There are exactly two good jokes in Mortal Engines, and they involve Minions and a Twinkie. These tiny scraps of humor jump out like Pop Rocks in a bowl of oatmeal, not only because everything that surrounds them is so dingy, but also because they remind us of the possibilities of the film’s core premise: that more…
The once-wide aesthetic gap between film and television has functionally ceased to exist, and this year we saw a number of TV series shot to look like films, as our own Noel Murray noted last month. But while Hollywood’s obsession with tentpole filmmaking has sent a number of big-name auteurs to TV, it’s still rare to…
So who are the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, anyway? A topic to ponder another time, as this morning, just one day after announcing hosts Andy Samberg and Sandra Oh (who’s now both a host and nominee, thanks to Killing Eve) for this year’s ceremony, the HFPA unrolled its list of nominees for the 76th Annual…
We’re limping toward the end of 2018, and everyone is exhausted. In a culture where truth is malleable, spite and greed are celebrated, and unimaginable atrocities are reduced to just another fleeting set of stimuli, how could you not be? A similar sense of existential fatigue permeates Vox Lux, The Childhood Of A…
Now that Lords Of Chaos, Feral House’s seminal (yes, seminal!) book on the Satanic origins and violent history of Norwegian black metal, has become a major motion picture, it’s time to welcome the next book in the publisher’s extreme metal series, Blood, Fire, Death: A Swedish Metal Story. Written by Swedish…
To be completely honest, we’ve read up on it, and we’re still not entirely sure what the deal is with this Once Upon A Deadpool release. It’s a PG-13 cut of Deadpool 2, with a name that makes it sound like a new cut of the original Deadpool, and it’s a cancer charity benefit that’s playing in movie theaters that has…
Clara’s Ghost is a film that’s difficult to put in a genre box: Our own Alex McLevy called it a “cracked dramedy” after seeing it at this year’s Cinepocalypse festival, and the film’s trailer swings between comedy, drama, and full-on horror, with a little Haley Joel Osment to boot. What we do know is that…
It’s been a while—eight whole months!—since the last Guided By Voices LP, and as longtime fans have come to expect, the group has been busy. Along with the upcoming albums, Zeppelin Over China and Street Party, we told you about back in July that are coming in February 2019 and February 2020, respectively (Zeppelin…
Call it the Game Of Thrones effect, or call it parallel thinking, or just call it a simple appreciation for fancy costumes and bitter hatred. Regardless of motivations, it’s been a big year for historical dramas about feuding British (and/or Scottish) royalty. First there was Chris Pine’s bloody Outlaw King, then the…
Imagine the last 20 years of American pop culture on fast-forward. Now imagine the last 50 years of American history all happening at the same time. Neither of those statements can fully capture the experience of life in contemporary China, which director Hao Wu—a Chinese-American tech executive turned …
Chicago’s homegrown genre-film festival Cinepocalypse is plotting its return to the Music Box Theatre, exclusively announcing through The A.V. Club its dates for 2019. Mark your calendars, weirdos: The festival is back for its third year next June, Thursday June 13 through Thursday, June 20. The programming…
