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Two years ago this month, while the industry was in the thick of the dual writers and actors strikes, Range Media Partners and Brian Kavanaugh-Jones and Fred Berger, principles of the busy production banner Automatik, decided to tie the knot. In 2024, the fledgling film and production division of Range Studios enjoyed a banner year by any measure.

Searchlight Pictures’ “A Complete Unknown” scored at the mainstream box office ($140 million worldwide) and had a strong award season ride capped by eight Oscar nominations.

Meanwhile, Neon’s “Longlegs” proved that there’s still plenty of box office gold to be mined from distinctive indie films. The horror film that finished out with $127 million in worldwide box office ($74 million domestic) also vaulted the director Osgood Perkins to a new level of industry recognition. Having that kind of career-building relationship with filmmakers is important to Kavanaugh-Jones and Berger, regardless of whether the talent is...

Lizzo is set to play rock & roll pioneer Sister Rosetta Tharpe in a new film in development by Amazon MGM Studios, per Deadline.

A brilliant guitarist and singer, Tharpe was a major influence to scores of rockers, including Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Johnny Cash, and Bob Dylan. “A queer black woman from Arkansas who shredded on electric guitar, belted praises both to God and secular pleasures, and broke the color line touring with white singers, she was gospel’s first superstar, and she most assuredly rocked,” wrote Rolling Stone...

Françoise Hardy, a French singer, actor and model whose classical beauty and often melancholy music combined to transfix fans internationally in the 1960s and beyond, has died at age 80.

Her son, Thomas Dutronc, also a musician, reported the death on his Instagram account, posting a baby photo of himself with his mother and writing: “Maman est partie.” Or, mom is gone.

Hardy had battled cancer for at least the last two decades, and had been known to have been fighting lymphoma and laryngeal since 2004.

In a sign of her ongoing legend, in 2023, Rolling Stone magazine ranked Hardy as No. 162 on a ranking of the greatest singers of all time. She was the only French performer on the list. Will Hermes wrote that Hardy “epitomized French cool and Gallic heat simultaneously, with a breathy, deadpan alto that wafted like Gauloises smoke. Her words enhanced her tone: Writing her own material, unusual in the early mid-Sixties,...

Lou Reed died 10 years ago, in October 2013. But since then, he’s just become a more massive, more famous, more influential figure. His life is one of the strangest music stories ever. Will Hermes tells the whole epic tale in his new biography, Lou Reed: The King of New York. For most people, he’s the black-leather avant-garde rock & roll poet who symbolized NYC with his band the Velvet Underground, in the Warhol Factory scene of the 1960s. “I’m Waiting for the Man,” “Sister Ray,” “Sweet Jane” — these are...

Terry Hall, lead vocalist of British ska-punk band the Specials, has died at age 63. On Monday, the band released a statement on social media informing fans that the musician had died after a “brief illness,” though more details were not made available.

“It is with great sadness that we announce the passing, following a brief illness, of Terry, our beautiful friend, brother and one of the most brilliant singers, songwriters and lyricists this country has ever produced,” read the statement.

Terry was a wonderful husband and father and one of the kindest,...

“Sample This” would make a hell of an article. In fact, it did. In 2006, Will Hermes told the story of the story of the oft-forgotten, oft-sampled Incredible Bongo Band in the New York Times. His article, wonderfully titled “All Rise for the National Anthem of Hip-Hop,” began like so: “This is a story about a nearly forgotten album and the birth of hip-hop music. Like many good hip-hop tales, and pop yarns in general, it involves unlikely characters rising from obscurity and is colored with creative passion, violence, drugs, thievery, paydays and paybacks.” That so-called pop yarn forms the basis for director Dan Forrer’s “Sample This,” a fascinating, fun, messy, and overlong documentary that never quite captures the simple beauty of Hermes’ article, but succeeds in bringing to light details about some of the most influential sounds in music history. Were it not for the Incredible Bongo Band, and,...