Sean O’Neal: This week, yet another movie-based personality quiz overtook Twitter—specifically, Film Twitter, that loosely defined consortium of critics, industry types, and eager film buffs united by their love of movies and making others feel bad about the movies they love. The “FilmStruck4” challenge was issued by …
As is increasingly the case, we won’t have to wait long between superhero movies—just three weeks after Avengers: Infinity War fires its opening salvo, Deadpool 2 is poised to hit theaters like Colossus (Stefan Kapicic). Or Cable (Josh Brolin). Or Bedlam (Terry Crews), though, if he sticks to his comic-book origins,…
Amy Schumer plays yet another shallow New Yorker with self-esteem issues in I Feel Pretty, but it seems that with each starring role, the characters become more pitiful and the life lessons more corny. Here, the stand-up and TV sketch comedian is cast as Renee Bennett, a low-level employee at a world-famous luxury…
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases or premieres, or occasionally our own inscrutable whims. This week: The recent (and very strange) Jeannette: The Childhood Of Joan Of Arc has us tapping our toes to other rock musicals, rock operas, and rock-driven movies.
The study of space dates back millennia, long before the same ancient humans pondering the sun could fathom just how we’d get beyond our own stratosphere (and before the word “stratosphere” even existed). Science fiction stepped in to fill that void, with the literary works of Johannes Kepler, Mary Shelley, and Jules…
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases or premieres, or occasionally our own inscrutable whims. This week: The recent (and very strange) Jeannette: The Childhood Of Joan Of Arc has us tapping our toes to other rock musicals, rock operas, and rock-driven movies.
The original Super Troopers was marketed with the tag line, “Altered State Police.” In the sequel, released some 17 years later, there is a scene in which one of those aforementioned drug-addled cops hallucinates the words “Highway Patrol” reversing to say “Way High Patrol.” If there is any further doubt as to what…
Adapted from their hit stage show, which played the West End in 2010 and 2011, Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman’s Ghost Stories pays homage to what was then a largely defunct mini-genre: the British omnibus horror movie. They were thinking of old-school chillers like Dead Of Night (1945), Black Sabbath (1963), and Asylum …
In the film canon, few figures enjoy a more divided reputation than the innovative Franco-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard, an artist of discontinuities, contradictions, and quotations who has spent his nearly 60-year career in a one-sided dialogue with the rest of cinema. His accessible early films—a run that spans…
It’s a true testament to Dwayne Johnson’s charisma that even when he’s being totally cocky, it still comes across as charming. (Even the official Doom twitter account played along when he shit-talked the movie on Twitter.) Now Johnson has something new to endearingly brag about on social media, as his new film Rampage
Early in This Is Our Land, the latest effort from perpetually underrated French filmmaker Lucas Belvaux (The Trilogy, Rapt, Not My Type), a group of friends—all of them white—are enjoying a backyard barbecue when one of them makes a racist joke. Immediately, someone else calls him on it, insisting that such remarks…
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases or premieres, or occasionally our own inscrutable whims. This week: With Ready Player One still flying the flag for beloved touchstones of the Reagan years, we’re looking back on some unsung gems from the 1980s—the movies from that decade that deserve…
On this week’s episode of Film Club, A.V. Club film editor A.A. Dowd and staff critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky take a look at the latest Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson vehicle, Rampage, loosely based on the arcade game of the same name. The Rock stars as Davis, a primatologist whose best friend—an orphaned albino gorilla named…
At its core, the romantic-comedy is about wish fulfillment. Individual films can subvert or comment on that idea in some way, but wish fulfillment is the basic template. That’s true of plenty of other film genres, too, notably sports dramas and superhero films, but rom-coms are unique because they’re the rare genre…
Back during the Winter Olympics, Disney unveiled a short trailer touting the upcoming animated superhero sequel The Incredibles 2. Along with laying out a Mr. Mom-esque plot that finds Craig T. Nelson’s Mister Incredible playing stay-at-home dad to the kids (including an increasingly volatile Jack-Jack), it also…
Standing in full regalia at the edge of a beachfront, eyes fixed on the still waters sprawling out before him, Don Diego De Zama (Daniel Giménez Cacho) strikes the perfect image of the imperialist invader: rising from the sand like a red pillar of fusty decorum, as though he himself were a flag planted in colonized…
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases or premieres, or occasionally our own inscrutable whims. This week: With Ready Player One still flying the flag for beloved touchstones of the Reagan years, we’re looking back on some unsung gems from the 1980s—the movies from that decade that deserve…
Cannes, the world’s most prestigious film festival, announced its selections earlier today, including the Official Competition (which competes for the top prize, the Palme d’Or), the Un Certain Regard undercard, and a handful of special, midnight, and out-of-competition screenings.
It Follows director David Robert Mitchell should be very flattered by Blumhouse’s Truth Or Dare, a film that takes the sophisticated artistry and paralyzing terror of his horror hit and waters it down into sloppily assembled teen genre fare that produces more giggles than gasps. The film creeps right up to the edge of…
Loosely adapted from the arcade button-masher of the same name, Rampage is an early contender for the most bewilderingly schizophrenic big-budget movie of the year: an ape-shit spectacle for a bat-shit era. True to its title, conceit, and mindless video-game source material, the film has no shortage of death and…
