The best romantic comedies on Hulu

Streaming libraries expand and contract. Algorithms are imperfect. Those damn thumbnail images are always changing. But you know what you can always rely on? The expert opinions and knowledgeable commentary of The A.V. Club. That’s why we’re scouring both the menus of the most popular services …Read more...

1d

Is there a January horror movie worth a damn?

An extended eligibility window for a pandemic Oscars means that this year, awards season will extend well into the spring. But for their first episode of 2021, our critics are setting the prestige pics aside and celebrating a January tradition: crappy horror movies. Since 2012's The Devil Inside, the cinematic…Read more...

1d

The Return Of The King was the last time a blockbuster could be weird, personal, and Best Picture

“Fantasy is the one genre that’s never been done especially well,” Peter Jackson told The Los Angeles Times. “After 100 years of cinema, there’s not a lot of new ground for storytelling. We can all point to great musicals or horror films, but no one’s ever really nailed fantasy. So that’s the challenge. I want to see…Read more...

2d

Jason Segel is a rock of selflessness in the sugarcoated cancer drama Our Friend

The opening scene of Our Friend, a tender indie tearjerker built from the blueprint of a wrenching true story, finds a husband and wife on the precipice of a difficult conversation. It’s time for Nicole (Dakota Johnson) and Matt (Casey Affleck) to talk to their children. Nicole, we’ll soon learn, is sick, and though…Read more...

2d

Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Adarsh Gourav on haves, have-nots, and The White Tiger

In Netflix’s new literary adaptation The White Tiger, Adarsh Gourav plays Balram, a driver who struggles against what he calls “the rooster coop” of India’s caste system. As he puts it in the film, he’s one of the people with a “small belly” looking to somehow fatten up—both literally and figuratively. Read more...

2d

Identifying Features is among the greatest, most devastating films about Mexico’s drug war

Some movies wound us so profoundly that once darkness has consumed their final frame we are incapable of shaking off the heartache. That’s the power of Identifying Features, which is as painfully intimate as it is unsparing in its indictment of a country ravaged by a corrosive, entrenched evil. Making her feature…Read more...

3d

1982 muddies a compelling historical snapshot with Jojo Rabbit whimsy

There’s a whole subgenre of movies about how war looks through the eyes of a child—a lineage of violent stories told from the initially unblemished perspective of youth, including Guillermo del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth; last year’s grueling The Painted Bird; and the gorgeous, tragic, Studio…Read more...

3d

Deeply felt daddy issues distinguish The Salt Of Tears from every other Philippe Garrel romance

Of late, the films of Philippe Garrel have felt less like standalone works than items in a series—variations on familiar themes and subjects (romantic love, sexual infidelity), all bound by a concerted stylistic consistency (pared-down plots, black-and-white widescreen frames). Co-written by Jean-Claude Carrière and…Read more...

3d

A confounding, oddly titled Oscar hopeful shrugs off its own intriguing mystery

Note: The writer of this review watched Preparations To Be Together For An Unknown Period Of Time on a digital screener from home. Before making the decision to see it—or any other film—in a movie theater, please consider the health risks involved. Here’s an interview on the matter with scientific experts.Read more...

4d

Notturno offers a striking look at the scars, but not the horrors, of life in a war zone

How does one sleep near a war zone? The question, though never directly posed, is given multiple answers in Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary Notturno: on bedrolls, on couch cushions, in a hospital. Rosi, who shot the film “over the past three years along the borders of Iraq, Kurdistan, Syria, and Lebanon” (the only…Read more...

4d