Few men know Steven Spielberg as well as Janusz Kaminski. The Oscar winning, Polish-born cinematographer has shot all of Spielberg's films since 1993, and their latest collaboration, Lincoln , is in theaters now. (Our David Edelstein reviews it here .) What better time, then, to talk to Kaminski…

Photo: Photos Courtesy of Warner Bros, Fox Searchlight and Brothers Productions The best cinematographers often form a long-lasting, creatively fruitful relationship with an A-list filmmaker — think of how Steven Spielberg uses Janusz Kaminski , for example, or how many iconic shots Roger Deakins…

Editor Tom Cross, who has been nominated for ACE and BAFTA awards and is a strong contender for an Oscar nom on Thursday, knew instantly that “ Whiplash ” would be created in the editing room and therefore worked closely with Chazelle on honing a multi-layered editorial approach for this intense,…

Root all you want for your Chastains, your Rivas, your Hathaways, and your Day-Lewises; for me, the Oscar nominee to pull for this weekend is venerated cinematographer Roger Deakins, nominated ten times with nary a win to his name. He's back in the race this year with the gorgeous, lush Skyfall ,…

Werner Herzog. Photo: Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images If you gaze into Werner Herzog talking about Werner Herzog for long enough, does Werner Herzog gaze back into you? I pondered that question in late June as the 71-year-old director sat across from me at a conference table in the Santa Monica…

How Dylan seized control of his own story and made things more complicated than ever By Joe Levy It’s 2004 , but Bob Dylan wants to tell you about a day some 42 years earlier. It’s an ice cold afternoon in New York City. Dylan is 20 years old. He has just signed his first publishing deal with Leeds…

Two-time Oscar-winning editor Kirk Baxter (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” “The Social Network”) enjoyed the narrative complexities and satirical fun of “ Gone Girl .” Gillian Flynn’s adaption of her bestselling thriller is like a Punch and Judy act for Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, which David…

I spoke to British cinematographer Roger Deakins via Skype while he was filming Angelina Jolie’s challenging new film “Unbroken” on the water in New Zealand. Deakins, who often collaborates with the Coen brothers, is a go-to cinematographer for many filmmakers and is revered by actors because he…

Adrian Younge inspires DJ Premier and Timbaland with his Blaxploitation-style instrumentals and directs new albums for Ghostface and Bilal “ Don’t half-ass it . If you’re going to go, earnestly go and do it.” Adrian Younge is speaking about experimentation. Younge is passionate and driven, traits…

All photos courtesy of the author Funk and disco might be making a comeback right now, but for some, including neo-soul artist Mayer Hawthorne and hip-hop producer Jake One, it never left. Tuxedo, their “new” collaboration, is set to drop a debut in March on Los Angeles indie heavyweight, Stones…

Stephen King ’s office building sits on a particularly dreary dead-end road on the outskirts of Bangor, Maine, just down the street from a gun-and-ammo store, a snowplow dealership and, appropriately enough, an old cemetery. From the outside, the anonymous building looks like a new branch of Dunder…

Photo: Martin Schoeller In Conversation Chris Rock What’s killing comedy.What’s saving America. Photographs by Martin Schoeller T he last time Frank Rich had a conversation with Chris Rock was in early 1996, when they and the 1950s teen heartthrob Pat Boone were thrown together in a New York…

A t the start of this year, Russia — a country that had recently banned gay “propaganda,” harassed and imprisoned political dissidents, and was run by a man who appealed to imperialist traditions and fear of foreigners — turned a seaside summer resort not far from a hotbed of separatist and…

Playmates Once Upon a Time in the West With Playmate Chelsie Aryn Drive off into the sunset with March 2015 Playmate Chelsie Aryn Once Upon a Time in the West With Playmate Chelsie Aryn FEATURED ARTICLES ICYMI: FEATURED ON PLAYBOY'S INSTAGRAM Previous Article Next Article PLAYMATE OF THE MONTH…

On April 10, artist Matt Lubchansky updated his popular webcomic series, Please Listen To Me, with a new comic called “Save Me.” It features a presumably mild-mannered fellow in a polo shirt who spots the “Man Signal” and barrels into a phone booth to emerge as a fedora-masked Not-All-Man, “defender…

My favorite movies growing up were Westerns. Cowboys, horses, six-shooters: these were daydream fuel for an eight-year-old boy. This was in the early ’80s, hardly the heyday of the genre—in America, at least. But in the Philippines, where I was born and raised, Pinoy Westerns were the rage , with…

At the end of July, Michael Ellsberg posted something truly subversive on Facebook. It wasn’t a scantily clad photograph of himself. Instead, to his 25,000 or so followers he wrote: “Jena and I are no longer married. This has been a heart-wrenching process for both of us, over the past year, and we…

We let Black artists create absolute shite for years but gag when it’s served on a white spoon I’ve been thinking for months about how to approach this subject that’s been eating at me, and I finally had to break down and just get it out there. In this time of think-pieces and media outlets…

S ometimes you see something that feels like it was pulled straight from your imagination. It can almost feel invasive — like someone has aggregated all the things that interest you, that haunt you, that titillate you, that you celebrate or loathe about yourself and others, and put it onscreen. That…

(or Lack Thereof) Pomplamoose just finished a 28-day tour. We played 24 shows in 23 cities around the United States. It was awesome: Nataly crowd surfed for the first time ever, we sold just under $100,000 in tickets, and we got to rock out with people we love for a full month. We sold 1129 tickets…

Cuepoint: "2014 wasn’t always a smooth ride for the digital music market, but it was certainly a fascinating year." http://t.co/18JSTJRbp6

Kyle Kramer: this interview with Larry King is so absurd http://t.co/sIy8JpfFQ3 http://t.co/ePhqmGEGdQ

NYT Science: Why can't nuclear power solve the clean energy crisis? @henryfountain analyzes the economics of nuclear power. http://t.co/cAf84Dpp1V

It’s been four in a row that I’ve done digital . There is still something inherently magical about shooting on film, and to some degree, it’s mysterious and you get to be the wizard behind the curtain that makes everything happen, which I kind of love. But also, with digital photography, you’ve…

Next City members make our features possible. Donate today. Can the birthplace of the Black Panthers gentrify without displacement? Story by Susie Cagle Twitter Published on Dec 15, 2014 Gentrification: We think we know it when we see it. Pour-over organic coffee, double-wide designer strollers,…

Amazon won the book war. In a series of rare interviews, the company tells us what's next Chris Green holds an envelope. At least, it looks like an envelope. In reality, it's a piece of office copy paper that's been cut and folded into the shape of a Kindle Voyage , the latest in Amazon's…

The Birth of ‘The Bad Lieutenant’ Terence McDonagh is a bad cop from the start. In the film’s first scene, he flips through pictures of a colleague’s naked wife and keeps them, even when he wasn’t the man sent to retrieve them in the first place. He’s a gambling addict to boot. Terry needs the risk…

In late August in a nondescript hotel banquet room in a nondescript section of Los Angeles, I gathered, along with about 50 other people from far-flung places around the world, to hear one man speak at the Rogue Film School. Who else but Werner Herzog could bring such a diverse group of strangers…

This is not a difficult thing to understand, so I will do my best in the coming moments not to make it such. In fact, I make it clear in the least difficult form I can think of, which is to answer fake questions that I’m asking myself. What am I about to look at? What you will be looking at is the…

James Grey, Gregg Araki and Rian Johnson studied filmmaking at USC; Ang Lee, Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee went to NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts; Paul Schrader, Catherine Hardwick and Gina Prince-Bythewood studied at UCLA Film School . The list of filmmakers who attended film school at USC, NYU,…

Robin Williams cheers with the Denver Broncos cheerleaders for a Mork and Mindy episode in 1979. AP Looking for news you can trust? Subscribe to our free newsletters. Not all is sunny and chipper in the world of professional cheerleading this year. NFL cheerleaders from five squads sued their teams…

Header image by Eric Stafford /// We keep trying to answer the question of what a game is with finality. Journalists, academics, and YouTube commenters have all weighed in on the subject with varying degrees of cocksureness and vitriol. “All games have X; no games have Y.” This debate got old fast.…

By now even Ben Edelman thinks Ben Edelman is fairly despicable. He's the now-infamous Harvard Business School professor who threatened to sue a Chinese restaurant for overcharging him $4 on a take-out meal. The consensus is that he's a cheap, entitled bully and that the immigrant restaurant owner…

Christian Donlan Features Editor On 29th April 1913, Christopher Clayton Hutton, who earned his pay manufacturing boxes, wrote a letter to Harry Houdini, who earned his own by getting out of them. Clayton Hutton was 20 at the time, a self-confident, ingenious, and perhaps rather eccentric young man…

Playmates Once Upon a Time in the West With Playmate Chelsie Aryn Drive off into the sunset with March 2015 Playmate Chelsie Aryn Once Upon a Time in the West With Playmate Chelsie Aryn FEATURED ARTICLES ICYMI: FEATURED ON PLAYBOY'S INSTAGRAM Previous Article Next Article PLAYMATE OF THE MONTH…

I. Are We Sure Tomorrow Never Dies? Of all the important thoughts about the movies this year that could have, should have, or honestly did occur to me, there was just one I kept coming back to: If Edge of Tomorrow can’t be a hit, then what can? I know. A whole year comes down to the movie in which…

Cinematographers live in interesting times, with technological developments offering more options, but also opening the door for others to meddle with the image. “It’s a changing time and that’s not a bad thing because we have new tools. The bad part is that our influence is diminishing,” Steven…

A commercially middling cult band whose brand awareness verges on the Beatles-esque, immortal in the hearts of a global stoner coterie for whom new product or its absence is largely beside the point, historically stronger on cryptic envelopment than hooks, never quite the same after drugs robbed…