Mank
2021 Golden Globes Predictions: Who Will Win, Who Shouldn’t Be There, and Who’s Missing
Every year, we say we’re not going to watch the Golden Globes. “They’re pay-for-play opportunists who trade awards for access,” we plea in the mirror. “Remember Pia Zadora?” And yet, just like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part III, they pull us back in. Maybe it’s the pandemic insisting upon things to look forward to amidst the threat of impending doom. Or, more likely, we just love TV and the people who make it too much to not want to root for them to get recognition — no matter how dubious the award. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, an enigmatic collective of 93 non-American journalists who nonetheless live in LA, give out their trophies every year, and the picks are virtually impossible to guess. Sometimes, it’s recognition of the best work in film and TV that year. Other t...
Composers of the Year Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross: “It’s Been an Intimidating Journey”
“You’re naming us Best Composers of All Time, right,” Trent Reznor asks over the phone. His partner-in-crime Atticus Ross laughs on another line. He’s joking, of course, but he’s also not exactly out of his element. While all-time might be a stretch — at least, for now — the two are certainly in contention for the last decade. After all, it’s been a wild 10 years for Reznor and Ross, one that began with a deafening bang. That big bang arrived at the 83rd Academy Awards in 2011, when Reznor and Ross triumphed over the likes of Hans Zimmer and Alexandre Desplat to win Best Original Score for David Fincher’s The Social Network. Their debut score wound up being an opening salvo as Hollywood came calling — and fast. Since then, they’ve amassed an eclectic resume that most composers spend decade...
Ranking: Every David Fincher Movie from Worst to Best
Mank, the latest from director David Fincher, is yet another feat by a filmmaker who has notched a few of them. He’s in that holy trinity of modern directors right alongside P.T. Anderson and Christopher Nolan — auteurs whose films are so defiantly theirs. Fincher would be the first to tell you that his career started off disastrously (read on for info on the Alien 3 production), so who could have anticipated all of the success that would follow both critically and financially? Not only did our film staff agree on a ranking of Fincher’s 11 films, we went ahead and dissected each movie, as well. The director’s career is full of highlights, curiosities, and a small serving of disasters. However, all of his films remain interesting in their own ways. We hope you’ll dive into the 8,000+ words ...
What’s Streaming on Netflix in December 2020
Netflix is unwrapping some big gifts in December 2020. The shiniest box under the proverbial tree is David Fincher’s Mank. The filmmaker’s first feature in six years stars Oscar winner Gary Oldman as legendary Hollywood screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and the drama that surrounded his work on Citizen Kane. Another star-studded feature is Ryan Murphy’s The Prom, a fish-out-of-water comedy that finds Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and Keegan-Michael Key putting on a Broadway production in a small town. That should keep the family business. Elsewhere, there’s the highly anticipated Selena: The Series, the fourth season of Big Mouth, the fourth and final season of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, and the de facto seasonal docuseries The Holiday Movies That Made Us. EditorsR...
David Fincher’s Mank Gets First Look from Netflix
Lest we forget that one of the more highly anticipated films of 2020 comes from David Fincher. Mank is his first feature since 2014’s Gone Girl and finds the veteran filmmaker pairing up with Oscar-winning actor Gary Oldman to tell the story of Citizen Kane co-writer Herman Mankiewicz. Today, in celebration of that iconic film’s 79th anniversary, Netflix has unleashed its first look. As promised, Manx is presented in sterling black in white — a first for Fincher — and the six photos available prove the shift has only given his razor-sharp portraits even more depth. Below, you can see first looks at Oldman as Mankiewicz, Amanda Seyfried as Marion Davies, and Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst. If you weren’t hyped before, well, get ready now. Mank is a curious project f...
The 25 Most Anticipated Movies of Fall 2020
“New year, new decade, new films, right?” That was January, back when we were still looking ahead at 2020 with blind optimism and ill-fated excitement. Sigh, hindsight is 20/20 they say, right? Who knew. At the time, we had 50 exciting new titles we were anticipating, most of which have since been either postponed, dumped to VOD, or relegated to a limbo state. It’s been an unnerving year for the film industry, to say the least. A year fraught with shutdowns, furloughs, layoffs, bankruptcies, and re-evaluations. All of that change has prompted a seismic shift in how everything’s run across the media landscape, and no one truly has a grip on things just yet. Odds are they won’t for quite some time. Because of this, anticipating anything right now — let alone anything in pop culture — seems l...
