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…
From the time he defected from the Soviet Union in 1961 until his health began to visibly decline in the 1980s, Rudolf Nureyev was arguably the most famous ballet dancer in the world—certainly the most famous danseur noble in classical ballet. He was unrefined, intense, a wild child of the dance world. Even in the…
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…
