How ‘The Midnight Sky’ Grounded Big Sci-Fi With Survival Stakes – Contenders Film

Jon Burlingame Composer Alexandre Desplat has made seven films with George Clooney, either as producer or director — including the Oscar-winning “Argo” and the Oscar-nominated “Syriana” — but creating music for “The Midnight Sky” may have been the their biggest challenge to date.“Music is a character in this film because a good portion of it is silent,” Clooney tells Variety. “My intent was for the film to be a meditation.

To follow up his 2017 breakout indie hit God’s Own Country, Francis Lee found inspiration in the story of a little-known British fossil collector named Mary Anning. For Ammonite, he embellished what little is known about Anning, fashioning a romantic story for her, and cast Kate Winslet as the enigmatic heroine and Saoirse Ronan as the young woman who cracks her shell.

Oscar winning screenwriter John Patrick Shanley says he had a simple reason for wanting to turn his play, Outside Mullingar, into a movie: location, location, location.

Norwegian director Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come takes her into frontier country, as two put-upon farmers wives—played by Vanessa Kirby and Katherine Waterston—unexpectedly find love in the drudgery of 1850s America, despite their strained relationships with their husbands, played by Casey Affleck and Christopher Abbott.

John Lee Hancock’s hunt for a serial killer script The Little Things drew a killer cast of Oscar winners Denzel Washington, Rami Malek and Jared Leto. In Deadline’s Contenders Film panel for the Warner Bros drama that premieres January 29, Hancock explains why it took nearly 30 years to make a movie he wrote when he had just completed the Clint Eastwood-directed Kevin Costner-starrer A Perfect World — ostensibly for Eastwood to direct it.

For all the praise of how great ’70s cinema was, when you come to think about it, many of the great crime classics like Straight Time, The Godfather and Thief were all testosterone-driven, with female characters resigned to second- or third-class status. Unfortunate, considering an era known for its sense of revolution.

When Amazon released it in the heat of presidential election season, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm captured the zeitgeist as Sacha Baron Cohen and his breakout co-star Maria Bakalova acted out a father-daughter story with the unwitting help of QAnon followers, Vice President Mike Pence and President Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow, which won the New York Film Critics’ Association award for best picture of 2020, significantly centers on food and food preparation two centuries ago in the Pacific Northwest region we now call Oregon, four decades before the area became an American state.

Coming off the heat of the first DreamWorks Animation movie Trolls, a bonanza musical that saw its tune “Can’t Stop the Feeling” from Justin Timberlake get nominated for a Best Song Oscar on top of going quadruple platinum, the sequel Trolls World Tour was always going to be more music, more color, more glitz and more glamour.

Poland has generated some fresh class distinctions since communist days, a development examined with a shrewd and merciless eye in the country’s Oscar-submitted feature Never Gonna Snow Again. The central figure is a mysterious private masseur, played by the UK-based actor Alec Utgoff, who goes door-to-door carrying with him a folding massage table through a wealthy gated community to offer is services to the numerous and invariably dissatisfied people living in the virtually identical houses.

Our Friend is a triangular narrative based on an Esquire article by journalist Matthew Teague about the death of his wife, Nicole. Before Nicole succumbed to cancer at age 36, an unusually intimate bond formed among the couple and mutual friend, Dane. Despite the ravages of fate, Dane offered a preternatural degree of support, caring for the Teagues’ daughters and effectively becoming a fifth family member.

In a wide-open year for Best Actor nominations, the buzz has been consistent around one performance in particular: Anthony Hopkins’ turn in Sony Pictures Classics’ The Father as an elderly man whose confused descent into dementia has heart-rending consequences for himself and his daughter.

“A lot of Pixar films are based on personal experiences,” says Onward director Dan Scanlon at Deadline’s Contenders Film awards-season event. “This might be more blatantly autobiographical in some ways.”

Ramin Bahrani’s Netflix thriller The White Tiger is a kinetic and thought-provoking ride. The acclaimed director’s adaptation of Arvind Adiga’s lauded 2008 novel charts the tumultuous journey of a poor Indian driver who must use his wit and cunning to break free from servitude.

Sundance winner The Forty-Year-Old Version is a familiar story to anyone who hits the age of 40, as it makes one re-evaluate life and decide the next steps in one’s career and beyond. For the film’s writer, director and star Radha Blank, it was a personal story — and driven by adversity.

When director Ryan Murphy saw the musical The Prom on Broadway a couple of years ago right after it opened, he quickly scooped up the rights, took it to Netflix where he has a deal, and got a film version in motion in record time with an all-star cast including Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Kerry Washington.

Irish actress Clare Dunne stars in Herself, a harrowing drama about a single mother who, after escaping an abusive partner, aims to rebuild her life in a unique manner. After months of struggling with the welfare and housing systems, she comes upon the idea of self-building an affordable home and, with the help of friends and neighbors, rebuilds her life and theirs from the ground up.

It took seven years for a sequel to come to fruition from DreamWorks Animation for its 2013 hit The Croods, but as it turns out the timing was just right. The coronavirus pandemic not only impacted the production process for the follow-up The Croods: A New Age, it also actually wound up giving it more gravitas and relevance.

George Clooney recently opened up about the time when he showed up drunk to a set!  The 59-year-old Oscar award winner spoke with Michelle Pfeiffer for Variety Studio: Actors on Actors.

George Clooney is opening up about accidentally less-than-professional behavior on set.