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How 'Oppenheimer's' sound designer turned thunder and train noise into a seat-rattling atomic blast

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How 'Oppenheimer's' sound designer turned thunder and train noise into a seat-rattling atomic blast

Over the course of four decades, Oscar-winning sound designer Richard King has accumulated a library of tens of thousands of thuds, thwacks, clacks and other original recordings, yet he’s still always searching for something new.

“I’m a big fan of found sounds, things you might find on YouTube, any sort of natural phenomena, like volcanoes,” says King, speaking from the Eagle Rock home he shares with three dogs.

A few years ago, King became smitten with scratchy audio of the sonic boom produced by a meteor explosion over Russia. “When the shock wave hit the earth, dogs started barking, car alarms went off everywhere, the camera shook,” he recalls. “The explosion was recorded on a built-in mic, but it captured enough of the feeling that I thought, ‘Someday I’ll have a place to use this.’”

Sure enough, when director Christopher Nolan asked him to emulate the sound of the world’s first thermonuclear device for “Oppenheimer,” King had his epic-scaled 2013 Chelyabinsk asteroid reference close at hand.

“Chris loves to make big, bold statements, and I love to create sounds for large events while trying to make them relatable,” says King, who won sound editing Academy Awards for Nolan’s movies “Dunkirk,” “Inception” and “The Dark Knight.” (His fourth Oscar was for Peter Weir’s “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.”)

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“I try to make sounds where an audience member would think, ‘I can imagine something like that in the world.’”

Real-world asteroid shock waves may have inspired King’s re-creation of the 1945 “Trinity test” detonation, but the explosion heard in movie theaters actually combined some 20 different elements into one mighty wall of sound. King breaks it down: “We built things from conventional explosions, we had some hard rock slams, thunder that we modified a bit, sounds of train [cars] shunting together where they make a gigantic bang.” The resulting rumble served Nolan’s often-articulated desire to impact audiences on a visceral level, King says. “Good theaters have sound systems that can reproduce very low frequencies in ways that don’t hurt the ears. It’s a full body experience just like those scientists and military men felt on the [Trinity test] day. You’re not even given a moment to think.”

The seat-rattling nuclear weapon detonation masterminded by J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) evokes peak dread, but even seemingly mundane sequences demanded deep dives from King and his team. When Oppenheimer’s wife, Kitty (Emily Blunt), gathers laundry from a clothesline, Nolan wanted the moment “to feel almost like an action scene, showing the power of nature with the snapping sound of clothes being whipped by the wind,” King says. “We flapped sheets, we snapped them, we added little sweeteners of whip cracks to the point where it’s almost frightening, like: ‘You don’t want to get in the way of one of those sheets!’”

King, who studied fine arts at the University of Southern Florida before pursuing film in New York, generally builds his soundscapes layer by layer, as if applying paint to canvas. “The idea is that if you start with one sound and layer another sound on top of it, you’re going to make a third sound. The more you layer, the more you create a dynamic that you could never achieve with the simplicity of one sound.”

But if Nolan had his way, the filmmaker would capture all sounds live on set.

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“Chris wants that tangible realism, so his preference would be to get all the sounds on the days he’s shooting,” King says. “That not being possible, we try to add sounds that feel like they were recorded on the day. Unless you really go overboard, you can get away with a lot.”

Case in point: When Oppenheimer climbs the Trinity test tower in the desert during a windstorm, King’s team added the sound of clacking cables and more. “Oppenheimer’s tie is flapping all over the place, so you add that,” he says. “Sand’s hitting his body, add that. It becomes almost like a photorealistic painting where the deeper you look into it, the more you can add.”

King’s talent for imbuing movie sound with affecting depth — also on display in “Maestro” and, next month, “Dune: Part Two” — reflects a storytelling imagination that goes beyond technique alone.

“For me, sound design is my chance to vicariously be there with the characters and live in their skin for a bit,” King says. “I might throw in something the audience won’t even notice, like an odd-sounding bird, but subconsciously all these elements add up to a rich experience. Chris and I always want to go into the image and make it feel as if you’re looking out your window. You see three dimensions, you hear three dimensions, and the audience assumes all that sound has always been there.”

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Roll On 18 Wheeler: Errol Sack’s ‘TRUCKER’ (2026) – Movie Review – PopHorror

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Roll On 18 Wheeler: Errol Sack’s ‘TRUCKER’ (2026) – Movie Review – PopHorror

I am a sucker for all those straight-to-video slasher movies from the 90’s; there was just a certain point where you knew the acting was terrible, however, it made you fall in love. I can definitely remember scanning the video store sections for all the different horror movies I could. All those movies had laughable names and boom mics accidentally getting in the frame. Trucker seems like a child of all those old dreams, because it is.

Let’s get into the review.

Synopsis

When a group of reckless teens cause an accident swroe to never speak of it.  The father is reescued by a strange man. from the wreckage and nursed back to health by a mysterious old man. When the group agrees to visit the accident scene, they meet their match from a strange masked trucker and all his toys with revenge on his mind.

Roll on 18 Wheleer

Trucker is what you would imagine: a movie about a psychotic trucker chasing you. We have seen it many, many times. What makes the film so different is its homage to bad movies but good ideas. I don’t mean in a negative way. When you think of a slasher movie, it’s not very complicated; as a matter of fact, it takes five minutes to piece the film together. This is so simple and childlike, and I absolutely love it. Trucker gave us something a little different, not too gory, bad CGI fire, I mean, this is all we old schlock horror fans want. Trucker is the type of film that you expect from a Tubi Original, on speed. However, I would take this over any Tubi Original.

I found some parts that were definitely a shout-out to the slasher humor from all those movies. Another good point that made the film shine was the sets. I guess what I can say is the film is everything Joy Ride should have been. While most modern slashers are trying to recreate the 1980s, the film stands out with its love for those unloved 1990’s horror films. While most see Joyride, you are extremely mistaken, my friend; you will enjoy this film much more.

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In The End

In the end, I enjoyed the entire film. At first, I saw it listed as an action thriller; I was pleasantly surprised, and Trucker pulled at my heart strings, enveloping me in its comfort from a long-forgotten time in horror. It’s a nostalgic blast for me, thinking back to that time, my friends, my youth, and finding my new home. Horror fans are split down the middle: from serial-killer clowns (my side) to elevated horror, where an artist paints a forty-thousand-year-old demon that chases them around an upper-class studio apartment. I say that a lot, but it’s the best way to describe some things.

The entire movie had me cheering while all the people I hated suffered dire consequences for their actions. It’s the same old story done in a way that we rabid fans could drool over, and it worked. In all the bad in the world today, and my only hope for the future is the soon-to-end Terrifier franchise. However, the direction was a recipe to succeed with 40+ year old horror fans like me. I see the film as a hope for tomorrow, leading us into a new era.

Trucker is set to release on March 10th, 2026

 

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Review: In ‘American Classic,’ Kevin Kline and Laura Linney deliver a love letter to theater

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Review: In ‘American Classic,’ Kevin Kline and Laura Linney deliver a love letter to theater

The lovely, funny “American Classic,” premiering Sunday on MGM+, is a love letter to theater, community and community theater. Kevin Kline plays Richard Bean, a narcissistic stage actor. He’s famous enough to be opening on Broadway in “King Lear,” but he has to be pushed onstage and is forgetting lines. After he drunkenly assails a hostile New York Times critic — caught on video, of course — he’s suspended from the play, and his agent (Tony Shalhoub) advises him to get out of town and lay low until the heat’s off, as they used to say in the gangster movies.

Learning that his mother (Jane Alexander, acting royalty, in film clips) has died, Richard heads back to his small Pennsylvania hometown, where his family — all actors, like the Barrymores, but no longer acting — owns a once-celebrated theater. To Richard’s horror, it has, for want of income, become a dinner theater, hosting touring productions of “Nunsense” and “Forever Plaid” instead of the great stage works on which he cut his teeth.

Brother Jon (Jon Tenney), running the kitchen at the theater, is married to Kristen (Laura Linney), Richard’s onetime acting partner, who dated him before her marriage; now she’s the mayor. Their teenage daughter, Miranda (Nell Verlaque) — a name from Shakespeare — does want to act and move to New York, as her mother had before her, but is afraid to tell her parents. Richard’s father, Linus (Len Cariou), is suffering from dementia, though not to the point he won’t actively contribute to the action; every day he comes out again as gay.

Across the eight-episode series, things move from the ridiculous to the sublime. Richard’s attempt to stage his mother’s funeral, with her coffin being lowered from the ceiling, while “Also sprach Zarathustra” plays and smoke billows toward the audience, fortunately comes to naught; but he announces at the ceremony that he’ll direct a production of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play “Our Town” at the theater, to “restore the soul of this town.” (His big idea is to ignore Wilder’s stage directions, which ask for no curtain, no set and few props, with a “realistic version,” featuring a working soda fountain, rain effects and a horse.) Fate will have other plans for this, and not to give away what in any case should be obvious, the title of the play will also become its ethos, with a cast of amateurs, including Miranda’s jealous boyfriend, Randall (Ajay Friese), and ordinary people standing in for the ordinary people of Wilder’s Grover’s Corners.

The series has a comfortable, cushiony feeling; it’s the sort of show that could have been made as a film in the 1990s, and in which Kline could have starred as easily in his 40s as in his 70s; it has the same relation to reality as “Dave,” in which he played a good-hearted ordinary Joe who takes the place of a lookalike U.S. president. The town is essentially a sunny place, full of mostly sunny people, to all appearances, a typical comedy hamlet. But we’re told it’s distressed, and Mayor Kristen is in transactional cahoots with developer Connor Boyle (Billy Carter), who wants clearance to build a casino on the site of a landmark hotel. (Much of the plot is driven by money — needing it, trading for it, leaving it, losing it.) He also wants his heavily accented, bombshell Russian girlfriend, Nadia (Elise Kibler), to have a part in “Our Town.”

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As in the great Canadian comedy “Slings & Arrows,” set at a Shakespeare Festival outside of Toronto, themes and moments and speeches from the play being performed are echoed in the lives of the performers, while the viewer experiences the double magic of watching a fine actor playing an actor playing a part. Kline, of course, is himself an American classic, with a long stage and screen career that encompasses classical drama, romantic and musical comedy and cartoon voiceovers; the series makes room for Richard to perform soliloquies from “Hamlet” and “Henry V,” parts Klein has played onstage. He brings out the sweetness latent in Richard. Linney, who played against her sweetheart image in “Ozark,” is happily back on less deadly ground (though she’s tense and drinks a little). Tenney, who was sweet and funny on “The Closer,” and who we don’t see enough of these days, is sweeter and funnier here, and gets to sing. (All the Beans will sing, except for Linus.)

As a comedy, it is often predicable — you know that things will work out, and some major plot points are as good as inevitable — but it’s the good sort of predictability, where you get what you came for, where you hear the words you want to hear, ones you could never have written yourself. “American Classic” is not out to challenge your world view in any way but wants only to confirm your feelings and in doing so amplify them. Shock effects are fine in their place — and to be sure there are major twists in the plot — but there is a certain release when the thing you’re ready to have happen, happens, whether it brings laughter or tears. Either is welcome.

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‘Scream 7’ Review: Ghostface Trades His Metallic Knife for Plastic in Bloody Embarrassing Slasher Sequel

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‘Scream 7’ Review: Ghostface Trades His Metallic Knife for Plastic in Bloody Embarrassing Slasher Sequel

It’s funny how this film is marketed as the first Scream movie in IMAX, yet it’s their sloppiest work to date. Williamson accomplishes two decent kills. My praise goes to the prosthetic team and gore above anything else. The filmmaking is amateurish, lacking any of the tension build and innovation in set pieces like the Radio Silence or Craven entries. Many slasher sequences consist of terribly spliced editing and incomprehensible camera movement. There was a person at my screening asking if one of the Ghostfaces was killed. I responded, “Yeah, they were shot in the head; you just couldn’t see it because the filmmaking is so damn unintelligible.” 

Really, Spyglass? This is the best you can do to “damage control” your series that was perfectly fine?

I’m getting comments from morons right now telling me that I’m biased for speaking “politically” about this movie. Fuck you! This poorly made, bland, and franchise-worst entry is a byproduct of political cowardice.

The production company was so adamant about silencing their outspoken star, who simply stated that she’s against the killing of Palestinian people by an evil totalitarian regime, that they deliberately fired her, conflating her comments to “anti-semintism,” when, and if you read what she said exactly, it wasn’t. Only to reconstruct the buildup made in her arc and settle on a nonsensical, manufactured, nostalgia-based slop fest to appeal to fans who lack genuine film taste in big 2026. To add insult to injury, this movie actively takes potshots at those predecessors, perhaps out of pettiness that Williamson didn’t pen them or a mean-spirited middle finger to the star the studio fired. Truly, fuck you. Take the Barrera aspect out of this, which is still impossible, and Scream 7 is a lazy, sloppy, ill-conceived, no-vision, enshittification of Scream and a bloody embarrassment to the franchise. It took a real, morally upright actress to make Ghostface’s knife go from metal to plastic. 

FINAL STATEMENT

You either die a Scream or live long enough to see yourself become a Stab.

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