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Best Of 2016

The A.V. Club

12/05/16 2:47pm

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The A.V. Club's bests (and worsts) from 2016.

Supper Club heads home for the holiday, so enjoy our smorgasbord of favorite stories

Your friendly Supper Club staff is at home sipping White Russians, and you’ll find us parked on our …

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From Train to Star Wars electronica, this is 2016’s least essential music

While The A.V. Club spends much of December praising the year’s best works, it’s also a time to…

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Help for the holiday procrastinator: 10 gift books that don’t say “last minute” at all

As someone once wrote in a book, the best-laid plans often go awry. Worry not if you have…

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Our favorite games of 2016, part 2

Every December, instead of searching for a group consensus, Gameological looks back at the year in…

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Our favorite games of 2016, part 1

Every December, instead of searching for a group consensus, Gameological looks back at the year in…

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Our 20 favorite books of 2016

When things get hard, you can always retreat into a good book. For all the drawbacks of 2016, the…

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The best of film 2016: The ballots

As usual, our list of the best movies of the year has been mathematically assembled from the ranked …

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The 20 best films of 2016

When people talk about what a terrible year 2016 has been, they could be referring to any number of …

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Hyper Light Drifter blended past and present to become 2016’s most beautiful game

Hyper Light Drifter is one of many modern games that cribs from the chunky sprite-based look of…

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The year’s best video game puzzle reminds us no world is an island

Earlier this year, we talked to Myst creator Rand Miller about the art of crafting adventure games. …

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The 35 best TV performances of 2016 (and one worst)

With more scripted television programs in production than ever before, it follows that there are…

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The 20 worst films of 2016

Critics tend to see all the same good movies and none of the same bad ones. That’s the major…

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A floating diner was the year’s most memorable video game location

After two years of increasingly feverish speculation, Cardboard Computer finally released the…

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The best TV of 2016, part 2

Yesterday, The A.V. Club ran down the first half of the year’s best television, from Last Week…

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The best comics of 2016

The world of comics is huge and ever expanding. All it takes is one look at Diamond’s weekly…

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The best TV of 2016, part 1

Prior to counting the top 40 television programs of 2015, The A.V. Club issued the following…

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Somehow this fascist take on Werewolf was created before Trump won

Werewolf is a game known by many names, but it always has the same core function: A group of people …

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The A.V. Club’s 20 best albums of 2016

There’s no easy way to summarize the year in music given how much of it took us by surprise.…

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2016’s best-sounding game gave a voice to nature’s small wonders

No one makes games quite like Amanita Design. For 13 years, this small Czech studio has turned out…

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The year in swag: 2016 left us with broken goggles, a cow eye, and witch pee

The horror of the year we are about to depart has been well-established, but thanks to our swag…

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Lucy Dacus somehow made the familiar sound new on No Burden

Lucy Dacus’ debut album reminds me of so many things that I already love that its only downside…

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The best film scenes of 2016

Even at their most cohesive, movies are still collections of individual moments. And any movie, no…

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Isaiah Rashad’s low-key, masterful new album is a Southern rap classic

What you hear first is the pastiche: the easy nods to A Tribe Called Quest, the snap of sleepy…

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Bloc Party’s Hymns was a musical exorcism for the band

Bloc Party dropped its long-awaited fifth album, Hymns, way back in January of this year. The last…

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Vote in The A.V. Club’s 2016 readers’ poll

Putting the “Club” in The A.V. Club, we once again ask you, the readers, to vote in the year-end…

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The definitive meme of 2016 was “fuck 2016”

The drum beat began early. At the beginning of the second week in January, both Rolling Stone and…

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Kanye, Chance, and Bon Iver can’t all be wrong about Francis And The Lights

Endorsements of Francis And The Lights come from way up the pop-music power structure: Ever since…

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Pissing Match Champions: A Year In Band Names 10-year retrospective

It’s hard to say who inspired it. Let’s Get Out Of This Terrible Sandwich Shop? Test-Icicles?…

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Our favorite podcasts of 2016

Last year, podcasting hit a hot streak, as Barack Obama took to Marc Maron’s garage for one of his…

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Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion: Side B is glorious, surprisingly deep pop

The best lyric in Carly Rae Jepsen’s best song on her top-notch Emotion: Side B goes, “You pulled a …

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From martial arts to mumbling cowboys: The best re-released and restored films of 2016

Movie culture has always been sustained by rediscovery and revaluation—that infinite process of…

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Parquet Courts’ raw, animal power evolves into a Human Performance

To say a band is maturing can come across as patronizing, as though to suggest that its previous…

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The best movies of 2016 that we didn’t review

Hundreds of movies come to American theaters every year. Sometimes they arrive at a rate of 20 per…

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Panting at the threshold of your worst imaginings: The year in band names, 2016

As The A.V. Club has done every year since 2006, we present a bewilderingly thorough list of funny, …

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Exploded View’s splintered post-punk debut is a timely call to arms

From its unplanned founding to its improvised, single-take recording process, Exploded View is a…

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Vaporwave is no longer a joke on 2814’s Rain Temple

Vaporwave felt like an exhausting inside joke before it even started, an internet-spawned musical…

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With Outer Heaven, Greys made a subtle, personal protest record

In the wake of the recent presidential election, there’s been plenty of chatter about how this…

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