The A.V. Club Presents Film Club

Last week was 2001 Week at The A.V. Club, and as part of this multi-day retrospective of the pop-culture of two decades ago, we voted on the best movies from the second year of the new century. On a brand new episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife continue that discussion of the bygone year in cinema, including thoughts on their respective favorites of Y2K1: David Lynch’s beloved dream-of-nig...

Last week, Film Club dived into the two Paul Thomas Anderson movies starring Daniel Day-Lewis. This week, in the final installment of our four-week series on the movies of this essential filmmaker, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife tackle the other major director-star collaboration of Anderson’s career: the one-two punch of The Master and Inherent Vice. Then we close this month-long retrospective with our respective choices...

Over this past month, Film Club has been revisiting the films written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. It’s all been in anticipation of Anderson’s new movie, Licorice Pizza, which hits theaters this holiday weekend. On this special bonus episode of the podcast, we cap our four-part series with a conversation about his latest. Where does it rank in the filmography of American cinema’s most acclaimed contemporary filmma...

What happens when the reigning Method actor of our time joins forces with one of America’s most celebrated filmmakers? On the third installment in our four-part series on the films of Paul Thomas Anderson, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife discuss the two towering collaborations between Anderson and three-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis: the oil-man epic There Will Be Blood and the fashion-world ...

Our four-part series on the films of Paul Thomas Anderson continues this week on Film Club, as A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife look back on what can be succinctly described as the second half of the first half of Anderson’s career. After the success of Boogie Nights, Anderson got a blank check for his next feature, the sprawling three-hour emotional rollercoaster Magnolia (1999). By comparison, the 94-minute Punch-Drunk Love (200...

Every new movie from Paul Thomas Anderson is an event. That’s certainly how we’ve treating Licorice Pizza, the writer-director’s latest picture, which hits theaters at the end of November. All month long, in the run-up to its release, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife will be revisiting all of Anderson’s other movies. The four-part series kicks off with a look back at his first two features, which happened to...

It’s a scary time to be alive, and to go to the movies. But have the movies themselves been scary? With Halloween coming this weekend, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife discuss the year in horror movies—the state of the genre in these uncertain times, the trends that defined these past few months of fright fare, and our spooky favorites of 2021.

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The fall movie season is in full swing, and that means we’re getting a look at some of the most buzzed-about movies of the rest of 2021. On this week’s episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife review three of October’s major auteur works: Denis Villeneuve’s enormous adaptation of the sci-fi novel Dune, which is now in theaters and on HBO Max; Wes Anderson’s foray into anthology storytelling,&nb...

This weekend, Michael Myers returns to Haddonfield and to theaters with Halloween Kills, a follow-up to David Gordon Green’s 2018 “legacy sequel” Halloween. To commemorate his latest rampage through the sleepy Midwest town that should probably outlaw trick-or-treating and rubber masks at this point let’s be real, Film Club is taking a deep dive into the whole Halloween franchise, looking back ...

Halloween the holiday is still two weeks away. But the movie franchise named after it is back this very weekend. On a special bonus episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife discuss the latest entry in this undying slasher saga, the middle entry in David Gordon Green’s reboot trilogy, Halloween Kills. And for their thoughts on the series as a whole, including the original and the remake, check out th...

This weekend, No Time To Die brings to an end the Daniel Craig era of James Bond, putting a lid on a story that began 15 years ago with the reboot origin story Casino Royale. This is, of course, just one stretch of a franchise that’s been running since the early 1960s, with no more than a few years ever passing between subsequent installments. In honor of this latest turned page in the ongoing book of Bond, ...

Now in its 16th year, Fantastic Fest is probably the biggest and more prominent genre-centric film festival in America. But it offers a lot more than just raw meat and geysers of blood for the midnight-movie crowd. On this week’s episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife discuss the evolution of this annual destination summit for fans of the weird, the wild, the extreme, and the outrageous. And ...

North America’s largest and most prominent film festival winds down this weekend. Experienced in person or virtually, the fest was a typically mixed bag of a movie marathon, offering the usual range from triumphs to follies. The A.V. Club’s critics, A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife, caught their share of both over the last eight days. On this brand new episode of Film Club, they talk about a few they both saw, ...

For almost as long as there have been movies, there have been movies based on literature. Even in the age of superhero spectaculars, novels remain one of Hollywood’s prime sources of source material. But transporting a story from page to screen isn’t always so simple. On this week’s brand-new episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife explore the tricky art of adaptation, identifying the pitfalls of this c...

Labor Day is traditionally thought of as the unofficial end of the summer movie season. It’s also generally a dead zone for new Hollywood releases, with the studios accepting the conventional wisdom that many Americans want to spend the holiday outdoors, not seated in a movie seater. Nonetheless, this strange year brings at least two major options for those feeling comfortable enough to head for the multiplex right time. O...

As summer begins to wind down and the crisp breezes and scented candles of autumn beckon, we’re taking a week to circle back and talk about what has (thus far) been the horror event of the summer: Netflix’s trilogy of Fear Street movies. Set in 1994, 1978, and 1666, each of the entries in director Leigh Janiak’s teen-centric series combines a period setting, abundant needle drops, and queer romance...

Negative reviews are fun to read—just asks the scores of film fans that have purchased Roger Ebert’s bestselling collection of them, I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie. Truth is, they can be very fun to write, too, at least for a critic who finds cathartic pleasure in chronicling their own torturous experience with a bad movie, book, meal, etc. But there is an art to penning a pan—and maybe a code of conduct the cr...

Late summer is not, normally speaking, a time to expect exceptional cinema; by the onset of August, blockbuster season is winding down and awards season hasn’t yet begun, leaving audiences stranded in a purgatorial middle zone, heavy on Hollywood’s less promising releases. But against all odds, in these abnormal times, the dog days of summer are bringing some big movies to the big screen that are very much worth seeing. On...

M. Night Shyamalan is one of the few Hollywood directors working today who qualifies as a household name. But what reputation does that name now carry? Since bursting into the public eye with his third feature, the Oscar-nominated box-office phenomenon The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan has experienced ups and downs, disappointments and comebacks. Today, he’s sometimes treated like an industry punchline and punching bag, even...