Last year, Run The Jewels’ El-P shared a brief snippet of a song he’d recently written, a demo for a possible gig as the score composer for Denis Villeneuve’s then-upcoming Blade Runner 2049. El-P didn’t end up getting the job—it went to Hans Zimmer and Benjamin Wallfisch instead—but he’s finally decided to let fans…
Denis Villenueve’s latest film, Blade Runner 2049 was a mixed success; critically praised, the film failed to do much at all at the U.S. box office. (European audiences were more kind.) Just in case you needed a reminder that, in Hollywood, you’re only as good as your last picture, though, Villeneuve—whose previous…
Blade Runner 2049 was a resounding success in every way save financially. The ambitious, artistically challenging sequel to a 35-years-prior film managed to dazzle audiences while also creating admirers out of those who weren’t even necessarily big fans of the original. But one group that didn’t love it were Oscar…
Now that Blade Runner 2049 is safely on video, it can be properly obsessed over by cult-like fans who bemoan the unwillingness of mainstream audiences to sit through a three-hour sci-fi tone poem. YouTube video essayist Thomas Flight has put together a tight four-minute analysis pitting shots from Denis Villeneuve’s…
This year’s Oscar nominations will be announced on January 23. Will the Academy uphold conventional wisdom or think outside of the box? With Oscar This, we highlight unlikely candidates—the dark horses we’d love to see compete.
Welcome back to AVQ&A, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you’d…
Movie trailers have always been fascinating things: perched at the intersection of art and advertising, rearranging hints and fragments of what they’re selling into attractive new forms. But it wasn’t until you could play them at a click of a mouse that they became the objects of obsession they are today. The first…
Blade Runner 2049 was a very long movie, but unlike some very long movies that waste time with interminable sequences where King Kong goes iceskating or Adam Sandler refuses to stop hanging out with Seth Rogen at Leslie Mann’s house, Blade Runner 2049 actually moved along relatively well (give or take some of that sex…
Every advancement in artificial intelligence technology seems like a step closer to one of Hollywood’s many robot-related dystopias. A robot becomes impossibly good at Ms. Pac-Man? That robot will soon be a Terminator. Robots learn how to track humans even when not on the internet? That will be helpful for when the…
Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? is a great title, a science-fiction koan that looks great in any era’s typography and instantly marks the dystopian novel as the work of Philip K. Dick. But just like “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale,” “Second Variety,” or How About A Cyborg Pope, Do Androids Dream Of Electric…
We, as impressionable humans, tend to fetishize the cultures that fascinate us. All it takes is one quick jaunt through downtown Tokyo to become convinced that its style, architecture, and mood is a peek into the future of the rest of the world, which is part of what led to it being associated with the “cyberpunk”…
Didn’t get the reference? The A.V. Club is here to help, picking apart the network of literary references and allusions that make up the ambitious alternate-future reality of Blade Runner 2049. The cyberpunk novelist William Gibson once praised the original Blade Runner’s intoxicating mix of quotations and designs as…
First, the good news: Blade Runner 2049 was the No. 1 movie at the box office this weekend, and its $32.7 million debut was only about $100,000 shy of what the original made during its entire theatrical run back in 1982. But even if the good folks at Warner Bros. choose to see a glass half full, that glass can’t…
Blade Runner 2049 is a very good film. It is also, we should remember, nearly three hours long. Those 164 minutes are a visually stunning exploration of a finely realized, deeply melancholy future America, sure, but they’re also 74 minutes longer than the Ideal Movie Length—the one everyone agreed upon before Peter…
Judging by the reactions online over the weekend, people seem torn on whether Blade Runner 2049 is good or great, long or too long, a box office failure or only kind of a box office failure. Pretty much everyone who loved the first film, though, at least very much enjoyed the long-awaited sequel, in part because of…
According to WhoSampled, that endlessly useful resource for determining which artists should probably be sued, bits of Blade Runner have been paid homage to—and straight-up pilfered—more than 80 times in the past 35 years, turning up in works from everyone from Ryuichi Sakamoto to Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Rutger Hauer’s…
With the highly anticipated sequel hitting theaters this weekend, today is pretty much the last day you can reflect on the themes and philosophical implications of 1982’s Blade Runner before whatever is going to happen in Blade Runner 2049 completely changes what you think. The original Ridley Scott feature is not…
After 35 years of science-fiction movies only inspired by—or blatantly derivative of—Ridley Scott’s landmark dystopian noir, they finally made another Blade Runner: a nearly three-hour, big-budget art movie masquerading as a blockbuster, starring Ryan Gosling as a new era’s robot-hunting answer to Harrison Ford (who…
Blade Runner takes place in a futuristic, smog-filled world with glowing umbrellas and flying cars, and with all of those fabulous advancements in technology, it simply wouldn’t make sense for free movie screenings in the future to be limited just to one city. So, to promote the movie’s upcoming sequel, The A.V. Club …
Harrison Ford is a slam-dunk late-night interview, his droll humor and stone-faced inability to give a shit leading to all-time great sit-downs with hosts who can keep up, like David Letterman. Watching him shit on Blade Runner 2049 co-star Ryan Gosling has been a blast, but at some point, the facade must crack,…
