Clint Worthington

As the opening minutes of Roku’s The Spiderwick Chronicles is all too glad to remind us, This is a dark fairy tale. A decidedly on-the-nose sentiment to blurt out to an audience in its beginning seconds, to be sure, but that matches the vibe of the series: A lot of spells, but very little magic. The show was rescued by Roku after Disney+ cut it in 2023 after completing the series; the move was ostensibly to cut costs, part of the streaming squeeze we’re all going through as streamers start reali…

Rosalind Chao discusses her early turn in Nancy Kelly’s recently-restored feminist Western Thousand Pieces of Gold, and her career since.

Composer Emile Mosseri talks about joining Amazon’s acclaimed mystery series Homecoming for its second season and finding the show’s original musical voice.

The biggest challenge any director making an exorcism movie faces is: How do you top The Exorcist? William Friedkin's apocalyptic, daring 1974 classic defined the genre so thoroughly that any subsequent entry is both indebted to, and haunted by, its mastery. The smartest move, really, is to just embrace its fog-covered shadow; The Exorcism, a meta-textual possession film that swims happily in the iconography of its forebear. In so doing it comes away with surprisingly melancholic ruminations on the strain that came with, well, making The Exorcist. The film is co-written and directed by Joshua John Miller (Final Girls), whose most direct connection to The Exorcist comes from being the son of Jason Miller, the actor who played Father Karras in Friedkin's original. In a way, this story feels like Miller exorcising demons of his own, likely spurred by watching the emotional toll his father experienced working on Friedkin's famously chaotic and unpredictable set back in 1974. Here, the timeline is moved to the

Oscar-nominated composer Daniel Pemberton talks about his thrilling, experimental score for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.

What is Horizon? It's a question that plagues the sprawling cast of characters in Kevin Costner's new Western saga, his return to feature filmmaking after staking out a healthy retirement fund (and keeping himself in the public eye of America's dads) with five seasons on Paramount's popular neo-Western soap Yellowstone. Most of them, one way or another, have been drawn West with the promise of prosperity thanks to mysterious flyers published nationwide; settlers, homesteaders, and forty-niners all rush out there to find their future and their fortune. But, as with so many tales of the frontier, down this way lies danger: Apaches, privateers, the shadows of your past following you into the unknown seeking vengeance. Horizon, it seems, is the intangible dream of westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, the romantic core of this nation's history (and the brutal underbelly of violence that created it). But it's also important to ask what Horizon is for Costner, especially in the context of this first chapter:

Composer Ian Hultquist breaks down his Carpenter-inspired, blank-slate score for The Walking Dead: Dead City.

Composer Christophe Beck talks through the long, fruitful road to scoring Ryan Reynolds’ sprightly video game action-comedy Free Guy.

It's finally fall—the leaves are changing, the temperature is lowering, and it's time for cuffing and pumpkin spice latte seasons to perk up. And, like clockwork, Criterion gifts us with their twice-annual half-off sales. This month, there's a lot to offer, from old-school spookiness for Halloween to long-awaited upgrades of early early spines, to queer classics both old and new. As is our wont at The Spool, we've collected a few offerings you can snatch up during today's sale, which runs from 9 a.m. PST on October 22 to 9 a.m. PST on October 23. Here, you get 50% off 4K UHDs, Blu-rays, DVDs, and in-store merch (like those genre T-shirts I've yet to invest in). Even if you just grab a couple of titles, though, you ought to be well-equipped to weather the tough winters. All of Us Strangers Andrew Haigh is no stranger to mournful laments of queer love intersecting with grief and loss (see his fellow Criterion entry Weekend), and last year's All of Us Strangers is a mighty exploration of queerne

It's a funny thing to be sinking yourself deep into festival season at a time like this, both for the country and the film industry. The new presidential administration heralds unprecedented (and terrifying) new implications for everything from healthcare to immigration to the safety and care of our most marginalized groups; Hollywood is still reeling from the wildfires that have decimated Southern California; and the open question of the future of streaming and AI leave creative endeavors uncertain, both in scope and in quality. But life and art will out, which leads us to the Sundance Film Festival, the prototypical start of film festival season. Running from January 23-February 2nd, 2025 (with a virtual component taking up the last five days of the fest), this year's Sundance features over 90 features and a bevy of shorts and other programs from the most exciting filmmakers from around the globe. Most notably, there aren't a lot of huge names putting their hats in the ring this year: Few of the indie au