Category Archives: Arts & Culture

Until Dawn Movie: Cast & Director Reveal How They Kept Those Constant Deaths Fresh | WonderCon

The Direct’s Russ Milheim spoke with the cast and filmmakers behind Sony Pictures’ upcoming horror film Until Dawn at WonderCon, where they revealed how they kept their time loop movie fresh.Until Dawn follows a group of friends who become trapped in a deadly timeloop, where, after each death, they start to be terrorized by an entirely different threat.The movie is actually based on the 2015 choose-your-own-adventure video game of the same name, though the stories are notably different.Until Dawn Stars Michael Cimino and Ella Rubin on Keeping Their Deaths Fresh
The DirectHow Did They Keep Their Performances and Characters Engaging With Consistent Deaths?The Direct: “Obviously, the concept is you guys are dying repeatedly in this movie, and so there’s almost a repetitive nature to that. So, for you guys, how did you work in your performances to make sure that was never felt, that audiences were always engaged, and you all felt like your characters never remained stagnant?”Michael Cimino: I mean, this is definitely, like, a bigger Ella question, because she, her character, is going through much more of like a big arc throughout this course of the film.But as far as Max goes, I think that throughout the course of the film, he’s going through an emotional arc, but also throughout the course of the film, we’re going through a physical arc as well, where it’s like we’re getting weaker and weaker, but we’re trying to find the determination to continue topersevere through all this crazy stuff that’s happening to us.Ella Rubin: I was gonna say something quite similar in that, Clover, my character, is emotionally fortifying. She starts the film at the highest point of her grief and sadness and is sort of lost and doesn’t really know who she is at the moment… She lost these two people that were her whole world, and she’s kind of questioning who she is without them. And so throughout the course of the film, she’s finding her strength and sort of emotionally fortifying, but she’s physically deteriorating.So the way, I guess I tried to kind of keep it fresh was, every night changing my physicality a little bit to show a little bit more emotional ability or emotional strength. And then, I mean, the makeup helped a lot. But I think, because—I’m trying not to spoil anything—because every night is different, and every night there’s a different horror.And honestly, I think that the practical effects and [director] David [Samberg] were incredibly helpful. And everything is new, and also you’re acting with a physical monster, and so it was always incredibly fresh, and the situation was always very different and newly horrendous. And so I think it allowed us to kind of just for the movie to feel fresh and yeah for it to constantly be shifting and changing emotionally, physically.Until Dawn Director and Producers on Keeping the Film Engaging
The Direct”Getting Killed Over and Over Again Really Takes a Toll on You…”The Direct: “Now, obviously keeping these deaths fresh and interesting must be a challenge. I know we change monsters and change threats, but how did you also just work to make sure that people watching it weren’t just like, All right, here they go again, but just making sure that people were engaged and it felt new throughout the movie.”David F. Sandberg: Yeah, I mean, we do it in different ways. I mean, one key here is that the characters in the movie, they don’t get refreshed, where it’s like, Okay, now it’s a new day. I’m back to normal. No, like getting killed over and over again really takes a toll on you. And the thing is, in this movie, you only get so many chances. Like, they can’t keep doing this forever.Lotta Losten: They need to figure out how to get this to stop happening to them. So there’s like, a story thread throughout that I think helps. Along with that, it’s the mystery element to it.The Direct: “The conceit of the film is [that] there’s a new threat plaguing these people every time they die. You guys have previously teased how it kind of changes movie genres and whatnot. But are those changes in genre more than just the monster, and do you kind of play around with the editing and how it’s filmed and other elements of the filmmaking process?”David F. Sandberg: I mean, we want to lean into the genres, so it feels like you know that, okay, now we’re in this type of movie. But it was interesting actually, because we, you know, one thought we had early on was like, well, let’s actually have the music change as well.So, it’s like, oh, this will feel more like a supernatural movie, and this is a slasher movie, but that’s something that we actually had to change because it didn’t feel cohesive enough. That was very important for us, that it doesn’t feel like it’s just like vignettes, because it is one cohesive piece.And our composer, Benjamin Wallfisch, did an amazing job with this score that’s something that sort of fits across genres and really ties the movie together.Lotta Losten: It’s so different because we realized that too, like a traditional horror movie soundtrack or like score just didn’t work with this. It needed something to be as playful and strange and big as our movie is.The Direct: “Looking at the trailer, it feels like a really awesome blend of two of my favorite horror movies, which is ‘Happy Death Day’ and ‘Cabin in the Woods.’ Does that sound pretty accurate to what you guys were trying to achieve, and what were some of your own inspirations while making it?”David F. Sandberg: I mean, those two movies come up a lot. I mean, the biggest difference between something like a ‘Happy Death Day’ is the changes. Like, it isn’t the same thing, sort of happening all over again. But those, for sure, were some, you know, inspirations.But because we have all these different genres, we could take inspiration from everything from like, ‘Evil Dead’ to ‘Paranormal Activity’ to like, you know, ‘Friday the 13th,’ which, yeah, The Descent,’ it’s all in there, yeah, which was super fun to do.The full interviews can be seen here:Until Dawn hits theaters worldwide on April 25, 2025.

Former Disney star Maitland Ward had clause written into adult movie contract after leaving Hollywood

A Disney actor-turned-adult film star has revealed a specific clause in her contract that must be followed.If you grew up in the late 1990s to 2000s, you’ll have heard of the popular Disney show Boy Meets World, with one of the sitcom’s stars making a drastic career change in the years since it wrapped.While it’s been almost 25 years since the TV show ended, the actress behind Rachel McGuire in seasons six and seven has taken the time to jump over to the adult industry.Maitland Ward played the character, in what was her breakout role before making appearances in films such as Dish Dogs and White Chicks.But in the porn industry, it turns out that the 48-year-old has specific requirements that need to be met.Ward spoke out about the idea of the industry being unsafe after the release of a graphic movie titled Pleasure back in 2021.Directed by Ninja Thyberg, the film explores the dark side of adult film-making, following aspiring porn star Bella Cherry (Sofia Kappel), who is pressured to fight her nerves and doubts as she gets cold feet in the lead up to her first scene.The men in Pleasure are framed as gross and sleazy, half-drooling over the new adult stars, making them feel uncomfortable in the lead-up to the shoot.However, the 2022 XBIX Porn Performer of the Year claimed the exact opposite of the industry.She revealed that because of how experienced the crew are, they aren’t affected at all by the X-rated scenes in front of them.Speaking to The Sun in 2022, the actress said: “Most of the guys are so bored with it, they’ve seen it all a million times. They’re probably thinking about what to have for lunch or picking up the kids from school.“Honestly no one is staring at you drooling, there are no seedy guys jerking off in the corner. It’s a job. We enjoy it, but it’s a job.”The ex-Disney star claimed that the adult industry isn’t sleazy, like most would think (Instagram/@maitlandward)Ward first appeared in US soap The Bold and the Beautiful in the 90s, but her role in Boy Meets World from 1998-2000 really pushed her into the mainstream.She was told she was ‘too old to be sexy’ by Hollywood directors, which prompted her to make a career switch, in which she claimed: “I have never ever in a million years been pressured to do anything I didn’t want to do by a male director or a male performer.“In the sets I have always been on, if you say no, the rule is the filming stops with no questions asked.”She said that there are now strict rules and clauses in contracts to protect stars while filming movies, going on to explain: “People think a porn set is like some wild orgy 24/7 but it’s not – it’s more controlled than you could imagine.“All the sexual positions have to be agreed on, written down, in black and white. You agree in writing to have sex on film and exactly what that sex will be.“You have to say you’re not under the influence of anything or anyone.“Even the celebrity sex tapes these days, if that film is in a store being sold with a cover and everything, then they would have had to agree to that.”Ward says that filming must stop when she requests it (Instagram/@maitlandward)Ward also said that it is a very physically demanding job, as people may need breaks at times, with water on hand if necessary.She added: “Believe me it’s hard work. If you’re doing 45 minutes of acrobatic sex with two guys it can be a lot of hard work.“It’s like a dance routine – like for ice skaters, for example, it’s a routine, you’re performing to the cameras.”Despite her day job, Ward is happily married to Terry Baxter, a real estate agent who supports her career.The former soap star also revealed that the number of guys she has sex with for her job is limited due to the small pool of top male performers.Ward explained: “My girlfriends tease me saying, ‘Oh my God you must be having sex with all these different guys all day every day’.“But let me tell you, there are about 15 top male performers in this industry and you get to work with the same ones again and again.“There actually isn’t that much variety.”

Steven Soderbergh’s ‘The Good German’ May Be the Director’s Most Reviled Film — It’s Also One of His Best

Reader, you have been lied to! Film history is littered with unfairly maligned classics, whether critics were too eager to review the making of rather than the finished product, or they suffered from underwhelming ad campaigns or general disinterest. Let’s revise our takes on some of these films from wrongheaded to the correct opinion.In a recent interview, Steven Soderbergh referred to “The Good German” as the “most reviled” film he’s ever made, claiming no one has ever brought it up to him in a positive manner. Soderbergh remains baffled by the response, and justifiably so. While the World War II drama was poorly reviewed and failed to find an audience in 2006, it’s one of the director’s most fascinating, original, and, for viewers able to get on its wavelength, emotionally devastating films.

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Adapted by screenwriter Paul Attanasio from a novel by Joseph Kanon, “The Good German” tells the story of Jake (George Clooney), an American war correspondent in Berlin during the final days of World War II who stumbles onto a murder mystery connected to his ex-lover Lena (Cate Blanchett). In a manner closer to the Nixon-era neo-noirs of the 1970s like “Night Moves” and “The Long Goodbye” than the 1940s war movies from which it borrows its style, “The Good German” depicts its hero’s inexorable descent into disillusionment and despair — the closer he gets to solving the mystery, the more horrible the world and the people in it look to him.

What makes “The Good German” so powerful is the complex relationship between the movie’s story and style. Soderbergh chose to direct “The Good German” not only as though it takes place in the 1940s but as though it was made in the 1940s, an idea the film adheres to rigorously with one key exception — an exception that’s ultimately the key to the film’s greatness. This is not merely an instance of shooting period-accurate clothes and props in black-and-white: “The Good German” dissects the entire visual grammar of the classical Hollywood studio system, replicating and subverting it flawlessly.

Certain aspects of Soderbergh’s approach are readily apparent from the outset, most notably the black-and-white photography and the choice to shoot in the narrow 1.37:1 aspect ratio of pre-1950s Hollywood. (Not all the home video and streaming transfers respect Soderbergh’s dimensions, but the new 4K and Blu-ray editions of “The Good German” hitting the street this month preserve the original frame.) Less obvious are the more subtle — and more difficult from a filmmaking perspective — ways in which he applies 1940s principles of lensing, blocking, lighting, and sound recording.

“The Good German” is extremely sparing in its use of close-ups, for example, in keeping with the style of a film like Michael Curtiz’s “Casablanca.” Soderbergh restricts himself to a handful of prime lenses in the film, avoiding zooms and shooting at the wider focal lengths typical of the era; the result is that most scenes are carefully staged in relatively long master shots with multiple actors interacting in the frame. Soderbergh has never been one to shy away from editing as an expressive tool — “The Limey” and “Out of Sight” are two of his best films that gain much of their impact from their self-aware cutting style — but here, the meaning is generated within shots rather than between them.

Just as he restricts himself to lenses and shot sizes typical of the era, Soderbergh (acting as his own cinematographer under the pseudonym Peter Andrews, as usual) also restricts himself in terms of lighting, using only incandescent sources and no modern fixtures like LEDs or fluorescents. There’s a heavy reliance on period-faithful wipes and dissolves as transitions, and the sound is all recorded with a boom mike.

‘The Good German’Warner Bros/Photofest

The absence of wireless microphones on the actors’ bodies not only gives the dialogue a technical quality closer to that of 1940s films but also requires the performers to project in a more dramatic, clearly defined register—yet another way “The Good German” resembles the work of Curtiz or Billy Wilder, whose “A Foreign Affair” provides backgrounds for some of the film’s driving sequences.

Most of Soderbergh’s choices aren’t consciously registered by the viewer, but their cumulative effect is impressive in its flawless evocation of classic Hollywood style. None of this in and of itself makes “The Good German” a great movie, of course, and if all Soderbergh was doing was imitating Curtiz or Raoul Walsh then perhaps “The Good German” would be the well made but hollow exercise described by many of its critics. But Soderbergh is up to something deeper and more profound here; he’s using a familiar style to unsettle us via the carefully chosen areas in which he departs from that style to generate new emotions and new contexts for the subject matter.

While Soderbergh largely forces himself to make “The Good German” with the tools and under the conditions under which Warners contract directors would have toiled, there is one major restriction he does not place upon himself: adhering to the censorship limitations of the Production Code. “The Good German” is filled with the kind of language, violence, and sexual content that the Hays Office expressly forbade, especially in war pictures expected to be patriotic and life-affirming.

There’s something jarring about this kind of R-rated content being delivered in a package that looks and sounds like the squeaky-clean movies of Hollywood’s past, and the incongruity is in keeping with the tensions that exist on a thematic level throughout the story. “The Good German” is one of Soderbergh’s most pessimistic movies (which is really saying something), a film in which most of the characters are operating from positions of extreme self-interest, even when — in some cases especially when — those positions get innocent others killed.

Yet it’s a story set during the so-called “good war.” We’re used to cynical visions of Vietnam, or even, as in the case of Robert Altman’s “M*A*S*H,” Korea, but virtually all the studio movies from the era in which “The Good German” is set and whose style it emulates are, with very few exceptions, heroic. “Casablanca” doesn’t have a happy ending, but it does have a heroic one, and its romanticism is all the more apparent when contrasted with the final scene of “The Good German.”

‘The Good German’©Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

As Jake puts Lena on a plane just like the one Humphrey Bogart put Ingrid Bergman on at the end of “Casablanca,” there’s no sense of bittersweet romance or selfless sacrifice — only a sense of lives shattered and an awareness of the depths of human evil. When Clooney walks away from the plane, he walks away alone — there’s no “beginning of a beautiful friendship” like at the end of Curtiz’s film. Lena has been proven to be, as Soderbergh put it in an interview compiled in the book “Steven Soderbergh: Interviews,” both a victim and a monster. This haunting realization lingers not only with Jake but the audience in a way that would have been unthinkable in a Hollywood movie of 1945.

The sense that not only Lena but all the movie’s characters are compromised at best and duplicitous or evil at worst is probably, as much as the bold stylistic experimentation, why “The Good German” rubbed so many people the wrong way in 2006 — and maybe why it has never been reappraised in the way that it deserves. It’s also what makes “The Good German” so singular among star-driven, Hollywood studio treatments of World War II.

As a dissection of the ethical pitfalls that emerge in a post-war society, “The Good German” is incisive — Attanasio and Soderbergh’s deft incorporation of unfortunate real-life malefactions like the immunity given to Nazi scientists gives the film real moral weight and authority. It’s also affecting, precisely because Soderbergh’s utilization of classical Hollywood tools exposes the contradictions they were meant to conceal. “The Good German” is, like Lena herself, both beautiful and rotten, a superficially elegant portrayal of internal decay.

When the movie came out, the general consensus was that Soderbergh hadn’t done himself any favors by inviting comparison to “Casablanca” and other films of its ilk, but its depth and pleasures can only be fully appreciated in dialogue with those movies. This is what makes Soderbergh one of the greatest directors of his generation: his persistent demand that the style of his films says something beyond merely illustrating the points of the script. The fact is that “The Good German” not only invites comparison with “Casablanca,” it earns it — on its own terms it’s every bit as perfect as Curtiz’s classic.

“The Good German” 4K UHD and Blu-ray editions will be released by Warner Home Video on April 15.

Michael C. Hall Spotted Filming ‘Dexter’ Sequel ‘Dexter: Resurrection’ in NYC

TVDexter Morgan’s story continues this summer on Paramount+ with Showtime.

Published on April 4, 2025

2 min read

Michael C. Hall is slipping back into his most famous character. On Thursday, the Dexter star was at work in New York City filming scenes for the upcoming sequel series Dexter: Resurrection. 

Hall sported a long-sleeved blue shirt and dark pants and held a coffee cup in a moment captured by photographers on April 3. The actor is reprising his role as serial killer Dexter Morgan in the upcoming 10-episode series, which will launch in summer 2025 on Paramount+ with Showtime.

‘Dexter: Resurrection’ cast also includes Krysten Ritter and Peter Dinklage 

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Details about the newest chapter in Dexter’s twisted story are scant. However, other candid snaps from filming offer some clues. Also on Thursday, paparazzi captured guest star Krysten Ritter shooting a scene where her character, Mia, is hauled away by police. On March 31, Hall and David Dastmalchian filmed a scene at McNally Jackson Books in Manhattan. Dastmalchian plays a character named Gareth in the new episodes. A few days earlier, Game of Thrones alum Peter Dinklage was seen on set with Hall at the Downtown Manhattan Heliport. Dinklage’s Dexter: Resurrection character is a billionaire venture capitalist named Leon Pater.

Dexter: Resurrection’s stacked cast also includes Uma Thurman as Charley, Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine as Blessing Kamara, Kadia Saraf as Detective Claudette Wallace, Dominic Fumusa as Detective Melvin Oliva, Emilia Suárez as Elsa Rivera, Neil Patrick Harris as Lowell, and Eric Stonestreet as Al. Returning cast members include David Zayas as Detective Angel Batista, Jack Alcott as Dexter’s son Harrison Morgan, and James Remar as Dexter’s father Harry Morgan. 

What happened at the end of ‘Dexter: New Blood’?

Michael C. Hall as Dexter in ‘Dexter: New Blood’ | Seacia Pavao/SHOWTIME

Dexter aired on Showtime from 2006 to 2013. Hall returned as the vigilante killer in the sequel Dexter: New Blood, which premiered in 2021. That show appeared to definitely wrap up Dexter’s story. In the finale, Dexter’s son Harrison shot his father in the chest and left him to die. But the prequel series Dexter: Original Sin reversed that ending. The opening scene revealed that Dexter miraculously survived the shooting, though he was in a coma.  

In addition to Dexter: Resurrection, a prequel series about the infamous Trinity Killer (played by John Lithgow in the original show) is in development, Deadline reports.

Dexter is streaming on Netflix and Paramount+ with Showtime. Dexter: New Blood and Dexter: Original Sin are streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime.

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