Just six months into a great year in music, we’ve seen strange, galactic records from R&B innovators Solange and Flying Lotus. In the crowded field of hip-hop, emerging talents like Denzel Curry, Little Simz, and Zelooperz have separated from the pack—not to mention Tierra Whack, whose five singles widened the view of…
Midsommar, a disturbing, ambitious, and unsettlingly colorful new horror movie from the writer-director of Hereditary, unfolds within a remote village in northern Sweden, a land where the sun never completely sets. The place doesn’t look especially threatening, in its bucolic summer-camp splendor, and neither do its…
You wouldn’t be wrong to wonder if Pixar was pushing its luck, cracking the toy box open again. After all, the studio, one of the last in Hollywood to truly deserve the designation of “dream factory,” already achieved something like the ideal conclusion to its flagship saga. Even those, like this cranky critic, who…
It takes all of five minutes for Jim Jarmusch’s new movie, the half-assed horror-comedy The Dead Don’t Die, to place a vast stretch of ironic distance between itself and its audience. The film’s eponymous theme song, a tongue-in-cheek country-western ditty by Sturgill Simpson, has just rolled over the opening credits.…
So many movies, so little time. Every week brings a new crop of them, opening in multiplexes and arthouse theaters across the nation, and arriving in increasingly high volumes on streaming platforms like Netflix. How’s a voracious moviegoer to keep up? That’s where The A.V. Club comes in. The first week of every…
Magneto, played again by Michael Fassbender, shows up about halfway through Dark Phoenix, the latest and probably last movie featuring this particular big-screen iteration of the X-Men. The master of magnetism has given up the terrorist life, redirecting his energies (and powers) to the creation of a new mutant state,…
Elton John isn’t the only rock star getting the biopic treatment this weekend. Friday also brings a movie on another musical icon, albeit one largely unfamiliar to the American masses: Viktor Tsoi, frontman of perhaps the most popular and influential of Soviet rock bands, Kino. Tsoi and his bandmates and his peers…
While Cannes winds down on the ground, I make my way home in the sky. In some respects, it was a weird year for the festival. Genre films, for example, were everywhere, with the competition lineup going unusually heavy on guns, flying saucers, zombies, evil spirits, cultists, and mind-controlling plants. And that’s…
One party animal on screen tells another that “It’s the end of everything,” and I finally lose count of the number of films at this festival that have vocalized the fatalism of our time, the nagging feeling that we all may be hurtling toward a point of destructive conclusion. Uttered during one of the last screenings…
I’m not proud to admit it, but my heart sank a little last May when Cate Blanchett announced that Shoplifters, from Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu, was her jury’s choice for the best film in the Cannes competition lineup. Nothing against the movie—quite to the contrary, Shoplifters is wonderful, and wound up…
A few years ago, Quentin Tarantino announced, with typical stop-the-presses grandiosity, that he would officially stop making movies after completing his 10th feature. It remains to be seen if American cinema’s reigning rock-star auteur will make good on this early retirement plan, but the rationale behind it appears…
Controversy, like long lines and coffee breath, is inevitable at the Cannes Film Festival. Last year, Lars von Trier supplied the lions’ share of it, as is his wont. This year, it comes from Quentin Tarantino, who may or may not dramatize Sharon Tate’s murder in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (I’ll find out today,…
Rejoice, for Terrence Malick has written a screenplay again. After nearly a decade spent cobbling together improvised memory poems like To The Wonder and Knight Of Cups, this great American director has returned to the blueprint of narrative filmmaking, ready to tell something like a straightforward story again. But A…
Pedro Almodóvar has never won the top prize at Cannes. That could change in a few days. Pain And Glory (Grade: B) is far from his best movie—it lacks both the mad energy of his early countercultural work and the ravishing melodramatic pleasures of the critical darlings from his prestige period (including All About My…
One of the prevailing ironies of Cannes is that while the films that win prizes here (see the work of Loach, first name Ken) are often urgent pleas for equality, the festival itself runs on rigid hierarchy. There is, for one, the whole badge system, which divides the thousands invited to attend every year into…
