Features

Picture editors’ storytelling skills are tested in animation to a degree rarely demanded in any other kind of film. In live action, they may come on to a project to consult and prepare before production begins, but their work usually begins when the cameras start rolling and footage comes into the cutting room.

The show-business career of Jeff Freeman, A.C.E., began on a terrifying note. At the age of four, he was plucked by his stepfather, director Arthur Napoleon, to appear in a movie co-written by his mother, Jo. Man on the Prowl (1957) may not have made any “best of all- time” lists, but the experience was memorable enough for young Jeff.

In his new film Fury, writer-director David Ayer takes a break from depicting violent crime to re-create a different kind of violence — that of warfare, as experienced by a five-man Sherman tank crew of the Second Armored Division near the end of World War II.

“I am attracted to real stories about real people with real problems, without layered-on artificial drama or melodrama. This runs through almost everything I’ve done.” – Alex Hall

Drone warfare “is not only topical, or even controversial; it’s something that many of us are ambivalent about.

When director Quentin Tarantino visualized his newest revenge Western, The Hateful Eight, as a 70mm widescreen production, sold it to distributor The Weinstein Company as such, and eventually upped the vintage widescreen aesthetic further by unearthing vintage lenses at Panavision and filming it in a format that Hollywood had not even attempted to use in almost 50 years — Ultra Panavision 70 — his intent was to make a piece of cinema that was a throwback to the rich, special- event theatrical spectacles of the analog era.

“Behold Kunta Kinte.” If those words ring a bell, you were around for Roots, one of the most forward-thinking and groundbreaking events in the history of television.