After a brief hiatus, A.V. Club film editor A.A. Dowd and staff critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky are back with a new edition of Film Club, discussing Disney’s latest trip to the galaxy far, far away, Solo: A Star Wars Story. Wherein the last entry in the Star Wars saga broke from convention (to the chagrin of some die-hard…
James Franco, whose résumé as a director is as extensive as it is undistinguished, leaves behind the misbegotten literary adaptations that have been the bedrock of his filmography to try his hand at a sci-fi B-movie in Future World, co-directed with repeat collaborator Bruce Thierry Cheung. In a post-apocalyptic…
Note: As suggested by the headline, this article will disclose a major plot point in Solo.
[There are no plot spoilers for Deadpool 2 below, but it does spoil a couple of jokes, if that concerns you at all.]
For a movie that features a professional pickup artist as its romantic leading man, Hitch has a surprisingly insightful central thesis: It’s sleazy, misogynistic dudes who make contemporary dating difficult for both women and men. The existence of these creeps forces women to be guarded and to couch their true…
Filmmaker Haifaa al-Mansour is Saudi Arabia’s first female director. Her feature film debut, 2012’s Wadjda, received critical acclaim and became the country’s first official Oscar submission (for Best Foreign Language Film) although it wasn’t nominated. Al-Mansour’s follow up is Mary Shelley, the story of the…
Time has been kind to the reputation of Terry Gilliam’s Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas, a film that stumbled into theaters 20 years ago today with vodka on its breath and dried vomit on its shirt and was quickly booted from the premises. Once derided as a slapdash, self-indulgent mess, it is now a mess with a…
Frankenstein, Or The Modern Prometheus, an exceptional piece of moody teenage fiction that the young Mary Shelley (née Godwin) first published anonymously in 1818, gave the world a new myth of creation gone wrong: the story of Victor Frankenstein, a scientist consumed by obsessions, and the nameless monster he brings…
In movies, as in politics, it’s not necessarily advantageous to acknowledge that everyday problems are often insurmountably complicated, with no easy answers. One of the best films released last year, From Nowhere, was seen by almost nobody (not even by critics, excepting those of us who were assigned to review it);…
Han Solo is based on a familiar archetype: Star Wars’ lovable scoundrel can trace his roots back to our earliest myths, while there are progenitors of his world-weary cynicism in Humphrey Bogart’s movies, his charming roguishness in Douglas Fairbanks’, and his reluctantly outlaw heroics throughout the samurai films…
The autobiographical childhood reminiscence, while naturally appealing to fledgling filmmakers in search of material (“Write what you know,” etc.), can be tricky to pull off. Unless your formative years were unusually eventful—spent fashioning a playground from the rubble of buildings bombed in the Blitz, for…
Spoiler Space offers thoughts on, and a place to discuss, the plot points we can’t reveal in our official reviews. Fair warning: Major plot points for Deadpool 2 are revealed below.
How To Talk To Girls At Parties, John Cameron Mitchell’s fourth feature and first in seven years, tries to be many, many things. It’s a coming-of-age tale about wading through the murky waters of adolescent sexuality. It’s a painfully sincere love story between a sensitive boy and a mysterious girl from out of town…
Filmmaker Haifaa al-Mansour is Saudi Arabia’s first female director. Her feature film debut, 2012’s Wadjda, received critical acclaim and became the country’s first official Oscar submission (for Best Foreign Language Film) although it wasn’t nominated. Now al-Mansour’s following up her debut with Mary Shelley, the…
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
They kept trying it. All through the 1990s, movie executives were greenlighting big summer movies based on mostly forgotten ’30s-vintage pulp superheroes. Clearly, people placed high within Hollywood’s largest studios thought that the teenagers of the ’90s, kids who had grown up buying gold-embossed collectors’…
The A.V. Club recently sat down with writer-director of the new film Terminal, Vaughn Stein (The Dark Knight, Sherlock Holmes), and star Simon Pegg, to discuss the advantages of indie filmmaking versus the typical big-budget, studio fare. Additionally, they discuss the cinematic influences that informed the look of…
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases or premieres, or occasionally our own inscrutable whims. The summer movie season is upon us, which means it’s time for a semi-annual tradition: singing the praises of the most unloved, underperforming, or simply forgotten summer blockbusters.
Apologies to anyone hoping for a first impression on the closing night film of Cannes, Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. It’s premiering right now, as I type this, but I’m on a flight to New York instead, ready to return to real life after 11 days in the bubble. I’ve missed or am missing a few other…
Haifaa al-Mansour’s new film Mary Shelley tells the story of the world-famous novelist when she was know as Mary Godwin. Starring Elle Fanning as the eponymous author, the film begins when Godwin is just 18, and follows the events in her life that inspired her to write Frankenstein, including her relationship with…
