Hey, remember the days when George W. Bush and his gang of wealth-worshipping, climate-change-denying, xenophobia-stirring plutocrats seemed like the worst thing that could possibly happen to America? How naive we were back then. Not that we’re encouraging nostalgia for the Bush era or anything—quite the opposite,…
Christian Bale is famously one of those actors who will just fuck himself up for a role, whether it’s transforming himself into a reasonable approximation of the popular cartoon human Batman, or starving himself for weeks on end for a part in something like The Machinist. Still, there are spooky Christian Bale…
Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies are as revered as any franchise of summer blockbusters can really be in this day and age. But when people make fun of them, they always seem to settle on one thing in particular: the Batman voice. When he’s in his Batman suit, Christian Bale doesn’t have too many long conversations,…
With the way they’re handing out minor Star Wars cameos these days, it seems like pretty much everyone who’s anyone can be in one of these movies if they want to—whether they’re a prince or a close friend of J.J. Abrams. Christian Bale isn’t just a prince or a close friend of J.J. Abrams, though, and he has bigger…
Proving that it is possible for a straight white male celebrity to comment on the wave of sexual misconduct allegations currently engulfing Hollywood without turning it into a “but what about me?” moment, Christian Bale was asked the question basically every actor is being asked in the aftermath of the Harvey…
Hostiles—a twilight-of-the-frontier Western as grim and obvious as its title and tagline (“We are all… Hostiles”), filled with greasy skin and scraggled, dimming landscapes—opens with a Comanche band gruesomely descending on a remote homestead and American soldiers torturing an Apache family in the reddish…
We’re back with another edition of Film Club. Today, A.V. Club film editor A.A. Dowd and staff critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky are discussing the period Western Hostiles, a film that reunites Christian Bale and director Scott Cooper—their first collaboration being 2013’s Out Of The Furnace—for an original story about a…
Christian Bale loves punishing his body as much as he does film crews. In the name of art, the actor became a living skeleton for The Machinist, packed on the muscle for the Batman movies, then sagged into sadness for American Hustle. It’s probably not entirely healthy or necessary, but it’s resulted in some truly…
Transforming his body for roles has become pretty standard for Christian Bale, who famously dropped 60+ pounds to play Trevor Reznik in The Machinist, got super-ripped for American Pyscho and Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies, then let it all hang out for American Hustle. We assumed he’d alter his appearance again…
Among the many virtues of James Gray’s The Lost City Of Z is its sense of proportion, which turns a decades-spanning historical epic into a pas de deux between vision and madness. Unfortunately, most recent historical epics have been more on the order of Terry George’s The Promise: messes of soap and cheese. Here at…
It sounds like Adam McKay might be keeping his The Big Short team together for his next politically infused project, with Variety reporting that Christian Bale and Steve Carell are both in talks to star in McKay’s still untitled biopic of former Vice President Dick Cheney. Bale would play the Wyoming face-shooter…
The nearly unrelenting moodiness of Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice didn’t just bum out audiences; it wore on Hans Zimmer, who was tasked with scoring the film. Zimmer of course wrote the music for the Dark Knight trilogy that starred Christian Bale, who proved to be a great muse for the legendary composer. So he…
Last spring, I encountered a feeling altogether new: There was a Batman movie in theaters, and I had no interest in seeing it. Everything surrounding Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice—the dishwater palette of its marketing material, the resurrection (and re-dispatching) of Thomas and Martha Wayne, the words “directed…
It’s impossible to talk about World War II without discussing the Holocaust. But World War I—itself not short on unimaginable atrocities—also had its own incident of race-based mass extermination. And what better filmmaker to bring those horrors to our pampered Western eyes than Terry George, the guy who directed …
Without any actual superpowers of his own, all Batman’s got is deep pockets, a bunch of gadgets, and fancy cars. He’s just your typical trust fund baby. And the Batcave is his underground garage full of glistening vehicles, which Batman apparently likes to name after himself. You’ve got the Batmobile and the Batplane…
Empire reports that Ben Foster has joined Christian Bale in Scott Cooper’s presumably brutal Western Hostiles. Foster and Bale previously worked together on James Mangold’s 3:10 To Yuma, and they’re saddling up again for a Western where Bale plays a Native American-hating soldier whose last assignment before…
Mary Harron’s 2000 adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel American Psycho has become an enduring cult classic, with the film looming even larger in the public’s imagination than the controversial book upon which it was based. In a piece for The Village Voice, Angelica Jade Bastién analyzes the film and discusses why…
This week’s question comes from A.V. Club contributor Caroline Siede:
With the transporting, repetitive Knight Of Cups, Terrence Malick either matures into the purest version of himself or finally lapses into self-parody. Maybe he does both at once. Each new Malick movie—and they arrive a lot quicker than they used to—pushes this giant of American cinema further away from the…
Things aren’t so quiet on the Western front this morning—following the news of some forward movement on that Dark Tower adaptation, The Hollywood Reporter has just learned that Christian Bale will team up with his Out Of The Furnace director Scott Cooper for the Western drama Hostiles. Cooper, who helped bring Black…
