From The A.V. Club

  • Glen Powell is a master of disguise (well, kind of) in new Hit Man trailer

    You’d think that, by now, Glen Powell’s characters would have learned that adopting a false identity and lying to pretty much everyone you know never pans out well, but nope! The actor is trading being Sydney Sweeney’s fake boyfriend in Anyone But You for being the cops’ fake hired gun in Hit Man, and—based on the film’s newly released trailer—the latter deception ends up in a territory just as sultry and complicated as the former. Directed by Richard Linklater and co-written by Linklater and...

  • Surprise, the Pretty Little Liars are still being terrorized in second season trailer

    The one rule of Pretty Little Liars is, no matter how many mysteries you solve, how deep down the rabbit hole you go, or how frequently you unmask A, the twisted, murderous mind games must always continue. Such is the case for the second season of the rebooted series, Pretty Little Liars: Summer School (premiering May 9 on Max). Sure, the bad guys were revealed and arrested at the end of the first season, but the Liars’ counselor (Annabeth Gish) doesn’t understand that their very unique trauma...

  • Several Quiet On Set subjects speak out against "retraumatizing" doc

    Re-airing any sort of exploitative or sexually explicit material—even for the purpose of exposing a predatory system—is a slippery slope, and it’s one Quiet On Set subjects Raquel Lee Bolleau and Alexa Nikolas say the documentary’s producers didn’t handle well. “After watching the show, I saw that it was not at all what I signed up for,” Lee Bolleau, who had recounted her traumatic time on The Amanda Show and subsequent passion for protecting other young performers for the documentary, told...

  • Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, We Are Lady Parts’ new season premieres in May

    Two years removed from the finale of the critically acclaimed, audience-beloved comedy We Are Lady Parts, it looked as though the show was going the way of MacGruber—another Peacock series destined to fade into obscurity because they premiered at a time when no one knew what Peacock was. (Yes, there really was a 10-episode MacGruber series starring Laurence Fishburne in 2021). But much like Girls5Eva, Peacock’s other comedy about an all-female music group, We Are Lady Parts has risen from the...

  • Does it still shimmer? The A.V. Club revisits Annihilation

    Alex Garland’s Civil War may be the movie of the month, but before Kirsten Dunst or Cailee Spaeny ever picked up their cameras to document a crumbling, divided America, Natalie Portman’s Lena set out with a team of three other scientists to explore an equally terrifying phenomenon called The Shimmer in the director’s landmark sci-fi thriller, Annihilation. The chilling 2018 film about a cancerous invasion of the Earth is the type that latches onto your brain and never really lets go—so much so...

  • What childhood TV shows deserve a reboot?

    Reboots are normally frowned upon, especially if it’s a project you’ve cherished for a long time. How dare anyone touch it and potentially ruin something fun you grew up with. Yet along comes X-Men ’97, which proves it’s still possible to nail the whole bringing-back-a-beloved-series thing. In that spirit, we asked The A.V. Club staff: What beloved TV show from your childhood deserves a reboot? Faerie Tale Theatre I was only four years old when I watched Faerie Tale Theatre, but something...

  • Fallout recap: A few great weirdos can't save a mostly dull penultimate episode

    [Editor’s note: This is a recap of Fallout episode seven. The recap of episode eight publishes April 19.] When you design the pacing of a modern TV drama, there are, basically, two general approaches to how you can handle the penultimate episode of your season. One model (made most famous, probably, by Game Of Thrones’ “The Rains Of Castamere”) is the one that says that episode 7, or 9, or whatever number is “Your season order, minus one,” is the ideal time to blow everything up—knocking your...

  • NBC's Olympics plans have heart monitors, Snoop Dogg, a strong hint of desperation

    The Olympics are almost upon us once again—that hallowed event where humanity comes together, once every two years, to ask itself the big, important questions that define us as a species. What is the pinnacle of human athletic achievement? How do some of these people swim so fast, and why? And, of course, the most important question of all: Why the fuck can’t NBC make any money off of the Olympics any more? That’s certainly the question the network is asking itself this year, if a recent...

  • Top Chef recap: In da (supper) club

    It’s official: We, and our plucky contestants, have made it to the top 10 on Top Chef: Wisconsin. But before our chefs can get even remotely comfortable with that reality, Kristen Kish bombarded them with an early-morning video message (“It’s always something!” Kévin cried in French. For their QuickFire Challenge, the chefs had to descend upon the unsuspecting Dane County Farmers’ Market, “like bats out of hell,” outside their hotel in Madison, WI and spend $100 each on farm-fresh ingredients....

  • Rebel Moon screenwriter says Zack Snyder's vision now includes a six-movie "trilogy"

    Stretching the definition of the word “trilogy” to (and, frankly, beyond) its logical breaking point, one of the writers of Zack Snyder’s Netflix-set sci-fi series Rebel Moon has claimed that he and Snyder actually have plans for six movies, with each pair of two films (like last year’s initial film, and this month’s The Scargiver) essentially one “installment” of the “trilogy.” That is, admittedly, a lot of scare quotes for a single lede, but damn if the idea of a Zack Snyder trilogy in which...

  • Quentin Tarantino reportedly decides The Movie Critic isn't good enough to be his final movie

    Hype has, both steadily, and inevitably, been building up for Quentin Tarantino’s The Movie Critic for a while now. It’s only natural: Not only is Tarantino coming off of one of the best films of his career, in the form of 2019's Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, but he’s also applied a huge amount of self-directed pressure on the movie by stating that it’ll be his 10th and final film. Now, that pressure has reportedly reached a breaking point, as Deadline reports that, after at least one...

  • The B-52's Kate Pierson is selling her little love trailers

    In what we can only assume is a dedicated effort to drive the parts of our brains devoted to writing punny headlines completely insane, Kate Pierson of The B-52s has announced that she’s selling a series of small, metal, inherently disposable living structures that cannot, in good conscience, ever be described as “shacks.” (Love-related, or otherwise.) No, in an act of frankly irresponsible linguistic cruelty, Pierson is instead selling “Kate’s Lazy Desert,” a campground she owns with wife...