A lot has changed in the 25 years since Kevin Smith’s low-budget debut, Clerks, introduced us to the New Jersey convenience-store parking lot drug dealers Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith). Comic book blockbusters rule Hollywood. Cannabis has been co-opted by venture capitalists. Comic-Con, once the domain of…

Rob Legato is kind of a big deal in the cinematic VFX world. He’s won three Oscars and worked on everything from Titanic to The Wolf Of Wall Street. Over the past couple of years, a good portion of his time has been devoted to acting as the Visual Effects Supervisor on Disney’s “live action” remake of The Lion King.…

The horror genre loves awful humans, the kind of arrogant, self-obsessed meat puppets that simply demand to be tormented and terrified for the audience’s pleasure. Armie Hammer plays such a barely animated mannequin in Wounds, Babak Anvari’s long-delayed follow-up to 2016’s clever ghost story Under The Shadow.…

The first Zombieland proved that its central foursome (played by Woody Harrelson, Emma Stone, Jesse Eisenberg, and Abigail Breslin) has what it takes to survive in a world filled with the undead. But the arrival of its decade-later sequel made us realize that not every character would be cut out for the apocalypse.…

Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe have the kind of faces Norma Desmond waxed nostalgic about in Sunset Boulevard. Like all the stars of the silent era, they don’t need dialogue; a whole movie could be hung on the topography of their features, on what Pattinson does with those haunted eyes he used to fix on Kristen…

It’s hard to imagine having the guts to pitch—let alone make—a movie about a boy and his imaginary friend Hitler, but that’s why Taika Waititi makes the big bucks. The director has been dreaming of making the new Jojo Rabbit for some time, and only managed to seal the deal when he agreed to play the aforementioned…

The ’00s will be remembered as the decade of snark, a period where being smart and funny also meant being witheringly condescending towards everyone and everything that wasn’t in on the joke. That, and zombie movies. 2009’s Zombieland combined these two trends to clever effect, and was rewarded for its excellence in…

It’s easy to forget that Spotlight, which looks reasonably contemporary at a glance, was in fact a period piece: The Boston Globe’s Pulitzer-winning investigative report about child sex abuse committed and enabled by Catholic priests was published in 2002, and took well over a decade to reach the screen. That’s…

Feras Fayyad’s Oscar-nominated documentary Last Men In Aleppo succeeded through the power of its vérité footage. Fayyad captured the White Helmets’ search-and-rescue missions with stunning immediacy, highlighting the heroism of the volunteers, who spend their days digging people out of bombed-out rubble, while almost…

You might not know its name, but chances are you’ve admired some of Ironhead Studio’s work on screen. The costume house and prop workshop has made costumes for everyone from Catwoman and Captain America to Daft Punk and Loki. The A.V. Club was recently invited into their Los Angeles-area workshop to check out their…

Final numbers are still rolling in, but it seems safe to say that Gemini Man is not the hit anyone involved might have hoped it would be. Ang Lee’s science fiction action movie, starring Will Smith as both an aging assassin and his younger, stronger, faster clone, landed in third place at the box office this weekend…

What a strange signature character Angelina Jolie has sketched out for herself in the Maleficent movies, which currently represent two of her three big-screen appearances in the past eight years. Casting Jolie as the live-action embodiment of the evil fairy from Disney’s gorgeous 1959 cartoon Sleeping Beauty seemed…

Yes, Crispin Glover has seen the photo going around of himself with his father, Bruce Glover, and he assures us it’s no “deepfake.” In fact, he’s pretty delighted it’s caught the internet’s attention, especially because their similarities play an important role in his next directorial feature—coming in 2020, he…

Given that Stephen Merchant is the co-creator of The Office, as well as the co-writer of both Extras and Life’s Too Short, it’s a fair assumption that he knows a little bit about comedy. That’s why we thought he’d make an excellent person to ask about the current global state of satire. While places like our sister…

As fans of his podcast Office Hours may know, Tim Heidecker is a huge Beatles dork. He grew up obsessing over minutiae related to the group, from producers to their days on the Reeperbahn, and has continued that obsession—to a slightly more palatable extent—to this day.

Imagine an episode of Black Mirror written and directed by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, the minds behind such piercing social commentaries as The Hangover, Bad Moms, and Office Christmas Party. Jexi, their latest, Adam DeVine-fronted jaunt, examines how people who live in a society are addicted to their phones, man.…

As the voice of Wednesday Addams in MGM’s new animated take on The Addams Family, Chloë Grace Moretz has some pretty big—gothic, black—shoes to fill. Christina Ricci all but became Wednesday for the two fondly remembered Addams movies of the early ’90s, so Moretz knew she had her work cut out for her if she wanted to…

We’ve still got a couple of months left to go in 2019, but at this early stage, Bong Joon ho’s Parasite might be the movie of the year. It’s the entertaining yet incisive critique of late capitalism that Adam McKay wishes he could have made, as well as a brilliantly constructed Hitchcockian identity thriller, farcical…

Middle school is a special kind of hell, so it helps to have some sympathetic pop culture to get you through it. For those coming of age in the early aughts, that likely included 2004’s 13 Going On 30, a romantic comedy that skews toward the younger end of the all-ages spectrum. It did okay at the box office, but…

There’s one moment of sharp satire in MGM’s new, wholly unnecessary animated Addams Family reboot. It takes the form of a song performed by the residents of Assimilation, New Jersey, whose lyrics go like this: “What’s so great about being yourself, when you can be just like everyone else? It’s easy to be happy when…