Talking ants. Unlikely detectives. Pigs in the city. Shakespeare in love. In 1998, the movies found room for all of the above and more. Nothing made the kind of impact that Titanic had the previous year. In fact, there’s a case to be made that James Cameron’s disaster epic about the doomed ocean liner was really the…

For about as long as there have been movies, there have been special effects. That’s no exaggeration: The medium was only a few years old when people began finding ways to toy with the reality of what the motion-picture camera was capturing, creating tricks from quirks in photographic science. A century later, the…

Comic books provide infinite opportunities for creative expression in the interplay between text and artwork, and 2018 has been a remarkable year for titles with unique, confident perspectives. From invigorating takes on decades-old properties to new works about interspecies romance, “alt-right” conspiracy theories,…

Conventional wisdom holds that the best movies of any given year tend to arrive sometime between Labor Day and Christmas—those few weeks annually and unofficially designated as “awards season.” But while the major studios and their indie subsidiaries do tend to hold their big prestige titles until at least early…

With one study recently estimating that as many as 180 million Americans are listening to online audio each month, podcasting as a form is indisputably on the rise in every way—a fact demonstrated by its inclusion, for the first time, in The A.V. Club’s “best of the year so far” coverage. As the sheer number of…

As it’s done with every other cornerstone of family sitcoms, The Simpsons has taken the vacation episode to new heights (and lows). In its 29 seasons—and counting—the animated series has journeyed to France, Australia, China, Iceland, and the town of Bronson, where even the children are stone-cold badasses. Over time,…

The world of comic books is always expanding, and as more creators push the boundaries of the medium, they inspire new talents who continue to experiment and innovate. 2018 promises some exceptional works from a mix of industry veterans and rising stars, including unconventional new takes on established superheroes,…

Well, we did it. New Year’s Eve. We end 2017 in as many ways as we started it: Some are preparing to ring in 2018 surrounded by beloved family and friends, while others are girding themselves for another New Year’s Eve alone. Some of us are at work, hoping to make rent off of drunken NYE revelers, while others are…

Every year The A.V. Club office is inundated with items promoting new TV shows, films, and the occasional book and video game. It’s an assortment of random stuff (mostly from TV shows—those studios must have big budgets for slapping their show’s names on crap). Here, we’ve collected some of the coolest stuff we…

Here at The A.V. Club office, 2017 will go down as the year we grappled with covering a host of unpleasantries ranging from our president’s Twitter habit to Hollywood’s systemic cover-up of abusive men. But we also continued to write about what we love, and even when we wrote about things we hated, we had some fun…

Here is a very partial roster of people who were wonderful on TV in 2017: Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Jessica Lange, Susan Sarandon, Carrie Coon, Elisabeth Moss, Laura Dern, Kyle MacLachlan, Sarah Gadon, Aubrey Plaza, Issa Rae, Rachel Bloom, Viola Davis, Pamela Adlon, Ted Danson, Alexis Bledel, Allison Janney,…

Bad movies can be torture to watch, but a blast to write about. Thankfully, the resulting pans can also be a lot of fun to read. Below, we’ve singled out every predominately negative review (that is, C- or lower) written by our resident film critic and master of the pan, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, in 2017.

Television provides so many units in which to appreciate the medium’s annual output. A series can leap to the forefront on the strengths of a single great season; if it’s running as part of the traditional broadcast calendar, those accolades might have two halves of separate seasons. Try as streaming services and…

No doubt you’re thinking, “How could there be anything good about the greasy roadkill stain that 2017 has left on the highway of American history?” It’s true that we spent much of this year staring shellshocked at our social media feeds, wondering how we got to a place where the revelation that an outspokenly…

While some people may be satisfied with year-end lists consisting of 10 or even 20 entries— some of which are great and you should definitely go read them —others, like comedian Zach Broussard, set their sights a little higher. For the past four years, the L.A.-based comedian has been constructing his definitive list…

2017 didn’t improve much on 2016. If anything, the horror and dread of last year only seemed to take root and blossom this year, as some of our worst collective fears were realized and the future seemed to grow dimmer with every bad-news bulletin and misjudged tweet. If there was a constant, at least for cinephiles,…

Every December, when looking to survey the previous 12 months of movies, The A.V. Club consults its dream team: the writers who spent all year in the review trenches, knocking out thoughts on films of every shape, size, and pedigree. The fruit of that labor is our annual, aggregate top-20 list, composed from the…

Bad movies were the least of anyone’s problems in 2017. But at a time when art seems uniquely vital as a way to escape or at least meaningfully grapple with the misery of real life, the follies still stung. It was a year of lousy franchise films that just kept creeping into the multiplex like cockroaches; of lazy…

Ryan Gosling slugging it out with Harrison Ford in a ballroom of holograms. Saoirse Ronan defiantly rolling out of a moving vehicle. Soldiers sitting like ducks on a beach as a German fighter plane dives menacingly out of the sky. All of the above moments—and a couple dozen more besides—would have made fine additions…

The A.V. Club’s picks for the top TV of 2017 carry with them a hint of escapism: otherworldly settings, larger-than-life characters, lavish costumes, talking horses, kitchens straight out of an interior designer’s wildest fantasies. Whatever could we be trying to escape from? And could we reasonably expect our glowing…