Right on Cue

In 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-direct...

It'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...

What 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 Fre...

Months 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 th...

Today 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 ....

For 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 co...

When 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 scor...

This 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...

This 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...

Refugee 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...

This 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 unde...

The 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 impendin...

Throw 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...

Grammy 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 -- on...

Film 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 stoi...

Given 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 th...

What 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...

In 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...

Central 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...

In 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 collaborat...

David 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 c...

One 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, clea...

As 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...

When R onald 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 givin...

During 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 Belush...