It’s easy when you see the trailer for Brittany Runs A Marathon to think “oh great. Another movie about a drunk, overweight girl realizing she’s unhealthy.” And while that’s part of Brittany Runs A Marathon, it’s deeper than that. She does run a marathon, but she also tells jokes, makes mistake, and moves through life…

1969 must have been a wild time to be alive. America was fighting with itself over civil rights and Vietnam. Teddy Kennedy crashed his car and killed a woman, thus effectively ending the romantic fantasy of the Kennedy dynasty. An entire generation came together to celebrate itself at Woodstock one week after the…

In her native Mexico, Issa López is an established—and celebrated!—novelist, director, and screenwriter. It’s those of us north of the border that have been slow to catch up. López’s third feature film, Tigers Are Not Afraid, seems poised to serve as her breakthrough in the U.S., riding praise from the likes of…

Some parents will go all out for their child’s birthday party. For Nailed It! stans, that includes putting an offer out to the show’s host, Nicole Byer, to come host the whole she-bang. Byer tweeted about the phenomenon recently, saying she’d host these parties for $1 million a piece, mostly because she hates kids. As…

If you’ve ever wanted to see Andie MacDowell wield a bow and arrow while hunting down her daughter-in-law in a deadly game of hide-and-seek, then Ready Or Not is the film for you. In the new comedic horror-thriller, MacDowell plays Becky, the matriarch of a gaming dynasty with some peculiar family rituals. In our…

Jillian Bell began her career as a writer on Saturday Night Live, but it wasn’t long before she was stealing scenes in everything from Workaholics and Eastbound & Down to Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. Now, the actor and comedian is headlining films like Brittany Runs A Marathon and Lynn Shelton’s Sword Of Trust an…

There is a surprisingly humbling element to Liza Mandelup’s documentary Jawline, a bristling look at social media fame from the perspective of 16-year-old Austyn Tester. At first, Tester’s plan to use the power of positivity to become famous (a goal that he repeats often without ever really getting specific) rings…

When we sat down with Samara Weaving to talk about her new role in Ready Or Not, we had to commend her on the rage-filled screams she lets out as the film’s tormented bride, Grace. But when we mentioned the term “Scream Queen,” Weaving was quick to point out that she wanted Grace to be much more proactive in her…

Mike Banning (Gerard Butler), the protagonist of the Has Fallen movies, isn’t just a Secret Service agent. He is the Secret Service agent, a neanderthal with veins of pure American cheese and a single-minded devotion to the bodily integrity of the president of these United States. In Olympus Has Fallen, a Die Hard clon…

Following a day in the life of a medical transport driver, Kirill Mikhanovsky’s Give Me Liberty is a portrait of chaos—specifically, how small, coinciding crises pile atop each other to create a manic web of stress. Vic (Chris Galust) has to drive a coterie of people with disabilities to their various appointments…

As Secret Service agent Mike Banning, Gerard Butler has taken his share of spills—and bullets—in the Has Fallen franchise. Now, Banning and Butler are back for the third movie, Angel Has Fallen, which features the usual explosions and gunfights, but also attempts to address how Banning deals with the PTSD and chronic…

Though it died a pretty swift death at the box office in the fall of 1990, Adrian Lyne’s hallucinatory horror freakout Jacob’s Ladder has gone on to a better place, climbing to an afterlife of cult fandom. Written by Joel Bruce Rubin, whose script sat on the Hollywood blacklist for a solid decade, the film fancied…

Taking on a role for which one of the world’s most famous actors has won an Oscar—not all that long ago, even—has to be mighty intimidating. Didn’t work out so well for Julianne Moore as the new Clarice Starling in Hannibal, but Moore eventually received a gold statuette of her own, and so may Elizabeth Debicki, one…

In the past decade, there’s been an ever-growing divide in how people think about body issues. The traditional view point associates health and fitness with a thin, trim body. The more radical body-positivity movement (as seen, for example, on Hulu’s Shrill) pushes for acceptance of bodies of all shapes and sizes,…

The original poster for Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre asked perhaps the definitive question in all of horror: “Who will survive, and what will be left of them?” For the film’s marketing campaign, that was a rhetorical inquiry. For the horror genre on a whole, it’s just part of the agreement—you know that…

In Brittany Runs A Marathon, Michaela Watkins and Micah Stock play Jillian Bell’s running buddies. As Catherine, Watkins is the woman who seems to have it all—including an innate talent for running. As Seth, Stock is Bell’s fellow back-of-the-packer, the guy who’s only running because his kids have started to make fun…

Now that Good Boys has won its opening weekend at the U.S. box office, it’s even clearer that Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg know what they’re doing. The producers helmed the project out of their Point Grey company, and helped frame what some reviews are calling “Superbad for Middle Schoolers.” The A.V. Club talked to…

It’s hard to imagine, but The A.V. Club has never run a Random Roles with Judy Greer. We’ve talked to her, sure—in 2011, for her show Mad Love—but never sat down and run through all her appearances as the funny friend in rom-coms or how she cut her teeth alongside Kyle Chandler in an episode of Early Edition. We…

In 2008, documentarians Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert filmed the final days of an Ohio GM plant for the Oscar-nominated documentary short “The Last Truck.” Nearly a decade later, they returned to the small town of Moraine—just south of Dayton—to film the same facility after it reopened as a glass factory, run by…

New documentary The Amazing Johnathan is an exercise in faith. As a viewer, can you really trust a magician who says he’s dying? And can filmmaker Ben Berman really trust his subject, the titular Amazing Johnathan, if that subject is known for being great at deception? Those are some of the questions tackled in the…