Since her early days designing stage shows for Pee-wee Herman and David Byrne, production designer Barbara Ling has specialized in creating heightened fantasy worlds. You can see it in her work on Joel Schumacher’s Batman movies, including the over-the-top sets for the infamous Batman & Robin. And, in a way, you can…
Editing is, by and large, a thankless profession. Film editors work behind the scenes, sculpting massive piles of footage into feature films with pacing and tone and foreshadowing and callbacks. If they’re good at their jobs, you barely notice their work at all, keeping them in the shadows. Not so with Thelma…
Welcome back to another edition of Film Club. Film editor A.A. Dowd is unable to join us this week, as he is in Park City, Utah covering this year’s Sundance Film Festival—check out his excellent coverage here. In his place, senior writer Katie Rife is joined by contributor Ignatiy Vishnevetsky to discuss this week’s…
I’ve left Sundance but it hasn’t left me. Two days removed from the mad hustle of the festival—the late nights, the early mornings, the packed shuttles, the crowded screenings, the mediocre meals, the winter-camp fun of talking with fellow critics—it’s the movies that have stuck with me. As usual, I’m a little hung…
Welcome back to another edition of Film Club. Film editor A.A. Dowd is unable to join us this week, as he is in Park City, Utah covering this year’s Sundance Film Festival—check out his excellent coverage here. In his place, senior writer Katie Rife is joined by contributor Ignatiy Vishnevetsky to discuss this week’s…
Occultism and horror movies make a good pair. On screen, the occult retains all of its intrigue, while eliminating the dense prose you otherwise have to slog through to get to the good stuff. Of course, serious occultists may disagree, not least because these movies also tend to paint them as cannibals and murderers.…
From Hustlers to Her Smell to Homecoming, 2019 was a great year for films about female ambition—not that you’d know it from the Oscar race. Little Women is the only woman-centric film to make a major impression at this year’s Academy Awards, in a round of nominations that favored masculine viewpoints. But it wasn’t…
Park City is a bit like the Punxsutawney of Groundhog Day, and not just because of the snow that reliably blankets its winding streets. Every January, the same thing happens: Studios try to outbid each other for the movies generating the most buzz —and usually, the “winner” ends up grossly overspending on their…
A massive part of Taylor Swift’s massive appeal is the notion that she’s an open book. Toward the beginning of the new Netflix documentary Miss Americana, she describes the fan experience of listening to her records as “kind of like reading my diary,” after literally reading some of her old diary entries directly to…
The Rhythm Section, a thriller about revenge and geopolitics, wastes no time establishing a tone of po-faced cheese. Armed with a silenced pistol, Stephanie Patrick (Blake Lively) creeps up a stairway in Morocco, past a parrot, and up behind an old man in a wheelchair. She appears to be some kind of stylish assassin,…
Last summer, a shocking viral video began pinging around Twitter. In the clip, a man at a ski resort makes a panicked dash for safety during a controlled avalanche, abandoning his wife and two children to the wall of snow rushing toward them. “Men are unbelievably useless” read one tweet from a verified user. Others…
Mob movies usually foreground the concept of honor among thieves. In this world, you can lie, cheat, steal, and sometimes even kill with impunity, but spill one word to the authorities and you’re forever a rat—the lowest, most irredeemable scumbag who ever was or could be. As a defense attorney sneers at Henry Hill…
You could come to Sundance and only party. Those who do probably spend a lot of their time on Main Street. The historic thoroughfare is the nightlife epicenter of Park City, its Bourbon Street. Swarm in from the adjacent transit hub, as many locals and tourists alike do, and you’ll experience an uphill climb of bars,…
In a hospital where few patients are ever healed, overseen by a doctor who only delivers bad news, a woman is having a seizure. Her guttural choking can be heard on the soundtrack before Beanpole fades in on its opening moments, her mouth gurgling and her limbs twitching as she stands frozen in a steaming, bustling…
One of the purest pleasures of regularly attending the Sundance Film Festival is watching a filmmaker grow into what Lady Bird’s mom might witheringly refer to as the best version of themself. It’s a bit like one of those human evolution charts, except that instead of witnessing early man gradually fix their posture…
It’s telling, perhaps, that the first big-screen dramatization of the Harvey Weinstein scandal doesn’t feature Harvey Weinstein at all. Not once over the course of the film is that name uttered. In fact, no one calls the character, a high-powered executive who looms over his movie studio like an ornery emperor, by any…
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…
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