When director Jonathan Glazer first pitched Johnnie Burn his dramatic vision for The Zone of Interest, the sound designer took a deep breath. Over the past two decades, the pair had developed a strong rapport, collaborating on a variety of commercials, music videos and long-gestating movies (most recently, 2013’s Under the Skin), experiences Burn remembers taking a physical and mental toll on him. But this rigorous new project—a Holocaust drama in which hellish audio is layered over otherwise idyllic imagery—promised to be the most challenging, counterintuitive and audacious job of his career.  “To be honest,” Burn says, “I was really […]

One Night in Miami stages a heavy-hitting, all-night-long hotel room conversation among Malcolm X, Cassius Clay, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke. In the aftermath of Clay beating Sonny Liston to earn the 1964 heavyweight title, the four talk in private about their fame and what to do with it in a white world. X challenges Cooke to take advantage of and subvert his palatable platform, to infuse his music for captive pale audiences with political outrage. During a year of moral reckoning, isolation and introspection, it was on schedule for those kinds of contentious discussions—about Blackness, protest and systemic inequality—to […]