A.V. Club film editor A.A. Dowd and staff critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky are back with another edition of Film Club, this time discussing director Alex Garland’s Annihilation. As in his previous films, including the Oscar-winning Ex Machina, Garland tries to strike a balance between intellectual sci-fi and visceral…
Rob Reiner’s LBJ hides Woody Harrelson under prosthetics and make-up. The result looks terrible, like a fish-lipped Dick Tracy villain with an elephant’s ears. Is this really supposed to be Lyndon B. Johnson, the guru of Senate politics who misread the first modern primary? The president who created the largest array…
Honestly, the most alarming thing about Amityville: The Awakening, the long-delayed 18th (!) film in the Amityville Horror series, is the name “Weinstein” splashed all over the opening credits. That’s just one of the ways time has worked against this film, though. It was originally supposed to come out in January…
Alex Garland’s follow-up to 2015's Ex Machina is another sci-fi project, this time an adaptation of Jeff VanDerMeer’s Nebula-winning novel Annihilation. The writer-director has teamed up with Oscar Isaac again, who’s mostly out of commission in this first teaser for the film. Natalie Portman plays Lena, the character…
Variety reports that Showtime’s new Benedict Cumberbatch project, Melrose, has added Jennifer Jason Leigh and Hugo Weaving to its cast as the parents of Cumberbatch’s aristocratic title character. Based off Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, the series will track the life of St Aubyn’s semi-autobiographical…
The first glimpse at Netflix’s new series Atypical features just a conversation between mother and son. The latter, played by Keir Gilchrist, is a teen on the autism spectrum who wants to date. His mom—the always wonderful Jennifer Jason Leigh—is supportive but wary. “Mom, I’m getting older,” he says as a means of…
Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by the week’s new releases or premieres. This week: Midnight Special pays inspired tribute to the work of both Steven Spielberg and John Carpenter. In its honor, we’re recommending excellent homages to other films and filmmakers.
A single mother and her three children fall victim to the economy and possible demonic possession in the trailer for Amityville: The Awakening, which is, fittingly enough, a Blumhouse production. Joan (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is raising three kids, including teenage twins Belle and James (Bella Thorne and Cameron…
Though Charlie Kaufman’s body of work is filled with unexpected delights and oddball left turns, no one could have anticipated that his second directorial effort (after Synecdoche, New York) would’ve been an animated movie. In true Kaufman style, Anomalisa defies any traditional sort of classification, even for a…
Stubbornly theatrical, Quentin Tarantino’s three-hour snowed-in Western The Hateful Eight is a difficult movie by a director who’s not known for making them. Slow in the early going, it withholds almost all overt action until just before the intermission, at which point it explodes into the meanest, most gruesome and…
The Hateful Eight and its director, Quentin Tarantino, have been attracting heat lately as police unions nationwide call for a boycott of the film following Tarantino’s statements about police brutality last month. There’s also quite a bit of tension—albeit fictional—in the new trailer for the film, where we see our…
Is it possible that none of the classic characters we knew and loved from the original run of Twin Peaks will show up on Showtime’s revival? We already know Kyle MacLachlan will be there, and set photos have suggested that Sheryl Lee will make an appearance as well, but what if that’s it? Michael Ontkean’s Sheriff…
After what feels like years of anticipation—because this thing has been years in the making—the Weinstein Co. has finally released the first real trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. While earlier trailers featured little more than the names of the eponymous eight, this one shows off not only the “crazy…
Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: It’s Siblings Week at The A.V. Club, so we’re recommending movies about sisters.
The Wrap reports that Quentin Tarantino has recruited Jennifer Jason Leigh to star in his upcoming Western The Hateful Eight. We already know a lot about The Hateful Eight, including what it’s about, where and when it will film, and how its director responds to having his work leaked onto the Internet (in short: not…
Every day, Watch This offers staff recommendations inspired by a new movie coming out that week. This week: It’s 1994 Week at The A.V. Club, so we’re recommending our favorite movies of that year.
Hollywood sits at its desk, struggling to think of an idea for a movie. It considers remaking a beloved classic. “People will love that,” it says, before realizing that every beloved classic has already been remade. It then considers a remake of a remake, since some movies don’t even get it right the second time, but…
