Indholdsfortegnelse for Awards Special 33A - December 2, 2024 i The Hollywood Reporter

Yura Borisov doesn’t want to talk about Stanislavski. Which isn’t to say the Moscow-born actor, who in Anora plays Igor — the heavy hired to keep Mikey Madison’s stripper character in check — is not steeped in the storied acting technique, a precursor to the Method. “In Russia, nobody speaks about Stanislavski,” the classically trained Borisov explains via Zoom from a hotel room in Abu Dhabi, where he’s filming a Russian sci-fi movie. “Because it’s already in our blood. It’s our groundwork. [Acting is about] building on top of that.” What Borisov, 31, has built is one of the year’s most quietly compelling screen characters. Playing the stony henchman who very gradually emits flickers of affection for his reluctant mark has brought the actor, already famous in his motherland, international…

A biopic of a British pop star, a psychological thriller and a sports drama don’t have much in common on the surface. But Better Man, A Different Man and Unstoppable do share at least one quality: They all use effects to inform and illuminate character. In each film, visual effects, both practical and computer-generated, help audiences embrace something unconventional about their protagonists and better understand their virtues and even insecurities. As A Different Man makeup artist and prosthetic designer Mike Marino says of his project, “The message is you don’t have to try to look like something else to be a good person, a quality person, an amazing person.” Marshaling the technology to achieve that, however, is no easy feat. In Aaron Schimberg’s A Different Man, Sebastian Stan stars as…

“Conspiratorial silence” was the phrase that came to mind for rerecording mixer and sound designer Ben Baird when he read the script for Edward Berger’s Conclave, about the mysterious event of electing a new pope. Conclave stars Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini and follows Cardinal Thomas Lawrence (Fiennes) as he’s organizing a papal conclave and finds himself uncovering secrets about each candidate. The process is often a quiet one, magnifying the importance of every sound. To capture them, Baird’s first task was to head to the Vatican, which happened to coincide with one of the pope’s Sunday speeches. While he wasn’t able to record any sounds (filming and photography are prohibited), Baird made a lot of notes on the things he could hear: singing, bells tolling…

Nickel Boys could change the way we see faces onscreen. That’s what editor Nicholas Monsour believes. The drama, based on Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Nickel Boys, is one of the most uniquely structured and shot films of the year. Director RaMell Ross made the decision to tell the story of two teenagers who meet at an abusive reform school in 1960s Florida from first-person perspectives. The camera starts as the eyes of Elwood (Ethan Herisse), who is sent to Nickel after accidentally hitching a ride in a stolen car on the way to college classes. Then it shifts to the point of view of Elwood’s friend Turner (Brandon Wilson), a charming young man initially resigned to his circumstances. “That’s the craziest thing about the movie, and the most…

If you think you’ve been seeing a lot of Donald Trump lately, just imagine being Brandi Boulet. The Toronto-based prosthetic and makeup artist who worked on The Apprentice spent months studying the once and future president to capture his hair, face and body as it aged. “[We would] change his foundation as he started getting a little bit darker but not quite orange yet. We changed his sideburns throughout, depending on what [life] stage we were at, changed the color of his eyebrows, the color of his wig, and then we’d put a bald plate on him that you could see through the wig as his hair was starting to thin,” she said, describing the process of turning Sebastian Stan into the leader of the free world. “When he looked…

“This is one of my favorite parts ever. This guy is just a servant for Albert Finney, and he goes totally underappreciated. When I first started acting, it was the role I really wanted to play.”…

In an increasingly polarized, complex and scary world, animated films are one of our last havens of pure communal joy. Divisions between red and blue, left and right, wokes and deplorables fall away when we collectively gather in a movie theater to hear stories of inner emotions transformed into quippy cartoons, to watch the adventures of elemental gods and sentient robots (or sentient garden gnomes), to ponder the marvels of real-world creativity through the medium of children’s building blocks. THR invited the directors of some of the biggest and buzziest animated films in this year’s awards season — Josh Cooley, director of Paramount’s Transformers One; Kelsey Mann, the helmer behind Pixar’s Inside Out 2, the highest-grossing animated film of all time; Dana Ledoux Miller, one of the directors of Disney’s…

“It might sound corny,” says Trent Reznor, “but we’re still in awe of how powerful music can make you feel. Writing a song, you put something out and maybe someone hears it and has a reaction to it or not. You can play it live and see something happen. But with film, being able to see experiences, sequences, scenes and know that you have the power to radically change how someone can feel is an awe-inspiring feeling for us.” It’s been almost 15 years since Reznor — the mastermind behind industrial music pioneers and Rock and Roll Hall of Famers Nine Inch Nails — and his bandmate and long-time creative partner Atticus Ross composed their first film score, for David Fincher’s The Social Network, which won them their first Academy Award.…