Right on Cue

When last we left composer Trevor Gureckis, he was just beginning his eerie, unsettling work on M. Night Shyamalan's acclaimed Apple TV+ series Servant . But in the intervening years, he's lent his uniquely experimental grasp of both classical and electronic instruments to films like The Goldfinch, Bloodline, and Old . But his most recent project sees him dipping not just into the world of video g...

The 2023 Grammys have come and gone, and the first Grammy for Best Video Game Score has already been awarded (congratulations, Assassin's Creed Valhalla 's Stephanie Economou !). But one of her fellow nominees in that category is video game music royalty in his own right -- Austin Wintory , whose score for the acclaimed indie game Journey netted him a Grammy nomination for a video game score years...

The Star Trek universe is a franchise with decades of musical legacy, from the original Alexander Courage fanfare to Jerry Goldsmith's nautical bombast for The Motion Picture , all the way to Michael Giacchino's sweeping work on the J.J. Abrams films. But Paramount+'s animated comedy Star Trek: Lower Decks , which follows the bottom-rung officers on the support ship the USS Cerritos , doesn't stra...

Today, we're talking about the latest film from director Brandon Cronenberg, Infinity Pool , another in a series of cinematic provocations from the son of acclaimed body-horror maestro David Cronenberg. While his works travel along similar roads -- the alienation of the self from the human body, how class intersects with violence -- the younger Cronenberg twists the visceral knife even further in...

Earlier this month, the 2022 Grammys ran its first-ever category for Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media -- a long-overdue recognition of the value of video game scores as a legitimate method of expression, and a source of some incredible music. And among an initial crop of stellar composers offering intriguing sounds to all manner of video games big and small, it was...

It's safe to say that Eywa has smiled on James Cameron's long-awaited sequel to his 2009 epic Avatar ; a mere two months into its run, Avatar: The Way of Water has grossed more than $2 billion, becoming the fourth-highest-grossing movie of all time as of publication (and the third-highest international box office success).   For Cameron, it was a work more than a decade in the making -- and compos...

For Texan-born composer Chanda Dancy, 2022 feels like a breakthrough year. She's worked in the film and television composing business for eighteen years, an alumnus of the USC Film Scoring Program and the Sundance Composers Lab, as well as projects like Netflix's The Defeated and Everything Before Us . But she's struck gold with several major projects this year... including one that has her on the...

It's hard to think of another songbook in Disney's oeuvre that has put a dent in pop culture quite like Encanto , the latest from Walt Disney Animation Studios. "We Don't Talk About Bruno," "The Family Madrigal," "Surface Pressure," all songs that have topped Billboard charts and dominated TikTok for more than a year now, courtesy of Hamilton scribe Lin-Manuel Miranda. But an equally vital part of...

William Gibson is the father of cyberpunk, that most evocative of sci-fi genres -- where technology meets flesh in the neon-soaked worlds of the corporate-run near future. But explicit adaptations of his work have been few and far between: the closest I can think of is the wishy-washy Keanu Reeves vehicle Johnny Mnemonic . The latest, and most sprawling, attempt comes from Prime Video's The Periph...

Welcome to Right on Cue, the podcast where we interview film, TV, and video game composers about the origins and nuances of their latest works.   It's hard to think of a more overt lens through which to satirize the divisions of class more than through food: Fast food vs. haute cuisine, Michelin stars over star-shaped chicken nuggets. Mark Mylod's The Menu is a sizzling satire of the snootiness of...

Imagine a world where pain and pleasure are one and the same, where hellish delights await those who crave the extremities of sensation. That's the philosophical underpinning behind Clive Barker's Hellraiser series, one of horror's most long-running and iconic franchises, centering around the poor unfortunate souls who come across the Lamarchand Box, a mysterious puzzle box which -- when opened --...

When Outer Wilds was released in 2019, it felt like a casual revolution of not just adventure games as a genre but video game music as a whole. The game is a sprawling yet intimate time-loop adventure in which you play an archaeologist/astronaut in a distant system, solving the mystery of why your sun keeps exploding twenty-some minutes after you wake up. And through its elegant, cozy presentation...

Much has been said and written about just the sheer size and scale (and cost) of Prime Video's new flagship series, Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power . And for good reason: Amazon's spent nearly a billion dollars on a series adapting arguably the most acclaimed and well-regarded fantasy series of all time, notably opting to tell a story set hundreds of years before Frodo's journey to destroy t...

Welcome to Right on Cue, the podcast where we interview film, TV, and video game composers about origins and nuances of their latest works, as well as select commentaries from some of the score's most important tracks.   This far into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, it's an undeniable challenge to find new musical avenues to tread, as some of our previous episodes talking to Marvel composers can at...

Of all the actors to get a John Wick-ian action vehicle, Allison Janney might just be the last one on your list. And yet, here we are with Anna Foerster's Lou , the straight-to-Netflix action thriller starring the West Wing legend, now transformed into a former CIA fixer who's given up the life for an isolated existence on a remote coastal island. But her skills are needed once more when her neigh...

We finally get to talk about a video game score for the first time in the podcast's history! And yet, we're still intimately connected to the realm of moviemaking considering the subject material: Immortality , the new game from Sam Barlow, who made Her Story  and Telling Lies .   Keeping with the interactive-movie brief of those previous games, Immortality is a time/genre-spanning mystery that ta...

As the Emmys swerve just around the corner, I wanted to take a look at one of the year's best shows -- Showtime's Yellowjackets , which is currently up for three Emmys, including Outstanding Drama Series. The witty, darkly comic series tracks the trials and traumas of a high school girls' soccer team stranded in the mountains by a plane crash, and the ways their situation ripples through into the...

While Apple TV+ is home to some of the biggest shows on TV -- your Teds Lasso , your Severances -- some of its best, most beguiling shows and miniseries don't get talked about nearly as often. Among those hidden gems is The Essex Serpent , the six-part adaptation of the novel by Sarah Perry, starring Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston.   Set in turn-of-the-century England, The Essex Serpent follows C...

Welcome to Right on Cue, the podcast where we interview film, TV, and video game composers about the origins and nuances of their latest works and select commentaries from some of the score's most important tracks.   What do you get when you throw Brad Pitt onto a fast-moving train with a bunch of eclectic assassins, an army of yakuza, and an arch sense of humor? Turns out you get Bullet Train , t...

Welcome to Right on Cue, the podcast where we interview film, TV, and video game composers about the origins and nuances of their latest works and select commentaries from some of the score's most important tracks.   Today, we're talking about Spiderhead , the Netflix Original Movie that premiered last month, starring Chris Hemsworth and Miles Teller, directed by Joseph Kosinski (who's already fly...

While Netflix is firmly in the grips of Stranger Things fever, another, more quietly affecting horror series made waves through the back half of 2021 -- Mike Flanagan's haunting, meditative horror-drama Midnight Mass , about a small, deeply religious seaside town beset by a series of miracles. First, a new, charismatic pastor (Hamish Linklater) takes over the local church; then, a young girl paral...

On Friday the 13th, 1980, humble housewife Candy Montgomery killed her friend Betty Gore with an axe, slashing her 41 times in her friend's home. The resulting case was a lurid tale of infidelity, suburban malaise, and bizarre self-defense claims (which actually got Candy acquitted). It's the framework for Hulu's latest limited series based on a true crime sensation, Candy , a five-part miniseries...

Films about sex are rare, films about porn even rarer. And when they do arrive, more often than not they're one-handed, moralistic tales of the subjugation and exploitation women experience in the porn industry. Ninja Thyberg's Pleasure , which we reviewed out of Sundance 2021 and is hitting wide release in America today, is more nuanced and complicated than that. Following a newly-arrived transpl...

One of the most heartening things about Disney+'s run of Marvel TV shows is that they seem to be an interesting staging ground for new ideas, the exploration of new communities, and -- most importantly for our interests -- new artists to reach broader audiences. That's certainly the case with Marvel's latest series in the MCU, Moon Knight , which sees Oscar Isaac as Marc Spector/Steven Grant, a pa...

How do you put music to the multiverse? Especially when the multiverse includes sights as strange as rocks with googly eyes, people with hot dog fingers, and heads exploding into glitter? That's the challenge experimental band Son Lux faced when composing the whirlwind, two-hour score for Daniels ' latest film, Everything Everywhere All at Once . Building on the devil-may-care absurdity of their p...