Right on Cue

Film 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

Paul Leonard-Morgan (My Psychedelic Love Story)

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 subject of Errol Morris ' latest documentary My Psychedelic Love Story (which hits Showtime this...

Nov 28, 2020•43 min

Sean Durkin and Richard Reed Parry (The Nest)

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 -- particularly Carrie Coon as Law's anxious, suffocated wife -- in the ominous atmosphere of the cave...

Nov 22, 2020•34 min

Rebekka Karijord and Jon Ekstrand (I Am Greta)

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 experimental compositions and sound design. As a result, they crafted a driving, atmospheric score that not on...

Nov 13, 2020•32 min

Andrew Carroll (Lodge 49)

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 organization called the Order of the Lynx. There, he finds all manner of colorful characters, all of whom are t...

Oct 30, 2020•38 min

Jay Wadley (I'm Thinking of Ending Things)

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 . But decoding Kaufman's adaptation of Iain Reid's novel, a twisty, meditative tale on loss, memory, and...

Sep 13, 2020•53 min

Tamar-kali (Shirley)

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 sparseness of voice and piano and string in ways that seem to creep into the psyches of her lonely,...

Jun 05, 2020•31 min

Phil Rosenthal (Somebody Feed Phil)

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 stops on Rosenthal's never-ending tour to eat everything on the planet. From Seoul, South Korea to Marra...

May 29, 2020•31 min

Emile Mosseri (Homecoming)

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 others; a compilation album in score form. Now Homecoming is back for a second season, which just drop...

May 22, 2020•30 min

John Grillo (Westworld, Snowpiercer)

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 -- the challenge of adapting them to screen is still vast, even in the big-budget world of Peak TV. A...

May 18, 2020•34 min

Rosalind Chao (Thousand Pieces of Gold)

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 acclaimed at the time but eventually lost to the annals of history, there's no better time to revisit it....

May 15, 2020•40 min

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