Alerts
When a name appears in the credits of a film as often as Mickey Reece’s does in his own, your first impulse as a writer is to call him a “one-man band.” But he’s not at least, not anymore. Before he was a self-taught filmmaker on the rise, this Oklahoma native was a touring musician, performing under the moniker El Paso Hot Button. Watching old YouTube clips of him playing a tambourine with one hand and his guitar with the other, left foot on a snare drum and right foot on the bass, it feels like a tidy visual metaphor for the life of a DIY artist. But the longer you talk to him, the more you realize that Mickey Reece resists neat classifications.
Advertisement
actors can say they have a catchphrase all their own? For Isiah Whitlock Jr., his one of a kind, distinctive, drawn-out reading of the word, “sheeeeeeeeeit” (that’s nine “e’s,” for those counting) has followed him from multiple film roles to an all-time-great television series, all the way to the canals of Venice, Italy. He’s even made it into a lucrative side business, selling talking bobbleheads with his likeness. The actor has no problem being branded as “the ‘sheeeeeeeeeit’ guy” “it makes people happy!,” Whitlock says so he’s learned to live with it, even if it may have cursed one of his relationships.
Alerts
Delroy Lindo is an actor who goes deep. He goes deep preparing for his roles, and he goes deep talking about them although, as he told
The A.V. Club in our interview with him, he sometimes has trouble articulating what goes into his process, because in the moment he’s just trying to do right by the story and the people telling it. The deconstruction comes after.
Advertisement
Lindo has acted in pretty much every genre you can think of, in films and on TV, but some of his buzziest roles have come out of his fruitful, decades-long partnership with Spike Lee. The two teamed up for a fourth time when Lee cast Lindo as Paul, a tortured soul haunted by his experiences in the Vietnam War, in Lee’s war/heist movie hybrid
List slides
Like many people who went through a deep and virulent
Hamilton phase, my listens of the Broadway juggernaut’s cast album often petered out some time around the start of Act II. Partly, that’s just because the back half of
Hamilton drags a bit it
does, fight me, sorry, not sorry but also because it’s vitally important that I not hear “It’s Quiet Uptown,”
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s attempt to channel the grief of parents Alexander and Eliza over the death of their son Philip, unless I’m ready for a protracted sobbing session. Some of this is my own baggage, and my own processing of sorrow. But it’s also just the sheer, unrestrained grief of the song, Renée Elise Goldsberry’s heart audibly breaking, even as her voice rings out crystal clear, paying tribute to two people learning to “live with the unimaginable.” [William Hughes]
Alerts
Clockwise from top left: The Faculty (Screenshot); Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade; Mission: Impossible (Screenshot); The Ring (Screenshot); Clue (Screenshot); Trainspotting (Screenshot); Boomerang (Screenshot
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 and our own archives to bring you these guides to the best viewing options, broken down by streamer, medium, and genre. Want to know why we’re so keen on a particular film? Click the author’s nameat the end of each slide for some in-depth coverage from