What really happened to Dag Hammarskjöld? Was the plane crash that killed the United Nations secretary-general and 15 others on the night of September 18, 1961, just as he was on his way negotiate a cease-fire with Belgian-backed Katangese forces in the Congo Crisis, the result of pilot error, as the initial…
The Fast & Furious series has, since 2011’s Fast Five, successfully retooled itself it as a multi-billion-dollar live-action cartoon, abandoning the street-racing formula of the 2001 hit The Fast And The Furious and its early, Vin Diesel-less sequels in favor of caper and spy plots and extravagant chase scenes that…
“What if I take all of this stuff off and I’m still a piece of shit?” wonders Bryon “Babs” Widner (Jamie Bell) toward the end of Skin, Guy Nattiv’s “inspired by true events” drama about a reformed skinhead’s journey out of the white power movement. The “stuff” refers to Bryon’s tattoos, neo-Nazi ink that covers his…
How do we reckon with history? And to what extent do we bear its guilt? These questions, not uncommon in countries that have done Bad Things, trouble the work of the Romanian filmmaker Radu Jude. Aferim!, the first of his films to garner significant international attention, was a sort of darkly comic “Romanian…
The bullets are already flying by the time the gun-toting burglar Abe (Frank Grillo) tumbles into the opening shot of Point Blank, leaping from a mansion balcony to the strains of Black Flag’s hardcore anthem “Rise Above.” Exchanging shots with a couple of goons in ski masks, he runs, bleeding, through the…
The Plagiarists, a no-budget, lo-fi comedy of millennial manners and neuroses, is one of those movies a critic hates to spoil. Suffice it to say that some of its misdirections are more obvious than others—beginning, very literally, with the fact that its credited director, one Peter Parlow, appears to be about as real…
Luc Besson has devoted his long career to showing the world that French movies can be even dumber than their Hollywood counterparts, and he offers plenty of proof in Anna, a parody of Cold War spy thrillers that gives the director no shortage of opportunities to once again leer at a statuesque woman with a gun. In…
Adam Sandler’s latest Netflix release, Murder Mystery, isn’t going to dispel the longstanding rumor that the Sandman mostly makes movies as an excuse to go on paid vacations, using his Happy Madison production shingle as a personal travel agency. Yes, the movie is set at an assortment of pricey European resort towns,…
Shaft. The name conjures up images of the classic blaxploitation hero, in a turtleneck and leather coat with jumbo lapels, walking along 42nd Street to the tune of the irresistible Isaac Hayes theme song: “Who’s the black private dick that’s a sex machine to all the chicks?” “Shaft!” chime the back-up singers. “You’re …
So many movies, so little time. Every week brings a new crop of them, opening in multiplexes and arthouse theaters across the nation, and arriving in increasingly high volumes on streaming platforms like Netflix. How’s a voracious moviegoer to keep up? That’s where The A.V. Club comes in. The first week of every…
Luciano Pavarotti the superstar, the popularizer, the sell-out. By the 1990s, the bajillion-record-selling Italian tenor had all but abandoned the opera stage to play sports arenas and benefit concerts. He recorded cheesy crossover singles with the likes of Céline Dion. Nearly everything about him courted ridicule:…
Before the rise of Quentin Tarantino, Brian De Palma reigned as the supreme fetishist of American movies, flirting with the absurd (and embracing camp) in thrillers, shockers, and occasional howlers that seemed to exist in part to indulge his own oversized appetite for kink and pastiche—a kind of pop cinema that…
The forced march of listless live-action Disney remakes continues with Guy Ritchie’s Aladdin, the worst of a batch that has already gifted us forgettable, over-designed reimaginings of Cinderella and Beauty And The Beast. Of course, Disney’s beloved 1992 animated musical about a young thief and the campy,…
John Wick, angel of death, deliverer of headshots, the man in the bulletproof black suit. Even in his own comic book reality, the bizarre underworld of sharp-dressed super-assassins and henchmen introduced in 2014’s John Wick, he is a mythic figure—the boogeyman of the Russian mob, the Energizer Bunny-esque embodiment…
The murder of the Italian director and writer Pier Paolo Pasolini on November 2, 1975—just weeks before the scheduled premiere of what would turn out to be his final and most notorious film, Salò, Or The 120 Days Of Sodom, the first part of a planned “trilogy of death”—remains a subject of morbid interest,…
The original French title of Olivier Assayas’ self-conscious lit-world comedy Non-Fiction translates as Double Lives; it could be read as a reference to the characters’ mutual infidelities or the pretensions of personal fiction, both hinting at some kind of cultural midlife crisis. At the approximate center of it all…
