In 1967, Tulsa teenager Susie Hinton published her first novel, The Outsiders. The first-person narrative of Ponyboy Curtis discussed his brothers and friends in the Greasers as they faced off against the local rich kids, the Socs. The novel has never been out of print, having sparked a sense of identification with…
“It left me just… speechless. Colorless. Bloodless. I couldn’t possibly believe there was that kind of savagery in the world, you see.”
The next time someone tells you documentaries are dull, there’s another title you can add to the long, long list of films that will prove them wrong. (Yes, it’s the one that’s the subject of this review.)
In times of peril, some people feel compelled (or are, in fact, legally compelled) to pick up a weapon. There’s no shortage of guns and bombs in Five Came Back, writer Mark Harris and director Laurent Bouzereau‘s three-part wartime documentary, but the weapon in focus is of a very different sort. This is a series…
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now wouldn’t have made a good video game in the 8-bit era, where stories were simple and screens only scrolled one way. Now, in an era where games unfold over dozens of hours and boast open worlds both vast and vibrant, things feel better equipped to encompass the sprawling, morally…
Palme Thursday is A.A. Dowd’s monthly examination of a winner of the Palme D’Or, determining how well the film has held up and whether it deserved the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival.
As reported by Deadline, Francis Ford Coppola’s production company, American Zoetrope, has taken to Kickstarter to fund an Apocalypse Now video game. It’s seeking $900,000 to help produce an “immersive, psychedelic RPG” based on Coppola’s classic Vietnam War movie, and should it reach that goal, its creators are…
A good biography should endeavor to not simply tell the story of its subject’s life, but also to interrogate that life—by challenging and defending it, putting both its successes and missteps into a greater context. Every person is complicated, and a biography that merely recounts the life instead of probing it is…
What Are You Watching? is a weekly space for The A.V Club’s film critics and readers to share their thoughts, observations, and opinions on movies new and old.
Back before YA was even a recognizable genre of literature, teenager S.E. (Susan Eloise) Hinton rocked the publishing world with her debut, The Outsiders, in 1967. Told from the perspective of an actual young person (Hinton received her publishing contract upon graduating from high school), the book offered an…
If the New Hollywood of the 1970s was a high school, Steven Spielberg would be the sensitive one, Martin Scorsese the cool guy, George Lucas the dork, Francis Ford Coppola the leader, and Brian De Palma the deviant. The man behind some of the best (and sleaziest) Hollywood thrillers of the ’70s and ’80s—and some…
Experimental filmmaker Godfrey Reggio blew people’s minds back in 1982 with his 85-minute cinematic tone poem Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out Of Balance, an unscripted, dialogue-free assemblage of footage documenting late 20th-century American life. Reggio and cinematographer Ron Fricke captured memorable, striking images in…
Welcome to Random Roles, wherein we talk to actors about the characters who defined their careers. The catch: They don’t know beforehand what roles we’ll ask them to talk about.
“All presidents are lonely guys,” humorist Bruce Jay Friedman once wrote, “since they have to go off regularly and make decisions that affect the hearts and minds of all Americans for generations to come. They usually do that after lunch.” As it happens, a film scripted by Friedman—the 1980 Gene Wilder/Richard Pryor…
This year’s Toronto International Film Festival has just begun, and one horror movie franchise has already been revived (that’s what TIFF’s all about, right?). Variety reports that Myriad Pictures announced it will finance the long-awaited (by some people, surely) Jeepers Creepers 3. And it looks like the whole gang…
Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by the week’s new releases or premieres. This week: America celebrates its independence (and court victories), so let’s celebrate some excellent patriotic movies—or at least the ones that make us feel proud of our country.
To some people, the true star of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed was not Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, or even Leonardo DiCaprio. Nope, it was that sweet, sweet McIntosh MVP861 universal disc player which gets its own loving closeup at one point in the Oscar-wining crime drama. Viewers with this particular bent should…
Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: Prepare for Dracula Untold with some of the best of Dracula already told.
I recently got into Pinterest, and although I can’t tell which came first, the pins or the pangs—for things that are unaffordable, impossible to make, etc.—I’ve still found it to be helpful. For example, when I came across a recipe for homemade Samoas Girl Scout cookies, I instantly remembered two things. One, nothing…
Francis Ford Coppola, the Academy Award-winning screenwriter of Patton, announced at the Produced By conference that he is writing “a multi-generational saga about an Italian American family not unlike his own,” as per Variety. This would be new subject matter for the director, who is primarily known for his work in…
