A24

Chance the Rapper makes his acting debut in a wild new slasher from A24.

Comedian Bo Burnham’s feature film debut is a coming-of-age tale about the nightmare of young adolescence, and it’s one of the year’s best movies.

Listen, I don’t need to even know that A24 is behind Moonbase 8 to be insanely excited for it. A new TV series from Portlandia co-creators Fred Armisen and Jonathan Krisel, starring Armisen, John C. Reilly and Tim Heidecker as astronauts? WHEN CAN I WATCH?! Having one of the most acclaimed film distributors involved is just an added bonus.

In recent years, one horror film emerges early on as the best horror film of the year. In 2017 it was Jordan Peele’s exceptionally smart social thriller Get Out; in 2016 it was Robert Eggers’ period stunner The Witch; in 2018 that honor goes to Ari Aster’s Hereditary. Starring Toni Collette as a woman struggling to cope with the increasingly disturbing implications of her mother’s death, Aster’s ferocious directorial debut plumbs the darkest depths of mental illness to reveal the true meaning of psychological terror.

Back in 2016, it was announced that Chance the Rapper was working on a secret film project with A24 — the acclaimed indie distributors behind recent faves like The Witch, Green Room, and Moonlight. That project is a horror film called Slice, and the studio has released a new teaser trailer for their collaboration with the beloved rapper just in time for Halloween.

Boutique studio A24 has made a name for themselves by doing things differently — that goes for the movies they buy, how they’re released, and especially how they’re promoted. The latest trailer for their upcoming thriller It Comes At Night mercifully eschews the Inception BWAAAAAAM and the creepy-children pop cover for a novel approach, pairing context-free images from the film with various disturbing quotes about fear, distrust, and evil. Instead of using pull-quotes from glowing reviews, the A24 marketing team figured they couldn’t get an endorsement more ringing than one of serial murderer Charles Manson’s family motto.

Due to what I am choosing to diplomatically refer to as “recent political shake-ups,” the future of women’s health center Planned Parenthood looks dark and uncertain. New bills have placed their all-important federal funding in jeopardy, and not the fun kind, where you get to show off how many river names you remember from middle school. In addition to making it more difficult to procure safe abortions, the proposed changes would threaten the availability of birth control and the various medical services that Planned Parenthood offers. If they hope to survive in the years to come, they’ll need grassroots support, and today brings the new that they’ll get a helping hand from the good folks at A24.

When that weird trailer premiered last week that looked like either a really cool futuristic sci-fi movie or a strange, oblique advertisement for touchscreens, we all wondered what exactly A24 was announcing. The long-awaited return of a director? The debut of someone new? A collaboration? An intern’s mistake? Now, after some sly detective work, we know what it is: the trailer was for a short film called Toru that’ll be premiering at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Studios have been extremely good at keeping secrets lately. Recently, we had Netflix’s Beyonce-like drop of the unannounced The OA, which spread some ripples but didn’t seem to make many waves. The streaming service hasn’t offered an explanation as to why they decided to not provide the show with any advertisement, but its an intriguing business model nonetheless. Today, the studio A24 released what looks like a trailer for a project called simply “Untitled.”

Boutique film distributor A24 is having what’s known in the world of professional sports as a “career year.” As Hollywood took a big number-two in the bed with a bevy of pricy flops over the past few months, the agile indie outfit has hogged all the critical acclaim with such widely praised releases as The Witch, Krisha, Green Room, The Lobster, De Palma, Swiss Army Man, American Honey, and Moonlight. They’ve got one more trick up their sleeve for 2016, too, with the generation-spanning drama 20th Century Women due in December. (Spoiler alert: it’s wonderful.) And today, they’re shoring up their future with another exciting get.