3 Best TV Shows Similar to My Hero Academia

A project that director/co-writer Barry Levinson had been working on for over a decade before it emerged in theaters in 1992—at one point, it had been planned as his directorial debut before he turned to Diner (1982) instead—Toys offered viewers a mélange of holiday sentiment, strident anti-war satire and the sometimes-unholy combination of schmaltz and schtick that marked the typical Robin Williams performance of the time, all produced on a budget high enough to outstrip the GNP of actual countries. There's no reason on Earth to think that such a bizarre combination would have worked, and Toys' eventual critical and commercial failure would seemingly confirm that it didn't. And yet, while I concede that the film as a whole is a mess—it is an undeniably intriguing mess with just enough moments of genuine brilliance to help get through the rougher and clumsier passages, of which there are more than a few.  Continue Reading →

For acclaimed actress turned first-time writer-director Rebecca Hall, her debut feature Passing is more than her first furtive steps into another facet of her expanding career. It's a deeply personal odyssey, one rooted in her own questions about her racial identity: Hall, whose grandmother is part-Black and whose mother has Black, Native American, and Dutch ancestry, has presented as white for much of her career. With this, her adaptation of the 1929 novella of the same name by Nella Larson, Hall gets to explore those myriad facets of herself, as well as the broader implications the phenomenon of 'passing' has for all of us in our respective negotiations with our identity. Continue Reading →

Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 sci-fi blockbuster Pacific Rim certainly has its core group of dedicated fans, but I was never among them. The characters fell flat, the jokes never landed, and even the action sequences lacked suspense. Far from the worst action films, but also nowhere near among the most memorable, I went into Netflix’s anime twist on the story with a healthy dose of skepticism. Continue Reading →