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.
Blade Runner 2049 was clearly a big, complicated project, if only because we’ve heard a lot about the different iterations it went through and the details that were changed late in production. We already heard that it was originally four hours long, though that version was never meant for the public, and now Collider has…
Just about a year ago, Blade Runner 2049 editor Joe Walker revealed that director Denis Villeneuve’s original cut of the film was four hours long and split into two parts, with the first half focusing on Ryan Gosling’s K learning about who he is (or who he thinks he is) and the second half starting after the high-tech…
This post contains plot details from Detroit: Become Human, season two of Westworld, and Blade Runner 2049.
Forget Westworld and the disappointing movies we sometimes write about in these monthly roundups, because HBO’s HBO GO and HBO Now streaming services are getting some legitimately good stuff in June. Have you heard of a little movie called A Cure For Wellness? It had leeches or something. How about The Mountain…
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…
Note: This article contains major plot revelations for Blade Runner 2049.
Today’s question: What’s missing from our list of the year’s best films?
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…
