In honor of the fast-approaching 92nd Academy Awards, airing Sunday, February 9, Film Club is taking a break from covering this week’s film releases to look back at the Best Picture nominees we didn’t cover last year. Yesterday, we hit Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood and Joker. For this week’s final episode, A.A. Dowd…
The incongruity usually begins at the airport. Year in and year out, a casual clash of cultures greets anyone stepping off a plane into the brisk mountain air of Salt Lake City, at least on the first day—the feverish opening Thursday—of the Sundance Film Festival. The terminal rings with the chatter of industry…
As Fletcher in Guy Ritchie’s new movie The Gentlemen, Hugh Grant embodies one of the people who’s bothered him most in recent years: A British “pay-for-play” tabloid journalist. It’s an irony not lost on Grant, who tells The A.V. Club in the interview above that he wasn’t quite sure he could pull off the role—which…
More of a two-hour ceremony than a movie, The Last Full Measure recounts strenuous real-life efforts to secure a very belated, posthumous Medal Of Honor for William H. Pitsenbarger, an Air Force pararescueman who was killed in Vietnam while saving fellow soldiers’ lives. It’s a full-throated, misty-eyed celebration of…
In honor of the fast-approaching 92nd Academy Awards, airing Sunday, February 9, Film Club is taking a break from covering this week’s film releases to look back at the Best Picture nominees we didn’t cover last year. Earlier today, our critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife revisited Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood. Now,…
In honor of the fast-approaching 92nd Academy Awards, airing Sunday, February 9, Film Club is taking a break from covering this week’s film releases (do we really need to cover The Gentlemen?) to look back at the Best Picture nominees we didn’t cover last year. First up, our critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife discuss…
At this point, Nicolas Cage the meme has overtaken Nicolas Cage the person, and the mere mention of his name is enough to send a certain subset of filmgoers into a hysterical giggle fit. And with this unspoken set of expectations looming in the background, it takes a visionary director to keep the circus inside the…
It used to happen all the time: Filmmakers would come up through the flashy world of music videos, and eventually make the jump to bigger screens. The Turning director Floria Sigismondi must remember; she got her start making music videos in the 1990s, eventually amassing an impressive roster of clips for artists like…
As the stars of The Gentlemen, Matthew McConaughey, Michelle Dockery, and Henry Golding know a little something about manners. As criminals wrapped in designer suiting, the trio weave their way through both British aristocracy and weed hothouses with aplomb, all while trying to one-up each other in the brains…
Guy Ritchie has spent the last decade translating his kinetic visual style and macho cool to big-budget revivals of intellectual property. He molded Arthur Conan Doyle’s trademark sleuth into a rakish brawler and brought a ’60s TV spy drama to the big screen with the help of top-notch costume design and good…
The actor: David Arquette was born into a family of actors—his father, Lewis, starred on The Waltons, and his siblings include Pulp Fiction star Rosanna, the late Alexis, and the Oscar-winning Patricia. His long, diverse career has seen him ping between performing, directing, writing, and even professional wrestling.…
I Wish I Knew, a 2010 documentary shot in Shanghai, closes with two starkly contrasting views: one from the observation deck of the Shanghai World Financial Center (the highest in the world at the time of filming), the other from a nondescript railcar in transit. These images, both concerned with development, are…
Bertrand Bonello’s Zombi Child, an eerie film about teenagers and the spirit world that will leave some viewers puzzled, opens in Haiti in 1962. A man prepares a poisonous concoction of powdered pufferfish liver and seeds and pours it into a pair of shoes. The next day, Clairvius Narcisse (Mackenson Bijou), about 40,…
For the second Film Club of the year, A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife sit down to discuss 1917, the “one-shot” World War I film from director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins. Join our critics as they discuss why this recently minted Oscar favorite feels like an empty technical showcase.
For the first Film Club of the year, A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife are taking a look at Dolittle, the wholly unnecessary reboot of Hugh Lofting’s children’s lit series starring Robert Downey Jr. in his first post-Endgame film. Join our critics as they try to figure out who thought this was a good idea, and what the hell…
Tyler Perry Studios has grown into a filmmaking empire that includes its own fully functioning studio lot. But rather than enabling Perry to make more ambitious, larger-scale movies, his efficient machinery still produces work that’s less polished than vaguely professional-looking. “Vaguely professional-looking”…
Since When Romance Met Comedy kicked off 2019 with an impassioned defense of Katherine Heigl and 27 Dresses, it seems only fair that I kick off 2020 by taking a look at the more questionable side of her rom-com oeuvre. Because while I stand by my defense of Heigl, there’s no defending her 2009 vehicle The Ugly Truth, a…
Anyone who’s ever plummeted down the rabbit hole of after-hours television knows there’s a goldmine of unintentional comedy waiting at the bottom. But it’s not as easy as Adult Swim makes it look, clowning on this twilight zone of programming. The challenge is that some of the funniest things you might stumble upon in…
Who is Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as the title character of Dolittle for, exactly? It’s a snuffling, shuffling, head-twitching collection of tics, with a physicality that’s more evocative of a nervous squirrel than the actual CGI squirrel who accompanies Dr. Dolittle on his adventures across the sea. Downey’s…
What’s the point of making a Bad Boys movie without Michael Bay? Assuming that there was a point to these things, beyond giving the Wesleyan-educated frat-guy auteur an opportunity to show his portfolio of camera moves. The first one, which starred Martin Lawrence and Will Smith as a couple of wisecracking Miami…
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