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 composer Simon Franglen was along for the ride for most of that journey. The London-born Franglen began his ...
Feb 12, 2023•42 min
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 shortlist for an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Score. If so, she'd be the first Black ...
Jan 21, 2023•30 min
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 Encanto 's inviting world, an enchanted casita in which the vibrant members of the Madrigal family ...
Jan 14, 2023•32 min
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 Peripheral , based on the 2014 novel of the same name about two siblings in a near-future rural dystopia (...
Dec 05, 2022•30 min
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 fine dining, and the class conflicts it unfurls. Set on a remote island that's home to one of the mos...
Nov 19, 2022•40 min
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 -- unleashes the Cenobites, a cabal of deformed hedonists riding the razor's edge of sadomasochistic e...
Oct 29, 2022•43 min
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 and the banjo-forward music of BAFTA-nominated composer Andrew Prahlow, it also explored ideas of o...
Oct 21, 2022•41 min
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 the One Ring. Instead, Rings of Power is content to slowly build a years-long tale in the Second Age,...
Oct 14, 2022•36 min
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 attest. But just as the Disney+ Marvel series are dabbling in new genres, so too is She-Hulk: Attorney a...
Sep 30, 2022•26 min
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 neighbor (Jurnee Smollett) comes to her in the middle of a rainstorm for help: Her daughter's been kidnap...
Sep 24, 2022•35 min
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 tasks you with poring over the raw footage of three films starring a young actress named Marissa Marcel, ...
Sep 03, 2022•48 min
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 future of the survivors decades later. It's a (literally) killer showcase for its cast, including Me...
Aug 26, 2022•32 min
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 Cora Seaborne (Danes), a recently widowed Londoner, who sees her newfound freedom as the perfect excuse...
Aug 13, 2022•31 min
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 , the latest high-concept action thriller from John Wick co-director David Leitch. Simply put, it's a gon...
Aug 10, 2022•59 min
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 flying high this year with the whirlwind success of Top Gun: Maverick ). But where Maverick is all massiv...
Jul 29, 2022•50 min
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 paralyzed all her life suddenly gains the power to walk again. But before long, we learn the deep, dark s...
Jul 11, 2022•31 min
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 that ran earlier this month starring Jessica Biel as Candy and Melanie Lynskey as Betty. Conceived ...
Jun 19, 2022•36 min
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 transplant from Sweden named Jessica (Sofia Kappel), who's landed in LA to break into porn, Pleasure refres...
May 13, 2022•41 min
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 pair of dissociative identities sharing the same body, which also happens to be able to summon the spi...
May 09, 2022•37 min
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 previous works, like the music video for "Turn Down for What?" and 2016's farting-corpse buddy movie ...
Apr 29, 2022•33 min
In a world where so many people have learned to start working from home the last couple of years(and many still do), the phrase "don't take your work home with you" has become ever more dubious. But what if you could really leave it all at the office -- not just your work, but your memories of doing that work? That's the eerie premise of Apple TV+'s latest series, Severance , a Ben Stiller-directed corporate satire that imagines a company that allows its employees to undergo an experimental proc...
Apr 09, 2022•28 min
It's safe to say that the world of film music, especially modern film music, owes a lot to Portishead's Geoff Barrow. In a large way, that's due to the instrumentalist and musician's founding of indie label Invada Records in 2001, which placed an early focus on hip hop and experimental acts before pinning down a unique emphasis on releasing film scores. But he's a prolific film and TV composer in his own right, as he paired with composer Ben Salisbury in the early 2010s for an abortive score to ...
Mar 25, 2022•37 min
What would you do if you could go back in time and talk to your 12-year-old self? What if you could also see a dead loved one again? For all the whiz-bang action-adventure stuffed into Ryan Reynolds' latest film, The Adam Project , composer Rob Simonsen's score never strays far from those sentimental questions. The next collaboration between Reynolds and director Shawn Levy after last year's Free Guy , The Adam Project follows a time-traveling fighter pilot who flees his dystopian past to crash-...
Mar 12, 2022•32 min
Months after he came on the show last (for the COVID documentary In the Same Breath ), composer Nathan Halpern has been extremely busy. Just a few weeks ago, he scored three films that premiered at this year's Sundance film festival: the nail-biting thrillers Watcher and Emily the Criminal , as well as the documentary short The Martha Mitchell Effect. But this week, we're talking about a film that premiered at last year's Tribeca Film Festival, one of the best, most under-discussed films of 2021...
Feb 26, 2022•33 min
Today we're talking to Hollywood Music in Media Awards-winning composer Dara Taylor, best known for her collaborations with composer Christopher Lennertz on a variety of projects, from the Netflix series Lost in Space to the cult 2020 comedy Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar . But her latest solo project is the biggest yet for the young composer - the George Clooney-directed drama The Tender Bar . Based on the memoir by J.R. Moehringer, The Tender Bar is a coming-of-age story about a young write...
Feb 14, 2022•31 min
For the next few weeks, we'll be highlighting some of the scores and composers we really liked out of the 2022 Sundance International Film Festival. First up is Something in the Dirt , the latest from Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead, who've made a cottage industry out of scintillating low-budget sci-fi and supernatural horror. Along with the ride for most of their endeavors has been longtime composer and friend Jimmy LaValle, for whom this is his fourth collaboration with the pair. Something in...
Feb 04, 2022•35 min
When one thinks of most modern film scoring, we're in an interesting realm of experimentation and innovation -- one less defined by the traditional symphonic orchestras of John Williams and James Horner and more by the electronic and textured influences of Hans Zimmer and his coterie. Normally, Oscar-nominated composer Daniel Pemberton operates in the latter realm, thinking outside the box on scores ranging from Ridley Scott's The Counselor to Into the Spider-Verse and beyond. But for Being the ...
Jan 14, 2022•31 min
This week, we're looking at Netflix's latest awards contender, The Lost Daughter , the directorial debut of Maggie Gyllenhaal and starring Olivia Colman , Dakota Johnson , Jessie Buckley , and Ed Harris . Based on the 2006 novella of the same name by Elena Ferrante, the film follows a middle-aged literature professor named Leda (Colman) as she attempts to spend a relaxing summer holiday on a Greek island. But her stay is interrupted by anxieties from both the present and past, as her connection ...
Dec 31, 2021•25 min
This week, we're talking to David Newman, son of acclaimed composer Alfred Newman and a proud member of a film music family that includes brother Thomas Newman and cousin Randy Newman. He's a prolific and legendary composer and conductor who's scored more than 100 feature films and television shows. You may know his work from films like Serenity , the live-action Scooby-Doo films, and most notably, his iconic score to Galaxy Quest . But his latest project isn't to compose a new original score, b...
Dec 25, 2021•40 min
Refugee narratives are a common one in documentary, but Jonas Poher Rasmussen's Flee is something unique. Telling the story of one of Jonas' childhood friends, a gay Afghan refugee named Amin, Flee charts its subject's childhood in Afghanistan, the circumstances by which he had to leave. Fleeing to Denmark without the rest of his family, he was left all alone to figure himself out -- not just his sexuality, but his identity as well. Told in striking, minimalist animation, both depicting intervie...
Dec 20, 2021•41 min
