Brendan Hodges

“Perfect Days” had its world premiere at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the festival’s Best Actor prize for Japanese star Kōji Yakusho. It would go on to be selected by Japan as their entry for Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards and would eventually receive the Oscar nomination. As the film expanded to more theaters, Academy Award-nominated director and co-writer Wim Wenders and Yakusho sat with us to discuss their experiences working on the movie. Please ...

“Godzilla Minus One” was one of 2023’s most surprising success stories. The film grossed over $105 million worldwide, becoming the highest-grossing Japanese “Godzilla” film of all time; it crossed over into the U.S., where it received an overwhelmingly positive response from critics and now has been nominated for an Oscar for Best Visual Effects making it the first film in the 70-year-old franchise to receive an Academy Award nomination. Director, Writer, and Visual Effects Supervisor Takashi...

It’s July of 2023 and I’m pulled to the screen like gravity, watching a gaunt face with piercing eyes study a dance of ripples in water, the tea leaves of consequence to come. Next, a concert of flame and flashes of swirling red-orange geometry, bulbs of detonating subatomic particles and pillars of cumulonimbus fire, blazing in his mind’s eye. I am watching “Fission,” the 8,000-foot-wi...

“Napoleon” is the latest historical epic from Academy Award-nominee Ridley Scott, which features technically marvelous battle scenes, political intrigue, and scandalous and corrupt behavior from one of history’s most studied, controversial, and awe-inspiring figures. The Next Best Picture team was lucky enough to conduct a series of interviews with the film’s production team. First up, we have Giovanni Lago’s interview with costume designers Janty Yates and David Crossman. Then we have Brenda...

“Ferrari” had its world premiere at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival, where it competed for the Golden Lion. It would later go on to close the New York Film Festival, and now, it’s playing in theaters from NEON. Legendary filmmaker Michael Mann examines the life of Enzo Ferrari in 1957 when his life, both professionally and personally, was on the brink of collapse. Academy Award-winner Penélope Cruz, who plays Enzo’s wife, Laura Ferrari, actor Gabriel Leone, who plays race car driv...

If every year is a great year for movies (at least, if you know where to look), it’s always a rewarding exercise to reflect on what each year’s body of work comes to represent. Throughlines and themes can seem to materialize out of the ether, with various subjects, ideas, or images repeated through makeshift groupings of films, whether by lucky coincidence or the idea that artists can be a lightning rod to capture the cultural electricity of a specific time and place.

The most obvious, of cou...

One of 2023’s most thrilling films, “Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One,” finds director Christopher McQuarrie, Tom Cruise, and their collaborators continually pushing the franchise higher, harder, and faster than it has ever gone before, dazzling audiences in the process. Visual effects supervisor Alex Wuttke and editor Eddie Hamilton were kind enough to spend time speaking with us about what goes into crafting a “Mission” movie and the challenges they faced on this latest film. P...

“Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse” exceeded most people’s expectations, surpassing the heights set by the previous film, “Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse,” and set audiences on a path for what promises to be a thrilling concluding chapter with the upcoming “Spider-Man: Beyond The Spider-Verse.” Composer Daniel Pemberton has recently been nominated for a Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award for his work on the film’s score. Blending many different genres and expanding upon the sound of t...

“The Boy And The Heron” had its North American premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, where it was 2nd runner-up to the People’s Choice Award. The new Hayao Miyazaki film has garnered strong reviews, winning Best Animated Feature from the New York and Los Angeles Film Critics and has now been nominated for two Golden Globe Awards for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score for Miyazaki’s close collaborator Joe Hisaishi. The world-renowned Japanese composer has scored ...

The opening minutes of Future Boy Conan, Hayao Miyazaki’s’ classic but seldom-seen 1978 directorial debut, is a prophetic vision of our eventual self-destruction. Sieged by a future war and post-nuclear weapons of mass destruction, humanity has doomed itself; cyberpunk mega-cities crumble, populations are wiped away, the climate withers, and the waters rise. In the decades since Future...

As soon as Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” begins, we’re greeted with beautiful but violent walls of towering flame, intercut with ripples of rain in water and an IMAX-sized closeup of Cillian Murphy’s haunted face. Later, we see incandescent white discs in furious vibration, and later still, hundreds of microparticles expand and collapse with great force. These fantastical images are the impressionistic imaginings of Oppenheimer’s mind, fantasizing about the subatomic world, how it works, ...

A woman dives off a yacht into the shimmering waters of the Amalfi Coast, simultaneously imprisoned by, and freed from, her future self. Only, before, she doesn’t know it yet. You see, time is relative. When she glimpses the woman––who is, in fact, herself––swan into the sea as she approaches the yacht by motor boat, she’s a stranger to the woman she will become, first seen in lean silhouette, a symbol of her desired extrication from an abusive husband who is both brute and doomsday philosoph...

Passed from friend to friend, Park Chan-Wook’s “Oldboy,” an enduring masterpiece that combined genre maximalism with operatic sincerity, gained its reputation in college dorm rooms, parent’s basements, and hushed late-night DVD screenings, becoming a cult sensation as the foul, blood-letting revenge saga that could stir the soul. The now infamous gauntlet of stomach-churning twists, unfolding more like a waking nightmare than the grounded grit of the typical revenge action movie, became “Oldb...

“20 Days In Mariupol” had its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award for World Cinema Documentary. The film follows an AP team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged city of Mariupol and struggling to continue documenting the atrocities of the Russian invasion. Director and writer Mstyslav Chernov was kind enough to talk with us about his work on the film as it draws on his daily news dispatches and personal harrowing footage of his own co...

We’re living in the age of fervid nostalgia. For film, that’s meant an ever-perpetuating cycle of reboots, sequels, reimaginings, and live-action remakes – a Hollywood more stuck in the swamps of the past than the relevant pastures of the present. On its face, “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” can be accused of doing the same: bringing back Nazis, sacred artifacts, and familiar Mediterranean locales, perfect for restaging the Spielbergian wonders of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” or “The Las...