Meet Me at Crafty

Dreams in Nightmares [Ludovica Isidori] There are two kinds of road trips: The ones you take for fun, and the ones where you have to move an entire Panavision package through Mexican customs. Subscribe to Crafty so I can take my act on the road For cinematographer Ludovica Isidori, Dreams in Nightmares was very much the latter (with a sprinkling of the former).

Sophie Darlington filming Lion [National Geographic/Simon Blakeney] There are plenty of reasons not to spend four years filming lions in Kenya. The hours are brutal. The animals are unpredictable. You have to work from a car. And if you’re lucky, you might get to spend the day just watching “bellies just gently rising and falling,” as cinematographer Sophie Darlington puts it. I promise you won’t have to watch me breathe if you subscribe Darlington, however, isn’t complaining.

A movie about Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev spending two days sitting across from each other in a tiny house in Iceland doesn’t scream “cinematic spectacle.” Christopher Nolan is not gonna make this movie (though that may be because Nancy Reagan and Raisa Gorbecheva have significant roles hey-o!). Mostly, TheBrink of War is about two very famous men talking and then one of those men talking to a less famous man about those conversations.

Peter Hujar’s Day [Janus Films] I don’t have to answer to anyone but my bartender. Which means stories that once lived on a maybe-someday list don’t require explanation or defense. Welcome back to Leftovers Are Today’s Special, a closer look at older films and series I want to know more about. I’m writing this while housesitting in Bronson Canyon and watching House Hunters, and both situations are increasingly bleak the longer I think about the world (and apartment) of Peter Hujar’s Day.

Lucky comes together in truly glorious fashion in its finale. The best show of 2026 sticks the landing, blowing everything else out of the water. And part of the beauty of the final episode is how it craftily builds on what came before, from Vegas casino chases to cosplaying as a SoCal wine mom to drunken breakdowns at hotel bars. Subscribe and support my next drunken hotel bar breakdown So there’s a full Lucky editing story, with the entire edit team, coming to Crafty.

Costume design is often about creating the illusion that everything happened exactly as planned. But we, sophisticates wise to the rigors of production, know better. Sometimes the costume department is operating on a matter of hours. Sometimes the star’s size changes at the last minute. Sometimes a costume has to fit both Kevin Hart and a much taller actor. And sometimes the director calls the day before shooting to say, essentially, Remember that thing we decided not to do?

Leanne [Patrick McElhenney/Netflix] There are plenty of recognizable sitcom homes. There are far fewer that make you want to move in. That was part of the challenge facing production designer Francoise Cherry-Cohen and set decorator Ann Shea on Netflix’s Leanne, the Chuck Lorre comedy starring Leanne Morgan as a newly divorced Tennessee woman rebuilding her life.

Seconds before, he was not wearing those jeans [Netflix] There are many reasons to watch Netflix’s Ransom Canyon: the scenery, the soapy plots, Patricia Clarkson, Minka Kelly as a lavender farmer, the romance. But let’s be honest. There is also the extremely compelling question—requiring two seasons of research to answer—of how many shirts a man can reasonably remove over the course of a day.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma [Ryan Plummer/Mubi] Before CGI could conjure entire worlds with a click—yes, even Christopher Nolan’s movies do this, you VFX deniers—filmmakers painted them. Today, those painstaking glass matte paintings are museum pieces. And for Jane Schoenbrun’sTeenage Sex & Death at Camp Miasma, production designers Brandon Tonner-Connolly and Matt Hyland found out just how hard it is to resurrect museum pieces.

Furious & :Lucky [Apple TV/Hulu] “Do me a favor. Don’t tell me what happens,” cinematographer Doug Emmett tells me at the start of our interview about his work on Furious and Lucky. “I shot the first two [episodes of Furious], and then I shot five and six. And I deliberately did not read the last two episodes so that I could come home a year later and watch it on the sofa with my wife, which is what we’re doing, and I’m so happy I made that choice.