April 7, 1979 was the date of the Japanese premiere of Yoshiyuki Tomino’s Mobile Suit Gundam, a low-rated sci-fi…

For a while, getting into modern Doctor Who was easy. The long-running BBC show is broken up into two distinct eras:…

Japanese horror movies have had a profound impact on their Western counterparts, permanently changing the grammar of…

This post is sponsored by el Jimador Tequila as part of its Day Of The Dead Special Coverage section on The A.V.…

In February—one month after the death of his close friend and collaborator David Bowie—Iggy Pop covered Bowie’s “The…

The films of Pedro Almodóvar are twisty, lurid, and lustful, melodramatic but deeply empathetic, taboo-breaking but…

As a pop-culture-consuming whole, Americans have a strange relationship with Jamaican dancehall. Although it’s one…

Independent record labels are often guided by a singular vision, but few instantly evoke a particular artist’s…

Mel Brooks’ reputation rests on a fragile precipice. He built a career pioneering, popularizing, and perfecting two…

For decades, horror was the thing you were least likely to see on your TV. It came and went sporadically,…

Steve Martin has been a part of pop culture for so long, and a force in so many mediums, that the best way into his…

Prerequisites: A History Lesson

Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, there were few artists as in-demand as Giorgio Moroder, an Italian record producer…

The films of Billy Wilder are more famous than Wilder himself. As with Howard Hawks—another director beloved by…

Any conversation about the mercurial singer-songwriter Damon Albarn begins with Blur. His longest-running…

If Lifetime movies came in Odorama—not Smell-O-Vision, Odorama—the scratch-and-sniff cards would have to include a…

When punk and rockabilly had a baby, the little bugger wasn’t pretty. Called psychobilly, the greasy mutant…

This month, The Sonics will release This Is The Sonics—the legendary garage-rock band’s first studio album of…

Countless indie darlings have made the jump from cred-laden buzz band to major label fixture. Just ask R.E.M., The…

Anyone needing evidence that punk rock is just as much an American musical institution at this point as jazz or…