Many of the best parts of Clint Eastwood’s uneven American Sniper had to do with its hero’s jittery, uncomfortable reintegration into stateside life between tours of duty in Iraq. So it makes sense that Sniper screenwriter Jason Hall would make his directorial debut on Thank You For Your Service, another movie based…
Every year, just in time for Oscar consideration, studios release a slew of prestige movies supposedly based on true stories. And every year, it turns out that most of those movies embellish the truth, gloss over inconvenient facts, and invent things for the sake of the plot. Does any of this matter? If people are…
Clint Eastwood’s recent works, including Sully and American Sniper, offer praise to a quiet but unwavering grit that the director has come to see as distinctive to the American ideal. Alternatively, Eastwood’s recent comments offer condemnation to a generation the octogenarian social commentator has come to see as…
Despite having one of the longest and most distinguished careers of anyone in Hollywood (especially if you consider both his acting and directing gigs), Clint Eastwood has lately been discussed for two things that have nothing to do with movies. One is his widely mocked speech at the 2012 Republican National…
This may come as a shock to some people, but Bradley Cooper—the Oscar-nominated actor from Philadelphia—was never a U.S. Navy SEAL sniper in the Iraq War. The confusion is understandable because he did pretend to be one in front of Clint Eastwood’s cameras in the process of making a biographical film about…
Serial memoirist Jim DeFelice, whose previous co-author credits include Chris Kyle’s bestselling autobiography American Sniper, is being adapted by Hollywood once again. Writer Alan Wenkus, one of several screenwriters who received a story credit on the recent biopic blockbuster Straight Outta Compton, has been tapped…
Welcome to Random Roles, wherein we talk to actors about the characters who defined their careers. The catch: They don’t know beforehand what roles we’ll ask them to talk about.
You’re probably aware of the common maxim in art: that critical acclaim doesn’t equate to commercial success. However, a new imgur graph argues that the two aren’t all that far apart.
Variety reports that American Sniper has overtaken The Hunger Games: Mockingjay— Part 1 to become the highest-grossing domestic release of 2014, settling, at least temporarily, the question of who has more cultural pull: Fox News aficionados or their teenage progeny. Since its debut in December, American Sniper has…
A Texas jury has found Eddie Ray Routh guilty of capital murder in the shooting deaths of fellow veterans Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield. At the time of his murder, Chris Kyle had risen to national prominence with his bestselling memoir American Sniper. Recently adapted for film by Clint Eastwood, American Sniper was…
While we at The A.V. Club can only discuss the Oscar race, make predictions, and complain about snubs, The Hollywood Reporter is running a new series of “brutally honest” interviews with the people who actually pick the Oscar winners. So far two interviews have been released, and under the protection of anonymity…
In the grand spirit of TV Roundtable and Music Roundtable, welcome to the creatively titled Film Roundtable, where A.V. Club writers discuss movies old and new, or sound off on topics related to cinema. In this inaugural installment, we preview Sunday’s Academy Awards.
“Are you curious?” asked the advertisements, to which America—and the world—responded with a resounding, “Yes, but only if you promise you’re not doing that thing where you film us in night-vision while we watch.” Moviegoers turned out in droves to titter nervously through the big-screen adaptation of that bestseller…
In the land of the rom-com, where two opposites somehow come together to find love, who’s pulling the strings? Some would say “craven and emotionally manipulative filmmakers,” but the true hero may just be the classic god of attraction and affection. Who will tell Cupid’s story? More importantly, how can it be punched…
More than a decade after the last time a SpongeBob SquarePants movie was in theaters, the asexual underwater burger flipper and friends have succeeded where time-traveling teens, Johnny Depp’s mustache, and muscular computer nerd Chris Hemsworth all failed. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out Of Water wiped the floor with…
One of the easiest ways to tell a reader that something is bad, not good, or maybe just not worth seeing is to say that it’s inauthentic, dishonest, or misleading, or that it otherwise mangles reality—better yet, the historical record. This is something critics do all the time, because it’s simple and effective and…
For the busy cinephile who doesn’t have time to sit through all the nominees before the Oscars are handed out on February 22, Cineplex Movies has put together a supercut of scenes from all of the various films nominated for Academy Awards this year. The montage is not just relegated to Best Picture nominees, but…
Hopefully Seth Rogen and Michael Moore can learn to subsist by gnawing the picked-over meat of their American Sniper opinions, because they’ll no longer be able to eat reasonably priced sirloin in a sports bar atmosphere in Michigan. Tommy Brann, owner of Brann’s Sizzling Steaks & Sports Grille, has refused to sizzle…
Confirming suspicions that stoners going to laugh at the fake baby are only one subgroup contributing to American Sniper’s box-office success, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee now claims that the film has led to a threefold increase in people talking about killing Muslims on social media. (The group has …
Confirming Seth Rogen’s suspicion that, yes, this is a slow news week, Rogen has been forced to further clarify an offhanded comment he made over the weekend saying that American Sniper reminded him of something from a Tarantino movie. Specifically, he said he thought it was reminiscent of Nation’s Pride, the…