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…
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…
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…
Every once in a while, the real world delivers a barn burner so dramatic that it would get dinged as pure contrivance if a screenwriter invented it. For the game of tennis, that magic moment arrived at Wimbledon in 1980, with the final match of the Men’s Singles championship. On one side of the net was Björn Borg,…
In Lynne Ramsay’s fragmentary, ferociously beautiful You Were Never Really Here, the great shape-shifter Joaquin Phoenix balloons his body into a fearsome new form: a bulkiness every bit as convincing and psychologically revealing as the bony odd angles of The Master’s Freddie Quell. “Intimidating” isn’t a word one…
Welcome back to Film Club. This week, A.V. Club film editor A.A. Dowd and staff critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky discuss the nifty new sci-fi horror film A Quiet Place. Directed by and starring Office alum John Krasinski, the film follows a family trying to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth crawling with blind monsters.…
So common you could call it cliché, the asynchronous mid-scene cutaway has become a clear shorthand: When the location changes but the sound doesn’t—transporting the audience someplace new and keeping it locked in the moment—you know you’re seeing a flashback. But that’s not always the case in Warwick Thornton’s…
In the ingenious suspense contraption A Quiet Place, Earth has been overrun by blind beasties from above: a species of fast, spindly, vaguely reptilian monsters who can’t see their prey but can sure as hell hear it, pouncing with scary velocity at any sound louder than a handclap. That’s a drag for humanity,…
Just about every scene in Lean On Pete, the sensitive, unvarnished, at times powerfully sad new drama from writer-director Andrew Haigh (Weekend, 45 Years), reveals something small but important about the hardscrabble lives it chronicles. We know, for example, that scrawny, 15-year-old Charley (Charlie Plummer) is an…
It’s just like the old saying goes: The door to one mega-budget, effects-heavy, nostalgia-mining franchise closes and another one opens. Steven Spielberg today told Entertainment Weekly that Colin Trevorrow, the man behind 2015’s massively successful (and relentlessly self-referential) Jurassic World, will be writing…
On today’s episode of Film Club, A.V. Club film editor A.A. Dowd and staff critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky sit down to discuss Ready Player One, the adaptation of the divisive novel by Ernest Kline, and the latest event from Hollywood’s blockbuster godfather, Steven Spielberg. Ready Player One imagines a bleak, ashen…
Is it possible for a Hollywood blockbuster to look both soulful and soulless, depending on where the light strikes its gleaming surfaces? Ready Player One, based on the bestseller of the same name, is a pandering, crassly commercial victory of intellectual property law that’s also, in its best moments, grand popcorn…
Arnaud Desplechin loves a good detour. Since making his international breakthrough in the mid-’90s, the French writer-director has built a career of messy, novelistic ensemble mosaics like A Christmas Tale and Kings & Queen that don’t so much move from A to B as zigzag wildly across the entire alphabet, taking special…
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases or premieres, or occasionally our own inscrutable whims. With the animated film Sherlock Gnomes hitting theaters Friday, we’re looking back on other interpretations of the famous sleuth from Baker Street.
