Hope you’ve got a quiver full of Activia jokes workshopped and ready to go, because as we reported yesterday, Halloween was by far the biggest draw at the U.S. domestic box office this weekend. In the end, David Gordon Green’s much-hyped horror reboot came just $2.5 million short of breaking Venom’s record for biggest…
Longtime readers of The A.V. Club may already know that we’re fans of the American Genre Film Archive, the Austin-based organization that does the important work of rescuing the B-movies that other archives won’t touch and treating them like the unique and valuable cultural artifacts that they are. In the past, AGFA…
We’ve enjoyed watching Jonah Hill’s progression as an actor over the years, from a comedic bit player in The 40-Year-Old Virgin to an honest-to-goodness leading man. Now, Hill is embarking on a new venture: His directorial debut. That film, the coming-of-age tale/ode to ‘90s skater culture Mid90s, opens in select…
With the release of Blumhouse’s rebooted Halloween just a couple of days away, studio head Jason Blum has been doing his usual round of interviews touting the studio’s success. But rather than letting Blum rest on the laurels of Get Out and Halloween, Matt Patches of Polygon asked Blum about a less flattering aspect…
Sure, technically you could watch Night Of The Living Dead (1968) on YouTube, thanks to the copyright registration error that’s made George Romero’s game-changing horror masterpiece also one of the most famous public-domain titles of all time. But those versions won’t be the 4k Ultra HD restoration of the film, which…
We were fans of Destroyer, director Karyn Kusama’s followup to her 2015 thriller The Invitation, when it made its North American debut at this year’s Fantastic Fest. At the time, we said that what made this particular variation on the rogue-cop movie special was the “collaboration between actress and director that…
Yes, Melissa McCarthy was great in Bridesmaids. But ever since, she’s been stuck in a uniquely Hollywood purgatory: She’s a well-paid movie star who regularly top-lines films that open in the top 10 at the domestic box office. But she’s not the highest-paid movie star either, and her films rarely receive accolades.…
As the horror genre becomes ever more mainstream, we here at The A.V. Club imagine that there are more of you than ever looking for something creepy to watch this Halloween season. And with streaming services on a similar upward cultural trajectory, we’re guessing that many, if not most, of you won’t be watching that…
With the release of the season’s buzziest horror flick, Halloween, still a week away, this weekend at the U.S. box office was once again marked by a battle between two titans whose partisans are engaged in all-out war: Venom and A Star Is Born. And sadly for the little monsters out there, the thiccer beast triumphed ag…
Gareth Evans’ The Raid: Redemption is frequently—and rightfully—cited as a watershed moment, leading the way for a new wave of action cinema that emphasizes intensely violent, visceral set pieces over all. It’s a film that asks: Who needs a complicated plot when you’ve got neck-snapping, bone-crunching violence? Of…
Haunted-house stories are, by their very nature, self-contained. So it’s especially impressive that The Haunting Of Hill House, the newest in a series of collaborations between Netflix and director Mike Flanagan, manages to be both sprawling and terrifying at the same time. Flanagan and the show’s writers take pains…
In some ways, Apostle, which debuts on Netflix this Friday, shows a new side of its director, The Raid’s Gareth Evans. It’s Evans’ first full-length foray into horror movies (he previously directed a segment in the anthology film V/H/S 2), as well as his first explicit period piece (his samurai short Pre Vis Action …
Film noir was born in the shadows. But as has been proven innumerable times over the last half-century or so of crime cinema, twisting tales of underworld intrigue can unfold anywhere, from the rain-soaked streets of New York City to the formica tables at a kitschy midcentury diner. The undisputed king of that latter…
These are both the best and the worst of times for independent film. Yes, it’s easier to make a film than ever before, but it’s also harder to get it seen. Even here at The A.V. Club, as much as we’d like to, we simply don’t have time to review them all. That’s why we’d like to draw your attention to The Book Of Birdie…
This live-action Barbie movie feels like a trap. “But it’s feminist!,” its makers cry, assuring skeptics that a multinational corporation like Mattel would totally greenlight a genuinely subversive big-budget take on one of its most valuable brands. The fact that the film has been in development for the past four years
Today is the one-year anniversary of the New York Times story that shook the mountain that started the avalanche referred to as #MeToo, and I am very tired. Tired of scraping and re-scraping the barrel of personal pain, and tired of not being listened to. Tired, as Alexandra Petri put it in The Washington Post last…
If you thought it was gonna be a long, long time until you were able to see First Man, Ryan Gosling and Damien Chazelle’s highly anticipated La La Land follow-up about Neil Armstrong’s inaugural moon landing, well, good news—it’s not going be quite as long as you think. That’s if you live in Chicago and are free the…
