When Debra Granik’s touching and truthful Leave No Trace premiered at the Sundance Film Festival one year ago today, a few writers and media outlets began loudly asking a leading question: Was Thomasin McKenzie, the film’s largely unknown 17-year-old star, “the next Jennifer Lawrence?” It was a reductive and imperfect…

This article contains plot details of the movie Cam.

This article contains plot details from A Simple Favor.

The unsung hero of First Man—one of our favorite films of 2018—is Claire Foy’s Janet Armstrong, one of the most public faces of NASA families during the Apollo program and the long suffering wife of Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling). Ahead of the film’s Blu-ray release next Tuesday, we sat down with Foy and director…

It’s been nearly two years now since Marisa Tomei was finally released from prison. Not an actual prison, obviously (though taking a role in Wild Hogs arguably constituted a federal offense), but a ludicrous penalty box of our collective imagination. After deservedly being named Best Supporting Actress at the 1993…

The first time Samuel L. Jackson appears in Unbreakable, M. Night Shyamalan’s majestically moody turn-of-the-century spin on the superhero origin story, he’s waxing rhapsodic about comic books, with all the command Jules Winnfield reserved for imaginary Bible verses. Comics are real art, and not just for kids,…

It’s safe to say that A Quiet Place wouldn’t work without the excellent sound design from supervising sound editors, Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn. The two have been working together for over a decade, sharing a pair of Oscar nominations for their sound editing work on Argo and Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and…

It’s impossible to make a movie about a militia without at least a faint aroma of the political. It’s not even an “...in the age of Trump” issue; heavily armed right-wing paramilitary organizations of the type depicted in The Standoff At Sparrow Creek have been hovering in the background of the American cultural…

For much of the past 25 years, the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay has functioned as a consolation prize given to movies too personal, unusual, or inventive—which is to say, too good—to win (or in some cases even get nominated for) the big Best Picture prize. Pulp Fiction, Fargo, Almost Famous, Lost In…

Hope springs eternal at The A.V. Club, at least when it comes to pop culture. The environment may be screwed, democracy may be endangered, the world itself may be forever inching toward fiery self-destruction, but we approach every new year with the same optimism that Calvin and Hobbes expressed in their final…

The Kid Who Would Be King, the English writer-director Joe Cornish’s family-friendly take on the King Arthur legend, might be smarter that the average live-action kids’ movie, but it’s hamstrung by a lack of visual imagination and a generic script. It starts promisingly enough. After an animated prologue about the…

We recently sat down with Erik Aadahl and Ethan Van der Ryn, supervising sound editors of A Quiet Place, to find out the five films and television shows most inspirational to their work.

How much sympathy should one feel for the formerly wealthy? That’s one of many questions barely explored by The Heiresses, Paraguay’s submission to the foreign-language competition at this year’s Oscars. (It didn’t make the shortlist.) The film begins with its protagonist’s decline already in progress, as Chela (Ana…

Replicas, the astonishingly inept new Keanu Reeves vehicle, plays less like a science-fiction thriller than some malfunctioning computer’s unconvincing approximation of one. If you woke up in a glitching simulation, this janky garbage would be projected on every screen, possibly under the title Human Movie. One could…

In the past decade, Hollywood has attempted to transform the franchise into something else: the cinematic universe. It’s a lofty and slightly absurd goal. Movies, we are now to understand, never exist as stand-alone stories, unless they’re arthouse flicks or Oscar bait (and even then, maybe not). They don’t exist as…

The new biographical drama On The Basis Of Sex follows the Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s early career as a lawyer, from teaching at Rutgers Law School to founding the Women’s Rights Project. In the film, Justin Theroux co-stars as Mel Wulf, the legal director of the ACLU and an early colleague of…

The Intouchables, Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano’s monster hit about the friendship between a quadriplegic white millionaire and a black ex-con, was such a formulaic crowd-pleaser that the idea of a Hollywood remake seems redundant. Yet here we are with Neil Burger’s The Upside, an adaptation that moves the story…

Dogs, and animals in general, are one of life’s simplest pleasures. There’s a reason we turn to our pets for comfort when we’re sad, or de-stress by watching videos of happy cats and silly dogs doing their thing on social media. Animals lead their lives blissfully unaware of the existential fears that weigh on their…

Felicity Jones stars as Ruth Bader Ginsburg in On The Basis Of Sex, a new biographical drama from screenwriter Daniel Stiepleman (who is Ginsburg’s nephew) that follows the Supreme Court Justice’s early career as a lawyer. In honor of the film’s release, we spoke with Jones about the film, and meeting the Justice for…

Rust Creek starts off like any number of films about a beautiful young woman menaced by rednecks in the isolated backwoods of some godforsaken hellhole (Kentucky, in this case): Sawyer (Hermione Corfield) is a bright, ambitious college student who, at the beginning of the film, sets out on a road trip to Washington,…