Let’s be reasonable: No one was expecting cinema gold from an August release in which Jason Statham fights a big prehistoric shark. But The Meg still failed to live up to our low expectations. Critics A.A. Dowd and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky sat down to discuss why on the latest (and final) Film Club.
As children, we learn three things about the shark: that its skeleton is made of cartilage, like your nose; that when it loses a tooth, another will pop up in its place; and that if it stops moving, it will die. None of this information is comforting, given what we instinctively believe about the toothier members of…
On this week’s episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky sit down to discuss the latest from Spike Lee, which tells the bizarre true story of Ron Stallworth, a black detective for the Colorado Springs Police Department who infiltrates the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan by posing as a white…
On this week’s episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky take a look at Disney’s new live-action Christopher Robin, inspired by the Winnie The Pooh stories by A. A. Milne and E. H. Shepard. In a Hook-esque twist, Christopher Robin follows a now grown-up, workaholic Christopher whose inner child…
Picture this: It’s the late 1940s or early ’50s, and Christopher Robin (Ewan McGregor), the little boy from A.A. Milne’s Winnie-The-Pooh stories, is all grown up. He works as a number-cruncher for a London luggage company, can’t get a weekend off to go to the country with his wife (Hayley Atwell) and their precocious…
When Angel Lamere (Dominique Fishback), the protagonist of Jordana Spiro’s debut feature Night Comes On, returns to Philadelphia, the first thing she does is get her hands on a gun. It’s her 18th birthday, and she’s just been let out of juvenile detention with nothing to her name but a phone with a dead battery and a…
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.
The summer movie season starts to wind down this weekend with Mission: Impossible—Fallout, the latest entry from one of Hollywood’s most reliably entertaining franchises. In a first for the series, which usually changes helmers with each film, Rogue Nation writer-director Christopher McQuarrie returns to orchestrate…
It’s the summer of 1991 in Cape Cod, a hormonal tragedy crudely destined to end in the billion-dollar biblical cataclysm of Hurricane Bob. The haves are the yachters, vacationers, and tennis-racket preppies. The have-nots are the townies: Hunter Strawberry (Alex Roe), the local prince of pot, a stud with a rumored…
The business of health is built on other people’s problems. This simple fact is reiterated in one form or another throughout Kirby Dick’s muckraking exposé of the medical devices industry, The Bleeding Edge; we see it in regulatory buck-passing, excruciating side effects, and a level of corporatization that, in Dick’s…
In the near future of Drake Doremus’ sci-fi inanity Zoe, androids (called “synthetics,” because it’s that kind of movie) have become ubiquitous, but true love remains scarce as ever. Hip and good-looking people turn to the Machine, a computer matchmaker that’s basically OkCupid, or gobble up 100 mg doses of the…
Welcome back to another edition of Film Club. For this week’s second episode , A.A. Dowd and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky follow up their discussion of Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again with a look at another lazy sequel. Although Denzel Washington has proven himself to be a credible action star in the past (see his collaborations…
For the first of two Film Club segments today, critics A.A. Dowd and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky discuss the jukebox musical Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, a combination sequel and prequel to the 2008 box-office hit. Even with a new writer-director (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’s Ol Parker), Here We Go Again learns nothing…
Here we are again, back in Greece, enchanted land of weathered baby-blue everything and swarthy fishermen who smack their chests and shout “Opa!,” for another two hours of watered-down soap opera and ABBA karaoke. What did these creators of catchy ’70s Europop par excellence do to deserve not one, but two dull jukebox…
The photographer Lauren Greenfield, whose documentary The Queen Of Versailles profiled a mega-rich Florida family and their unfinished 85,000 square foot house, offers a career survey in Generation Wealth, revisiting her earlier books, photo assignments, and short docs in a purported overview of our global culture of…
Our A.V. Club Field Guide To Parenting is designed to guide you toward the best kids’ books, shows, movies, and music, just like we do with The A.V. Club for adults. Every month or so, we will feature a new subject with a few essential pop culture takes parents should know, saving you from the mountains of kids’ dreck…
Last week, I rewatched Casino, Martin Scorsese’s 178-minute glitz epic about the rise and fall of the mob in Las Vegas in the 1970s and ’80s—a movie that wrestles with its own conspicuous excess. The needle-drop montages, the zillion costume changes and killer suit-shirt-and-tie combos, the physical and verbal…
