Right on Cue
150 episodes - English - Latest episode: 10 days ago - ★★★★ - 3 ratingsFilm and TV critic Clint Worthington (Consequence, RogerEbert.com, The Spool) talks to a new composer every episode about the origins, challenges, and joys of their latest musical scores.
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Episodes
Theodore Shapiro (Severance)
April 09, 2022 12:19 - 27 minutes - 31.6 MBIn a world where so many people have learned to start working from home the last couple of years(and many still do), the phrase "don't take your work home with you" has become ever more dubious. But what if you could really leave it all at the office -- not just your work, but your memories of doing that work? That's the eerie premise of Apple TV+'s latest series, Severance, a Ben Stiller-directed corporate satire that imagines a company that allows its employees to undergo an experimenta...
Ben Salisbury & Geoff Barrow (Archive 81)
March 25, 2022 16:09 - 36 minutes - 41.9 MBIt's safe to say that the world of film music, especially modern film music, owes a lot to Portishead's Geoff Barrow. In a large way, that's due to the instrumentalist and musician's founding of indie label Invada Records in 2001, which placed an early focus on hip hop and experimental acts before pinning down a unique emphasis on releasing film scores. But he's a prolific film and TV composer in his own right, as he paired with composer Ben Salisbury in the early 2010s for an abortive sco...
Rob Simonsen (The Adam Project)
March 12, 2022 20:07 - 32 minutes - 44 MBWhat would you do if you could go back in time and talk to your 12-year-old self? What if you could also see a dead loved one again? For all the whiz-bang action-adventure stuffed into Ryan Reynolds' latest film, The Adam Project, composer Rob Simonsen's score never strays far from those sentimental questions. The next collaboration between Reynolds and director Shawn Levy after last year's Free Guy, The Adam Project follows a time-traveling fighter pilot who flees his dystopian past t...
Nathan Halpern (Catch the Fair One)
February 26, 2022 16:30 - 33 minutes - 37.9 MBMonths after he came on the show last (for the COVID documentary In the Same Breath), composer Nathan Halpern has been extremely busy. Just a few weeks ago, he scored three films that premiered at this year's Sundance film festival: the nail-biting thrillers Watcher and Emily the Criminal, as well as the documentary short The Martha Mitchell Effect. But this week, we're talking about a film that premiered at last year's Tribeca Film Festival, one of the best, most under-discussed films...
Dara Taylor (The Tender Bar)
February 14, 2022 15:24 - 31 minutes - 35.8 MBToday we're talking to Hollywood Music in Media Awards-winning composer Dara Taylor, best known for her collaborations with composer Christopher Lennertz on a variety of projects, from the Netflix series Lost in Space to the cult 2020 comedy Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar. But her latest solo project is the biggest yet for the young composer - the George Clooney-directed drama The Tender Bar. Based on the memoir by J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar is a coming-of-age story about a young w...
Jimmy LaValle (Something in the Dirt)
February 04, 2022 14:30 - 34 minutes - 40 MBFor the next few weeks, we'll be highlighting some of the scores and composers we really liked out of the 2022 Sundance International Film Festival. First up is Something in the Dirt, the latest from Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who've made a cottage industry out of scintillating low-budget sci-fi and supernatural horror. Along with the ride for most of their endeavors has been longtime composer and friend Jimmy LaValle, for whom this is his fourth collaboration with the pair. ...
Daniel Pemberton (Being the Ricardos)
January 14, 2022 14:36 - 31 minutes - 35.8 MBWhen one thinks of most modern film scoring, we're in an interesting realm of experimentation and innovation -- one less defined by the traditional symphonic orchestras of John Williams and James Horner and more by the electronic and textured influences of Hans Zimmer and his coterie. Normally, Oscar-nominated composer Daniel Pemberton operates in the latter realm, thinking outside the box on scores ranging from Ridley Scott's The Counselor to Into the Spider-Verse and beyond. But for ...
Dickon Hinchliffe (The Lost Daughter)
December 31, 2021 15:50 - 24 minutes - 28.5 MBThis week, we're looking at Netflix's latest awards contender, The Lost Daughter, the directorial debut of Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman, Dakota Johnson, Jessie Buckley, and Ed Harris. Based on the 2006 novella of the same name by Elena Ferrante, the film follows a middle-aged literature professor named Leda (Colman) as she attempts to spend a relaxing summer holiday on a Greek island. But her stay is interrupted by anxieties from both the present and past, as her connection w...
David Newman (West Side Story)
December 25, 2021 17:16 - 40 minutes - 46 MBThis week, we're talking to David Newman, son of acclaimed composer Alfred Newman and a proud member of a film music family that includes brother Thomas Newman and cousin Randy Newman. He's a prolific and legendary composer and conductor who's scored more than 100 feature films and television shows. You may know his work from films like Serenity, the live-action Scooby-Doo films, and most notably, his iconic score to Galaxy Quest. But his latest project isn't to compose a new original ...
Uno Helmersson (Flee)
December 20, 2021 14:54 - 41 minutes - 47.5 MBRefugee narratives are a common one in documentary, but Jonas Poher Rasmussen's Flee is something unique. Telling the story of one of Jonas' childhood friends, a gay Afghan refugee named Amin, Flee charts its subject's childhood in Afghanistan, the circumstances by which he had to leave. Fleeing to Denmark without the rest of his family, he was left all alone to figure himself out -- not just his sexuality, but his identity as well. Told in striking, minimalist animation, both depicting in...
Siddhartha Khosla (Only Murders in the Building)
November 12, 2021 13:35 - 36 minutes - 42.4 MBThis week, we talk to composer Siddhartha Khosla about his twisting, mercurial score for Hulu's Only Murders in the Building, co-created by John Hoffman and Steve Martin. It's a charming, unassuming murder-mystery-comedy series buoyed by career-best work from Martin Short, Steve Martin, and Selen Gomez, and as many twists and cosmopolitan affectations as the podcasts on which it's styled. And underneath it all is Khosla's score, a plinky, minimalist affair that makes sneaky use of circular...
Steven Price (Last Night in Soho)
November 06, 2021 13:24 - 39 minutes - 44.9 MBThe latest film from director Edgar Wright, Last Night in Soho, is a time-twisting psychological thriller about a young woman named Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) who moves to London to enter fashion school. Once there, though, the sheltered Ellie finds herself haunted by dreams in which she's transported into 1960s Soho, viewing the young life of an aspiring singer (Anya Taylor-Joy) and the impending doom she may be hurtling towards. It's a film as informed by 1960s British gangster movie...
Drum & Lace and Ian Hultquist (Night Teeth)
October 29, 2021 14:21 - 36 minutes - 41.4 MBThrow a rock at an LA-based thriller, and you can hit any number of stylistic signposts: neon lights, fancy cars, pumping dance clubs, androgynous threats in the night. But in Netflix's Night Teeth, the LA thriller gets some fresh blood - literally! - in the form of a sprightly, energetic vampire flick that still beats with the oddly warm heart of a John Hughes film. Night Teeth follows a young college student (Jorge Lengeborg Jr.) suddenly saddled with the responsibility of chauffeuri...
Harry Gregson-Williams (The Last Duel)
October 15, 2021 15:24 - 23 minutes - 26.7 MBGrammy and Golden Globe-nominated composer Harry Gregson-Williams is no stranger to director Ridley Scott: First working with his brother, the late Tony Scott, on films like Enemy of the State and Spy Game, Gregson-Williams began working with Ridley on Kingdom of Heaven, and has scored several other films with him since (including his sprawling score for The Martian). But his latest score -- one of two with Ridley this year; he'll be providing the music for House of Gucci in a couple month...
Cliff Martinez (Drive)
October 09, 2021 20:10 - 31 minutes - 43.4 MBFilm scores don't often chart, but when they do, it's for good reason. In 2011, that happened to the piercing, airy, enigmatic score for Nicholas Winding Refn's neo-noir Drive, starring Ryan Gosling as a nameless Hollywood stunt driver turned getaway driver. It was a minimalist throwback to the car-based crime films of the '70s and '80s, fueled by Refn's own arthouse aesthetic and Gosling's stoic performance. But even more than Gosling's scorpion jacket, it's the music of Drive that endure...
Laura Karpman (What If...?)
September 24, 2021 17:45 - 24 minutes - 33.5 MBGiven the sprawling nature of the decade-old Marvel Cinematic Universe, it makes sense that Phase Four would be dedicated to breaking apart the house they've built and changing around the pieces to see what happens. We've had alternate realities with WandaVision and Loki, of course, but Disney+'s latest, the animated What If...?, is a pure alternate-universe thought exercise. Overseen by Uatu the Watcher (Jeffrey Wright), What If...? escorts us through an anthology of stories that plays mer...
Marco Beltrami and Miles Hankins (Nine Perfect Strangers)
September 11, 2021 15:14 - 26 minutes - 36.7 MBWhat lengths would you traverse to let go of your traumas? That's one of many premises swimming around in the hazy ether of Hulu's new series Nine Perfect Strangers. Created by David E. Kelley and based on the book by Liane Moriarty, the series follows nine people drawn for one reason or another to a mysterious wellness center called Tranquillum, led by an equally mercurial resort director plated by Nicole Kidman. Some of them are reeling from the suicide of a family member, like the Marco...
Joel P. West (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings)
September 03, 2021 14:00 - 33 minutes - 45.4 MBIn the wake of Avengers: Endgame, the MCU has been taking bigger chances in Phase Four with smaller, lesser-known heroes, especially ones from communities not often represented in Hollywood. With Marvel's latest, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, we get the live-action film adaptation of '70s Marvel's answer to Bruce Lee, a superhero-flavored martial arts picture teeming with Asian and Asian-American representation. It's one of the more clearly-staged action films in the MCU, ...
Nathan Halpern (In the Same Breath)
August 21, 2021 12:23 - 40 minutes - 55.1 MBCentral to the horror-film feel of Nanfu Wang's new COVID-19 documentary, In the Same Breath, is the eerie, evocative score courtesy of Emmy-nominated composer Nathan Halpern. A prolific scorer of feature films, documentaries, and limited series alike, Halpern has brought his idiosyncratic approach to films as diverse as Chloe Zhao's The Rider, Swallow, and Minding the Gap. His upcoming scores include the Darren Aronofsky-produced thriller Catch the Fair One, and now, he joins us to talk ab...
Christophe Beck (Free Guy)
August 13, 2021 20:27 - 28 minutes - 38.7 MBIn the Grand Theft Auto-like world of Free City, Free Guy's Guy (Ryan Reynolds) gets to while away the days as an NPC in his hyper-violent video game world with a host of licensed music, courtesy of Mariah Carey, Digital Underground, Frankie Valli, and more. But the incidental score to Shawn Levy's surprisingly charming adventure film comes courtesy of this week's guest, frequent Levy collaborator Christophe Beck. The Emmy-winning composer of Ant-Man, Frozen, and more, Beck worked with Lev...
Daniel Hart (The Green Knight)
July 31, 2021 13:10 - 41 minutes - 56.6 MBDavid Lowery's The Green Knight is a brilliant, mesmerizing take on the 14th-century Welsh poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, starring Dev Patel as a flawed, headstrong variant on the archetypal Knight of the Round Table. It's steeped in the ancient Arthurian traditions of chivalric romance, but muddied and tarred with the grit, fatalism, and pagan supernaturalism of the time in which it was created. It's a perfect assignment for Lowery, whose films, while diverse, are deeply thoughtful...
Reza Safinia (Warrior)
July 16, 2021 18:37 - 41 minutes - 56.5 MBOne of the best, most undersung action shows on television is Cinemax's Warrior, a stylish period piece based largely on concepts developed by the late Bruce Lee for a show that would eventually (and unfortunately) become Kung Fu. Charting the conflicts between Chinese gangs and the American police in San Francisco's Chinatown in the 19th century, it's a show that combines some of the best, clearest action on TV (thanks to Andrew Koji, Joe Taslim, and a roster of incredible martial artist...
Natalie Holt (Loki)
July 09, 2021 14:35 - 24 minutes - 33.3 MBAs the Marvel Cinematic Universe expands its reach into TV, so too does its musical palate expand in turn. And so it goes with Loki, the latest Disney+ series, which will see its season finale next week. It's been a wild ride, following Loki (Tom Hiddleston) through his misadventures with the Time Variance Authority, his unlikely friendship with TVA agent Mobius (Owen Wilson), and the ongoing quest to discover exactly who's behind the TVA's implicitly sinister plans -- with the aid of a fem...
Bear McCreary (Battlestar Galactica)
July 02, 2021 16:20 - 40 minutes - 56.1 MBWhen Ronald D. Moore's reimagined Battlestar Galactica premiered on The Sci-Fi Channel in 2003, it was a watershed moment for the genre. A gritty, moody, morally complicated redo of the cheesy '70s Glen Larson series, Moore's take on the show -- a space opera about a fleet of ships carrying the remnants of humanity to a mysterious planet called Earth, with a robotic enemy called the Cylons giving chase -- crystallized so many of America's post-9/11 fears about terrorism, splinter cells, and...
Tree Adams (Belushi)
June 25, 2021 14:36 - 38 minutes - 53.4 MBDuring his all-too-brief stint on this Earth, John Belushi was one of comedy's greatest voices. A blustering buffoon one minute, a deeply intelligent trickster the next, Belushi's work on SNL, The Blues Brothers, and Animal House made him a household name in the blink of an eye -- before his life was tragically cut short by the very lifestyle that success gave him. RJ Cutler's documentary Belushi is a stylish, straightforward chronicling of the man's life -- what drove him, the good and th...
Charlie Clouser (Spiral: From the Book of Saw)
June 15, 2021 16:39 - 33 minutes - 45.5 MBWhen the first Saw premiered in 2003, it rattled the foundations of the horror genre -- not just for its pioneering of gruesome, high-concept gory horror of a type that would come to be known as 'torture porn', but for its perversely iconic musical soundscapes. "Hello Zepp," with its grungy buildup and cacophonous, rising strings, quickly became a staple of the long-running Saw series, which is now in its ninth installment with 2021's Spiral: From the Book of Saw. Central to those disturbin...
Joseph Trapanese (Shadow and Bone)
April 23, 2021 17:27 - 40 minutes - 55.7 MBIn the wake of Game of Thrones' ending, virtually every streaming service has tried its hand at vying for prestige-fantasy drama supremacy, adapting book series filled with sprawling worlds and dense mythologies. The latest of these, Shadow and Bone, based on the Grishaverse novels by Leigh Bardugo, is one of the lushest and most intriguing in a good long while -- set in a war-torn steampunk world split by various warring nations. The largest of these, Ravka, is split by a mysterious black ...
Henry Jackman (Falcon and the Winter Soldier)
April 16, 2021 14:11 - 31 minutes - 42.6 MBWhen last we spoke to Henry Jackman (for Joe and Anthony Russo's creaky but sonically-fulfilling Cherry), he relished in the sense of freewheeling experimentation he got to enjoy on such a devil-may-care project. Now, he's back in the Marvel saddle with Disney+'s six-part limited series, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, which follows the titular Captain America sidekicks (played by Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan) as they adjust to life after the Star-Spangled Man with a Plan "retires" ...
Gazelle Twin and Max de Wardener (The Power)
April 09, 2021 14:32 - 35 minutes - 48.4 MBCorinna Faith's chilling supernatural horror film The Power charts one horrifying night in a dank, dreary hospital in 1974 London for Val (Rose Williams), a nurse in training whose idealism and naivete brushes up against the insular, competitive world of the hospital she's been assigned, one with its own morbid history of ghosts and the violence of the past. Stuck in the dark with little but her own fears, the animus of her colleagues, and the terrifying specter of a mysterious presence th...
Dominik Scherrer (The Serpent)
April 02, 2021 16:47 - 37 minutes - 51 MBFrom 1963 to 1976, famed French serial killer Charles Sobhraj traveled the so-called Hippie Trail, the path counterculture enthusiasts took through Southeast Asia in the 1970s to escape the conformity of Western life and seek transcendence and culture in the Far East. There, he killed at least twelve people, gaining their trust with his good looks and charm before drugging them and eventually killing them after taking their valuables -- often with the help of accomplice Ajay Choudhury and...
Kevin Kiner (Star Wars: The Clone Wars)
March 26, 2021 13:56 - 35 minutes - 49.3 MBJohn Williams' score for the Star Wars films numbers among the most iconic, well-recognized soundtracks in pop culture history. But as the universe expands from the films into spinoffs, animated series, live-action shows, and a host of other media, other composers have had to take up the baton and translate the bombastic space opera sounds Williams developed for other corners of a galaxy far, far away. No one's done it longer (or more voluminously) than Kevin Kiner, who's spent nearly fift...
Jermaine Stegall (Coming 2 America)
March 13, 2021 17:58 - 40 minutes - 55.8 MBDecades before Black Panther, Eddie Murphy gave us the first real glimpse of a fictional pan-African paradise with the country of Zamunda in John Landis' 1988 classic Coming to America, in which Murphy played the naive Prince Akeem finding love and playing fish out of water in the concrete jungle of Queens. More than thirty years later, Dolemite Is My Name director Craig Brewer brings us back to Zamunda with Coming 2 America, as now-King Akeem tries to figure out the future of Zamunda with ...
Daniel Blumberg (The World to Come)
March 05, 2021 18:14 - 27 minutes - 37.7 MB"White lesbian films set in the past" is a budding subgenre in the last few years, stretching from The Favourite to Portrait of a Lady on Fire to last year's Ammonite (which we've covered on this very same show). But there's something intriguing about the latest entry in this rapidly-expanding field, Mona Fastvold's The World to Come, a 19th-century queer drama set on a quiet homestead in the rural areas of upstate New York. Abigail (Katherine Waterston), a pensive woman in a frigid marriag...
Henry Jackman (Cherry)
February 26, 2021 13:41 - 36 minutes - 50.6 MBIn a post-Endgame world, it's no surprise that brothers Joe and Anthony Russo are taking a step back from multi-billion-dollar superhero tentpoles into slightly smaller, grittier territory. Their latest, Cherry, based on the semiautobiographical novel by Nico Walker, certainly achieves that, though with no small amount of style. As the latest component of Tom Holland's post-Spidey career pivot to a Serious Adult Actor, Cherry casts him in the titular role of Cherry, a cynical Army vet ...
Emile Mosseri (Minari)
February 15, 2021 21:08 - 26 minutes - 36.5 MBOne of the most talked-about films of last year is Lee Isaac Chung's Minari, a scintillating, layered tale of a Korean-American family trying to chase the American Dream that's racking up awards nominations all over the place -- though admittedly, strangely in Best Foreign Film categories even though the film features American characters in an American setting. It's a highly personal film for writer/director Chung, who based a lot of it on his own upbringing growing up in rural America to...
Austin Brown (PVT CHAT)
February 06, 2021 17:44 - 37 minutes - 43.4 MBAt its heart, Ben Hozie's tingly, complicated Internet drama PVT CHAT (read our review here) is about connection or our lack thereof -- even as it's disguised as a lurid De Palma-esque thriller about a lonely young man named Jack (Peter Vack) who finds himself enamored with his favorite online dominatrix, Scarlet (Julia Fox, keeping up her New York bona fides after her big breakout in the Safdie Brothers' Uncut Gems). He's an insecure, pathological liar convinced that all human interactions...
Ed Bailie (Small Axe)
January 16, 2021 20:38 - 38 minutes - 53.3 MBSpend any amount of time in Film Twitter circles anytime in the last six months, and someone's bound to bring up one of the most resplendent musical moments in the hell-year that was 2020: ten minutes in Steve McQueen's groovy tone poem Lovers Rock. Two-thirds of the way through the film, the packed floor of a London house party in the 1980s slow dances to Janey Kay's delicate, flirtatious "Silly Games". They're so lost in the rhythms and gyrations that, even after the song fades out, the c...
Ilan Eshkeri (A Perfect Planet)
January 08, 2021 17:30 - 30 minutes - 41.9 MBEven before the pandemic, before we couldn't leave our homes anymore, nature docs were my happy place. But luckily, the Sir David Attenborough Industrial Complex continues apace with BBC One's A Perfect Planet, which just started airing on Discovery Channel's new streaming service, Discovery+. This five-part series explores the planet on which we live, the natural forces that maintain our fragile ecosystems, and the life that lives on it: volcanoes, oceans, sunlight, and so on. If you've s...
Branford Marsalis (Ma Rainey's Black Bottom)
December 18, 2020 21:35 - 33 minutes - 45.7 MBAwards season is upon us, which means all the studios and streaming services are breaking out their big guns. Luckily, one of the best films of the year comes to Netflix this weekend. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, based on the play by August Wilson and starring Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman in his final role. A fictionalized snapshot in the life of the Mother of the Blues, Ma Rainey, George C. Wolfe's film imagines her in a sweaty, muggy Chicago recording studio in the 1920s, trying to record...
Dustin O'Halloran and Volker Bertelmann (Ammonite)
December 11, 2020 08:00 - 29 minutes - 41.1 MBSometimes, less is more -- where some composers might look at Francis Lee's sumptuous queer romance Ammonite, with its period detail and bodies crashing against each other like waves against the rocky shores of England, and go for maximalism, Dustin O'Halloran and Volker Bertelmann (who also plays under the moniker Hauschka) are kings of restraint. That's an important quality to have, especially in something as transcendently dreamlike and wordless as Lee's latest film. Throughout Lee's de...
Paul Leonard-Morgan (My Psychedelic Love Story)
November 28, 2020 22:31 - 42 minutes - 58.6 MBWhat happened to Timothy Leary? One minute, he was an anti-establishment rebel, spending ten years in prison after advocating for the "turn on, tune in, drop out" drug liberation culture of the '70s; the next, he was a government narc, informing on the same people he hooked in. One possible explanation lies in his exciting, deeply idiosyncratic relationship with Swiss-born Joanna Harcourt-Smith, the subject of Errol Morris' latest documentary My Psychedelic Love Story (which hits Showtime t...
Sean Durkin and Richard Reed Parry (The Nest)
November 22, 2020 16:39 - 33 minutes - 46.1 MBThe Nest, which marks filmmaker Sean Durkin's second feature film, his first since 2011's Martha Marcy May Marlene, sees him operating in the same sophisticated, glitteringly fragile mode as his debut. Charting the deterioration of a family in the 1980s after their fast-talking patriarch (a rivetingly brittle Jude Law) moves them to London to chase opportunity, The Nest soaks its characters -- particularly Carrie Coon as Law's anxious, suffocated wife -- in the ominous atmosphere of the cav...
Rebekka Karijord and Jon Ekstrand (I Am Greta)
November 13, 2020 08:00 - 32 minutes - 58.6 MBHow do you put the urgency of the climate crisis to music? For Nathan Grossman's documentary I Am Greta (now available on Hulu), an intimate look at teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg, composers Rebekka Karijord and Jon Ekstrand were inspired to take some less-than-traditional routes. Rather than creating something melodic and passionate, the two drew on their own backgrounds with experimental compositions and sound design. As a result, they crafted a driving, atmospheric score that n...
Andrew Carroll (Lodge 49)
October 30, 2020 15:57 - 37 minutes - 34.6 MBOne of the best, strangest shows of the last few years was Lodge 49, a curious, sleepy, fascinating show that ran for two seasons on AMC until it was canceled in 2019. Created by author Jim Gavin, it followed a down on his luck Californian named Dud (played by Wyatt Russell) who mourns the death of his father and ends up finding a new sense of purpose in the membership of a fraternal organization called the Order of the Lynx. There, he finds all manner of colorful characters, all of whom ar...
Jay Wadley (I'm Thinking of Ending Things)
September 13, 2020 15:19 - 53 minutes - 48.8 MBFor up-and-coming NY-based composer Jay Wadley, landing the composer gig for the latest from Charlie Kaufman, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, was a dream come true. It's the latest in a string of darlings he's lent his delicate, idiosyncratic work to in the last couple of years, from the plaintive piano of Andrew Ahn's thoughtful Driveways to award-winning Sundance darling I Carry You With Me. But decoding Kaufman's adaptation of Iain Reid's novel, a twisty, meditative tale on loss, memory, ...
Tamar-kali (Shirley)
June 05, 2020 16:04 - 31 minutes - 28.5 MBBrooklyn-born artist Tamar-kali is relatively new to the composer scene -- her first feature-length score was her sparse, chamber-infused work on 2017's Mudbound -- but she's spent years before that as a vocalist, Afropunk musician, and composer for projects like the Psychochamber Ensemble and her own five-piece alt-rock group. Her sounds are ambitious, startling, and unexpected, leaning into the sparseness of voice and piano and string in ways that seem to creep into the psyches of her lon...
Phil Rosenthal (Somebody Feed Phil)
May 29, 2020 14:34 - 30 minutes - 27.9 MBYou'll hardly meet a more ebullient man than Phil Rosenthal. He's got good reason to be happy: he's a multiple Emmy winner for creating, writing, and producing Everybody Loves Raymond, he's got a lovely family, and a Netflix show where he gets to run around the world trying new dishes and meeting new people. Somebody Feed Phil returns for its third season this weekend, featuring another five stops on Rosenthal's never-ending tour to eat everything on the planet. From Seoul, South Korea to ...
Emile Mosseri (Homecoming)
May 22, 2020 14:57 - 30 minutes - 27.5 MBAmazon's Homecoming, based on the Gimlet Media podcast of the same name about a mysterious facility meant to rehabilitate combat veterans, but which carries its own secrets, was one of the most inventive and deeply strange TV series of 2018. Directed by Mr. Robot's Sam Esmail, the show was a twisty, timeline-hopping mystery carried musically by source tracks from noir thrillers like Vertigo and others; a compilation album in score form. Now Homecoming is back for a second season, which jus...
John Grillo (Westworld, Snowpiercer)
May 18, 2020 18:23 - 33 minutes - 31.5 MBA futuristic park that simulates the Old West with human-like robot characters. A 1001-car-long bullet train that speeds perpetually along the remnants of a frozen Earth. These are the worlds of two of TV's most high-concept series to date, HBO's Westworld and TNT's Snowpiercer. Both adaptations of out-there science fiction films -- the former from Michael Crichton, the latter from Bong Joon-ho -- the challenge of adapting them to screen is still vast, even in the big-budget world of Peak T...
Rosalind Chao (Thousand Pieces of Gold)
May 15, 2020 19:48 - 40 minutes - 37 MBSince we've been stuck inside for so long, I've longed for the open plains of the Western. Luckily, Kino Lorber's got our back; this year marks the twentieth anniversary of Nancy Kelly's sumptuous film Thousand Pieces of Gold, which they're celebrating with a remarkable 4K restoration, courtesy of IndieCollect, which you can find on their virtual screening service Kino Marquee. Critically acclaimed at the time but eventually lost to the annals of history, there's no better time to revisit i...