Many musical biopics depict their subjects’ output as monumentally, revolutionarily important. So there’s novelty to how much time Bohemian Rhapsody dedicates to the comparable strangeness of Queen’s songs. The movie puts forth that Freddie Mercury (Rami Malek) had a stage presence unlike any other singer, which…
A few years ago, legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman made one of his occasional geographical portraits, capturing an entire community rather than focusing intently on how one of its institutions works (or doesn’t work). In Jackson Heights had a lot of ground to cover, as that particular Queens…
Patrick Wang’s unlikely two-part comic epic A Bread Factory is set in Checkford, New York, a quiet town where residents gossip over coffee at Sam’s diner about the goings on at the school board, the town council, and the Bread Factory, the community arts center that is the soul of the town. Long ago in Checkford’s…
Note: This article contains minor plot revelations for the new Suspiria and Halloween.
It sounds like an easy layup: Rowan Atkinson inserted into James Bond-style adventures, rubber-faced and disaster-prone where your Sean Connerys and Daniel Craigs are steely and sexy. Maybe Johnny English could have been Atkinson’s own Pink Panther series; the title of Johnny English Strikes Again certainly bears that…
This summer’s Ant-Man And The Wasp finally brought Evangeline Lilly’s Wasp to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, three years after the mid-credits scene in Ant-Man teased her appearance.
No horror movie hitting theaters this October could hope to inspire as much nausea as Caniba does. It’s the new documentary by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, Harvard-trained researchers who specialize in a queasily up-close-and-personal school of nonfiction. Their last movie, the remarkable Leviathan,…
It’s kind of hard to believe that First Man has been in theaters for less than a week. Hasn’t the controversy surrounding this movie been raging for a small eternity? Damien Chazelle’s biodrama about Neil Armstrong, the late astronaut and American icon, has already inspired an entire awards season’s worth of hot-take…
It’s time for pumpkins and fall leaves, crisp cool air and wool sweaters, the Duke of Fall and the High Priest of the Harvest. So with that in mind:
Here’s a fun mental exercise: Describe Venom to a child. I’ve tried it. It’s ridiculous.
To the extent that Jim Hosking’s cartoonishly grotesque characters can be called human, they paint an unflattering portrait of the species. They are dopes and bullies, middle-aged virgins and horndogs with bad hair, disgusting habits, ugly thrift-store clothes. The Greasy Strangler, his debut feature, pitched itself…
We were fans of Destroyer, director Karyn Kusama’s followup to her 2015 thriller The Invitation, when it made its North American debut at this year’s Fantastic Fest. At the time, we said that what made this particular variation on the rogue-cop movie special was the “collaboration between actress and director that…
“I think there’s three kinds of people in this world,” says Amy Cappellazzo, chairman of the Fine Art division of Sotheby’s. “Those who see, those who see when they are shown, and those who will never see.” Seeing is the business of art, in the most sublime sense of the word. It asks the beholders to open their eyes…
Yes, Melissa McCarthy was great in Bridesmaids. But ever since, she’s been stuck in a uniquely Hollywood purgatory: She’s a well-paid movie star who regularly top-lines films that open in the top 10 at the domestic box office. But she’s not the highest-paid movie star either, and her films rarely receive accolades.…
Michael Shannon is so great at playing over-the-top villains that it’s easy to forget how great he is at playing normal people, too. Writer-director Elizabeth Chomko’s debut feature, What They Had, takes great advantage of Shannon’s everyman likability, casting him as a gruff Chicago bar owner…
In the decade (nearly) since Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino has directed two films—three, if you want to count his Manson Family picture, due next summer. Mélanie Laurent, who played the vengeful Shosanna in Basterds, has since directed five features, maintaining a steady acting career all the while. It’s an…
Stories confined to a single location had a special place in the career of Alfred Hitchcock, who saw them as opportunities to experiment: with long takes in Rope, 3D in Dial M For Murder, and studios sets in Lifeboat and Rear Window, one of his celebrated and most imitated films. But one wonders what the master of…
It should come as no surprise that Michael Myers goes back to Haddonfield in the new Halloween movie. When the escaped lunatic can, he always makes it home for the holiday. He’s a creature of habit, and so, too, is the apparently immortal Halloween series, which returns repeatedly—like a mindless, unstoppable force of…
As the horror genre becomes ever more mainstream, we here at The A.V. Club imagine that there are more of you than ever looking for something creepy to watch this Halloween season. And with streaming services on a similar upward cultural trajectory, we’re guessing that many, if not most, of you won’t be watching that…
The obvious motif that recurs throughout Wildlife, Paul Dano’s directorial debut, is that of fire. Adapted by Dano and his partner, Zoe Kazan, from Richard Ford’s 1990 novel of the same name, the film follows a teenager, Joe Brinson (Ed Oxenbould), as he grows up during the 1960s in Great Falls, Montana—prime wildfire…
