Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases or premieres, or occasionally our own inscrutable whims. With the remake of the blaxploitation classic Super Fly opening in theaters this week, we’re looking back on the genre’s 1970s heyday.
Guileless charisma is the main weapon in Alden Ehrenreich’s holster. It’s why he was perfect as the blissfully ignorant singing cowboy of Hail, Caesar!, but also, perhaps, why he couldn’t quite disappear into Han Solo: There’s no hint of outlaw amorality—of anything other than boyish magnetism, really—behind his sly…
Most comedies about men stubbornly refusing to act their age are actually stealth lectures: Fun is fun, they’ll grant, before going on to insist that sorry, you really do have to grow up eventually. Tag begs to differ. This is a comedy that says you never have to totally grow up, so long as you occasionally, literally…
It’s mid-June, which means Pixar is racing another shiny all-ages blockbuster into theaters: Incredibles 2, Brad Bird’s belated return to animation and to his first family of incognito superheroes, scrambling through another retro-futuristic adventure and some of the best action scenes in superhero-cinema history. On…
Early into Brad Bird’s Incredibles 2, Elastigirl (Holly Hunter) races down the gridlocked streets of a Space Age metropolis on a custom-built motorcycle: flinging the bike in and out of tight traffic, stretching her impossibly malleable limbs around the sleek surfaces of a runaway maglev train. One of several dazzling…
Does Hereditary live up to the hype? Or is its scariness a matter of personal taste? On this edition of Film Club, A.V. Club film editor A.A. Dowd (who has been raving about the movie since the beginning of the year) and staff critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky sit down to discuss the Sundance horror sensation, which gives…
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases or premieres, or occasionally our own inscrutable whims. With the Sundance sensation Hereditary opening in theaters this week, we’re taking a look at other movies that make our skin crawl.
A.V. Club film editor A.A. Dowd and staff critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky are back with another edition of Film Club, this time discussing Ocean’s 8, the female-fronted soft-sequel to Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s trilogy. Directed by The Hunger Games’ Gary Ross, Ocean’s 8 unfortunately lacks the polish, charm, and wit of…
Of all the blood-curdling images conjured up by Hereditary, the most traumatically terrifying new horror movie in ages, one sticks out as particularly definitive: Toni Collette, face twisted into a grotesque grimace of fear, staring off screen at a ghastly something we’ll soon have the bad luck of laying eyes on too.…
There’s no artist so unconventional that a highly conventional biopic can’t be made about them. As its title suggests, Rodin takes as its subject the famous French sculptor, considered by many to have ushered his medium of choice into the modern era, breaking the “rules” almost by accident, reshaping the art form in…
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…
When could $100 million possibly be disappointing? When, and perhaps only when, you’re talking about one of the biggest blockbuster franchises of all time. Solo, Disney’s attempt to engineer an origin story for the most devil-may-care smuggler in the galaxy far, far away, predictably topped the box office this…
After a brief hiatus, A.V. Club film editor A.A. Dowd and staff critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky are back with a new edition of Film Club, discussing Disney’s latest trip to the galaxy far, far away, Solo: A Star Wars Story. Wherein the last entry in the Star Wars saga broke from convention (to the chagrin of some die-hard…
Four days after The Tale premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Larry Nassar faced his final legal fate. “Topical” wasn’t a strong enough word for how the film looked, adjacent to the current events it seemed to be processing, dramatizing, making cathartic in real time. Here, after all, was a portrait of a…
Apologies to anyone hoping for a first impression on the closing night film of Cannes, Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. It’s premiering right now, as I type this, but I’m on a flight to New York instead, ready to return to real life after 11 days in the bubble. I’ve missed or am missing a few other…
