What Are You Watching? is a weekly space for The A.V Club’s staff and readers to share their thoughts, observations, and opinions on film and TV. 

Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases or premieres, or occasionally our own inscrutable whims. This week: The recent (and very strange) Jeannette: The Childhood Of Joan Of Arc has us tapping our toes to other rock musicals, rock operas, and rock-driven movies.

Amy Schumer plays yet another shallow New Yorker with self-esteem issues in I Feel Pretty, but it seems that with each starring role, the characters become more pitiful and the life lessons more corny. Here, the stand-up and TV sketch comedian is cast as Renee Bennett, a low-level employee at a world-famous luxury…

The late Father Gabriele Amorth, founder of the International Association Of Exorcists, claimed to have performed tens of thousands of exorcisms in his career, a rate that realistically would have had him working office hours to cast out Satan seven days a week. There were other claims, too: that Stalin and Hitler…

We’ve noticed here at The Takeout that practically everyone has their own weird food peculiarities. Staffer Gwen Ihnat’s husband won’t eat fruit, for example. Editor Kevin Pang can’t stand the sight of cottage cheese. We’ve had friends who can’t do hot beverages or hate the texture of melted cheese. And we know…

In the film canon, few figures enjoy a more divided reputation than the innovative Franco-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard, an artist of discontinuities, contradictions, and quotations who has spent his nearly 60-year career in a one-sided dialogue with the rest of cinema. His accessible early films—a run that spans…

If you like going to Hollywood blockbusters—The Dark Knight, Divergent, and most recently, Rampage—there’s one city block that by now should look very familiar. Located at East Upper Wacker Drive between North State and North Wabash in The A.V. Club’s hometown of Chicago, the block is a one-of-a-kind collection of…

Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases or premieres, or occasionally our own inscrutable whims. This week: With Ready Player One still flying the flag for beloved touchstones of the Reagan years, we’re looking back on some unsung gems from the 1980s—the movies from that decade that deserve…

On this week’s episode of Film Club, A.V. Club film editor A.A. Dowd and staff critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky take a look at the latest Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson vehicle, Rampage, loosely based on the arcade game of the same name. The Rock stars as Davis, a primatologist whose best friend—an orphaned albino gorilla named…

Cannes, the world’s most prestigious film festival, announced its selections earlier today, including the Official Competition (which competes for the top prize, the Palme d’Or), the Un Certain Regard undercard, and a handful of special, midnight, and out-of-competition screenings.

In a remarkable run that lasted from the mid-1970s until the start of the 1990s, the German director Wim Wenders created a personal cinema of tastes, as intimate as a mixtape and as leisurely as a road trip. The big existential statements (Kings Of The Road, The State Of Things, Paris, Texas, Wings Of Desire) were…

It’s a stereotype of comedians that they want to be taken seriously; think Woody Allen’s Bergman worship or The Day The Clown Cried, to cite a couple of the more notorious cases. But how often does the opposite happen, that a more or less humorless moralist sets out to reinvent themselves as a jokester? Bruno Dumont…

Beirut, a businesslike spy thriller set in the early 1980s, finally gives Jon Hamm a film role that makes something of the Mad Men star’s Humphrey Bogart qualities, playing Mason Skiles, an alcoholic, washed-up former diplomat with a perpetual hangover squint who has been enlisted by the CIA for a secret hostage…

What Are You Watching? is a weekly space for The A.V Club’s staff and readers to share their thoughts, observations, and opinions on film and TV. 

At this point, HBO’s real-life-scandal-based TV movies—its Emmy-bait character studies of influence and notoriety, its Profiles In Hubris—are something like an annual tradition. But the pay-cable titan’s long-in-the-works, Al Pacino-led drama about the fall of the popular Penn State football coach Joe “Joe Pa” Paterno…

Welcome back to Film Club. This week, A.V. Club film editor A.A. Dowd and staff critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky discuss the nifty new sci-fi horror film A Quiet Place. Directed by and starring Office alum John Krasinski, the film follows a family trying to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth crawling with blind monsters.…

The close proximity of mining and myth is one of the starting points of Good Luck, a documentary by the peripatetic avant-garde filmmaker Ben Russell in two parts, each long enough to be its own stand-alone feature: the first shot deep in the bowels of an industrial copper mine in Serbia, the second at an illegal gold…