Now that the long night of Game Of Thrones’ offseason has begun, we can take stock of its main players’ journeys. YouTuber TheGaroStudios was up for the challenge of condensing six seasons’ worth of character developments into a couple of well-executed vignettes that eschew chronological retelling for each character’s…

For Star Trek fans, there’s been surprisingly little fanfare surrounding the show’s 50th anniversary (even more so considering that one of Star Trek’s legacies is the creation of modern fandom as we know it in the form of fan-fictions, conventions, and cosplay). Sure, there’s a new Blu-ray box set coming out and a…

Scoring Nick Offerman to be a spokesperson for your scotch whisky portfolio has the feel of both marketing coup and head-smackingly obvious marriage of convenience. His character on Parks And Recreation, Ron Swanson, is a noted fan of Lagavulin (inspired by Offerman’s own tastes), so it’s only natural that beverage…

For adults of a certain age, MTV’s TRL (or Total Request Live to those of us of an even more certain age) was a television event that was both musical tastemaker and locus around which a teen could define her musical identity. Budding snobs could align themselves against it, pop lovers could be validated by it, and,…

Great news, Rick And Morty fans: Everyone’s favorite insectoid assassin, Krombopulus Michael, lives. Or rather, there’s a universe in which Krombopulus Michael—the Andy Daly-voiced killer who died on screen in “Mortynight Run”—isn’t dead yet, and that’s the universe we’ve been following for most of the show’s run.

Auralnauts, the humorists behind the musical score-less version of the Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope’s throne room scene, a now prophetic-looking “paradox edition” of Terminator Genisys , and an entire series devoted to an alternate retelling of the Star Wars saga, have trained their sights on the latest…

In concept, a fan-made animated series about Nintendo’s Star Fox games following the continuity of Star Fox 64 sounds like a recipe for charming failure, akin to the many passionate but ultimately cringe-inducing Star Trek fan films. So it’s an unexpected delight that animator Matthew Gafford’s A Fox In Space is so…

The success of Bryan Singer’s first X-Men film in 2000 arguably kicked off the modern era of superhero filmmaking, followed as it was by Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, Singer’s own X2 and the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe with 2008’s Iron Man. So the director can be forgiven for opting for more “serious”…

There’s a reason why the intricate cogs-and-gears opening sequence of HBO’s Game Of Thrones is created in a computer instead of using practical materials, and that’s because the latter would be hellishly difficult. Still, given the show’s audience and popularity, those with the money, time, and the brand synergy…

Letterboxes, the black boxes that appear on either the top and bottom or sides of film and television shows to preserve their original display format, have become so commonplace that most people don’t bat an eye at them. Instead, companies like Netflix have gotten in hot water from users for cropping videos that…

Erik Bauersfeld, the voice behind Star Wars’ striking crustacean commander, Admiral Ackbar, and speaker of one of the most famous lines in the franchise’s history, died last week at 93. But shortly before his death, BBC radio presenter Jamie Stangroom sat down with Bauersfeld, sharing with The A.V. Club what he…

One of the great and frustrating things about the internet is that while it promises incredible depth and variety, it’s hard to get out of the shallows. Using the web in the early days elicited a sense of excitement and possibility that’s been circumscribed by brands, changes in search engine technology, and the…

How does a cinema sin denoting careless technique become a cinema staple assuring authenticity and verisimilitude? That’s what Vox explores in its latest video on the history of the lens flare, tracing its place in film history from Citizen Kane (where it was studiously eliminated) to its absurd apogee in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek films

Understanding the intricacies–and, hell, even the broad strokes–of Marvel’s multiple title-spanning Civil War comic book event will almost certainly be unnecessary to understanding the upcoming Captain America: Civil War movie. This is good, because the main Civil War comics are a mess of puzzling characterizations…

One of the hallmarks of good CGI (and great visual effects in general) is its invisibility. Success means never letting the audience figure out what’s been made with a computer and what was done practically. By this measure, Deadpool VFX studio Atomic Fiction did a remarkable job creating one of the film’s big action…

Blade Runner is a movie full of suggested mysteries, some of the biggest of which—like “Is Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard a replicant?”—have been revealed in the decades since the film’s release. Others, such as “What is Gaff’s (the origami-making character played by Edward James Olmos) deal?” are left blessedly open to…

Last weekend’s episode of The Walking Dead took a break from the show’s usual grim nihilism, almost overcorrecting in one particularly silly sequence. A new character, Jesus, briefly steals Rick and Daryl’s ride, gets tied up, immediately unties himself off camera and hides on top of their truck—only to be chased down…

Depending on your age, Josh Burdick’s 45-minute slice-of-life home video “April 1990 - Video I Shot Of My Typical Day Of a High School Student,” is either a nostalgia trip or strange alien artifact of a bygone era. There’s no real attempt at a narrative through-line here. Instead, it’s exactly what it says on the…

Never challenge the determination of a dedicated fan base. In 2006, George Lucas claimed that all quality prints of the 1977 theatrical release of Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope had been “permanently altered for the creation of the Special Editions” and that remaining prints were in too poor of a condition to…

To take a series of novels and reduce them to just their punctuation would have been a herculean manual task in the past, but it’s just a trivial one in 2016 with the help of a little Python script created by neuroscientist Adam J. Calhoun. The result, Calhoun writes in a Medium post on his experiment, is a “wild mix…