano. In the case of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon for Apple/Paramount — about a series of murders that […]
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‘The Zone of Interest’ DP Lukasz Zal on Depicting Evil Without the Emotional Manipulation
To work on The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s harrowing Holocaust drama about the domestic life of an Auschwitz commandant and his family, Polish cinematographer Lukasz Zal said he had to “forget everything I was taught” about making “beautiful images.” Glazer’s film, loosely adapted from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel, follows the seemingly mundane activities of […]
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How VFX Pros Transformed Worlds and Faces With Visual Effects
Without a juggernaut such as Avatar: The Way of Water in the running — and schedule changes that pushed big tentpoles, notably Dune 2, back to 2024 — this season’s visual effects Oscar race is shaping up to be a competitive one. The road to a nomination begins with a committee of branch members who […]
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Creative Fusion on an Extra-Large Scale: Jennifer Lame on Editing ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘Postcard From Earth’
Editor Jennifer Lame’s work has appeared on many of the world’s largest screens this year. Over the summer, her second movie with director Christopher Nolan, his historical epic Oppenheimer, for Universal, had moviegoers scrambling for tickets to Imax’s large-format theaters. And in October, the Lame-edited Postcard From Earth, from director Darren Aronofsky, became the first […]
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From Lillian St. Cyr to Lily Gladstone: A Brief History of Hollywood Honoring Native Talent
Lily Gladstone is creating a lot of excitement these days. The 37-year-old actress of Blackfeet and Nimíipuu heritage is generating Oscar buzz with her performance as Mollie Burkhart, the Osage wife of the scheming Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Apple/Paramount’s Killers of the Flower Moon. The actress also earned a Gotham Award nom on Oct. 24 […]
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Netflix Short ‘The After’ Depicts a Shocking Tragedy and a Father’s Grief
In Netflix’s live-action short The After, a man named Dayo (David Oyelowo, who also serves as executive producer) loses his wife and child in a brutal public display of violence. Describing his film’s intense and shocking opening scene, director Misan Harriman compares it to “an act of God” — one born out of the “collective […]
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Kris Bowers Is the Busiest Composer in the World
Kris Bowers is one of the busiest multihyphenates working in Hollywood. This year, the Emmy-nominated Bridgerton composer returned to Shondaland and Netflix’s hit costume drama to compose its prequel series, Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story; he also composed the score for two Disney properties, the feature film Haunted Mansion and the Marvel series Secret Invasion. On […]
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She Starred as the Iconic “Maxine Shaw,” But Erika Alexander Says Her ‘American Fiction’ Role Is Her Best Yet
Many actors have several key roles in their careers, but Erika Alexander is one of the rare ones who’s had the role of a lifetime. Thirty years ago, she stepped into the character of Maxine Shaw on Living Single — a now-iconic attorney character inspired by her role models Cicely Tyson, Phylicia Rashad, Whoopi Goldberg […]
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‘Silver Dollar Road’ Director Raoul Peck on Doc’s Interrogation of Systemic Racism: “When Was America Great, and For Whom?”
Our ancestors left this here for us,” a member of the North Carolina-based Reels family says in the documentary Silver Dollar Road, referring to the 65-acre waterfront property that had long been their financial and spiritual haven. In the late 1970s, a relative of the Reelses cited a legal loophole to claim that he was […]
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“We Wanted to Paint With the Light and Write With the Camera”: The THR Cinematographer Roundtable
“I think it was a voice from the wider audience telling us that people wanted to go to the cinemas again and people wanted to join in with an event,” says Oppenheimer cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema of the summer’s Barbenheimer phenomenon. Rodrigo Prieto, who lensed Greta Gerwig’s Barbie as well as Martin Scorsese’s Killers of […]
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‘The Lord of the Rings’ Trilogy Cast, Then and Now
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the third film in Peter Jackson’s trilogy, premiered in theaters 20 years ago (on Dec. 17, 2003) to throngs of moviegoers. It was a triumphant moment for everyone involved, the culmination of a franchise that entertained both existing fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels about the […]
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‘The Family Plan’ Director Simon Cellan Jones Talks Making Back-to-Back Mark Wahlberg Movies
After a decorated career in television, The Family Plan director Simon Cellan Jones has returned to feature films for the first time in two-plus decades. Cellan Jones’ feature career began with 2000’s Some Voices, a British drama starring a still-emerging Daniel Craig, and he soon followed that up with 2002’s The One and Only, before […]
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Mattel’s Robbie Brenner Knows ‘Barbie’ Is a “Unicorn” That May Never Be Topped. She Still Has a Slate to Build
Mattel headquarters, in El Segundo, is some three freeways removed from the heart of Hollywood. It shares a parking lot with a DoubleTree, and the Stamps.com headquarters is across the road, but given the hold that Barbie has on the entertainment industry, it might as well be the center of the universe. Inside, Hot Wheels […]
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Hollywood Flashback: In 1986, Drew Barrymore Saved Christmas in ‘Babes in Toyland’
Nearly four decades ago, NBC brought Babes in Toyland back to life with an all-star cast. The holiday project was based on the 1903 operetta, which features Victor Herbert’s score — including Christmas staple “Toyland” — and a libretto from Glen MacDonough that draws together numerous Mother Goose characters. It followed such previous adaptations as […]
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Greta Gerwig, Bradley Cooper and the THR Director Roundtable: “Final Cut Is a State of Mind”
The preshoot rituals they can’t live without, the studio negotiations they’ve learned to finesse and the creative choices they still can’t believe they got away with — the directors of six of this year’s most remarkable movies got together and talked shop. In November, Blitz Bazawule (The Color Purple), Bradley Cooper (Maestro), Ava DuVernay (Origin), […]
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