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Filmmakers have many remarkable superpowers. The ability to create kaleidoscope fractals of terrifying credit card debt. The ability to turn any friendship into a stark transactional binary. The ability to blot out the very sun itself with the G&e crew’s interlocking vape exhalations.

Most impressively, filmmakers have the ability to take some abstract, internal element of the human experience and physicalize it into something photographable and dramatic. Sure: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But sometimes in movies, a cigar is actually the memory of your dead father, a metaphor for America’s self-immolation, or—occasionally—a penis.

Of course, a reliable way to transmute emotions and anxieties into something tangible, visible and narratively propulsive is to lean on metaphysics and the supernatural. Just look at the prestige horror boom of the last 15 years, which has turned grief and despair into ghosts and haunted houses so often it’s become cliche.

Exclusive: Good Deed Entertainment has acquired North American and UK rights to the indie drama Midday Black Midnight Blue, starring 2x Emmy winner Merritt Wever (Godless), slating it for a day-and-date release in June.

The first feature from writer-directors Samantha Soule and Daniel Talbott, also starring Chris Stack (AMC’s Interview with the Vampire) and Soule (Godless), follows Ian (Stack) as he grapples with his shifting memories of Liv (Soule), a woman he once loved. For Ian, it’s a chance run-in with Liv’s sister (Wever) that sparks a journey in which he has a chance to reconnect to the light and fight his way back to life.

The film, which world premiered at last year’s Seattle Film Festival, is produced by Soule, Talbott and Stack, as well as Lovell Holder and Addie Johnson Talbott. Exec producers are Timothy Farrell, Conner Marx and Will Pullen. Gde’s EVP...

The Creative Arts Emmys aired this weekend, giving recognition outstanding artistic in technical achievement in a variety of different genres.

An edited presentation of the Creative Art Emmys will premiere Saturday, Sept. 10 on Fxx.

Scroll down for the full list of winners.

Outstanding Television Movie

Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers • Disney+ Mandeville Films

Outstanding Cinematography for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie

Dopesick • Breakthrough Pain • Hulu 20th Television, Danny Strong Productions, John Goldwyn Productions, the Littlefield Company Checco Varese, ASC, Director of Photography

Outstanding Cinematography for a Multi-Camera Series

How I Met Your Father • Pilot • Hulu 20th Television

Outstanding Contemporary Hairstyling

Impeachment: American Crime Story • the Assassination Of Monica Lewinsky • FX 20th Television and FX Productions Natalie Driscoll, Department Head Hairstylist Nanxy Tong-Heater, Assistant Department Head Hairstylist Michelle Ceglia, Personal Hairstylist Suzy Mazzarese, Personal Hairstylist Lauren Kress, Hairstylist Leighann Pitchon, Hairstylist

Outstanding Actor in a Short Form Comedy or...

The Marvel Cinematic Universe made a big splash on TV in 2021 with its first ever spinoff series, “WandaVision,” which staged a coup at the Emmys by receiving 23 nominations including Best Limited Series. At the same time the MCU’s “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” earned five nominations including Best Drama Guest Actor for Don Cheadle. The extended superhero franchise has a lot more chances at recognition this year. Scroll down to see all 94 submissions for the canonical MCU shows on the ballot in 2022: “Hawkeye,” “Loki,” “Moon Knight,” and “What If?”

SEEEvery Marvel Cinematic Universe actor who’s been nominated for an Emmy

Those four shows give Marvel a foothold in four different genres. “Hawkeye” was surprisingly submitted into comedy categories, perhaps to avoid competing it directly against “Loki” in the drama field. “Moon Knight” is going the “WandaVision” route by competing as a limited series. And “What If…...

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“Welcome To The Club”

By Raymond Benson

Kino Lorber and Something Weird Video continue their collaboration to present “Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture” with Volume 11—Girl Gang/Pin-Down Girl, a double bill of so-bad-they’re-funny early 1950s “crime” movies. They were marketed as such, but they were really what passed for softcore in those days. If the movie ratings had existed then, these two gems would likely have been rated “R.”

These delicious and suitably sleazy pictures in the “Forbidden Fruit” series were made cheaply and outside the Hollywood system. They were distributed independently in the manner of a circus sideshow, often by renting a movie theater for a few nights, advertising in the local papers, and promoting the scandalous title as “educational.” It’s certain, however, that in this case both Girl Gang and Pin-Down Girl are not...

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“More ‘Forbidden Fruit’ Exploitation Relics”

By Raymond Benson

Here we go again! Another entry in the “Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Picture” series, this time it’s Volume 7. Presented by Kino Lorber in association with Something Weird Video, we have for your shocking pleasure the double-bill of Test Tube Babies (1948) and Guilty Parents (1934), and what a hoot these pictures are.

There have always been what have been termed in the motion picture industry “exploitation films,” even back in the silent days. The late 1930s and much of the 1940s, however, saw a deluge of cheap, not-even-“B” pictures made, usually independently of Hollywood and marketed in guerilla fashion as “educational” adult fare. You know the type. Reefer Madness. Child Bride. Mom and Dad.

Kino Lorber and Something Weird have been doing a bang-up job on releasing a series of some...

Lenny Bruce: Dustin Hoffman in the 1974 Bob Fosse movie. Lenny Bruce movie review: Polemical stand-up comedian merited less timid biopic (Oscar Movie Series) Bob Fosse's 1974 biopic Lenny has two chief assets: the ever relevant free speech issues it raises and the riveting presence of Valerie Perrine. The film itself, however, is only sporadically thought-provoking or emotionally gripping; in fact, Lenny is a major artistic letdown, considering all the talent involved and the fertile material at hand. After all, much more should have come out of a joint effort between director Fosse, fresh off his Academy Award win for Cabaret; playwright-screenwriter Julian Barry, whose stage version of Lenny earned Cliff Gorman a Tony Award; two-time Best Actor Oscar nominee Dustin Hoffman (The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy); and cinematographer Bruce Surtees (Play Misty for Me, Blume in Love). Their larger-than-life subject? Lenny Bruce, the stand-up comedian who became one of the...