Right on Cue

When 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 no...

In 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 wo...

When 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 Mac...

Corinna 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 o...

From 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 kill...

John 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...

Decades 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...

"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...

In 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...

One 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 wr...

At 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 Sa...

Spend 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 "Sill...

Even 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...

Awards 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. Wol...

Sometimes, 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...

What 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 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 --...

How 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 experiment...

One 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 organizatio...

For 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 . Bu...

Brooklyn-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...

You'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 stop...

Amazon'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 o...

A 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 -...

Since 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 accla...