The A.V. Club Presents Film Club

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 this week’s episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife talk about a trio of new releases giving the summer movie calendar a good name: M. Night Shyamalan’s nightmarish aging thriller Old, which came out last week; David Lowery’s hypnotic Arthurian fantasy epic The Green Knight, which opens today; and James Gunn’s gory, funny new addition to the DC superhero universe, The Suicide Squad, which will hit theaters and HBO Max next Friday.

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By popular and very persistent demand, this week saw the improbable release of a kind of holy grail of superhero-cinema fandom: the fabled, four-hour Zack Snyder cut of Justice League, which fans have been clamoring for since the heavily rewritten, reshot, and recut version of the movie landed like a hunk of kryptonite back in 2017. In honor of the occasion, regular Film Club host A.A. Dowd and special guest Alex McLevy (who’s filling in for Katie Rife this week while she covers the SXSW Film Festival) look back on the franchise Snyder launched eight years ago, tracing its origins and course corrections, while talking about what works and what doesn’t in super-sized spectacles like Man Of Steel, Batman V Superman, and Wonder Woman.

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Every January, thousands of people fly into Utah and then descend on the sleepy ski town of Park City for the annual movie-lover summit that is Sundance. Not this January, though. Because we’re still snowed in, so to speak, by the dangers of an ongoing pandemic, America’s most popular and prominent film festival went largely online in 2021. Did this change in format change the fabled Sundance experience? And how were the films themselves this year? Reporting “from” Sundance—which it to say, their living rooms—critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife discuss this unusual year for the festival, including some of its most prominent and talked-about titles.

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Once upon a time, movies and television were mortal enemies, and pretty easy to tell apart, too. But the lines that once separated these two mediums have been blurring for a while now—a process that’s only been accelerated by the rise of streaming platforms, where everything is just content for the algorithm. And this year, as movie theaters closed their doors in the face of a deadly pandemic and people began watching everything at home, the distinction between big and small screen entertainment seemed less relevant than ever. But have we really reached the point where the two are one and the same? On this week’s episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife are joined by a very special guest, TV Club editor Danette Chavez, to discuss our strange new media landscape. Don’t worry: Twin Peaks comes up, of course.

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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 for the best of PT Anderson. Surprising spoiler alert: It might be the same film.

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