News

Uta Briesewitz, the German cinematographer who landed her first U.S. break shooting the pilot of HBO’s The Wire, has stepped into feature directing with American Sweatshop. Before turning to long-form drama she directed episodes of Severance, Westworld and Stranger Things, experience that shapes her new film’s boxed-in visual language. The thriller premiered in March in SXSW’s Narrative Spotlight strand and, on 8 June, closed the Lighthouse International Film Festival on New Jersey’s Long Beach Island.

Filmed at Mmc Studios in Cologne and on Bonn streets during the 2024 summer break, the production received €400,000 from the Film- und Medienstiftung Nrw. Producers Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana partnered with Elsani Film and Baltimore Pictures, while Plaion Pictures will oversee German theatrical release. Matthew Nemeth’s script follows Daisy, a low-paid content moderator driven to hunt for the source of a violent online video that she cannot erase from her mind.

Cinematography discussion in TV criticism can be all too rare. It lends the perception that TV is all about story and acting, when really there are a number of creative television auteurs who devote careful cinematic craft to shot composition, what’s in the frame, and what is out.

David Simon, creator of The Wire, is one of those, and on Wednesday he penned a blog post that discussed HBO’s recent plans to remaster The Wire for HD re-release on Blu-Ray. In talking about memories of his old filmmaking partner Robert Colesberry, he begged the question “What Would Bob Do” and approached HBO with an invested interest in making sure the show would look appropriate in the new HD format.

As Collider points out, the conversion to HD has been unkind to TV shows made prior to it. Prior to HD, shows were shot in 4:3 aspect ratio to...

"The Wire" is finally entering the world of high-definition — even if it's not the way the series was originally meant to look. HBO announced today that they had completed the high-definition re-mastering of all five seasons of "The Wire," which will debut in December on HBO Signature and HBO Go, be sold in digital HD (through iTunes, Google Play, etc.) starting January 5, and on Blu-ray starting next summer. As the press release notes, "The entire series has been beautifully re-mastered in 16x9 Full-Frame HD from more than 8,000 reels of original 35mm camera negative, allowing for a tighter fit on widescreen TVs and computer/tablet screens. The original negatives were scanned, edited, dust-busted and color-corrected with great care and attention taken to stay true to the look and feel of the original Standard-Definition 4x3 version." This was a more complicated process than most re-masterings from that period. "The Wire" debuted in...

He was the swaggering star of Queer as Folk and cocky young mayor in The Wire, but the real Aidan Gillen is the exact opposite. The shy Dubliner talks (a little) about lunch with Pinter, party-pooping in Baltimore and his latest, taciturn film role

Although it's almost a showbusiness cliche, the notion of the performer grappling with shyness is hard to reconcile with some of the attention-grabbers who make loudest use of the old line. Aidan Gillen, the Irish actor who made his name as the outlandish Stuart in Queer as Folk, is different. He is shy, and not remotely in a self-dramatising way.

His arms form a protective tangle when he sits down in a Soho hotel, and his gaze flits back and forth to a spot awkwardly adjacent to my own. Then there's the conversation. Originally from Dublin, Gillen is the very opposite of the blarney-spouting Irishman. As he once put it,...

Long-time readers of this blog should be familiar with Seith Mann; last year, we featured his critically-acclaimed, impressive 20-minute short film called Five Deep Breaths, his Nyu Mfa thesis project in 2002, which helped get Mann work, directing several television shows – notably episodes of HBO’s hit, The Wire.

Television producer Robert F. Colesberry saw Five Deep Breaths and introduced the other producers of The Wire to the short, who then approached Mann with an offer he couldn’t refuse, asking him to shadow their already-hired directors, during production of the show’s third season in 2004. 2 years later, in 2006, Mann joined the directing crew of The Wire’s fourth season, and later went onto helm episodes of not only that series, but also Grey’s Anatomy, Cold Case, Entourage, Friday Night Lights, and Heroes.

Mann had been working on a feature film script titled Come Sunday, which was to be his debut.

Release Date: Dec. 9

Producers: Ed Burns, Joe Chappelle, Robert F. Colesberry, Nina K. Noble, George Pelecanos, David Simon, Karen L. Thorson

Writers: Simon, Burns, Chris Collins, Pelecanos, Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, David Mills, William F. Zorzi

Starring: Dominic West, Idris Elba, Aidan Gillen, Michael K. Williams, Andre Royo, John Doman, Frankie R. Faison, Jim True-Frost, Sonja Sohn, Lance Reddick, Jamie Hector, Jd Williams, Felicia Pearson, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Chris Bauer

Studio: HBO

Crime series does pay... huge emotional dividends

My only real complaint about HBO’s full-series box set of The Wire—the groundbreaking series about drug dealers, detectives, dock workers, students, reporters and pretty much everyone else in Baltimore—is the timing. This cinder block of a set, including 23 DVDs and an abundance of commentaries and features (many previously released on the series sets), arrives just months after the show’s final heart-rending, mind-blowing episode in March. It’s a handsome,...