The Latest Reviews For The Language Italian

Hulu’s crime thriller/environmentalist warning is less than the sum of its references, but star Emma Corrin earns viewers’ attention. The plot for A Murder at the End of the World goes a little something like this. A wealthy tech genius invites a group of similarly impressive individuals—including a detective who seems not to belong—to an isolated location for not entirely clear reasons. A murder sets everyone on edge as competing interests suggest several suspects and impede a proper investigation. Things only get worse as more die, and a storm ensures the group has no means of immediate escape. Continue Reading →

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The first two entries in director/actor Kenneth Branagh’s foray into Agatha Christie adaptation lost the magic of the English writer’s mysteries. With his third attempt, A Haunting in Venice, Branagh decides to make considerable changes to the story. Using the bones of Christie’s Hallowe’en Party, writer Michael Green changes the setting from a small town in the English countryside to a palazzo in Venice. Branagh emphasizes the gothic elements of Christie’s story, leaning on the horror of the location, the manic nature of the children’s Halloween party, and the gruesome moments before and after an unexpected death.  Continue Reading →

The sea is always a great setting for a story. It’s both soothing and menacing; water is cleansing and purifying, and a consistently replenishing source of food. But it’s also dangerous and uncompromising. Water is one of nature’s greatest antagonists, it can get into virtually anything, softening it, weakening it, eventually breaking it apart. But nothing on earth would survive without it. It’s a brilliant metaphor for so many things, as it’s constantly changing and moving and covers wondrous and monstrous secrets. It works even better in visual mediums like TV and film because it’s beautiful to both look at and listen to. The CW’s new eco-thriller, The Swarm, makes good use of its watery locations in establishing an aura of tranquil menace: everything seems calm and orderly, but there’s trouble bubbling up just below the surface. Continue Reading →

How long can you hold your breath? A minute? Maybe? Kids time these sorts of things when swimming, but it's not something most of us think about in our waking lives. But I know that when I swim and misjudge the time it takes to surface, panic sets in almost instinctively. The body wants to live. It takes a particular personality to ignore the body's demands in apparent life-or-death circumstances. Stephen Keenan and Alessia Zecchini are two such people. Zecchini's first words in The Deepest Breath, Laura McCann's documentary about Keenan and Zecchini's goal to become legendary deep sea free divers, are about how she's never associated diving with death. I'll grant a writer is more likely to associate everything with death. But I cannot understand plunging into the darkest depths of the earth while holding your breath for minutes at a time and passing out before you can return without thinking of your own demise. Some of us, I suppose, see a Way where the rest see a void.   Continue Reading →

Happiness for Beginners happens when hundreds of hours of labor come together over months to create something so bland and ineffectual it feels years old even on a first watch.  Continue Reading →

One of Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One's earliest pieces of marketing was a trailer-by-way-of-behind-the-scenes featurette. In that clip, Tom Cruise, strapped to a motorcycle, rockets off the edge of a cliff in the Swiss Alps. He lets the bike drop away before popping his parachute and sailing into the horizon. It's one of the most death-defying sequences ever captured on film and, as we now know, it's one Cruise himself did again and again and again. The sequence, even devoid of context, sums up exactly what director Chris McQuarrie and Cruise (the two are also co-producers) hoped to achieve in Dead Reckoning: grade A movie spectacle.  Continue Reading →

One of the things I enjoy most about the moviegoing experience is coming out of a film feeling as if I've actually learned something that I didn't know before, or had not even occurred to me in the first place. That's exactly the feeling that I got while watching Sam Pollard’s The League, a documentary about the history of Negro baseball leagues in America. Going in, I suppose I knew the basics about the subject and could name such key figures as Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, but Pollard, who previously directed MLK/FBI, and executive producer Questlove delve much deeper, and the results are indeed fascinating. Continue Reading →

It's so, so wonderful that Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse loves comics. Not just their characters (though it does) or the superhero genre (though it does)—the medium of comics itself. Comics are an infinitely flexible form. They can engage in dialogue with popular works in other mediums! They can use space to shape their readers' perception of time! They can use form and illustration style to capture the difference between perception and reality! Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is, amongst other things, a celebration of comics and their possibilities. It is glorious. Continue Reading →

The documentary Kim's Video stumbles when it stops relying on the facts in favor of flights of fancy. The video rental empire known as Kim’s Video began in the late 1980s. It started as an adjunct to a Manhattan dry-cleaning establishment owned by a mysterious man named Yongman Kim and eventually expanded to five New York City locations. Though it never went further than that geographically, it became a mecca for cinephiles worldwide. They were drawn in by tales of its legendary collection of classics, cult favorites, rare and quasi-legally obtained titles, and straight-up weird shit.  Continue Reading →

Social media has normalized behaving as though we know and can even speak for celebrities. Going beyond the concept of the “number one fan,” we address them directly, make demands of them, and attack anyone perceived as meaning them harm, acting as though we’re under personal orders. It peaked during the Amber Heard defamation trial, then that angry energy transferred over to Olivia Wilde, largely for committing the crime of dating Harry Styles. The mere tweeting of Wilde’s name seems to summon antagonistic replies listing her sins, accusing her of everything from being a rape apologist to a pedophile to preventing Styles from being with the person he truly loves, fellow One Direction member Louis Tomlinson. Though Styles and Tomlinson have both denied (many times) that they’re in a secret relationship, their “true” fans insist that they know better, and that it’s all subterfuge to fool the press. So it’s up to the fans to aggressively defend them, even threatening those they perceive as “enemies.” Continue Reading →

“You’ve seen one you seen them all," says the dastardly movie director from beyond the grave. It’s the recently murdered Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody), telling us early in the film about how stale the murder mystery genre was even by the 1950s, when See How They Run takes place. It’s also a warning to the audience that this movie will not be adding anything new, revelatory, or exciting to whodunnit cinema. Everything here has been done before, and better.  Continue Reading →

Jon Hamm is a darn good comic actor, and he's a darn good comic actor with range. In Top Gun: Maverick for instance he played Naval Airboss Cyclone's abiding sternness and exasperation with Maverick for solid straight man work. Confess Fletch—which Hamm leads as unlicensed detective Irwin Maurice "Fletch" Fletcher (previously played by Chevy Chase in 1985's Fletch), by contrast, sees the Mad Men star go quietly goofy to strong effect. Even in a film packed with colorful and more openly eccentric weirdos, Hamm's Fletch is an odd man. Continue Reading →

When people first came upon Class of 1984 in theatres at the tail end of the summer of 1982, they likely had expectations about what they would see. Those not instantly put off by its sleazo ad campaign likely assumed they would be encountering a trashy update of The Blackboard Jungle. Perhaps one with far more blood, guts, and nudity than would have been permissible back in those comparatively innocent days of 1955. In many ways, that is essentially what it was, and that is how many people at the time chose to dismiss it. However, true fans of exploitation cinema came out of it with a genuine sense of surprise over what they had just seen. Here was a film that looked and sounded like the usual garbage but had far more wit, style, and intelligence than anyone expected. Those qualities continue to impress even today.  Continue Reading →

Amber’s (Alison Brie) dead-eyed stare in the opening montage of Spin Me Round tells you everything you need to know about where she’s at in life. She’s the manager of a fast-casual “Italian” restaurant, and from what we see about how they make the alfredo sauce, the quotes are very much warranted. Her life is small and dull and she’s secretly ready and hoping for an adventure to sweep her off her feet. When Amber wins a trip to Tuscany, the film doesn’t take her or the audience on the journey you’d expect, which creates something of a mess for everyone.  Continue Reading →

In Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn’s spy thriller Rogue Agent, English actor James Norton plays Robert Hendy-Freegard. Or, more aptly, Norton plays every version of Hendy-Freegard — lovable, charming, terrifying, convincing, evil. Norton’s up to the task, and the film rewards a level of misunderstanding and a lack of knowledge about Hendy-Freegard and his history (he has already been made into a docuseries). With each passing moment, Norton becomes more persuasive, more potent in his convictions, and more believable in his alleged employment as an MI5 agent constantly on the run.   Continue Reading →

Much to the Republican Party’s dismay, the birth rate in the United States has been gradually on the decline, hitting an all-time low in 2020. Couples are not only waiting longer to have children, they’re having less of them, with an average of 1.6 per family. While climate change and cost of living expenses are the primary factors in the decision to have fewer children (or none at all), a small part of it can also be attributed to more people accepting a difficult truth: that raising children can be an incredibly hard and thankless task. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes an assured debut as a writer and director in her adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, a complicated and strangely moving psychological drama/thriller about two women who bond over this truth. Continue Reading →

There’s a word that exists in the Italian language that doesn’t quite have a counterpart in any other language: sprezzatura. What it essentially boils down to is the art of looking like you don’t care – a style of perfectly-studied imperfection. This idea goes back at least to the Renaissance, a time when the Gucci family earned its reputation as skilled saddlemakers to the rich and aristocratic. Or at least that’s how Aldo Gucci, the powerful and powerfully at-ease paterfamilias played by Al Pacino, relates the family history in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci. It is against this backdrop – of wealth, power, history, and above all, style – that Scott and screenwriters Roberto Bentivegna and Becky Johnston weave their story, an uneven yet compelling story about the only person who became a Gucci through their own making rather than by an accident of birth, and yet was forever an outsider.  Continue Reading →