After a year of big changes, The A.V. Club’s roster of film critics has added a slew of new faces and brought back some old favorites. That state of flux—a net positive to be sure—means our final voting roster of regulars is a little smaller than in years past. But we also wanted to be […]
In Cult Of Criterion, The A.V. Club highlights a new release from The Criterion Collection each month, examining the films entering an increasingly accessible film canon. Only Sammo Hung could inject a grim Vietnam war movie with the kind of bouncy humor that always seems to accompany his regular troupe of acrobatic action heroes. Eastern
The internet is filled with facts, both true and otherwise. In Film Trivia Fact Check, we’ll browse the depths of the web’s most user-generated trivia boards and wikis and put them under the microscope. How true are the IMDb Trivia pages? You want the truth? Can you handle the truth? We’re about to find out.
Even if a movie doesn’t end up on The A.V. Club’s best of the year list, that doesn’t mean it lacks memorable moments or scenes that encourage mid-movie pop-offs. A movie doesn’t need to be an all-time great to include something that rattles around forever in the back of your mind. As our staffers pick
In 1974—the year Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of Watergate, and just one year after the United States withdrew from the Vietnam War, having wasted 19 years, five months, four weeks, one day, and nearly 60,000 American lives—confidence in and trust of the United States government was in a shambles. Facing failure for what
On December 23, 1935, exactly 89 years ago today, Walt Disney sent out a memo to Don Graham, head of the studio’s internal training and orientation classes. The letter outlines what Disney values in an animator, and what he values in animation. “The point must be made clear to the men that our study of
Director E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow Of The Vampire, a sly and meta interpretation of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, poses a question: When is a traditional adaptation of a famous story not enough? It’s still a pertinent question, almost 25 years after that film’s release. Given that the film industry is replete with reboots and reimaginings, and
Something that The A.V. Club noted in our breakdown of the best films of 2024 is that, as the industry becomes more polarized between massive too-big-to-fail franchise films and all-but-ignored indies, seeking out good movies is more and more becoming the audience’s responsibility. In a corporate landscape where intellectual property’s reign as god-emperor shows no
Born 100 years ago today, Rod Serling was a television man. He came up in the 1950s, at the dawn of the medium, during the days of live televised plays—Kraft Television Theatre, Lux Video Theatre, The Motorola Television Hour, etc. Big names would star in meaty productions without the opportunity for a second take, racing
“This is a business where the buyer gets nothing for his money but a memory,” MGM founder Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) says in Mank. “What he bought still belongs to the man who sold it. That’s the real magic of the movies, and don’t let anybody tell you different.” Appropriately, Mank exists as a
