Sandy Powell is one of the great costume designers working today, having worked on films like The Aviator, Shakespeare in Love, and The Other Boleyn Girl. This month, audiences can see her costuming work in a pair of new films: Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite and Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns. We recently sat down…
Natalie Portman and Raffey Cassidy’s new film, Vox Lux, follows the rise of aspiring entertainer Celeste, from the ashes of a major national tragedy to pop superstardom. With the film in theaters today, we sat down with Portman and Cassidy about the film, and the demands of their performances.
As usual, there was no shortage of worthy contenders for The A.V. Club’s list of the best movie scenes of the year. Even flawed films can contain flashes of brilliance, the parts that shine more brightly than the whole. And of course, plenty of the year’s best movies worked on a micro and macro level, though not all…
So many movies, so little time. Every week brings a new crop of them, opening in multiplexes and arthouse theaters across the nation, and arriving in increasingly high volumes on streaming platforms like Netflix. How’s a voracious moviegoer to keep up? That’s where The A.V. Club comes in. The first week of every…
Ben Is Back isn’t the year’s first American drama about a teenage drug addict and the parent agonizing over how to help him. Two months ago, Timothée Chalamet and Steve Carell acted out that same scenario in Beautiful Boy, a film so committed to capturing, in agonizing detail, each step (and misstep) on the road to…
We’re limping toward the end of 2018, and everyone is exhausted. In a culture where truth is malleable, spite and greed are celebrated, and unimaginable atrocities are reduced to just another fleeting set of stimuli, how could you not be? A similar sense of existential fatigue permeates Vox Lux, The Childhood Of A…
Although it’s more faithful to the characters of The Jungle Book than any of the Disney adaptations, Andy Serkis’ long-delayed Mowgli: Legend Of The Jungle owes as much to bastardized interpretations of Joseph Campbell as it does to the stories of Rudyard Kipling. Mowgli, the wild child raised by wolves in central…
The retro-psycho Thirst Street brought the prolific Nathan Silver within spitting distance of the indie mainstream (in production values, if not style or subject matter), but he returns to the micro-indie world with his latest black comedy, all the while continuing the earlier effort’s interest in delusion, diffusion,…
Sebastián Silva’s Tyrel puts an existential spin on the time-honored tradition of “a guy’s weekend” by providing a menacing edge to superficially safe situations. Tyler (Mudbound’s Jason Mitchell), wishing to escape the stress of his girlfriend’s family, joins his friend Johnny (Christopher Abbott) for a birthday…
Art imitates life a bit too strenuously in Clara’s Ghost, the first feature written and directed by Bridey Elliott. (She’s probably best known for her starring role in the indie comedy Fort Tilden.) Set almost entirely in a rich Connecticut family’s home, this clumsy quasi-supernatural psychodrama features the entire…
One thing the historical drama Mary Queen Of Scots seems to acknowledge straight away is that to apply the traditional biopic structure to the life of Mary Stuart, a queen of Scotland and would-be queen of England from the 16th century, would be an exercise in uncontrollable dramatic excess. (A 1936 attempt ended with…
In honor of the long-awaited Wreck-It Ralph sequel, Ralph Breaks The Internet, we sat down with the animation team behind the film to talk about the parts of the internet they’d like to see Ralph break.
If you watched every film The A.V. Club reviewed in 2018, you’d walk away with a fairly comprehensive grasp of the year in movies. But it wouldn’t be a complete one. Because for as much as we aim to write about all the new cinema that matters, plenty of gems slip through the cracks in our coverage plan. And so once…
Zoe Kazan stars in the Coen brothers’ western anthology film The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs as Alice Longabaugh, a women traveling West with her brother when a tragic event sets her on a new course. In honor of the film, we sat down Kazan to talk Buster Scruggs, her character, and working with the Coens for the first…
Imagine the last 20 years of American pop culture on fast-forward. Now imagine the last 50 years of American history all happening at the same time. Neither of those statements can fully capture the experience of life in contemporary China, which director Hao Wu—a Chinese-American tech executive turned …
Movie trailers can be misleading. Their primary function is to sell us something, to get asses in seats any way they can. Sometimes, that entails making a film look like something it’s not, as when a moody arthouse crime pastiche is passed off as a de facto Transporter sequel. (Newsflash: Advertising isn’t always…
In honor of Ralph Breaks The Internet making a boatload of money this past weekend, we sat down with the animation team behind the film about bringing the internet to life.
Too many superhero movies get lost in the attempt to navigate years or decades of comic-book lore, bending and compressing time in ungraceful ways. Origins are belabored into feature-length exposition, only to spawn sequels where universe-altering events happen in a snap. Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse pushes both…
In honor of Ralph Breaks The Internet making a boatload of money this past weekend, we sat down with directors Rich Moore and Phil Johnston to talk about its long development process, the difference between live-action and animated filmmaking, and they’re favorite YouTube videos.
Most great filmmakers stumble eventually, and they often do so in a particularly dispiriting way: attempting to rehash a previous triumph. Before winning two foreign-language Oscars (for A Separation and The Salesman), Iran’s Asghar Farhadi made a splash on the festival circuit with 2009’s About Elly, in which the…
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