Since breaking into Hollywood, writer/director Denis Villeneuve has been on an absolute tear. His most recent films, which include the excellent Blade Runner 2049 and Arrival, are beguiling, beautiful reminders that show mainstream cinema still has room for genre work blending both thoughtfulness and action.
When AMC announced its new pop culture docuseries, Visionaries, at the Television Critics Association 2017 summer press tour, the network made it clear that these explorations of genres and media would be informative, but informal—expansive, but specific to whatever prominent filmmaker or producer was at the helm of a…
This week’s question is the result of a discussion about the 90th Academy Awards ceremony happening this weekend:
JĂłhann JĂłhannsson, the Oscar-nominated film composer who lent his talents to The Theory Of Everything, Mother!, and a number of films from frequent collaborator Denis Villeneuve, has died. According to Variety, JĂłhannsson was 48.
Last year’s Arrival managed to be the rare thought-provoking, emotionally rich sci-fi blockbuster, another stepping stone on director Denis Villeneuve’s ascendence toward becoming a major Hollywood talent, currently helming Blade Runner 2049 and tapped to rework Frank Herbert’s Dune. While there’s a clear sci-fi…
Arrival remains a rare case of a critically acclaimed, successful sci-fi movie that shirked action or horror in favor of the genre’s headier pleasures. It’s a dreamy, philosophical, sometimes melancholy film, known as much for the mood created by its elliptical editing as the twist ending that editing hid. An…
Nostalgia can make anything seem sweeter than it really was at the time, but it’s hard to argue with the assertion that movies were simply better when more of them had Will Smith rapping about the movie during the end credits. Granted, it only ever happened a handful of times, but the simple idea that the end of a…
The 89th annual Academy Awards are this Sunday, and to celebrate the end of another long awards season, The A.V. Club has been sitting down every day this week to discuss the major Oscar categories, offering thoughts of who will win and who should win. For our final edition, we take a look at all nine of the Best…
“Quiet” is a relative distinction when it comes to Oscar season; Hollywood’s annual pageant of self-congratulation—stretched across several very long weeks of acceptance speeches, for-your-consideration campaigns, and precursor award ceremonies—is about as reliably loud as any other pageant. If it seems quieter this…
There’s a party line when it comes to Universal’s upcoming monster movies: Don’t worry, guys, they’ll be super scary. Doctor Strange and Passengers writer Jon Spaihts claimed that The Mummy will be “the first Mummy film in the entire Universal canon with the true power to terrify.” Now Eric Heisserer, Spaihts’…
For some—like us or, say, the Academy Awards—Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi mind-bender Arrival was one of the best films of 2016. For others, it was two hours of waiting for the aliens to please do something. Regardless, it’s bound to be the subject of many, many college theses. The latest to chime in with their take on…
The producers of the recently Oscar-nominated Arrival are working on another high-stakes science-fiction story, this time from Hugo-winning Ringworld author Larry Niven. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Shawn Levy and his 21 Laps production banner have acquired the rights to Niven’s “Inconstant Moon,” a short…
It’s not every year that a sci-fi movie gets nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards, so to celebrate the honor of being this year’s Inception or Her, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival will be returning to theaters on Friday, January 27 for a special limited run. For people who did already see the film last year,…
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La La Land joins an elite club after receiving 14 Academy Awards nominations morning. Damien Chazelle’s musical about lovers in Los Angeles tied for most nods ever received by a film alongside All About Eve and Titanic. Now it seems just about preordained for glory when the ceremony rolls around.
Sometimes it’s tempting to watch a movie just to see big, expensive special effects. Michael Bay, for example, has built his career on the notion that people will line up to see money falling out of the screen (also: lampposts). Often those movies leave you feeling a little dazed and worse for the wear by the end, and…
The Producers Guild of America selected a familiar list of films to nominate for their top prize, the Daryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion Pictures, which is a fancy name for Best Picture. Among them are: Arrival, Fences, Hacksaw Ridge, Hell Or High Water, Hidden Figures, La La Land, Lion
When people talk about what a terrible year 2016 has been, they could be referring to any number of things, from virus scares to the death of beloved celebrities to whatever the fuck happened on November 8. What they can’t mean is the movies, though. Only those who spent all their money on the biggest Hollywood…
The scores for Arrival, Manchester By The Sea, and Silence won’t be getting Oscar nominations this year because the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences disqualified them all, according to a report in Variety.
Musicals ruled the top of the box office this weekend. While Disney’s animated Moana (with songs co-written by Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda) took the No.1 spot for the third week in a row with an estimated $18.8 million, La La Land set the record for the year’s highest per-theater average. Opening in just five…
