The A.V. Club Presents Film Club

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 on a dozen slasher movies (and one weird magic-mask outlier) released over the last 40-plus years, with an eye towards the cream of the pumpkin crop—beyond, of course, John Carpenter’s timeless and unimpeachable original. For our critics’ thoughts on Halloween Kills, check out this special bonus episode of the show.

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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, we’ve programmed a prospective marathon of 007 adventures, selecting one movie for each of the six actors that have played the superspy. To discuss this daunting, nearly day-long block of espionage blockbusters, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife welcome a special guest: fellow A.V. Club staffer and lifetime James Bond superfan Cameron Scheetz. Fair warning: We do not see eye to eye on Goldeneye.

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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 they take a close look at three of the most prominent selections of the program this year, including an ultra-violent COVID-era zombie movie, the latest character study from a hometown indie-film hero, and the big, controversial winner of another festival across the pond.

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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, including a delicate French familial drama, a confounding German experiment, and a batshit found-footage horror movie featuring one of the most obnoxious protagonists in recent cinema history. The two also offer a couple of recommendations for movies to watch out for as the fall festival season spills out into the wider world of film releasing.

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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 common practice, and why the expression “The book is better” still rings plenty true much of the time.

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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. On a brand new episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife discuss these franchise competitors: this week’s addition to the Marvel canon, Shang-Chi And The Legend Of The Ten Rings, and last week’s reboot of a ’90s horror sensation, Candyman.

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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 for a YA riff on slasher movies. Our critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife dig in to all this in their discussion of Fear Street, as well as the layers of homage that go into these films.

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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 critic should follow, lest scathing analysis shade into mean-spirited invective. On this week’s very inside-baseball episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife take the listener behind the curtain of their critical process and discuss how to write about bad movies right.

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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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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 as his movies continue to do good business and satisfy a faithful critical fanbase. On this week’s episode of Film Club, A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife discuss the career of this divisive blockbuster auteur, whose latest thriller, Old, is now playing in theaters.

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