On this week’s episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky take a look at Disney’s new live-action Christopher Robin, inspired by the Winnie The Pooh stories by A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard. In a Hook-esque twist, Christopher Robin follows a now grown-up, workaholic Christopher whose inner child…
There’s a scene in The Darkest Minds, Hollywood’s latest attempt to turn a teen-lit bestseller into a multiplex sensation, where the heroes literally compare themselves to Harry Potter. Well, one of them does, anyway. Her name is Ruby (Amandla Stenberg, a veteran of this genre, given her role as Rue in the original …
Picture this: It’s the late 1940s or early ’50s, and Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor), the little boy from A.A. Milne’s Winnie-The-Pooh stories, is all grown up. He works as a number-cruncher for a London luggage company, can’t get a weekend off to go to the country with his wife (Hayley Atwell) and their precocious…
Lauren Miller Rogen obviously appreciates romantic comedies, and thinks a lot about how their structures can be applied to material not focused exclusively on romantic love. For a Good Time, Call..., which she wrote and starred in, is a comedy of sex and romance rejiggered to emphasize (platonic) female friendship.…
The Fantasia Film Festival wraps up its 2018 edition in Montreal tonight, completing 21 days of the 22nd year of one of the longest-running (and just plain longest) genre film festivals in North America. Believe it or not, Fantasia used to be even longer: The inaugural 1996 edition ran for a solid month, and focused…
Greetings, fellow kids! After about 15 minutes of browsing skate lingo glossaries online, we’ve decided to spare ourselves—and you—the indignity of attempting to use said terminology as if we had any idea what we were talking about. Instead, we’ll just let you know that Crystal Moselle, director of the 2015…
As the second decade of the 21st century sputters to a close, two comedic concepts that just a few years ago were hailed as exciting and fresh—raunchy, R-rated, female-led comedies and violent, R-rated action comedies—are now commonplace. (Pineapple Express came out 10 years ago, and Bridesmaids seven years ago, if…
Nico largely endures in the popular imagination for her work with the Velvet Underground, an unhappy marriage arranged by Andy Warhol in part for the model’s aesthetic virtues, the contrast she cut against the scuzzy band. On 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico and the same year’s solo debut Chelsea Girl, she plays…
When Angel Lamere (Dominique Fishback), the protagonist of Jordana Spiro’s debut feature Night Comes On, returns to Philadelphia, the first thing she does is get her hands on a gun. It’s her 18th birthday, and she’s just been let out of juvenile detention with nothing to her name but a phone with a dead battery and a…
While being in the room for the launch of a buzzy new movie is undeniably thrilling, one of the most exciting (and underrated) side effects of cramming dozens of movies into your eyeballs as quickly as possible—which, when you get down to it, is what a film festival is all about—is watching cinematic trends coming…
It doesn’t take long for The Miseducation Of Cameron Post to fulfill some of the promise director/co-writer Desiree Akhavan showed in her first feature, Appropriate Behavior. Miseducation, this year’s winner of the U.S. Grand Jury drama prize at Sundance, introduces its teenage title character (Chloë Grace Moretz)…
One of these days, Tom Cruise is going to seriously hurt himself. It’s kind of inevitable, isn’t it? Cruise, who just turned 56 but still throws himself into every role like a teenager certain of his own invincibility, has a new Mission: Impossible movie out, the terrifically exciting Fallout. The star’s insistence on…
The Condemned: 24 Hours To Live (2017)
What Are You Watching? is a weekly space for The A.V Club’s staff and readers to share their thoughts, observations, and opinions on film and TV.Â
The summer movie season starts to wind down this weekend with Mission: Impossible—Fallout, the latest entry from one of Hollywood’s most reliably entertaining franchises. In a first for the series, which usually changes helmers with each film, Rogue Nation writer-director Christopher McQuarrie returns to orchestrate…
It’s the summer of 1991 in Cape Cod, a hormonal tragedy crudely destined to end in the billion-dollar biblical cataclysm of Hurricane Bob. The haves are the yachters, vacationers, and tennis-racket preppies. The have-nots are the townies: Hunter Strawberry (Alex Roe), the local prince of pot, a stud with a rumored…
The business of health is built on other people’s problems. This simple fact is reiterated in one form or another throughout Kirby Dick’s muckraking exposé of the medical devices industry, The Bleeding Edge; we see it in regulatory buck-passing, excruciating side effects, and a level of corporatization that, in Dick’s…
For about as long as there have been movies, there have been special effects. That’s no exaggeration: The medium was only a few years old when people began finding ways to toy with the reality of what the motion-picture camera was capturing, creating tricks from quirks in photographic science. A century later, the…
A lot of shocking things happen in The Captain. A man is summarily executed for the crime of stealing eggs from a barn. Quicklime is thrown on the gasping bodies of dozens of dying prisoners after a botched attempt at a mass execution. Four prison camp inmates are tied together and forced to race across a muddy field…
Only about 30 rocket-paced minutes have whizzed by before Mission: Impossible—Fallout first flirts with truly impossible odds. Ethan Hunt, the human missile of American intelligence that Tom Cruise has been popping back in to play for more than 20 years now, is masquerading as a mysterious terrorist, the perfectly…
