Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases or premieres, or occasionally our own inscrutable whims. The summer movie season is upon us, which means it’s time for a semi-annual tradition: singing the praises of the most unloved, underperforming, or simply forgotten summer blockbusters.
David Fincher’s World War Z was a fairly big hit, but Fincher, Paramount, and original star Brad Pitt have had a surprisingly difficult time getting a sequel off the ground.For one thing, the original came out in 2013—which is like 12 Marvel movies ago, if that’s how you keep track of time—and the sequel burned…
Welcome to Stream And Stream Again, a monthly column highlighting films and TV series new to streaming catalogs that are of special interest to The A.V. Club’s staff—and hopefully to you, our readers. Here are five new titles streaming this April.
Anyone going to see a movie that’s supposedly “based on true events” knows that what they’re actually getting is the Hollywood version of events. That means certain elements or characters have been cut, the timeline has been reordered, and things have generally been made more dramatic to serve the narrative. But for…
All of you clamoring to @RealDavidFincher and let him know that, actually, Alien 3 is better than it had any right to be will now have to face up to reality. The director and producer has issued news that he will not, in fact, be joining any social network in the near future.
While you’d be forgiven for thinking that the story of a betrayed woman getting elaborate revenge on her cheating husband is a pretty common trope, some stories are more similar than others. And some, as though we needed reminding, can spur lawsuits.
Pop music has long served to elevate key moments in film, but it can also serve as a crutch emblematic of Hollywood bloat, especially of late—“Putting ‘Fortunate Son,’ ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ ‘Sympathy For The Devil,’ and ‘Spirit In The Sky’ in the same movie has to count for some kind of record,” we wrote in our review…
Showing the same resilience of a reanimated corpse, a sequel to 2013's World War Z is still kicking around. This, despite an onslaught of bad news, including preproduction squabbles between Brad Pitt and the screenwriters, departing directors, as well as the film’s removal from Paramount’s upcoming releases. But fear…
Computer-generated imagery tends to get a bad rap among cinephiles for the way its digitization can shatter the illusion of reality or distract from the action. Andy Muschietti’s adaptation of Stephen King’s It, for example, probably would’ve been that much scarier had Pennywise’s gaping maw been rendered with…
Clayton Purdom: Mindhunter was just compulsively watchable, at least for me. It hit the perfect mid-October note of derangement and morbidity while still being funny, quick, and tightly produced. I loved it. But it was an odd show, wasn’t it? The show shirks a traditional antagonist in favor of raw, procedural action…
Netflix’s new drama Mindhunter explores the early days of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, as investigators interview imprisoned serial killers in an effort to understand their motivations. As is common for Netflix shows, Mindhunter seems to breed endless discussion and debate. The A.V. Club recently sat down with…
The final episode of Mindhunter’s first season depicts a pyrrhic victory. Holden Ford, the Behavior Science Unit’s boy wonder, gets a confession out of a man who raped and murdered a 12-year-old girl and becomes a media sensation overnight. But the fallout from both the attention the case brings on the BSU and the…
For the Behavioral Science Unit, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The penultimate episode of Mindhunter Season 1 shows the team operating at the peak of their powers, working in in tandem to create the term for which they’ll go down in history: “serial killer.” It also depicts faultlines forming…
David Fincher is a reasonably acclaimed director who could probably get any kind of gig he wants, but lately he’s been trying to make it very clearly that he absolutely does not want some gigs. Specifically, Fincher doesn’t want to make Marvel or Star Wars movies, telling The Financial Times recently (via Collider)…
David Fincher’s patient, almost essay-like Netflix show Mindhunter is driven by a series of long-playing interactions with monstrous serial killers. The first major one is also perhaps the show’s most indelible: The hulking, conversational sociopath Edmund Kemper, who, in between joking asides and bites of pizza,…
“[David] Fincher is meticulous,” John Carroll Lynch, who co-starred in the director’s Zodiac told us during a recent Random Roles interview. “He’s after something. And it takes him 50 takes to get it.”
Twitter is a portal straight into hell, but every so often a li’l angel of insight manages to spread its wings and fly out of its maw. So I offer a sincere thank you to the twitter user who put into words something I might not have been able to put my finger on otherwise: The more like a procedural Mindhunter becomes,…
Edmund Kemper is not your average pop-culture serial killer. That’s the point. Mindhunter’s second episode may be dogged by many of the same problems as its premiere—we’ll get to that later—but its decision to cast “The Co-Ed Killer” as the Hannibal Lecter to restless FBI Agent Holden Ford’s Clarice Starling is as…
“It’s not like there’s some magical machine that makes identical copies of things.” To its eternal credit, Mad Men got the single worst line of dialogue in the entire series out of the way in its pilot episode. Don Draper’s brief aside about the state of the art in office equipment functions as a gag only from the…
Special agents Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) and Bill Tench (Holt McCallany) are two instructors at the FBI Training Academy in Quantico, Virginia. They’re seated across from one another, in a symmetrically framed, hazily lit cafeteria, discussing Holden’s extracurricular studies in psychology and their applications to…
