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 underneath it all is Khosla's score, a plinky, minimalist affair that makes sneaky use of circular motif...
Nov 12, 2021•37 min
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 impending doom she may be hurtling towards. It's a film as informed by 1960s British gangster movies and kit...
Nov 06, 2021•39 min
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 college student (Jorge Lengeborg Jr.) suddenly saddled with the responsibility of chauffeuring around...
Oct 29, 2021•36 min
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 -- one of two with Ridley this year; he'll be providing the music for House of Gucci in a couple months' ...
Oct 15, 2021•23 min
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 stoic performance. But even more than Gosling's scorpion jacket, it's the music of Drive that endures in ...
Oct 09, 2021•32 min
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 the Watcher (Jeffrey Wright), What If...? escorts us through an anthology of stories that plays merry ...
Sep 24, 2021•24 min
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 by Nicole Kidman . Some of them are reeling from the suicide of a family member, like the Marconis,...
Sep 11, 2021•27 min
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 Asian-American representation. It's one of the more clearly-staged action films in the MCU, courtesy...
Sep 03, 2021•33 min
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 include the Darren Aronofsky-produced thriller Catch the Fair One , and now, he joins us to talk ab...
Aug 21, 2021•40 min
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 collaborator Christophe Beck . The Emmy-winning composer of Ant-Man , Frozen , and more, Beck worked with Levy...
Aug 13, 2021•28 min
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 created. It's a perfect assignment for Lowery, whose films, while diverse, are deeply thoughtful and ...
Jul 31, 2021•41 min
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, clearest action on TV (thanks to Andrew Koji, Joe Taslim, and a roster of incredible martial artists and...
Jul 16, 2021•41 min
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 quest to discover exactly who's behind the TVA's implicitly sinister plans -- with the aid of a fem...
Jul 09, 2021•24 min
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 giving chase -- crystallized so many of America's post-9/11 fears about terrorism, splinter cells, and th...
Jul 02, 2021•41 min
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 Belushi is a stylish, straightforward chronicling of the man's life -- what drove him, the good and the ba...
Jun 25, 2021•39 min
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 now in its ninth installment with 2021's Spiral: From the Book of Saw . Central to those disturbing me...
Jun 15, 2021•33 min
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 world split by various warring nations. The largest of these, Ravka, is split by a mysterious black fo...
Apr 23, 2021•41 min
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 Mackie and Sebastian Stan) as they adjust to life after the Star-Spangled Man with a Plan "retires" aft...
Apr 16, 2021•31 min
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 own fears, the animus of her colleagues, and the terrifying specter of a mysterious presence that hau...
Apr 09, 2021•35 min
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 killing them after taking their valuables -- often with the help of accomplice Ajay Choudhury and lover/...
Apr 02, 2021•37 min
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 away. No one's done it longer (or more voluminously) than Kevin Kiner , who's spent nearly fifteen y...
Mar 26, 2021•36 min
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 Zamunda with Coming 2 America , as now-King Akeem tries to figure out the future of Zamunda with th...
Mar 13, 2021•41 min
"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 rural areas of upstate New York. Abigail ( Katherine Waterston ), a pensive woman in a frigid marria...
Mar 05, 2021•27 min
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 to a Serious Adult Actor, Cherry casts him in the titular role of Cherry, a cynical Army vet who comes...
Feb 26, 2021•37 min
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 writer/director Chung, who based a lot of it on his own upbringing growing up in rural America to Kore...
Feb 15, 2021•27 min
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 Safdie Brothers' Uncut Gems ). He's an insecure, pathological liar convinced that all human interactio...
Feb 06, 2021•38 min
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 "Silly Games". They're so lost in the rhythms and gyrations that, even after the song fades out, the coll...
Jan 16, 2021•39 min
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 ecosystems, and the life that lives on it: volcanoes, oceans, sunlight, and so on. If you've seen t...
Jan 08, 2021•31 min
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. Wolfe's film imagines her in a sweaty, muggy Chicago recording studio in the 1920s, trying to record he...
Dec 18, 2020•33 min
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 in something as transcendently dreamlike and wordless as Lee's latest film. Throughout Lee's delica...
Dec 11, 2020•30 min
