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Beyoncé is facing some particularly familiar competition for an Emmy this year: her own husband.

As the 2025 Emmy nominations were announced on Tuesday, both Queen Bey and Jay-Z (real name Shawn Carter) were listed as nominees in the outstanding variety special (live) category; Beyoncé for her Beyoncé Bowl halftime show for the NFL’s Christmas Day game on Netflix, and Jay as one of the executive producers for Kendrick Lamar’s Apple Music Super Bowl Lix Halftime Show.

It’s hard to track how many times a husband and wife have ever competed against one another in the same Emmy category in the past, though it’s certainly not a common occurrence.

Both Beyoncé and Lamar’s halftime shows were critically lauded and groundbreaking. Beyoncé performed the first-ever Christmas Day NFL halftime show, while Lamar broke records for the most-viewed Super Bowl halftime show of all time with over 133 million viewers.

A father-daughter composing team was nominated, Hans Zimmer could win his first Emmy, and a music supervisor was nominated for three different shows — just some of the surprises among nominations for the 2024-2025 Emmys unveiled Tuesday morning by the Television Academy.

Thomas Newman and his daughter Julia Newman were nominated for their music for Netflix’s miniseries “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story,” a first in Emmy history for a two-generation, same-family collaboration on a single television score. And in another musical-family story, Oscar and Emmy winner Michael Giacchino’s son Mick Giacchino was nominated for his original music for HBO’s “The Penguin.”

Zimmer, who has two Oscars and four Grammys, has never won an Emmy but could this year with his nomination in the documentary music category for NBC’s “The Americas” (shared with fellow composers Anze Rozman and Kara Talve).

Music supervisor Gabe Hilfer dominated the...

Peacock’s upcoming series adaptation of the Elin Hilderbrand novel “The Five-Star Weekend” has added four new cast members.

Variety has learned that Harlow Jane will join the cast as series regular. David Denman, Josh Hamilton, and Rob Huebel will appear in recurring roles.

The four will appear alongside previously announced cast members Jennifer Garner, Regina Hall, Chloë Sevigny, Gemma Chan, D’Arcy Carden, and Timothy Olyphant.

The official description for the series states:

“Hollis Shaw (Garner), a famed food influencer known for her delicious recipes, impeccable taste, and warm demeanor suffers a devastating loss. Unable to move forward, the death starts to expose the cracks in Hollis’s picture-perfect life—her strained marriage, her complicated relationship with her daughter, and her growing pursuit of validation from her followers. In an effort to overcome grief and find herself again, Hollis gets the idea to host a weekend away at her house...

Harlow Jane has joined the Peacock drama series The Five-Star Weekend in a series regular role. Additionally, David Denman, Josh Hamilton, and Rob Huebel (Sex Lives of College Girls, Transparent) will recur.

Bekah Brunstetter created the project based on Elin Hilderbrand’s bestselling novel The Perfect Couple. The Five-Star Weekend centers on Hollis Shaw (Jennifer Garner), a famed food influencer known for her delicious recipes, impeccable taste, and warm demeanor, who suffers a devastating loss. Unable to move forward, the death exposes the cracks in Hollis’s picture-perfect life — her strained marriage, her complicated relationship with her daughter, and her growing pursuit of validation from her followers.

In an effort to overcome grief and find herself again, Hollis gets the idea to host a weekend away at her house...

Leonardo van Dijl’s debut feature Julie Keeps Quiet was one of 2024’s most visceral discoveries, plumbing a systemic excavation through the tale of a tennis player who has to contend with serious allegations against her coach. Amidst mounting pressure on Julie to speak up, come forth with her experiences, she chooses to retreat. A febrile, tightly composed drama, one whose silences cut deep and scathingly, Julie Keeps Quiet is a singular, incisive portrait of systems and cultures that aren’t well-equipped to respond to, engage with victimhood, anchored by a tremendous, unforgettable Tessa Van den Broeck.

The film, which was Belgium’s entry to the 2025 Oscars, is slated to open in select US theatres from March 28. Ahead of the release, High On Films’ Debanjan Dhar sat down with Dijl for an exclusive conversation.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity:

Debanjan: I know the ending came to you as an epiphany.

"I just need to concentrate on school and tennis." Film Movement has unveiled an official US trailer for an acclaimed indie film titled Julie Keeps Quiet, a Belgian thriller about a star tennis player. This premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival in the Critics Week sidebar, then played at the Karlovy Vary, Melbourne, Vancouver, and Toronto Film Festivals last year. As the star player at an elite tennis academy, Julie's life revolves around the game she loves. When her coach is suddenly suspended following the suicide of one of his female protégées, all the players at the academy are encouraged to speak up about their experiences with him. Julie, however, decides to keep quiet. Executive produced by tennis champion Naomi Osaka, the film is a "tense, taut, artfully hushed debut feature" by Belgian writer-director Leonardo van Dijl. Led by newcomer Tessa Van den Broeck whose key performance "embodies the different ways trauma is internalized,...

Lots of folks trace the origins of cinema to Eadweard Muybridge’s timed sequence photography or William Kennedy Dickson’s kinetoscope, but Ken Burns makes a convincing case that the true spirit of filmmaking starts with Leonardo Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.”

Burns and co-directors Sarah Burns and David McMahon broke out every tool in their documentary belt in order to demonstrate how Da Vinci brought emotion and intention to his painting in “Leonardo Da Vinci.” And the filmmaking in this two-part PBS series really does feel akin to the dynamism of Da Vinci’s work, within a documentary framework.

Split screens between the usual archival material and modern photography of bodies, animals, and objects in motion act as visual proof of the lateral connections Da Vinci saw between everything. “There’s a huge explosion of technique here. But the process is the same as every film I’ve ever worked on,...

Ken Burns’ latest documentary masterwork, a pioneering two-part series that transforms our understanding of one of history’s most astonishing polymaths, brings Leonardo da Vinci’s art and science to vivid life. Burns, along with his daughter Sarah and son-in-law David McMahon, creates an immersive investigation of a genius centuries ahead of his time.

This four-hour documentary deeply explores Leonardo’s incredible life, nuancedly portraying a man who flawlessly combined art, science, and imagination. The series focuses on fewer than ten completed paintings while revealing hundreds of notebook pages overflowing with revolutionary ideas, revealing Leonardo’s restless intellectual drive.

Burns and his team have produced something more than a typical biographical documentary. They created a dynamic visual narrative that captures Leonardo’s distinct viewpoint with split screens, historical footage, and imaginative cinematography. Keith David narrates the documentary and features an intriguing musical composition by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, bringing Leonardo’s world to life.

Leonardo Van Dijl’s Julie Keeps Quiet has been selected as Belgium’s submission for the 97th Academy Awards in the best international feature category.

Van Dijl’s feature debut premiered in Cannes’ Critics’ Week, winning both the Prix Sacd and the Prix Fondation Gan.

Julie Keeps Quiet is a story of a star player at an elite tennis academy. When her coach falls under investigation and is suspended, the club’s players are encouraged to speak up. But Julie decides to keep quiet…

Tennis champion Naomi Osaka is executive producing the movie through her company Hana Kuma. The film...

Saltburn composer Anthony Willis leads the pack in the second wave of nominations for the World Soundtrack Awards (Wsa) 2024.

As well as his previously announced nomination in film composer of the year, Willis is also up for the discovery and the public choice award.

The winners will be announced on October 16 at the Wsa ceremony and concert, held during Belgium’s Film Fest Ghent.

In discovery, Willis battles it out alongside Jerskin Fendrix for Poor Things; Carlos Rafael Rivera for Ezra; Caroline Shaw for Julie Keeps Quiet; and Diego Baldenweg for In The Land Of Saints And Sinners.

Willis and...

It’s hard to believe that Ken Burns has had a rule for what subject matter he takes on, given that the diversity of his work ranges from “The Civil War” and “Vietnam” to “Baseball” and “Jazz.” But he is finally breaking through that limitation — sort of.

Burns’s latest two-part documentary on Leonard da Vinci, a collaboration with his daughter Sarah Burns and son-in-law David McMahon, is his first non-American subject and has to be by default; the United States wouldn’t be founded for more than 250 years after da Vinci’s death in 1519. But Burns is claiming the Italian polymath for America, anyway, or at least he did so with tongue in cheek at his talk, “In Their Shoes with Ken Burns,” given at the Nantucket Film Festival, which concludes June 24.

“The thing that was my balm throughout the whole [filmmaking] period is that a contemporary of Leonardo’s in Florence was Amerigo Vespucci,...

For teenage tennis prodigy Julie, discipline isn’t merely a virtue but a survival strategy. Repressing adolescent urges and emotional swings has long been part of her routine at the high-level youth tennis academy where she’s currently the star student: Years of concentrating all her time and attention on her game — all work and all play, as it were — look likely to reward her with the pro career she dreams of. Yet as whispers build of inappropriate behavior by her coach, Julie’s deliberate tunnel vision seems less a rigorous regimen than a fragile defense against interior collapse. A tense, taut, artfully hushed debut feature by Belgian writer-director Leonardo van Dijl, “Julie Keeps Quiet” also knows the value of control — though its own calm is fraught with anxiety and anger.

A standout of this year’s Critics’ Week programme at Cannes — where it won the Sacd Award and scored sales including a U.

Chicago – When the word “Opera” is defined today, the person that would illustrate the word is Renée Fleming. The lyric soprano has done most major female opera roles, and has written a new book … “Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness” … and recently appeared at the Chicago Humanities Festival.

Renée Fleming has performed coloratura, lyric, and lighter spinto soprano operatic roles in Italian, German, French, Czech, and Russian, aside from her native English. A significant portion of her career has been the performance of new music, including world premieres of operas, concert pieces, and songs composed for her by André Previn, Caroline Shaw, Kevin Puts, Anders Hillborg, Nico Muhly, Henri Dutilleux, Brad Mehldau, and Wayne Shorter.

Renée Fleming at the Chicago Humanities Festival, May 8, 2024

Photo credit: Joe Arce of Starstruck Foto for HollywoodChicago.com

Renée Lynn Fleming was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, and got her Masters of...

Belgian director Leonardo Van Dijl’s assured debut feature, Julie Keeps Quiet, builds a riveting psychological drama around the choice of a star player from an elite youth tennis academy not to speak up in the wake of tragedy. In her first acting role, young tennis ace Tessa Van den Broeck internalizes the title character’s brooding unease with slow-burn intensity. The movie’s silence is so loaded with the anxiety, obstinance, inchoate anger and desire for anonymity of the traumatized teenage sportswoman that the constant thwack of her racquet hitting the ball cuts through the tension like violent shocks.

Unfolding predominantly in static frames that keep the story laser-focused, with pinpoint use of American contemporary classical composer Caroline Shaw’s needling vocal score, this is an austerely effective work. It has a kinship with Laura Wandel’s Playground from 2021 and last year’s The Teachers’ Lounge by İlker Çatak,...

New York, March 26, 2024— Chelsea Music Festival celebrates its 15th season with nine evenings of concerts, conversation, and tastings with musicians, visual artists, chefs from June 21-29, 2024. This summer Festival, led by Artistic Directors Melinda Lee Masur and Ken-David Masur presents “Connecting the Dots,” which traces how music and art allows us to touch what seems intangible, repair what seems broken, and reimagine our interconnectedness with one another. The Festival will focus on the restorative powers of the arts as we examine ways that music and art both calm and reinvigorate the brain and nervous system. We will also explore together various neurological challenges and changes we can encounter in ourselves and our loved ones.

Festival concerts will explore these themes with World & US Premieres by Jacob Beranek (Charles Ives scholarship recipient), 2024 Composer-in-Residence Ania Vu (Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music), Tebogo Monnakgotla (Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music), Nicky Sohn (“Cool 100” by...

Ken Burns’ two-part, four-hour documentary Leonardo da Vinci is set to air on November 18-19 from 8-10 p.m. Et on PBS. The project, co-directed with Sarah Burns and Dave McMahon, is Burns’ first non-American subject.

The film explores the life and work of the 15th century artist and how he influenced and inspired future generations. The musician and composer Caroline Shaw recorded original music for the film performed by Attacca Quartet, Sō Percussion and Roomful of Teeth. The voice of da Vinci is read by Italian actor Adriano Giannini. Keith David serves as the film’s narrator.

Leonardo da Vinci will reveal a significant change in the Burns team’s filmmaking style, which includes using split screens with images, video and sound from different periods to further contextualize da Vinci’s art and scientific explorations.

“No single person can speak to our collective effort to understand the world and ourselves,...

Ken Burns has already cracked the code for being synonymous with highbrow documentary filmmaking, but now the award-winning director is taking on an unprecedented feat: capturing the life and legacy of Renaissance painter Leonardo da Vinci.

Burns’ upcoming PBS film “Leonardo da Vinci” marks the director’s first non-American subject. The two-part, four-hour documentary will debut November 18 and 19, as Burns codirects with daughter Sarah Burns and Dave McMahon.

Per the official synopsis, “Leonardo da Vinci” follows the 15th century polymath’s life and evolution as a draughtsman and painter, scientist and engineer, who used notebooks to explore an astonishing array of subjects including painting, philosophy, engineering, warfare, anatomy, and geography, among many others. Set against the rich and dynamic backdrop of Renaissance Italy, at a time of skepticism and freethinking, regional war and religious upheaval, “Leonardo da Vinci” brings the artist’s towering achievements to life through his prolific personal notebooks,...

Herbie Hancock, John Paul Jones, and Laurie Anderson are among the artists set to perform at the 2024 Big Ears festival. On Tuesday, the Knoxville, Tennessee-based fest announced its stacked lineup of legends.

The festival is set to be held in downtown Knoxville from March 21 through March 24 with nearly 200 events, including expositions, conversations and film presentations, along with musical performances.

Multi-instrumentalist Fred Frith, band Unwound, Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker, bluegrass picker Molly Tuttle, hip-hop trio Digable Planets, and Samora Pinderhughes are also featured on the lineup, along with the likes of Fatoumata Diawara,...

Warning: Spoilers for Yellowjackets season 2!Yellowjackets season 2 has come to a close in a fittingly disturbed and gripping fashion. The hit Showtime series grabbed the attention of viewers worldwide when it debuted in 2021, and now has successfully ramped up the suspense, horror, and thrills that made it a hit, even while explaining things like the first season’s cannibalistic ritual. Although production of Yellowjackets season 3 has been halted due to the writer’s strike, there is much of season 2 worth stewing over.

Just as with season 1, Yellowjackets season 2 is given even more depth and impact thanks to its musical score, which has been provided by Anna Waronker and Craig Wedren. Wedren and Waronker created an eerie and at times hauntingly beautiful soundscape for season 1 that they expanded and iterated on in unique ways this time around. They even got to flex their songwriting muscles for a standout scene involving adult Misty,...

Los Angeles – On June 3, 2023, Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (Redcat), CalArts’ center for contemporary arts in downtown Los Angeles, presents Music for Transitions from New York-based composer inti figgis-vizueta.

Called “intense” with a “sense of true dramatic stakes” by The New York Times, figgis-vizueta writes magically real music through the lens of personal identities, braiding a childhood of overlapping immigrant communities and Black-founded Freedom schools—in Chocolate City—with direct Andean and Irish heritage and a deep connection to the land.

In Music for Transitions, she is joined by collaborators, including cellist/composer Andrew Yee and violist Nadia Sirota, to present a program featuring new arrangements of previous remote works, a newly co-composed piece for soloists and string quartet, and works by her contemporaries including Leilehua Lazilotti, Caroline Shaw, Nico Muhly, and Andrew Yee.

About the Artist:

inti figgis-vizueta (born 1993) is a New York-based composer who captures the sounds of the magically real,...

New York, NY — March 27, 2023 — The 92nd Street Y, New York (92Ny), one of New York’s leading cultural venues, presents Drew Petersen, piano, plays Chopin, Schumann, Ravel, and more, on April 20, 2023 at 7:30pm Et. The concert will also be available for viewing online for 72 hours from time of broadcast. Tickets for both the in-person and livestream options start at $25 and are available at 92ny.org/event/drew-petersen-piano.

Pianist Drew Petersen makes his NYC recital debut in 92Ny’s newly renovated Buttenwieser Hall. At the heart of his program: piano masterworks by Ravel and Schumann in Gaspard de la nuit and Schumann’s love letter in music, the C-Major Fantasie. A selection of Chopin Études is preceded by John Corigliano’s Etude Fantasy, a set of five studies in the form and character of a fantasy, creating an arc from the program’s start to finish that reflects the thoughtfulness of Petersen’s artistic conception.

Hollywood Records’ The Big Score series sheds a light on the unique creative processes and styles of some of the top film, video game, and television composers of the modern day, and next up is the recent release, Boston Strangler. The Big Score tells its unique stories in easy-to-digest video and audio formats, with the video clips often featuring looks at the recording process and inside the composers’ studios.

Composers previously featured on The Big Score include Siddhartha Khosla for Only Murders in the Building, Carter Burwell for The Banshees of Inisherin, and Caroline Shaw for Fleishman Is In Trouble. Now, Screen Rant is excited to exclusively premiere a brand new episode of The Big Score, featuring Paul Leonard-Morgan discussing his work on Boston Strangler. Leonard-Morgan dives deep into his intellectual approach to the music of the film, which offers a fascinating insight into the amount of intention behind every note in the score.

Exclusive: House of the Dragon star Milly Alcock tells me that she will make her professional theater debut for London’s National Theatre playing the vengeful Abigail Williams in Arthur Miller’s powerful drama The Crucible.

The 22-year-old admits that she’s “mortified” at the prospect of treading the boards at the Cameron Mackintosh-owned Gielgud Theatre for a strictly limited season from June 7-September 2.

Lyndsey Turner, who directed what became referred to as the Benedict Cumberbatch Hamlet at the Barbican eight years ago, staged Miller’s revival at the National last fall with Erin Doherty — who played Princess Anne in The Crown — as Abigail.

Alcock is the first cast member booked for the West End transfer. “These were the only ones who offered me a job, you know what I mean?” she laughed.

It’s the first role she’s signed for since playing the younger Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen in...

New York, NY — March 2, 2023 — The 92nd Street Y, New York (92Ny), one of New York’s leading cultural venues, presents Tetzlaff-Tetzlaff-Dörken Trio plays Schubert, Beethoven, and more, on March 28, 2023 at 7:30pm Et at the Kaufmann Concert Hall. The concert will also be available for viewing online for 72 hours from time of broadcast. Tickets for both the in-person and livestream options start at $25 and are available at 92ny.org/event/tetzlaff-tetzlaff-dorken-trio.

A brilliant trio of musicians – violinist Christian Tetzlaff, cellist Tanja Tetzlaff and pianist Kiveli Dörken – in a rare NYC engagement featuring one of Beethoven’s Opus 1 Trios, a Dvořák masterwork, and Schubert’s B-flat Major Trio.

Program:

Beethoven, Piano Trio in C Minor, Op. 1, No. 3

Dvořák, Piano Trio No. 2 in G Minor, Op. 26

Schubert, Piano Trio in B-flat Major, D. 898

About the Artist

Comprised of violinist Christian Tetzlaff, cellist Tanja Tetzlaff and pianist Lars Vogt, the Tetzlaff/Tetzlaff/Vogt...

The 92nd Street Y, New York (92Ny), one of New York’s leading cultural venues, in collaboration with Liquid Music, presents Adam Tendler: Inheritances, on March 11, 2023 at 7:30pm Et at the Kaufmann Concert Hall. The concert will also be available for viewing online for 72 hours from time of broadcast. Tickets for both the in-person and livestream options start at $25 and are available at 92ny.org/event/adam-tendler.

After his father’s unexpected death, acclaimed New York-based pianist Adam Tendler used his inheritance – a wad of cash received in a parking lot – to begin a commissioning project, inviting some of today’s most influential composers and sound artists to create new piano works exploring the idea of inheritance itself. Woven into an intimate program, these pieces tell a universal story of lineage, loss, and place, and result in a meditation on confronting our past while moving toward the future.

The...

New York, NY — February 1, 2023 — The 92nd Street Y, New York (92Ny), one of New York’s leading cultural venues, presents West-Eastern Divan Ensemble plays Dvořák, Mendelssohn, and more, on February 22, 2023 at 7:30 pm Et at the Kaufmann Concert Hall. The concert will also be available for viewing online for 72 hours from time of broadcast. Tickets for both the in-person and livestream options start at 25 and are available at 92ny.org/event/west-eastern-divan-ensemble.

The West-Eastern Divan Ensemble is the chamber arm of the orchestra founded in 1999 by renowned Israeli pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim and Palestinian scholar Edward Said.

Created under concertmaster (and Daniel’s son) Michael Barenboim, the ensemble brings together young Palestinian and Israeli musicians, crossing cultural boundaries and spreading the message of its parent orchestra: “equal in music.”

Michael Barenboim, violin

Mohamed Hiber, violin

David Strongin, violin

Samir Obaido, violin

Miriam Manasherov, viola

Sindy Mohamed, viola

Astrig Siranossian,...

New York, NY — January 18, 2023 — The 92nd Street Y, New York (92Ny), one of New York’s leading cultural venues, presents Caroline Shaw, vocals & Sō Percussion: Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, with special guests Bora Yoon and Iarla Ó Lionáird, vocals, on February 4, 2023 at 7:30pm Et at the Kaufmann Concert Hall. The concert will also be available for viewing online for 72 hours from time of broadcast. Tickets for both the in-person and livestream options start at 25 and are available at 92ny.org/event/caroline-shaw-and-so-percussion..

Composer Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion make their only NYC appearance together this season. Their program draws from their Nonesuch recording project, Let the Soil Play Its Simple Part, with original songs and lyrics inspired by and reflecting the artists’ broad span of interests: James Joyce, a poem by Anne Carson, the Sacred Harp hymn book, American roots music, and more. The program will...

I'm very amused that some people mistake "TÁR" for a biopic. It's surprising how many people have seemingly thought this, as one would think we would have heard about this woman prior to seeing this movie. However, I think this is a testament to writer/director Todd Field and actor Cate Blanchett for being able to craft such a densely layered character that her complexities, contradictions, and lived-in history could only come from a real source. Character studies this thorough and messy used to be a staple of American filmmaking, particularly in the New Hollywood era, but today, movies rarely afford the opportunity for a film to go so deep on one person, as these stories have mostly been shuffled off to television.

One thing that struck me about the stated biography of Blanchett's Lydia Tár was that the conductor/composer was an Egot winner, meaning she had won an Emmy,...

New York, NY — November 11, 2022 — The 92nd Street Y, New York (92Ny), one of New York’s leading cultural venues, presents Musicians from the New York Philharmonic and John Holiday, countertenor, on November 20, 2022 at 3pm Et at the Kaufmann Concert Hall. The concert will also be available for viewing online for 72 hours from time of broadcast. Tickets for both the in-person and livestream options start at 25 and are available at 92ny.org/event/new-york-philharmonic.

One of the opera world – and vocal music’s – most remarkable young talents and exciting rising stars, countertenor John Holiday joins us with Musicians from the New York Philharmonic.

Program:

Schubert, Selections from Die schöne Müllerin

Debussy, Syrinx

Maconchy, String Quartet No. 3

Nourbakhsh, White Helmets as white as death

Purcell, Chacony in G Minor

Fisher, Uchi-Soto

Featuring:

John Holiday, countertenor

Michelle Kim, violin

Jin Suk Yu, violin

Cong Wu, viola

Ru-Pei Yeh, cello

Yoobin Son, flute

Eric Huebner,...

Click here to read the full article.

In a downtown parking lot on Oct. 27, a couple of grey cars pulled up from which dancers emerged. They proceeded to enact a rave party scene mostly in slow motion.

A work by Franco-Austrian choreographer Gisèle Vienne, the 90-minute dance performance, titled Crowd, was a vivid tableau, the slow motion effectively amplifying the urges on display: to feel a sense of abandon and freedom while never quite being able to escape the ennui of one’s circumstance. It felt a bit as if the characters of Euphoria had been asked to choreograph a Super Bowl halftime show with intriguing results.

The dance work was one of three presented in Los Angeles as part of Van Cleef & Arpels’ arts initiative Dance Reflections, which supports dance companies and institutions around the world. Earlier in the evening, the L.A. Dance Project, founded by choreographer Benjamin Millepied,...

Jon Batiste hauled home five trophies at the 64th Grammys, including Album of the Year for We Are. He went into the night with 11 nominations and ended up with Album of the Year, American roots performance and American roots song, best score soundtrack for visual media (in a tie with Carlos Rafael Rivera’s score for The Queen’s Gambit) and best music video for “Freedom.”

Right behind Batiste was the duo Silk Sonic, who took the night’s two other big categories: Record and Song of the Year, both for “Leave the Door Open” as well as Best R&b Performance (in a tie with Jazmine Sullivan) and Best R&b Song.

Olivia Rodrigo was named Best New Artist and also won Best Pop Vocal Album and Best Pop Solo Performance.

Other big winners included Chris Stapleton, who won for Best Country Album, Best Country Song and Best Country Solo Performance.

There’s breathless, relentless energy to the work of Josephine Decker, a trait usually accompanied by a sense of the unexpected, never quite knowing where her narrative may turn or how her characters could express their mercurial emotions. Her latest film The Sky Is Everywhere, adapted by Jandy Nelson from her own novel, features a strong sense of the former without ever offering the latter. What results is an aesthetically imaginative, narratively banal YA adaptation hitting too-familiar beats despite its relatively invigorating style.

Following the sudden death of her older sister to fatal heart arrhythmia––the same issue that claimed the life of their mother––17-year-old Lennie Walker (Grace Kaufman), a talented clarinetist, is adrift. Understandably still reeling from the loss, Lennie attempts to rebuild her life in a moment of transition when others her age are consumed by the promise of young love and limitless possibilities of the future...

Insistently rejecting the idea that a little bit of a good thing goes a long way, “The Sky Is Everywhere” finds director Josephine Decker indulging in affectation overload in an effort to imbue her adaptation of Jandy Nelson’s young-adult novel with uplifting magic. Whereas individual moments might work on their own, however, the “Madeline’s Madeline” auteur’s latest never provides its romantic tale with room to breathe, so intent is it about operating with maximum whimsicality. Teen audiences may be enticed to give it a try when it debuts in select theaters and on Apple TV Plus on Feb. 11, but what they’ll discover is

There isn’t a look-at-me device left unemployed by “The Sky Is Everywhere,” as Decker utilizes dreamy narration, swirling and rotating camerawork, gliding edits, paper mâché-style animation, CGI flights of fancy and an eclectic Caroline Shaw score full of orchestral music, woodwinds, horns and dainty French tunes.

How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? As I worked remotely with editor Nick Ramirez and composers Colin Stetson and Caroline Shaw, so much erupted around us. When the horrible Covid surge overtook New York City, we heard endless ambulance sirens while banging pots and pans every night at 7 p.m. to honor our frontline and essential workers. We were simultaneously swept up in the mobilization of Black Lives Matter. We marched, masks on, proud of our own city’s electrifying reaction […]

The post "Firework Explosions Went Off During So Many Sleepless Nights Just as They Do in Our Film": Director Karen Cinorre | Mayday first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

How did events of 2020—any of them—change your film, either in the way you approached it, produced it, post-produced it, or are now thinking about it? As I worked remotely with editor Nick Ramirez and composers Colin Stetson and Caroline Shaw, so much erupted around us. When the horrible Covid surge overtook New York City, we heard endless ambulance sirens while banging pots and pans every night at 7 p.m. to honor our frontline and essential workers. We were simultaneously swept up in the mobilization of Black Lives Matter. We marched, masks on, proud of our own city’s electrifying reaction […]

The post "Firework Explosions Went Off During So Many Sleepless Nights Just as They Do in Our Film": Director Karen Cinorre | Mayday first appeared on Filmmaker Magazine.

What stands out about Theodore Shapiro’s score for “Bombshell” is that the music isn’t frantic despite being set in a fast-paced environment — Roger Ailes’ newsroom at Fox News. Instead, the score straddles two worlds: that of Ailes and that of the women who worked for him.

“[Director] Jay [Roach] and I talked about finding Roger’s voice in the music. He saw himself as a tough-minded realist — the only one brave enough to speak the truth about how the world really worked. We wanted to find a musical language that reflected Roger’s view [of himself],” Shapiro explains. “That music is very dry, hard and percussive. There are closed mic, deep percussion and piano. There are strings, but they are very dry and in-your-face. There are harsh string plucks.”

The film is also about women telling their story, Shapiro says. It’s about Megyn Kelly (an unrecognizable Charlize Theron) and Gretchen Carlson...

Francis and the Lights had dropped a new song, “Take Me to the Light,” featuring Bon Iver and Kanye West. Band frontman Francis Farewell Starlite produced the track alongside West, Bj Burton, Benny Blanco, Cashmere Cat, Jeff Bhasker and Noah Goldstein, and used contributions from Pulitzer Prize winning musician Caroline Shaw in the composition.

The shimmering, atmospheric synth-pop number features layers of sound alongside Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon’s familiar croon. West chimes in as a heavier beat comes in: “And you still take me to the light/ Every...

The movie scores of 2018 have been as eclectic as the movies themselves, with any list of the year’s best forced to hop between the pep of “Paddington 2,” the swoons of “If Beale Street Could Talk,” the bloody tumult of “Mandy,” and the regal triumph of “Black Panther.” Yes, for the first time in forever, the score for a Marvel movie was worthy of being discussed alongside work from the likes of Jonny Greenwood and Justin Hurwitz. In fact, there was too much great work this year to celebrate all of it, especially in under-the-radar films like “Mary Shelley” (Amelia Warner), “Nostalgia” (Laurent Eyquem), and “Madeline’s Madeline” (Caroline Shaw). And while attention is too seldom paid to the original music in foreign films, the likes of “Burning” (Mowg) and “Capernaum” (Khaled Mouzanar) boasted indelibly evocative scores, as well.

2018 also featured a number of memorable soundtracks full of original...

Some movies are statistically designed to be seen by as many viewers as possible. Others are handcrafted in express defiance of commercialism. “Madeline’s Madeline” was definitely not created with mainstream tastes in mind. But by pushing to the edges of her own iconoclastic vision, director Josephine Decker touches on universal truths rarely found inside a multiplex. Will Decker’s experimental psychodrama — her third feature after festival favorites “Butter on the Latch” and “Thou Wast Mild and Lovely”– be for you? Well, the very first line ought to give some indication: “You are not the cat,” an anonymous woman intones hypnotically. “You are inside the cat.” It should be said that things get much weirder from there. So yes, you’ll have to be ready to go with the film’s free-form flow. But the rewards are considerable, beginning with the discovery of striking newcomer Helena Howard playing the the teenage Madeline.