- Everything for Someone: San Diego Comic-Con 2026 Part 2 (July 28, 2026)
San Diego Comic-Con always has a few up-to-the-minute costumes (like someone dressed as Cyclospora lettuce), and a few looks especially popular among a wide range of people. This year, I saw Monkeys D. Luffy from “One Piece” in all shapes, sizes, and ages, easy to spot with the red vest, blue pants, and straw hat. One reason may be that the costume is easy to make and comfortable to wear.
But another reason is the series’ ability to earn the affection of its audience. In one of Impact24’s Fan Favorite panels featuring the craftspeople behind popular movies and television, “One Piece” editor Eric Litman talked about working on the reverse mountain sequence to “make sure we understood the scale and relationships of the characters” in a shot featuring “a whale the size of the Empire State Building.” With a “danger we thought was a threat but is lovable and misunderstood,” he used “lingering shots” to make it more touching than scary. How did he know it was finished? “We would not stop working on that sequence until someone in the cutting room cried.”
“Spider-Noir” editor Jennifer Barbot also used longer shots to evoke the classic noir films of the 40s, with temp scores from “The Maltese Falcon” and “Double Indemnity,” but when it came to the action sequences, she shifted to the kind of pacing modern audiences appreciate.
Co-composer Matt Bowen said the key to his music for “The Boys” was whose perspective the score evokes. For one scene, where a mother has to make a painful decision about her very sick child, he initially wrote something to get “the cry factor.” But it turned out the showrunner wanted to make clear that the mother was considering something very unethical, so it had to be rewritten from the audience’s perspective, less sympathetic, more uncomfortable. Blair James, costume designer for “Obsession,” looked out at the colorful choices of the attendees, some in costume, some just wearing t-shirts with snarky comments or showing off their favorite cultural touchstones, and said, “Everything you wear has conscious or subconscious meaning in it. Costumes help explain the story without saying it, making you see without noticing.”
While the big stars and blockbuster movies were taking over the 6000-seat Hall H, I went to the smaller events, with audiences in about one percent of that size previewing clips from two upcoming films. “Ultraduck” is animated, based on Arcana’s graphic novel about a superhero duck. And “Buddy” is a horror film about a Barney/Pee Wee Herman-like children’s television character from director and co-writer Casper Kelly (“Too Many Cooks”), featuring Keegan-Michael Key as the voice of the murderous plush unicorn-costumed host and Patton Oswalt as the voice of Strappy the backpack.
For the first time in its 29 years, The Black Panel was all-female. Dr. Lando Tosaya responded to complaints about diverse casting of traditionally white characters: “Why are we otherizing something that’s fictional?” And she pointed to the “one Black friend” cliché in mainstream culture that “uses diversity as a checkbox,” keeping those characters “in the Blackground” instead of making the relationships authentic. Research scientist-turned comic and novel author Stephanie Williams quoted Toni Morrison: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” And she responded to critics who point to work they say is “not Black enough.” She was very clear that “If I touch it, it’s Black.”
The “You’re Wrong, Leonard Maltin” session moderated by his rainbow-haired daughter, Jessie, is always a lot of fun. He has missed some of the big releases this year, but so far, his favorite of 2026 is “Tuner” with Leo Woodall and Dustin Hoffman. As always, he responded to critiques of his criticism with grace, charm, and astounding recollection of every detail of the tens of thousands of movies he has seen. Some of the films he was asked about were ones he respected more than loved, like “Blue Velvet” (he urged the audience to watch another David Lynch film, “The Straight Story”), “Taxi Driver,” and this year’s breakthrough, “Backrooms” (“like a ‘Twilight Zone’ episode that never resolved in a satisfying way”). He liked the documentary about the making of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” as a portrait of a filmmaker who is “a creative spirit who doesn’t limit himself, shackle himself, a dreamer like [the real-life character portrayed by Jeff Bridges in one of his films] Preston Tucker, a creative spirit but not a disciplined creative spirit.”
Every year, Comic-Con seems to take over more of the Gaslamp neighborhood, with streets near the Convention Center shut down to traffic, events at nearby hotels and public libraries, buildings, buses, and train cars being wrapped with ads for movies and television series, and some stores and restaurants being completely taken over for extensive “activations,” installations featuring sets and props. Paramount+ had the biggest one for “The Lodge.” LAIKA had a small but beautiful activation promoting its October release “Wildwood.” Attendees entered a small but immersive forest set with hints about the movie’s story: a newspaper headline about a missing child, a sweater left on a wagon.
The activation for the upcoming Christmas Carol story, “Ebenezer,” was wonderfully detailed, a humorous winter creation in a hot California summer. Very realistic-looking snow and icicles decorated a Victorian-looking storefront with a Scrooge and Marley sign, a moving animatronic crow and large clock with hands that spun around, and inside a glimpse of Bob Cratchit’s desk, with the flickering candle he’d use to warm his hands. Actors in winter Victorian costumes interacted with the crowd, and star Johnny Depp came out as a surprise, wearing full Scrooge make-up and costume to greet some lucky visitors.
Long-time Comic-Con attendees know that the funniest panel is just before it closes down, the Starship Smackdown, celebrating its 25th anniversary as a beloved tradition. Mark Altman, television writer/producer and big-time “Star Trek” nerd who has written the definitive guide to the show, presides over a panel of experts that, with some audience participation, creates a bracket of the best movie and television starships, from the iconic (Millenium Falcon, various versions of the Enterprise) to the esoteric (the Rocinante, and does the TARDIS qualify?) for very lively, hilarious and encyclopedically nerdy debate. This year’s winner was a first-time entrant, but an undeniably worthy one: the Hail Mary.
I love the way the more than 100,000 San Diego Comic-Con attendees always cheer each other on, no matter what fandom they support. As I went through the gigantic exhibition hall and saw people of all sizes, shapes, genders, races, abilities, and ages wearing snarky t-shirts, fan regalia, and full-on, homemade costumes, buying items from a few dollars to more than a mortgage payment, it was impossible not to feel how much joy the most passionate fans get from the lively arts that are most meaningful to them. As Crunchyroll’s Leslie Bland said on a panel about SteelBooks for Blu-Rays. “We don’t try to make something for everyone. We try to make everything for someone.”
- Advance to Paradise, Retreat to Hell: Kiyoshi Kurosawa on “The Samurai and the Prisoner” (July 28, 2026)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is celebrated for making tense, methodical genre films that study the horrors of contemporary society. Defined by their unsettling atmospheres of psychological dread and dislocation, as well as by their subversive depiction of character archetypes breaking down in response to this mood of existential unease, Kurosawa’s best-known masterpieces—like the hypnotic psychological thriller “Cure” and the eerie cyber nightmare “Pulse”—have reflected the alienation and malaise of modern Japan.
But with “The Samurai and the Prisoner,” in US theaters this week from Janus Films, the 71-year-old filmmaker has made his first Japanese period drama—more specifically, his first jidaigeki, an incomparable genre of the country’s cinema engaged with the isolationist Edo period of samurai rule, which lasted 250 years. At the center of the story is Lord Murashige Araki (Motoki Masahiro), who rises against Nobunaga Oda, the ruthless warlord he once served, and is summarily besieged in his own castle. As a series of mysterious deaths threatens to turn the members of his court against one another, Murashige is forced to consult Kanbei (Masaki Suda of “Cloud”), the cunning enemy strategist he has locked in the dungeon.
In adapting Honobu Yonezawa’s bestselling, Naoki Prize–winning novel, Kurosawa is faithful to the story’s stately, classical contours while elevating it into an intellectually stimulating, formally elegant puzzle of shifting loyalties and moral conundrums. Unfolding near-entirely within the confines of its protagonist’s castle, his variation on a locked-room mystery gradually expands into something more ambitious by capturing the arrayed ideological forces warring for cultural dominance in 16th-century Japan, from the traditional warrior code to Christianity and multiple forms of Buddhism.
As Murashige questions his allegiance to an authority he might no longer believe in, influenced by Kanbei and others in his orbit to challenge the social hierarchies of his time, Kurosawa’s film emerges as a thorny philosophical consideration of power, belief, and the relative morality of our social contracts.
The morning after the film’s much-anticipated world premiere in the Cannes Premiere sidebar of the 79th Cannes Film Festival, Kurosawa sat for an interview in the Grand Théâtre Lumière with the assistance of curator, producer, and translator Aiko Masubuchi. In conversation, he reflected upon working in the classical mode of Japanese period drama, how Araki Murashige emerged as another one of the filmmaker’s many protagonists defying society’s constructs, and what influence the other Kurosawa—specifically, his “Throne of Blood”—had over this latest work.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
At last night’s Cannes world premiere of “The Samurai and the Prisoner,” you had the experience of seeing the film with an international audience, as well as with two directors who consider themselves students of yours—Ryūsuke Hamaguchi and Kōji Fukada—by your side. What was that experience like for you?
Last night, it was my first opportunity to show the film to an international audience, so I was very, very nervous about how it was going to go—because ultimately this film has many proper nouns and names that even people in Japan are not familiar with. It’s also a film with a lot of dialogue, so I wasn’t sure just how much of the film would actually be communicated to and received by the audience. That’s how the screening started for me. And I’m sure there are certain details and minutiae that may not necessarily be understood by an international audience.
At the same time, I felt the main drama of the film—the change that the character of Araki goes through, what he becomes, and what happens at the end—was very much communicated. I felt that was the case because there were some parts where I didn’t expect a laugh to happen or for people to be surprised by something, but I felt that in the room. It requires an understanding of the film for that kind of reaction to occur—so I felt the core and the spine of the film was communicated.
Also, as you mentioned, there were many Japanese directors in the room last night, and this gave me quite an interesting feeling. As you mentioned, I used to see directors Fukada and Hamaguchi quite often in Tokyo, but these days I don’t see them as often as I used to. It had been a while since I’d seen them, and it’s funny to me that Cannes was the place where I could see them after all this time. I really didn’t teach them anything, I don’t believe. They are in the positions that they are because of the strength and the power that they have in themselves.
All I can do is respect the work that they have been making. It’s interesting that it was Cannes of all places where we ended up in the same room—but that’s what’s charming about film festivals as well. One realizes that we’re all working on the same grounds, that we’re all making films, even though we might be acting individually and doing work separately from each other.
Lord Murashige Araki, as played by Motoki Masahiro, is not your typical heroic samurai and instead rebels against the Bushido code, the traditional “way of the warrior” that at this time in Japanese history was considered sacrosanct. Murashige does so, like many of your characters, out of a desire to break with societal constructs and restrictions that would otherwise mandate how he must live, how he must die.
It’s just as you said. There was this original book that I adapted, but even before I came across this book, I was always interested in this historical figure of Araki Murashige, from 16th-century Japan, because he is known as this person who ran away, and he is almost seen as a villain within history for having left behind his people. I was drawn to this character because he tried to free himself from the values that were tying him down; even if it meant negative consequences, he still wanted to live away from those strict values.
That kind of character is somebody I really empathize with, because it’s very hard to do in actual life. In fact, I do believe that, with this historical figure, what he did actually reflects a rare kind of character; he was a rare kind of person. As you mentioned, within some of my other films, even those set in contemporary or modern times, the protagonist often tries to escape from what they’ve built up until then—a certain kind of peace or stability—and they still try to leave that behind, even if it’s a dangerous path, to try to go to a place that they can truly believe in. I think ultimately those are the kinds of people that I am drawn to the most.
You’re known for films set in contemporary times, but this film is set in feudal Japan, specifically Osaka circa 1578; that makes it your first Japanese period drama, or jidaigeki. I’m curious what you’d say about how this classical style of filmmaking has influenced you—and what was required for you to embark down this path of making your own contribution to this genre, both logistically and also creatively.
This is something that I really had to think deeply about, because I had always had the desire to do jidaigeki period pieces and samurai films, but what I had in mind then was the chanbara style, which is the sword-fighting style of action cinema. But, as you saw with the film, this one is actually a conversational film, and a mystery, and most of the conversation happens inside. It’s not an action-filled samurai film in any way.
That left me wondering how I was going to do this, so I went back to the cinema from the 1950s. At its peak, that period saw lots of masterpieces made in Japan that were jidaigeki but were also quieter and not so action-filled. I had seen these masterpieces before, but I went back to many of them to rewatch them and realize that wonderful movies could be made without action, while being more drama-driven in this way. I was able to relearn from the past jidaigeki and decide that’s the direction I wanted to go in.
To add to that, most of the 1950s jidaigeki films—of which there are many masterpieces—were also shot in a standard-sized frame, and they were all made in black-and-white. I really couldn’t make a decision until the very end about whether I was going to make this a black-and-white film. Ultimately, I wanted to make sure that this story has a connection with our contemporary times, and so I decided not to do that; but, again, the frame, as you saw, is not so wide, and it’s closer to a standard-sized frame. The colors in the frame, I also kept rather subdued, instead of incredibly vibrant, and so in that way I tried to get the picture closer to some older jidaigeki films.
As I watched “The Samurai and the Prisoner,” your film brought to mind one jidaigeki in particular: Akira Kurosawa’s epic “Throne of Blood,” regarding not only the intense, claustrophobic nature of its dialogue between warlords, and between a samurai and his wife, but also the Shakespearean nature of the Warring States period—the sengoku jidai—in which your film is set. In drawing upon those earlier films, tell me about finding the style of blocking and framing that you wanted alongside Yasuyuki Sasaki, your director of photography. It feels highly intentional how various characters move through their surroundings, where they are and how they interact relative to one another at any given time.
“Throne of Blood” was a major reference point; again, I was working in the tradition of a samurai drama that’s set in the 16th century, and what that means is that there was fundamentally, within the way people moved, a very clear hierarchy that existed. If somebody is standing and talking to someone, there is somebody who is on their knees, looking up and talking to that person. In the way their gazes would interact, sometimes they would meet, but a lot of the time somebody would be looking up or somebody would be looking down, because the hierarchy was so strict at that time. You see that in the films of Akira Kurosawa as well as the films of Kenji Mizoguchi.
I wanted to make sure that we were working with the right kind of gaze, and that the gazes would sometimes shift from top to bottom, from looking up to looking down. That was something that I was really thinking about when I was directing. Something I told our DP, Yasuyuki Sasaki, is that, when people stand and sit down, we still have to think about the gazes—but just because somebody has suddenly stood up, I don’t want the framing to be awkward and suddenly change. So, I always asked him for an angle or a frame that would make that transition happen in a more natural way.
“Throne of Blood” was also a black-and-white film. The changes that happen in time, and in location or setting, are not shown through color but through changes in lighting, and that’s something that I brought into my film as well. I tried to show how time has passed, or how the place or setting has changed, by thinking about the amount or the direction of the lighting. This is something I was very strict about myself.
I wanted to ask about this Buddhist teaching—“advance to paradise, retreat to hell”—that became a Sengoku-period battle slogan and sits at the core of this film’s moral argument, as framed by the character of Chiyoho (Yuriko Yoshitaka), Araki Murashige’s wife. It has modern resonances in the teachings of late capitalism, the concept of the entrepreneurial work ethic or “grindset,” that you should spend your entire life as an appendage of a productive organism. Tell me about deciding to place this dialogue at the core of the conversations between these characters.
I almost want to say that the answer that I would like to give is already present in your question, in the sense that, yes, I was working off an original story, and of course this is fiction, and there is the key phrase that Chiyoko utters: “Advance to paradise, retreat into hell.” It is a very old Buddhist teaching that might be difficult to understand in today’s times, in a way. But I do believe that these words are also the impetus behind her rebellion. That’s coming from her, these old Buddhist teachings.
I wanted to make sure that this connects with how the change in Murashige is expressed as well: maybe there can still be paradise, even if he decides to stop chasing power and vying to be the top samurai. He can still find paradise in that decision to leave. I figured that, if I could link his change properly to those words, then something about the way Murashige lived his life could truthfully be expressed.
Once we bridge this to our contemporary times, it is hard not to start thinking about the forces and structures and ideas that we are today bound by. What can we actually let go of? What can we throw away? In throwing those ideas away, where can we still find happiness? Can we find happiness? Whether we can feel that way, I think, was the big question I was trying to throw out in the world with this particular film.
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s “The Samurai and the Prisoner” opens in US theaters July 31, via Janus Films.
- Get on the Train: “NYC in Transit” Launches at Film Forum (July 28, 2026)
The New York subway system is a perfect location for a scene, sequence, or whole movie, whether the scene is a meet-cute or a meet-your-maker. Everything about it is cinematic: the filthy platforms; the busking musicians; the long and winding pedestrian tunnels; the clackety-clack of wheels in motion; the screech of brakes; the Jenga-like density of commuters packed into a train car at rush hour.
Film Forum’s “NYC in Transit” series celebrates the New York subway with a series that starts today, July 28, and currently has no end date; perhaps, like the A train, the system’s longest rail line, it will run and run until there’s no track left. The co-sponsor, appropriately, is the New York Transit Museum, which is headquartered in a decommissioned, Depression-era subway stop in downtown Brooklyn. It’s a great way to spend an afternoon if you live in the region, and fun to visit online if you don’t.
Program highlights through September 1 are listed below, with a few thoughts on each.
July 28, 6:45 p.m. “Speedy” and “In the Footsteps of Speedy”
In “Speedy,” silent slapstick master Harold Lloyd (“Safety Last”) co-stars with New York circa 1928. Screened on 35mm film, “Speedy” includes one of the earliest known “packed into a subway car like sardines” sight gags, but there’s actually just one full scene set in the subway proper. But footage of long-gone elevated trains and horse-drawn streetcars and a brief guest appearance by Babe Ruth compensate. Shown with live musical accompaniment by Steve Sterner, and followed by Film Forum programmer Bruce Goldstein’s short documentary “In the Footsteps of Speedy,” which revisits key filming locations, some of which are within walking distance of the theater.
August 4, 6:45 p.m. “The Naked City”
Shot in 107 locations all over the city, including the former city morgue, the Essex Street market, and the Williamsburg Bridge, director Jules Dassin’s murder mystery follows an NYPD police detective and the head of his department as they attempt to identify and capture whoever murdered a model on 83rd St. in Manhattan. Screenwriter and producer Mark Hellinger, a former newspaper reporter, narrates in the manner of a hardboiled hero on an old fashioned radio drama. It’s probably too much information– at times, the meandering, fact-packed voice-over makes “The Naked City” feel more like a fictionalized sociological study than a procedural — but that might not be a dealbreaker for viewers attending this series, which is mainly about being able to study the subway in all of its forms as it became what we see today.
August 11, 7:20 p.m. “The French Connection.”
Screened on 35mm film. This movie about an obsessive New York City narcotics detective and his partner turning the city upside-down to arrest a French heroin trafficker is what academics call “a rich text.” As both a box office hit and a multiple Oscar winner, it was a springboard that turned a lot of still-developing talents into very big deals—especially director William Friedkin, who went straight onto even more successful “The Exorcist” after this, a one-two punch of iconic films that kept him employable for the rest of his life; screenwriter Ernest Tidyman, who also adapted 1971’s “Shaft” from his own novel; star Gene Hackman, an A-list supporting player and ascendant leading man who had never been asked to carry major Hollywood feature before; and Roy Scheider, aces as Hackman’s partner, who quickly became a leading man himself, and starred in multiple classic films (including “Jaws,” “All That Jazz,” and Friedkin’s “Sorcerer”).
“The French Connection” is also a political lightning rod for arguments about law enforcement and police brutality that are still raging today. The Supreme Court case Miranda vs. Arizona—the one that spurred the still-mandatory recitation of a suspect’s rights upon arrest—had just been decided five years earlier, sparking backlash among reactionaries and their elected representatives who felt that that the political establishment had gone soft on crime and put criminals’ constitutional rights above the rights of citizens not to be victimized. (This was a major factor in Richard Nixon’s 1968 election as president.) Hackman’s Popeye Doyle doesn’t care about any of that. He’s openly racist, physically and verbally abusive, and violates laws and procedures whenever he deems it necessary, which is often.
But in the end–as well as in life; this story is loosely based on a real drug bust that yielded the largest narcotics seizure in NYPD history–the righteous cop gets his man, though at terrible cost to society. (Also released this year: “Dirty Harry,” wherein the villain is basically the Zodiac killer and the hero is way more handsome and likable than Doyle.) Friedkin, ever the opportunistic showman, leaves us unclear about where he stands on any of this, pouring all of his energy into the confrontations, the centerpiece of which is the now legendary chase scene with Doyle driving like a maniac to overtake Frog One in the elevated train above.
Tuesday, August 18, 8:10pm. “The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three”
In this 1974 thriller, Walter Matthau’s Transit Authority cop Lt. Zachary Garber does battle—mainly verbal, via radio—with Mr. Blue (Robert Shaw), the coldblooded leader of a gang of four (Hector Elizondo, Martin Balsam, Earl Hindman) all identified by colors, who has seized control of a subway train and is willing to murder hostages if his demands aren’t met. (Yes, Quentin Tarantino took the “colors as aliases” device for “Reservoir Dogs.”)
Few New York films, even some all-time classics, have atmosphere as thick as this one. Viewers are lucky it’s not in Smell-o-Vision. “Pelham” was shot mainly in existing locations (including subway tunnels) during the city’s financial low point, when it was two or three catastrophes away from turning into Detroit. As a result, on top of the thriller theatrics, which are executed with wit, laser-sharp focus, and minimal fuss, it doubles as a snapshot of major city that had been neglected until it began literally as well as figuratively falling apart, with only a handful of dogged public servants (such as Garber) keeping things patched together. Although the movie was decently remade by Tony Scott in the aughts with Denzel Washington as Garber and John Travolta as Mr. Blue, nothing beats the original, especially when you see it with a crowd.
August 25, 6pm “Tracking Shots: Films from the New York City Transit Museum Archives.”
The Transit Museum curates a program of short informational and documentary movies showing the evolution of the subway—and, paradoxically, the consistency of its image outside New York as a death trap full of muggers, sex offenders, gang members, huge rats, and other perils. (One of the films promises that “The New York Subway System is the Safest in the World,” copyright 1922.) If you see one program in the series, make it this, because you can’t see the material anywhere else.
Sept. 1, 9 pm. “The Warriors”
Fifty–plus years after its original theatrical run, director Walter Hill’s blend of Greek tragedy and urban exploitation — about a street gang trying to find its way home after a city-wide meeting of gangs that turns out to be a pretext for an assasination and power-grab—is still electrifying, and arguably feels more dangerous than it did when it first came out. Hill and David Shaber’s script is adapted from Sol Yurick’s novel Anabasis—which itself was inspired by the soldier and dramatist Xenophon’s same-titled, seven book series, dated to 401 B.C. — no surviving movie studio would take a gamble by funding something this elegant yet raw (although it’s constantly being floated as a candidate for a remake).
With each year, its incidental record of an analog-era New York City — filled with pockets of unreachable and unknowable darkness where violent people could do violent things and never be seen, much less caught — becomes more eerily unrelatable. “The Warriors” has some of the most visually thrilling footage of subway trains, entrances, platforms, and tunnels of any film in this series, and some of the most inadvertently quaint: the late-1970s subway has token-operated turnstiles, freestanding and unattended pinball and video games and vending machines; and most astonishingly, working public restrooms. There’s no video surveillance, no credit card swiping, no electronic maps and billboards, but on the plus side, lots more places to sit than today. The action sequences still hit hard, although in this viewer’s opinion, more could’ve been done with The Punks, a roller skating gang that wears rugby shirts and matching blue denim overalls.
- San Diego Comic-Con 2026: Composers, Costume Designers, and Brad Bird in Hall H (July 27, 2026)
While clips and headlines exploded from Comic-Con 2026 this weekend about the upcoming “Avengers: Doomsday,” the casting of David Jonsson in Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther III,” and the fact that Ryan Gosling is playing “Ghost Rider” for Shawn Levy, we found the stories at this year’s event that deserve more attention.
As San Diego Comic-Con attendees walked through the Sails Pavilion on the second floor of the convention center, about 20 cosplayers dressed as Indiana Jones, a Henry Jones senior, a Marion, a handful of Short Rounds, and someone dressed as the boulder in the first scene of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” surrounded a guy in a suit who turned out to be the real-life John Rhys-Davis, who played Indy’s friend Salleh in four films. San Diego Comic-Con is where fans get to be the characters they love and interact with the creators and the real-life stars who played them.
And they have the fun of learning that it goes both ways. At the panel of costume designers for the Percy Jackson show, lead designer Catherine Adair told the audience that when it came to a wedding dress that was described in detail by author Rick Riordan in book two of the series, they checked out the online fan art to see how the audience envisioned it. I asked composer Michael Dean Parsons how it felt to know the “Bridgerton” theme he composed with Kris Bowers was so popular at weddings; he admitted he checks out YouTube to see the way people are incorporating it into their most significant moments. And on the panel for collectors of the cherished physical media collectibles SteelBooks, Devon Downs of Alliance Entertainment presented the forthcoming “Project Hail Mary” 4K UHD edition, telling the audience that the company likes to find new artists for the cover and interior designs through Instagram. And the entire SteelBooks panel loves to check online for “shelfies,” displays of fan collections.
I especially enjoy the panels with people we don’t usually get to hear from, but who make creative contributions that contribute immeasurably to cinematic storytelling. The twelfth annual panel of composers who write for superhero movies is one of my favorites and I had a chance to talk with each of them afterward. The panel was moderated by Oscar-winner Michael Giacchino (“Up,” “The Incredibles,” “Spider-Man: Brand New Day”), with Kris Bowers and Michael Dean Parsons (“Spider-Noir” and “Bridgerton”), Mick Giacchino (“VisionQuest”), and Claudia Sarne (“Supergirl”). Parsons talked about the “bottle episode” 6 of “Spider-Noir,” where his assignment was to make it “really weird,” so they “played every instrument that you could play wrong.” For “Spider-Noir,” the music had to combine classic noir, sci-fi, and superhero, conveying a strong theme and a character arc. His co-composer, Kris Bowers, said they felt like they were in the writers’ room. They had a funny discussion about naming track titles, some referring to what is actually happening in the scene, some more random, some a reference to how much trouble they had getting it finished. But all agreed that nothing is more fun than “painting with sound.”
Michael Giacchino shared the “VisionQuest” theme; the rest of the world will not hear it until the show premieres on October 14, and he told us Ultron (James Spader) will be getting a new theme. I asked him about using voices in his composition for the first time. “In some of the more emotional moments, I had the choir double what the strings were doing, but with humming. The texture can almost sound like one of those old Disney films. It just gave a really nice kind of warmth to the strings and filled out the sound a little bit. But there are also times where vocals are leading with melodies, and there is one character who has a theme that’s more based around vocals at times, and then it transitions into the orchestra.” Bowers, last year’s Middleburg Film Festival Composer Award-winner, said, “When you work on a project, it creates this filter. Then you see the whole world through that filter, and you hear something and say, ‘Oh, that’ll be perfect for this thing.’” Sarne said, “Music imprints just as much as visuals do. And it’s such a shorthand. It does what words can’t. You’re immediately brought into the world of the characters, and that to me is the magic of what we do.”
A panel of Black costume designers specializing in action and superhero movies provided a lot of insights into the challenges of making supersuits that are like “mini-Ferraris,” inserting stretch panels, hidden zippers, cooling or warming layers, and pick points (to attach to harnesses and pulleys). Gersha Phillips (“Captain America”), Trayce Gigi Field (“Spider-Noir”), Charlese Antoinette (“Children of Blood and Bone”), Antoinette Messam (“The Bluff”), Dominique Dawson (“HIM”), Tiffany Hasbourne (“Shadow Force”), and Jennifer Bryan (“The Acolyte”) have to dress stunt performers who are often bigger and more muscular and with different races or skin tones from the actors they are portraying to make them look indistinguishable while keeping them safe with padding and inflammable fabrics.
The question that provoked the most laughter from the panelists was, “How do they go to the bathroom?” That is an important issue not just for the comfort of the actors but for the production as a whole, so they don’t hold up shooting for an hour “while three people help the actor pee.”
Messam talked about setting up a full costume production operation in a parking lot with dyers, agers (pro tip: put the clothes in the dryer with cut-up car mats to make them look worn), welding, with one set of costumes that needed to be drenched with water and another that they had to keep dry. Field said that when she signed on to do “Spider-Noir,” she was told it was just going to be black and white. Two weeks into it, they told her it was going to be in color, too. They had to keep special lenses in the costume department because over 1000 items had to be “camera-tested” to see if they would work in both formats. “Anything with a lot of contrast or reflective translated well.” All of the panelists were department heads, sometimes supervising 100 people with different specialties. Antoinette had a cobbler, a jeweler, sewers, a group working with the background performers, fitters for men, fitters for women, and beaders. “It was like running my own fashion brand.”
Writer/director Brad Bird held the cavernous Hall H rapt with a discussion of his films, with stories about “The Iron Giant” (“The story of a gun with a soul who didn’t want to be a gun”), “The Incredibles” (completely changing the villain to one created for a brief opening scene), writing and re-writing Ego’s speech at the end of “Ratatouille” (“You’re supposed to get faster and louder near the end but we made it slower and quieter”). And he told us about when shooting his first live-action film, “Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol,” he was terrified as the “one of one” fearless Tom Cruise was hanging off a skyscraper. “He’s the producer; you can’t tell him no.” He showed us the first seven minutes of his new film for Netflix, “Ray Gunn,” a “Buck Rogers meets ‘The Maltese Falcon’”) detective story he had been developing for 30 years. It features the voices of Sam Rockwell, Scarlett Johansson, and Tom Waits. His other dream project is a series about the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.
Of course, there were many questions throughout Comic-Con about AI. One of the booths on the exhibition floor had a sign assuring us that there was no use of AI in creating their products. When the subject came up on the composers panel, Michael Giacchino said, “I don’t think anyone wants to see a laptop doing a concert.”
- A Home Away from Home: Goodbye to the Lake Street Screening Room (July 27, 2026)
Last week, it was reported that Chicago-based Honore Properties had purchased the 17-story building at 70 E. Lake St. in the Loop. The 99-year-old office building will be converted into approximately 170 luxury apartments.
Just another real estate story, just another sign of an evolving downtown. There’s nothing villainous about this; in fact, it will likely inject new life into the structure for generations to come. Still, for me and for my fellow critics from the Chicago area (especially the veterans), there was a deeply personal element, because for decades, that gorgeous and weathered Gothic Revival/Art Deco building has been home to one of the most iconic screening rooms in the world.
The place where Siskel & Ebert saw so many films. A newsroom away from the newsroom, a destination where critics from the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune and suburban papers, as well as TV and radio personalities and producers and publicists, gathered for advance showings of movies that would be coming soon to a theater near you.
The Lake Street Screening Room.
This is where Roger Ebert would always sit in the last row on the left, closest to the entrance, and Gene Siskel would take the farthest right seat in that last row. Back in the day, there was a small table in the middle of that back row with a landline telephone. Before and after screenings, Gene or Roger would sometimes work the phones, confabbing with an editor or the producers for their local TV gigs or their nationally syndicated show. When you saw them on your television on Saturday or Sunday, or on Carson or Letterman or Leno, engaging in passionate conversation about a particular film, there was a good chance they had seen that movie at the Lake Street Screening Room. (Sidebar: I can neither confirm nor deny that on occasion between screenings in the 1990s, Gene would take me over to the Off-Track Betting facility around the corner on State Street.)
Downtown Chicago commuters hustling to and from work, tourists on their way to the Magnificent Mile and Grant Park, street musicians and traffic cops, shoppers and diners, hotel guests—virtually none of them had any inkling that while they were going about their business, a small group of us were hunkered down in the cool and soothing darkness of the 48-seat screening room on the 16th floor as early as 10 a.m., lost in the latest film from Spike Lee or Steven Spielberg or Quentin Tarantino, or tapping our feet while enduring some tepid remake or unnecessary sequel. (Although you never really knew what anyone else was thinking. The first unwritten rule of Screen Club was you generally kept your opinions to yourself, until it was time to share those opinions with your respective outlets.)
There was no marquee on the outside of the building, no concession stand in the lobby. On countless mornings and afternoons dating back to the early 1990s, I’d walk down a stretch of Lake Street that was not particularly glamorous, maybe stopping in at the 7/11 (still open) or the branch of the Billy Goat Tavern (sadly, closed) for a coffee before walking past Imperial Shoe Services and entering the lobby. I’d take an elevator car with a capacity of four people (hey, the building is about to turn 100), ride up to the 16th floor, and make a hard left past the framed movie posters to enter the screening room. The curtains are straight out of a 1980s “Tonight Show” set and the seats are well-worn, but the sound and picture were always state of the art.
That pristine viewing experience came courtesy of Steve Kraus, who has been with the Lake Street Screening Room for some four decades and has run it as his own business since 2000. “It used to mean getting there an hour before showtime to inspect heads and tails of every reel of film prior to projection,” said Kraus. “Now it means going to ingest movies onto the server. Usually days before. Many cinemas get movies via satellite. We get them on hard drives.” (Kraus’ expertise is such that Roger would often rely on him to answer technical questions for the “Movie Answer Man” columns.)
When Siskel & Ebert celebrated their 20th anniversary, I interviewed them in the Lake Street Screening Room. When the city honored the 50th anniversary of their TV partnership last year, ABC-7’s Hosea Sanders interviewed me in the Lake Street Screening Room. In the 2000s, Roger and I would huddle with our producers in the stairwell on the 16th floor between screenings, mapping out the next show taping. Kevin Smith attended a screening there when he was filling in for Roger on an episode of “Ebert & Roeper.” When an actor friend of mine was in town shooting a long-running hit TV series, I took them to a showing of “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” at Lake Street. In addition to the regular critics’ screenings, Kraus would often screen a locally made film for cast and crew. Shortly after COVID, he held a test screening for a biopic starring an A-lister.
Still, it was never about Hollywood or celebrities or glamour. Day in and day out, the screening room was a workplace in a building filled with workplaces. In fact, it shares 16th-floor space with an office that has housed administration for the Joffrey Ballet and legal aid organizations, among other tenants. Get this: whenever a movie was playing, the sound was piped into the bathrooms, so your friendly neighborhood critic wouldn’t miss any dialogue while taking a break. Imagine being a guest or a new employee at the adjacent office, going to the bathroom—and hearing Tom Hanks saying, “Life is like a box of chocolates” or a blood-curdling cry from a “Scream” movie emanating from an overhead speaker.
Not that Lake Street was the only place for advance screening. We sometimes saw “big ticket” films at commercial theaters, along with other critics and fans who had been granted an opportunity to see a movie in advance. These days, nearly all of the screenings I attend are in the afternoon or evening at one of the AMC theaters in the city. I still see a lot of friendly faces, including critics who write for this very site, as well as the new breed known as influencers. Every once in a while, there’s a screening at Lake Street—and when there is, I almost always take my usual spot in the third row. Sometimes the attendees sitting in Roger’s or Gene’s old seat are aware that royalty once occupied those spots; I would imagine that with other, younger members of the press, they might not be aware of all the history. That’s OK. Time marches on.
I asked Steve Kraus if he planned to establish another space after 70 E. Lake closes. His answer was matter-of-fact: “No. Business is too low. It pays the bills but not much beyond. It’s been a good run. No complaints.” Although Kraus does note that the timeline on the end is unclear (“could be a matter of months or years”) and there’s even “a remote chance they wish to keep the space as an amenity.” Although that seems unlikely to include film critics.
Over the last 30 years, Chaz Ebert has been a treasured regular at Lake Street screenings. “The Lake Street screening room, presided over by Steve, served as a magic cocoon over the years to see movies with Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel and Richard Roeper,” she said. “What a thrill when we saw something we suspected would be special. Steve always made sure the sound and picture were just right. As I think back on those times, I realize that the glow of the friendship among the film critics was sometimes as special as the glow from the screen. There was an unspoken agreement not to talk or do anything to distract from the experience we were having from the film. What beautiful memories.”
The building at 401 N. Wabash Ave. that once housed the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger’s home newspaper (and mine as well), was demolished to make way for a gleaming luxury condo skyscraper. The tower at 435 N. Michigan Ave. that once housed Gene’s home newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, has been converted into a high-end condo building. A similar future awaits the home of the Lake Street Screening Room. In the not-too-distant future, residents will move into their new homes with the prestigious address of 70 E. Lake Street. I’m sure there will be times when someone living on the 16th floor will unwind at night by playing an old movie. They’ll probably have no idea how fitting that will be.
