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[This story contains spoilers from the Apple TV+ limited series Lady in the Lake, including its finale, “My story.”]

The process of turning Laura Lippman’s 2019 novel Lady in the Lake into an Apple TV+ limited series began more than three years ago and involves the series’ late executive producer, Jean-Marc Vallée, who died suddenly in late December 2021.

Vallée and producing partner Nathan Ross had read the book, with Ross checking it out quickly after its release thanks to a rave review from Stephen King in The New York Times. Ross told Vallée about the novel, thinking of Natalie Portman for the role of Maddie Schwartz, and Vallée wanted Alma Har’el for the project due to her work on the film Honey Boy, Shia Labeouf’s semiautobiographical drama.

Portman too saw and was impressed by Honey Boy.

“Jean-Marc and Nathan brought me the book and told me that I should work with Alma, that she was so incredibly talented, and...

We’re living in a post-“Mad Men” world — and that raises the difficulty level of production designing and dressing the sets of period series like Alma Ha’rel’s “Lady in the Lake,” currently airing on Apple TV+.

“Shows like ‘Mad Men,’ the general public knows what mid-century modern is, and those things are very desirable, and people want to pay money to make it feel like, ‘Oh, my sofa feels like Don Draper’s sofa.’ It’s not as easy and accessible [anymore],” “Lady in the Lake” set decorator Karuna Karmarkar told IndieWire. “It requires really searching far and wide to get all the pieces that fit into the puzzle.” The hard work paid off; the production design of “Lady in the Lake” adroitly conjures up Baltimore of the ’60s in a way that is both stylized and character-defining.

Just look at how production designer Jc Molina creates two...

A bird’s eye view of “Lady in the Lake” may make Alma Har’el’s ambitious new Apple series sound as generic as its title. In 1966, just outside of Baltimore, a young girl is found dead. The woman who discovers her body, an aspiring journalist, becomes obsessed with the case, and it soon leads her to another body, another suspect, and a criminal conspiracy with dangerous ties to cops, politicians, and more.

All of this is true, but none of it is the full truth. Throughout the ethereal, furious, seven-episode limited series, layers are peeled back over and over. Sometimes they reveal new clues about the case. More often, they tell us something about the two women at its center. Yes, two women. Aside from Natalie Portman’s hungry reporter, Maddie Schwartz — a white woman (of course) whose personal yet picayune connections to the victim spark an outsized obligation to...

Gael García Bernal nails his best role in years, giving a performance steeped in cheeky humor, resilience and radical self-belief — not to mention some amazingly nimble moves — as groundbreaking lucha libre wrestler Saúl Armendáriz in Cassandro. Seasoned documentarian Roger Ross Williams, who profiled Armendáriz in 2016 for the Amazon series The New Yorker Presents, makes an assured transition into narrative features with this entertaining biopic, which doubles as a gorgeous depiction of mother-son love and an exhilarating exploration of fearless queer identity in a macho environment.

While Williams (Life, Animated) and co-screenwriter David Teague (who adapted Ta-Nehesi Coates’ Between the World and Me for HBO) slightly fumble the ending, this is a film with enormous heart, vivid immersion into its culturally specific milieu and celebratory admiration for its flamboyant subject, images of whom both in and out of the ring grace the end credits. It should prove popular with both LGBTQ...

A production designer known for his work in the commercial world, and on high-end music videos for the likes of Beyoncé and P!nk, Jc Molina had his work cut out for him on Honey Boy, helping to define a visual approach to a film where incredibly raw memory and gorgeous fantasy would collide.

Written by actor Shia Labeouf as part of court-mandated therapy, Honey Boy examines the turbulent childhood and early adult years of an actor’s life, as he struggles to reconcile with his father, an alcoholic ex-rodeo clown whose abuse and neglect were both intensely felt from a young age.

Approaching the first narrative feature of Alma Har’el with a cinematic eye and avant-garde flare, prepared to be unprepared for what would transpire everyday on set—with Labeouf playing his own father, shortly after being diagnosed with severe Pstd—Molina says that the Honey Boy shoot was...

The Guild announced on Thursday nominations for the 21st Annual Excellence in Production Design Awards across a multitude of categories covering features, TV, commercials and music videos.

Among the film nominees were Café Society, Manchester By The Sea, Hell Or High Water and Arrival.

TV nominees encompass Game Of Thrones, The Night of and Silicon Valley, while Beyonce’s Lemonade visual extravaganza is a heavy-hitter in the music videos section.

The awards show is set for February 11 at the Ray Dolby Ballroom at Hollywood and Highland.

Excellence In Production Design For A Feature FilmPERIOD Film

Café Society, Santo Loquasto

Fences, David Gropman

Hacksaw Ridge, Barry Robison

Hail, Caesar!, Jess Gonchor

Hidden Figures, Wynn Thomas

Jackie, Jean Rabasse

Fantasy Film

Arrival, Patrice Vermette

Doctor Strange, Charles Wood

Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, Stuart Craig

Passengers, Guy Hendrix Dyas

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Doug Chiang, Neil Lamont

Contemporary Film

Hell Or High Water, Tom Duffield

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