China’s relentless march for progress inspires Jia Zhang-ke’s contemplative Competition entry
ENTERTAINMENT
Janet Montgomery to Play Young Faye Dunaway in Jonathan Baker’s ‘Fate’
British actor Janet Montgomery has landed a starring role as a young Faye Dunaway in Jonathan Baker’s supernatural love story “Fate,” a film that is shooting in Vancouver for Baker Entertainment. The film will toggle between a yesteryear version of the character (Montgomery) and a present-day incarnation (Dunaway), spanning much of the protagonist’s entire lifetime. […]
Box Office: ‘IF’ Stumbles on Opening Day With $10.3 Million, ‘The Strangers: Chapter 1’ Unmasking Third Place
Paramount’s family comedy “IF” is leading domestic charts in its opening after earning $10.3 million from 4,041 locations across Friday and preview screenings. But the John Krasinski-directed fantasy feature has decidedly fallen behind its projections heading into the weekend, which had originally forecast a debut around $40 million. The film is now looking to finish […]
Who Really Wins with Comcast’s New StreamSaver Bundle?
Streaming Wars is a weekly opinion column by IGN’s Streaming Editor, Amelia Emberwing. To read the last entry, check out The Disney and Warner Bros Streaming Partnership Spells Trouble For Curation on Disney Plus, Hulu and Max. (Yeah, it’s a long headline. It’s a long problem!)
Another week, another streaming bundle. StreamSaver, just announced by Comcast, will include Netflix, Apple TV+ and Peacock in one package. This news is notably different than last week’s Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery announcement though, and not just because it involves different companies with separate streamers. Here’s a quick and easy breakdown, from one tired consumer to another, of what makes it unique and who’s really benefiting. I’ll do my best to make fun of the name “StreamSaver” as little as possible, but know that I am weak.
StreamSaver Isn’t Available to Everyone
Unlike the currently unnamed Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle, StreamSaver isn’t available to all subscribers. According to Variety, the new bundle will only be available to Comcast/Xfinity customers. Now, performance greatly depends on your area, but there is no price tag they could put on a streaming bundle that would bring me back as a Comcast subscriber after all the outages I’ve had. (Not that any cable provider is particularly great.) You are also eligible to subscribe to StreamSaver if you use Comcast/Xfinity as an ISP.
Like the press release for the Disney+/Hulu/Max bundle, the word “value” was thrown around a lot for the soon-to-launch StreamSaver, with Comcast chief Brian Roberts noting that the bundle will “come at a vastly reduced price to anything in the market today.” Of course, take that with a grain of salt.
We Love a Good Discount, But…
Listen, I think we’ve all gotten to the point where we’re pretty cynical when it comes to any major corporation telling us they’re saving us money. Corporate profits are at an all-time high, while entertainment executives continue to rake in the cash even as they trip over themselves trying to find a way to make streaming profitable. (Spoiler: fix your salaries and your budgets, m’dudes.)
Credit where it’s due: Forbes does note that Xfinity offers competitive pricing. Still, whenever a corporation talks about unprecedented value or savings in their marketing, it usually means that they’re just charging you what the product is worth vs. the typically inflated pricing. With streaming prices continuing to rise without the products improving in any real way, consumers are speaking out. In fact, more than a third of subscribers say the prices they’re paying for their services aren’t worth it.
Who Will StreamSaver Benefit Most?
This is going to be an annoying answer, given the fact that I just spent an entire section dogging on corporate profits, executive pay and the perception of a good deal. But, regardless of what the “super savings” on the bundle end up being, Apple TV+ is the real winner here.
After last week’s column, I was asked in the comments what I thought the best streaming service was. Keeping in mind the same caveat that I put in my response then (it depends on what you personally value most in a streamer, whether it be content quantity, content quality, user experience (UX), speeds, etc.), my answer is easily Apple TV+. Its quality to quantity ratio is unmatched, I don’t hate its UI, everything loads the way it’s supposed to with limited buffering, and finding my favorite shows is a breeze because of the hyper-curated content. The thing is, not a lot of folks prioritize Apple TV+ for the exact reason I enjoy it so much: Its content library is quite limited.
But keeping their offerings limited is a feature, not a bug. Apple isn’t focused on frequent acquisitions or churning shows in order to create a content mill. They have an actively different strategy from the other major streamers because they, like Prime Video, don’t have the same goals as a Netflix, Disney+, or Max-like platform. Instead of relying on subscriber growth, Apple (and Prime Video) act as “value add” services, meaning that their streaming services are solely there to make existing subscribers or customers happy. In short: Apple is focused on quality over quantity because they are not beholden to the same subscriber concerns as their competitors. Also, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Apple is hyper-focused on its image. They’re not going to turn to messy reality content anytime soon.
So why’s Apple the real winner, despite having their name attached to something called StreamSaver? (I tried, y’all. I really did.) Exposure.
Sounds stupid, given that Apple is the second-largest company in the world, that they should want exposure. But your competitors having far more to watch than you can hobble a streamer when it comes to getting user attention. Now, folks who need Netflix (or Peacock, I guess) for one reason or the other also get Apple TV+ tacked on to their bundle.
So Will StreamSaver Be Worth It?
The answer here is going to depend on several factors — one of which is a major unknown. If you already have Xfinity for your cable or internet and subscribe to Netflix, Peacock and Apple TV+, StreamSaver will be a no-brainer for you. No matter what the discount is, you can be assured that it’s lower than what you’re currently paying as a subscriber.
Every other scenario has the price question mark attached to it. Just how steep is this discount going to be? If it’s the current cost of, say, Netflix on its own, folks looking to expand their streaming horizons will probably find some value there. But beyond that, it’s going to come down to a case-by-case basis.
Though, one thing I’ll say for those who don’t have Xfinity for cable or internet, you should do a price check in your area to see if you can save by swapping providers! Often, cable and internet provider discounts only apply for a year or two. (And my shoddy experience with Xfinity is not universal.) So, if you’ve been with your current provider for a while, you may be able to save twice by lowering your cable and internet bill as well as dropping the price on your streaming services as well with this bundle.
Sins of a Solar Empire 2 Review
I have played Sins of a Solar Empire 2, and I am poorer for it. This sequel is extremely similar to the original real-time 4X strategy game from 2008 (including a lot, but not all of the content from its 2012 Rebellion expansion) with nicer graphics and needed engine improvements. That alone is more than welcome for a game that’s had such staying power, and revamps to its well-differentiated and complex factions give them even more depth to explore. However, the version that stealth-launched out of early access on the Epic Games Store feels rougher and less complete than a lot of games when they launch into early access. Expanding my empire, conquering planets, and watching my fleets do battle with rivals and bomb their planets to ash did grow on me a bit once a friend and I worked together and eventually taught ourselves its ins and outs, but getting to that point was so much less fun than it should’ve been that any joy was sucked out of it like atmosphere through a hull breach.
For context, I played Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion a fair amount a decade ago, and have been playing 4X and real-time strategy games habitually long before and since. And yet, after buying Sins of a Solar Empire 2 and jumping in, I felt completely lost. There are no tutorials for this enormously complex game (outside of a website with a quick-start guide that’s barely more than a glossary), and the in-game instructions you do get for things as relatively simple as climbing the research tree to unlock essential technologies often send you on wild goose chases through the confusing interface. For every ounce of interstellar entertainment I managed to laboriously mine like metal from an asteroid, there was always some major headache to accompany it. Between that sort of thing, bugs, grayed-out options in the map creation interface, and a lack of a server browser to play with people you don’t know, it clearly isn’t a finished product.
There is no way to talk about how Sins of a Solar Empire 2 ended up like this without addressing its strange exit from early access at some uncertain point earlier this year – a warning label it really shouldn’t have dropped in its current state. After arriving on the Epic Games Store back in early 2022 as a “technical preview,” it recently removed all caveats from its store page without so much as an official press release. Instead, the publisher, Stardock, has announced a Steam launch date for this August, which promises a major patch that will include significant new features, such as the third race called the Advent and its two factions that are already listed as playable on the store page but are currently nowhere to be found.
In comments around that announcement, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell stated that you “only get one shot at a Steam release,” (where the vast majority of PC games are sold). So the plan is to wait until then to get the word out properly. It’s not a crazy idea: any strategy game enjoyer will tell you that you should save your limited resources for the moment they’ll have the maximum effect, and the same is true of game marketing dollars. But while that may sound reasonable from a business perspective, the reality is quite misleading for anyone looking to play Sins of a Solar Empire 2 who stumbles across the Epic Games Store page right now. This isn’t some hypothetical misunderstanding, either: my friend and I actually did spend a while looking for the Advent as we played. Did we have to unlock them? Enable an option in some menu? Play a couple games with the other races first? Nope. They’re just not there yet.
I’d like to tell you the rest of it is better, but as of today Sins of a Solar Empire 2 is about as barebones as can be considering how many systems are packed in on top of combat, including diplomacy, trade, culture spread, and pirate bounties among others. It’s disappointing that there’s no story campaign – there isn’t one in the original Sins of the Solar Empire, either, and it proved it didn’t require one any more than Civilization or Stellaris do, but it’s long been a fan-requested feature and it might’ve gone a long way toward gradually introducing us to how everything works rather than throwing you into the deep end. Instead, it took me and a friend several hours of fumbling through a couple of games against the AI to nail down how one of the two human factions even worked, and again, we’re both RTS and 4X veterans.
Once, when I was trying to build something I had insufficient research points for as the alien Visari race, I was told to build more orbital labs. The problem is that you don’t get research points for building orbital labs – they just speed up your research rate. You get the actual research points by buying upgrades on each planet’s development tracker menu, but you’d never know that unless you happened to mouse over the tooltip on the right button instead of doing what you’re told to do.
Sometimes buttons don’t seem to do anything at all… until they do. Here’s an example: the construction ships you get from colonizing planets have a button literally labeled “Build Structure,” but clicking it has no discernable effect because nothing you click on afterward, be it a planet, ship, asteroid, or anything else will give you the option to build something… unless you click on an orbital structure that’s already queued to be built, which then tells the ship to prioritize that building over any others in the queue. If you actually want to build a new building, you’ll select it from a separate menu; the ship will build it without you ever having to be controlled directly.
It’s a problem that the interface is confusing because you’ll spend a lot of Sins of a Solar Empire 2 in menus. When you’re not grouping your ships into fleets and ordering them to jump from one planet’s gravity well to the next or focus their fire on an enemy capital ship, you’re going into a menu, clicking a button, and waiting for the thing you’re researching or the ship you’re building to complete, and then you’ll click another button in another menu and wait some more. That’s fine because that’s just the kind of game Sins is – it has as much or more in common with Crusader Kings 3 as it does with StarCraft 2, so there’s very little micromanagement of individual units beyond retreating them as they’re damaged or triggering capital ship abilities manually. Managing an efficient build order offers satisfying challenges, but you want those challenges to be about interesting choices rather than figuring out how to make them in the first place.
Through hours of experimentation, I finally discovered that the developers at Ironclad have actually added some nice quality-of-life features to the interface. If you want to build or research something but don’t have the necessary prerequisites, the Intelligent Construction System will queue all of the things you need up to be researched in order and let you check their progress in real-time. The new Empire Management screen lets you, well… manage everything in your sinful solar empire – planets, fleets, starbases, the whole space enchilada – from one page. That beats the heck out of clicking around the star system for each of them, shortcuts or not.
Then there’s the new Fleet Management System, which allows you to request reinforcements for any of your specific fleets directly from that fleet’s menu – no heading back to a planet to queue them up and setting the rally point required. New ships are then built at the closest factory and rallied to that fleet automatically (though you can opt for traditional rally points if that’s more your speed). These are all good, smart additions that make Sins of a Solar Empire 2 easier and more engaging to play, once you figure them out.
When it comes to space combat, the basic idea hasn’t changed: you mostly build big fleets and throw them at your opponent, then watch them duke it out in entertainingly flashy battles that – as you’d hope – put the original Sins’ to shame in terms of detail and ship behavior. Instead of ships largely lining up and plinking away at the other side until someone explodes like a Civil War reenactment in space, we now have smaller classes that dart around like large fighters, and larger ships are loaded with gun turrets that swivel to track targets, bringing much more of a sense of action. Long-range missiles can be intercepted by point defenses or blocked by other ships before they hit something expensive, which is a nice nibble of tactical depth for those looking to micro something. And at the top of the Warfare tech tree sits the Titan, a single enormous, faction-specific behemoth that can take on entire fleets by itself. Watching all of these ships shooting all these different weapons, exploding, and making emergency phase jumps out of a system before their hull points tick down to zero looks pretty cool when you’re zoomed in, but early skirmishes with basic units are generally pretty dull.
Like its predecessor, Sins of a Solar Empire 2 saves most of the fun stuff for the late game when you unlock tech that can do a lot of damage in a hurry. The pinnacle of that is the human’s Novalith cannon, which can shoot massive, literally world-ending shells across the solar system and take out enemy planets in one hit, as opposed to bombarding them into submission with a fleet after bashing through whatever turrets or starbases the enemy has built up to defend it. That’s awesome normally, but it’s even more so (and way funnier) when you have two Novaliths target the enemy’s home planet – you know, just to be sure – and eliminate them from the match without ever moving a fleet into orbit. Then you’ve got the Visari’s Orkulus starbase, which is essentially just a bigger, angrier version of the Cylon Basestar from Battlestar Galactica. Armed to the absolute teeth and containing several support fighters, it’s all but unstoppable by conventional weapons and, once you upgrade it, it can jump to other planets like a spaceship. Nasty.
Speaking of the two current races, they’re fairly different from one another, which means there’s a lot of learning to do but also a ton of opportunity to experiment with tactics and strategies geared toward their strengths. The human Trader Emergency Coalition (TEC), for instance, needs credits to manage their economy and build things. The super-advanced alien Visari don’t, though money gives them access to the galactic markets where they can buy resources. There are unique ships and structures for each race, including several that are unique to one of their two sub-factions. The TEC, for instance, currently has the only ship that repairs others on the fly, while the Visari can build Phase Gates that allow them to immediately jump between planets that aren’t connected by phase lanes.
That’s taken even further by some of the biggest additions to Sins of a Solar Empire 2, such as the Empire System bonuses. The TEC’s Trade Port structures were in the original game and provided a steady stream of credits, but now they allow you to allocate points to boost your production of metal, crystal, or credits on the fly. The Visari, meanwhile, can build all-new Phase Resonators that let you allocate points to upgrade ships, their research rate, and so on. I love these additions; they add some spice to each race’s already distinct flavor while offering interesting strategic choices that allow you to build your economy or military in cool, unique ways.
Drilling down further into the subfactions, there are a lot of options to suit different playstyles. The Loyalist TEC, for instance, are more defensive, gaining access to planetary garrisons of ships that are produced automatically and don’t take up population cap, but have limited range. They can also build two starbases around a planet instead of one, which can make conquering their systems an especially difficult nut to crack. The TEC Rebels, however, are much more about offense: They get the aforementioned planet-destroying Novalith cannon, can ally with pirate factions and build a pirate base in a system they control, get economic bonuses for going on the attack, and can use propaganda abilities to make their ships more effective in combat.
The Visari are similarly divided between defensive and offensive factions. The Exodus are here for a good time, not a long time, so they’re happy to force humans into labor camps, strip mine the cores of planets they don’t need, and gain resources by destroying things. The Alliance, meanwhile, is all about fostering cooperation with other races, trade, and good table manners. They want to put down roots and stick around for the long term.
These distinctions sound subtle, but they make a big difference in how you play (and serve as the majority of the lore you’ll find). I was more fond of the Rebels for the TEC because I tend to prefer an aggressive playstyle, and in my experience, purely defending in Sins of a Solar Empire 2 isn’t going to win you the war. Like any good – sorry, successful – empire, you have to expand or you’ll eventually get overwhelmed. But when I needed to hold out long enough so my teammate could provide support against the two AI opponents I was facing down, those Loyalist garrisons sure did come in handy. With the Visari, though, I much preferred making alliances with the Minor Factions (small AI players who don’t expand) and supporting my teammate, though I had a couple of nasty fleets capturing planets by the end. I like that the Factions provide so much variety, and when Sins of a Solar Empire 2 works, it feels good (mechanically, not morally) to build your empire up, expand, and conquer your neighbors.
And, in a nice touch, there are a lot of options for map generation, ranging from recommended player counts (between two and 10) on procedurally generated star systems to specific scenarios with unique challenges. Most of that is carried over from the original, but Sins of a Solar Empire 2 introduces planets and other astral bodies that rotate around stars, which can open up new phase lanes between them when they get close enough. That sounds a bit cooler than it is in practice because it can take hours for rotations to sync up in a way that truly matters (and on smaller maps, it might never happen at all), but when the stars literally align it can let you hit an enemy with a surprise attack on a world they thought was protected by heavily defended neighbors. You have a Future Orbits button that shows you how phase lanes will change for up to an hour into the future, so it’s not left up to chance or guesswork.
But, man, so many things just feel incomplete or underbaked. Take the Minor Factions, for instance. You gain favor with them – and special bonuses – by spending Influence Points; when I was playing the Visari Alliance, Influence Points were easy to get, so I earned lots of bonuses, but once I’d more or less unlocked everything I could only use the points to bid on auctions for resources. Being buddy-buddy with a Minor Faction doesn’t really do anything for you aside from getting you some abilities and making it so they’re (sometimes?) not actively hostile. Like most things in Sins of a Solar Empire 2, it’s hard to tell because there’s not much in-game to clue you in until you’ve pieced together a lot of disparate tooltips and experimented enough to you find the right answer.
Then there are the bugs. I’ve already mentioned misleading audio cues telling me to build the wrong thing, but I’ve also had incorrect notifications telling me an enemy had conquered a planet I’d just colonized and so I spent a minute trying to figure out what happened before realizing, “Oh, it was me who conquered the planet, actually.” Once, I started a team game with a friend where we were clearly set to be allied, only to be told we weren’t once we got into the match, forcing us to fix it in-game.
There are also entire menu options grayed out that control things like “Orbiting Planet Speed,” or “Research Rates,” or “Ship Build Rates” when you try to adjust pre-game settings – you know, things you might like some say in when you’re setting up a match – that just aren’t available. There’s a tooltip telling you that these options are disabled “as we collect balance feedback,” which is fair, but these limitations just drive home how unfinished everything is.
All of that said, when Sins of a Solar Empire 2 works, it really works. There’s a lot of nuance when it comes to choosing your upgrade paths, deciding which structures to build on your planets, how to spend each planet’s limited orbital slots, and constructing your fleets. Do you go for an economic opening or a military one? Which capital ship do you start with, and why? What upgrades do you give it? What kind of research do you prioritize? Do you trade with other players, or buy the resources you need on the market? How much, if at all, do you engage with the Minor Factions on the map? If a battle looks like it will come down to the wire, do you pull your fleet out and live to fight another day, or go all in and bet on the victory?
The consequences of those choices, and the choices your opponents make in response to them, determine how games play out. The right decision at the right time – even one as seemingly small as prioritizing one research upgrade over another or choosing a specific capital ship to lead your first fleet – can snowball and make all the difference in an interplanetary power struggle that can last for a dozen hours or more. In its best moments, Sins of a Solar Empire 2 understands that, and that makes for compelling, memorable matches. It just needs to get us there much faster and with less frustration along the way.
Bomb scare temporarily shuts down entrance to Cannes Palais
Festival staff required to close Palais entrance and terrace due to “suspicious” package.
Cannes Bomb Scare: La Croisette Shut Down in Front of Palais
The entrance to the Palais in Cannes was closed briefly Saturday afternoon after a bomb scare due to a “suspicious item,” according to a news report. Police officers shut down La Croisette, the street that runs in front of the Palais, and prevented pedestrians crossing in either direction. A specialist police unit were observed inspecting […]
Yorgos Lanthimos to Reunite With Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons for Alien Conspiracy Drama ‘Bugonia’ at Focus Features
Yorgos Lanthimos cant’ stop (won’t stop!) working with Oscar winner Emma Stone, casting the actress once again as leading lady for his next project “Bugonia.” The drama will also star Jesse Plemmons who, along with Stone, appears in Lanthimos’ forthcoming “Kinds of Kindness.” That three-chapter feature just premiered on Friday at this year’s Cannes Film […]
Martin Moszkowicz Honored With Carl Laemmle Producer Award
Martin Moszkowicz, who recently segued from being CEO of leading German film and TV company Constantin Film to a producing role at the company, has been honored with the Carl Laemmle Producer Award. The award, presented by the Alliance of German Producers – Film & Television e.V. (Produzentenallianz) and the city of Laupheim, Germany, honors […]
Director George Miller Picks His Favorite Shot From Fury Road, Mad Max, and More | My Best Shots
With Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga out this month, we asked director George Miller to pick one favorite shot from each of his movies, as well as one from any other film (he couldn’t resist and picked two there!). The man behind not just Mad Max but also Babe, Happy Feet, and more breaks down each shot for us with some fascinating behind-the-scenes details on how they were achieved.
This was fun!
Mad Max (1979)
“The first Mad Max, I think there’s shots where the camera is mounted low on the road and it’s moving, and you see a lot of road blur. There were some lenses … which were dumped in Australia because Sam Peckinpah had shot The Getaway with Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw, and he’d shot with these non-spherical anamorphic lenses. But basically the whole package, there are only two lenses that work, the 35mm lens and the 75mm lens. The hiring house said you could almost have them for nothing because no one is ever going to use them.
“We ended up shooting most of Mad Max I on the 35mm lens. And because I realized that in that film, unlike something like that chase in French Connection, which was shot on that highline underneath where the city was blurring past all the time, which gave a sense of speed, the only thing we had was the road blur. So the camera had to be really low on the ground on a wide-angle lens. The camera always had to be moving. So those shots ultimately were at the heart of the kinetics of that film. Again, that was not inadvertent, but it was certainly what gave its special flavor.”
Babe (1995)
“This is going to sound strange. The shots that really stuck in my mind on Babe were the chapter headings.
“There was a test screening in Seattle, and the test screening was in the afternoon, and there were mothers and fathers, and in many cases, little kids. The thing I noticed immediately in the test screening is the moment a caption came up, the mothers or fathers would turn and read the caption to the little kids. We had the little mice, the three little mice at the bottom of frame, saying, ‘Pork is very sweet meat’ in their little mouse voices. That, to me, those captions were really what glued the film together and made it much more cohesive. That was a big moment in the life of that film. The captions owned up, leant into the problem of [the film] being episodic and basically made a virtue of it. Those captions were probably very, very key, particularly that one, ‘Pork is a very sweet meat.'”
Happy Feet (2006)
“There were shots in Happy Feet that I’d like to talk about. There was one where you see the little penguin dancing by himself when he’s little. I didn’t know how to make the film, and then a wonderful cinematographer, Andrew Lesnie, who shot the Babe movies, went and shot Lord of the Rings, and … showed me the first motion capture of Gollum. I’d never heard of motion capture before, but the moment he showed it to me, I said, ‘Ah, that’s how we can tell Happy Feet.’
“Not only were we able to get great tap dancers, but we were able to get the greatest living tap dancer, Savion Glover, who basically inherited that tradition of tap dancing from all the great African-American tap dancers, from Sammy Davis Jr., but from all those that go back earlier. We were able to motion capture Savion Glover. That little penguin dancing was a big moment, a big moment for me.”
Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
“Well, it’s not character based, but the first one that comes to mind, I still enjoy seeing it, is that shot where they finally get on the road to chase Furiosa and Max’s part of it. Then we push past these guys on the back of the Doof Wagon and the guys drumming. We come right around the front to see the speakers and the Doof Warrior with his guitar, and at the right moment, he fires off this big plume of flames, and we see all the vehicles at the back, and there’s a great army that’s giving chase to the War Rig. I still enjoy seeing that shot.”
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)
“Well, there’s one shot in Furiosa, the stowaway sequence, where she’s stowing away on the newly built War Rig. The opening shot, which pulls back on a roadway, and then you see someone’s painted the Immortan’s logo on the road and you see the black horns of the Octoboss somehow claiming the territory of the Immortan, and then the horizon having almost a Lawrence of Arabia heat haze. And something’s way off in that mirage, and then the bike … turns 180 degrees and rides off, and we’re left with the image coming forward. That had all those references to Lawrence of Arabia and the beginning [of Furiosa], leading up to the sequence where she has to have a crash course into being basically a road warrior.”
The Godfather (1972)
“There are two shots I’ve got from other films. One scene I can’t forget in terms of its function in the story, and it’s from one of my top three favorite films of all time, Godfather. There’s that shot where Michael Corleone goes to the place where his father comes from. He meets the girl. There’s a shot, and I’m sure you remember it, where he’s walking along some sort of track. The camera stays back and you see them walking off and they’re talking, and then they’re followed by the chaperones, which I think are three or four women, all women, all chatting amongst themselves, and they’re walking along. Before the shot ends, there’s two guys with shotguns.
“That shot is perfect storytelling in one shot. It tells you everything about the culture, everything about that specific people in that story.”
The Fabelmans (2022)
“The other favorite shot of all the cinema that I’ve seen in recent years [is] the one that I keep going back to with a great deal of joy and it makes me smile every time, and it’s just a shot that exists by itself. At the end of The Fabelmans, that very last shot, where having spoken to John Ford, the young Steven Spielberg, he talks about the horizons. And he’s got that last shot, which he just, very abruptly at the end, there’s a little comment. It’s just a wonderful, wonderful shot.”
For more directors picking some favorite shots from their movies, check out Ridley Scott and David Leitch‘s picks!