The Oscars are less than a month away, but there are a handful of films from this year’s Best Picture lineup we haven’t covered on Film Club. So we’re catching up with these contenders in a few special-edition episodes. First up, A.V. Club film editor A.A. Dowd and staff critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky discuss Darkest Hour

The baroque competence of Joe Wright, the director who never met a camera movement he couldn’t overwork, makes Darkest Hour one of the more enjoyable entries in the endless, post-King’s Speech cycle of mannered prestige biopics; it turns out there is something of an art to these things. But no amount of distancing…

“Did Jesus worry about being liked?” The unexpected surprise of this year’s TIFF turned out to be Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (Grade: B+), a grotesque dual homage to Diary Of A Country Priest and Winter Light in which the alcoholic rector of a nearly empty church in upstate New York is asked to hide a suicide bomb…

Before Rashida Jones bid farewell to Parks And Recreation and beautiful tropical fish Ann Perkins, she regularly worked with that show’s creator Michael Schur. But for all the years of their long friendship—which started on their second day of college—they had never written with each other. That is, until they…

The two Black Mirror episodes that premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September—“San Junipero” and “Nosedive”—are unexpected in that their endings don’t make us feel too terrible about humanity. One might even go so far as to suggest that they are somewhat heartwarming. But just before the The…

Pan may have fallen flat, but Joe Wright will have a chance to redeem himself on the small screen, as Deadline reports the director will helm an upcoming episode of Black Mirror. There’s no word on what kind of tech-nightmare story Wright will oversee or when it will be released, but it will star Bryce Dallas Howard…

In the middle of the London Blitz, devious nuns sell orphan Peter Pan to a band of space pirates (some of whom are also clowns), who whisk him away to the mines of Neverland and the domain of Blackbeard, a time-traveling fascist dictator who huffs down crushed rock-form fairy dust in a vaporizer mask. Blackbeard has…

It isn’t surprising that Peter Pan has lasted for more than 100 years, or that each generation gets a new version of him in the same way the character himself returns to visit each of Wendy Darling’s descendants in turn (though they’re coming faster than once a generation now; the latest, Joe Wright’s Pan, hits…

Just as the world was preparing itself for a Hans Christian Andersen story set to a My Bloody Valentine soundtrack, it was announced that director Sofia Coppola has dropped out of Universal Pictures’ The Little Mermaid live-action film.