Drip-drip-drip, drizzle-drizzle goes the terrifically immersive soundtrack of the Chinese writer-director Bi Gan’s sophomore feature A Long Day’s Journey Into Night—a film in which it always seems to be raining, even when it isn’t. Drops recall tears, washing up misty fragments in the mind of the remorseful former…
The Best Of Enemies, an adaptation of Osha Gray Davidson’s nonfiction book about the unlikely friendship of the Durham, North Carolina activist Ann Atwater and the local Klansman-turned-labor-organizer C.P. Ellis, wastes no time telling us where its two main characters are supposed to be coming from. It’s 1971, and…
A phenomenon of the 1940s, the superhero formerly known as Captain Marvel embodies a simpler era of comics, the sock‘’em Golden Age of godlike costumed do-gooders. But then, what superhero-addled kid of any generation hasn’t at some point wished for a secret identity, powers, and an opportunity to fight evil in any…
Twisted fantasies of depraved junk-food consumption and revenge, the slacker-psycho comedies of Joel Potrykus (Buzzard, The Alchemist Cookbook) plumb the dark corners of self-destructive Midwestern loserdom—though never as theatrically or as bizarrely as in the unhygienic delirium of Relaxer, a film that evinces the…
Benjamin Franklin’s well-worn adage that time is money has led us, some centuries later, to the business of high-frequency trading, or HFT. Shares are bought and sold by algorithms in the blink of an eye for fractional profits that accumulate into millions—a mind-boggling business whose theoretical limits are the laws…
Whitney Horn and Lev Kalman’s debut feature L For Leisure bewildered many critical minds (including The A.V. Club’s own), but their follow-up, the next-to-no-budget and barely representational Western comedy Two Plains & A Fancy, turns out to be even more of a confounding put-on. Not that its trio of 19th century city…
For over a decade now, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has plied us with its stories of conspiracies and smart-alecky celebrity heroes, returning again and again to the same theme: Our heroes are just like us, in that all wish they could go back in time. Think Peter Quill’s mixtape and Captain America’s missed date;…
It’s true: Some 20 years after her stage debut, Tyler Perry’s drag persona “Madea” Simmons—the loud, crazy aunt from hell—is being retired. The big ruffled dress is being hung up, and the gray wig and the granny glasses are being put away. We will have no more of her mangled, malapropistic Bible verses, and no more of…
The French film school La Fémis, which accepts only around 1 percent of applicants to its directing program, has a well-earned reputation as one of the most exclusive institutions of its kind. It promises world-class instruction and facilities to budding filmmakers, provided they speak near-fluent French and can pass…
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases or premieres, or occasionally our own inscrutable whims. With the Academy Awards right around the corner, we’re suggesting the perfect pairings for this year’s Best Picture nominees—movies to watch with, or instead of, each of them.
The characters of the wildly prolific and consistent South Korean writer-director Hong Sang-soo are awkward guests in lives of missed opportunity and dreamlike repetition, their insensitivities and drifting attentions paralleled by a predisposition to smoke, drink, and overstay one’s welcome. In that sense, Ko…
In Nancy Meyers’ 2000 hit What Women Want, Mel Gibson plays an alpha-dog ad executive who gains the power to read women’s minds after accidentally electrocuting himself in a bathtub, and quickly discovers that most of his female coworkers think he’s a massive tool: His aftershave stinks, and so do his jokes. But while…
A crashed cargo plane sits on a sheet of snow, one wing twisted, nose blackened by an engine fire. Some distance away, a lone man works at the snow and ice with a long metal spike, clearing an “SOS” that’s been scraped into the rock underneath. We watch as he heads back in the direction of the plane and stops to check…
Dresden, in the mid-1930s. A precocious little boy and his beautiful young aunt follow a tour through an exhibit of “degenerate” artworks, taking in the paintings of Otto Dix and Wassily Kandinsky while their tour guide blathers on about the common man, real art in the Reich, and the like. Nazism is the status quo,…
The Kid Who Would Be King, the English writer-director Joe Cornish’s family-friendly take on the King Arthur legend, might be smarter that the average live-action kids’ movie, but it’s hamstrung by a lack of visual imagination and a generic script. It starts promisingly enough. After an animated prologue about the…
The Intouchables, Olivier Nakache and Éric Toledano’s monster hit about the friendship between a quadriplegic white millionaire and a black ex-con, was such a formulaic crowd-pleaser that the idea of a Hollywood remake seems redundant. Yet here we are with Neil Burger’s The Upside, an adaptation that moves the story…
