164 Best Releases From the Genre Animation (Page 8)

While there are many ways to adapt material to another medium, there do seem to be two prominent schools of thought. Some want adaptations of existing works to take the source material as a jumping-off point. The original text should inspire the creators of the new media, but should make their own perspective felt. On the other hand, there are those that crave pure accuracy. They want the new piece to resemble the original as closely as possible, in tone, point of view, and style. Continue Reading →

What if during one of your worst nightmares, you couldn't wake up, no matter how hard you tried? This the brooding question hanging throughout Come True, Anthony Scott Burns' sophomore horror thriller, coming off of Our House in 2018. The director (and now screenwriter) brings his visual effects background to develop an atmospheric wasteland of pure, spine-chilling dread with just a touch of analog sci-fi. The result is an ironically snoozy slog about the horrors of sleep paralysis that gets by more on vivid aesthetic than the sheer terror of what keeps us up at night.  Continue Reading →

High school sucks. You know it, I know it, we all know it. Yet, culturally, we can’t leave this awful period of our lives alone, like a scab we have to pick over and over again. For what seems like eons, the high school sex drama has been a staple, whether it’s American Pie or Euphoria, we just can’t seem to stop obsessing over the sex lives of teenagers. But who are these movies and shows for? Are these for teenagers, or adults recreating high school in the image they wish it was, rather than what it is.  Continue Reading →

Early on in The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run, the third cinematic iteration of the long-running Nickelodeon series SpongeBob Squarepants -- after 2004's The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie and 2015's The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water -- the Tim Hill-directed road movie flashes us back to the childhood of our absorbent, yellow, porous protagonist (voiced by Tom Kenny) and his first meeting with his beloved snail, Gary. By the time the film's over, we'll learn that all of SpongeBob's friends -- Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke), Squidward (Rodger Bumpass), Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown), and the rest -- all met as kids in an undersea summer camp called Kamp Koral. 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 →

(Note: We heavily encourage you to read reviews and criticism from Southeast Asian critics, who have a much more intimate and detailed understanding of the cultures from which Raya and the Last Dragon draws inspiration. This thread is a helpful primer.) Continue Reading →

Who actually wants movies like Tom & Jerry? Think back to the dregs of the Alvin & the Chipmunks movies from the aughts: the awkward blend of live action and animation, the creaky dragging of baby-boomer cartoon mascots awkwardly into present-day pop culture, the incessant noise of it all. What's worse, the characters you've come to see -- the ones your kids never knew -- come on screen in a form you hardly recognize. Continue Reading →

Ed Helms and Patti Harrison charm in Nikole Beckwith's refreshing, pleasurable dramedy. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Nikole Beckwith’s Together Together doesn’t break any new ground. But it doesn’t have to -- the film’s greatest pleasure lies simply in watching every part of the story fall into place the way we predict and expect it to. The dramedy is only Beckwith's second feature, but despite its familiarity, it's a pleasurable and refreshing experience. It’s light and witty, often packed with laughs and touching moments, with two stellar lead performances at its heart. Continue Reading →

Arjitpal Singh's drama about a rural family in the Himalayas struggling to get by leans on strong performances and interlocking class critiques to overcome some clunky narrative structure. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Since 2012 when Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli Live became the first Indian movie to ever debut at Sundance, the film festival has seen a more consistent inclusion of films from Indian filmmakers. This year’s edition saw two movies from India – one narrative and one documentary. Both deal with underrepresented and economically disadvantaged communities in the country and focus on women. While the documentary (Writing With Fire) is a tale of inspiration and community perseverance, the narrative feature, Arjitpal Singh’s Fire in the Mountains, is more frustrating and somber. Continue Reading →

The new film from Dash Shaw and Jane Samborski uses its breadth of bold psychedelic inspirations to distract from a tepid script. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Somewhere in the forest, Amber (Louisa Krause) and Matt (Michael Cera) strip naked, have sex, and then get high. Matt relays a dream he had of—of all things—storming the Capitol and overthrowing the government. His mind’s eye blends with our objectivity, which, in turn, heightens his and our subjectivities. It’s trippy to say the bare minimum. The animation in Cryptozoo holds a breadth of inspirations. There’s the classic psychedelia of the ‘60s, sure. There’s also the choppy, two-dimensional aesthetic that Fantastic Planet popularized in 1973. Some locales look like a backlit blackboard and some are even cleaner, like in 1981’s Son of the White Mare. But that’s mostly when Dash Shaw’s latest is peaceful, and that’s not always. Minutes into Cryptozoo, Amber and Matt come across a fenced-in tower and find a collection of caged mythical creatures. Then tragedy unfolds. This isn’t this couple’s story, and there are several spurts of violence, to say the least. Our lead is Lauren Gray (Lake Bell), a veterinarian who helps the sage Joan (Grace Zabriskie) save cryptids from the government. To be fair, the plot is by far the least original and most protracted part. The visual ingenuity, on the other hand, is something to witness. Continue Reading →

There are certain places that, when you visit, you can feel the weight of time pushing up from under your feet. In 2015, I was visiting a friend in Sweden when his partner took us to the island of Oland, where you can touch the monolith headstones of the Vikings buried there. In one spot, two rows of stones met, parted, and met again in a longboat shape. I’ve thought about that day often since then, the long-dead warriors whose monuments I could touch. Less than a year later, my friend would be gone, but I will always remember that day, the way the time-worn stone felt under my hands. Continue Reading →

In Hulu’s new original TV miniseries The Sister, we follow Nathan (Russell Tovey) as his life is upturned by Bob Morrow (Bertie Carvel), a figure from his past bringing disturbing news about the missing and presumed dead sister of his wife Holly Fox (Amrita Acharia). This delves into the supernatural and the psychological as Nathan desperately struggles to keep his life and his sanity together. What ensues is a perfectly watchable series full of twists and turns which never quite manages to maintain its tension.   Continue Reading →

If Panic Room is really known for anything, it’s the opening credits. Opinions differ about the movie itself, it’s Minor Fincher, if that’s something that’s even really possible. But those credits, man, those things are dope as hell. Panic Room opens with Howard Shore’s ominous score playing over a gorgeous ninety second montage of aerial footage of Manhattan architecture and the credits displayed as words occupying physical space, hovering in the air, taking up room and casting shadows just like everything else in the world. It’s the kind of showy stylistic thing that David Fincher’s always doing that thrills his fans and irritates his critics. It’s gorgeous, sure, but does it actually mean anything? Continue Reading →

As TV’s best series about mental illness and addiction comes to an end, our hero BoJack doesn’t get closure, exactly (because there’s really no such thing), but is further down the road to self-awareness and real insight than he ever was. He may end up making yet another bad decision based both on self-loathing and selfishness, but there has to be some reason he keeps getting another chance, another hit at the reset button. If you’ve ever struggled with depression and/or addiction, then you know how both wonderful and absolutely terrifying that feels. Though the final season stumbles a bit with extended bits on cancel culture and open relationships, it ends on a subtle, melancholy note: “Life’s a bitch, and then you go on living.” [Gena Radcliffe] Continue Reading →

Pixar gets back to its tear-jerking roots with an emotionally complex modern fantasy about grief, loss, and brotherhood. Early in Pixar's Onward, lanky, nerdy elf Ian Lightfoot (Tom Holland) retreats from a harrowing day of school into his bedroom, sitting at his desk where he's effectively erected a shrine to his father. He never met his dad; the man died of illness before Ian was born. All that's left of him are a collage of photographs, which gaze lovingly at the lens (and, by extension, Ian), but without context. The only recording of his dad's voice is a rambly outtake from a tape recorder, a one-sided conversation Ian pretends to fill in with his own words. When we lose someone, especially someone we never got to have in the first place, we do what we can to emulate that experience as best we can. It may not be real, but it's the best we get. And sometimes, it can blind us to the people who are actually around us. That's the scene that finally began to unlock Pixar's Onward for me, a film whose kitschy ads and Dreamworks-level character designs made me fear the worst for the acclaimed studio's output. Pixar's long been known for their original tear-jerkers (it's easy to forget that Inside Out and Coco are two of their best films, released only in the last five years), but their continued mining of their existing franchises for whatever narrative meat is left on the bone -- and, let's be real, toy sales -- has diluted the brand somewhat. It's pleasing to say, then, that Onward, while not Pixar's best, will absolutely hit you in those finely-tuned heartstrings. The premise is somewhere between Zootopia, Frozen and Dungeons & Dragons -- imagine a Tolkien-esque fantasy world where the various races of the realm went all-in on industrialization and abandoned the wonder of magic for the reliability and convenience of electricity, automobiles, and urban development. (The timeline's admittedly a little janky, and the film can't quite settle on how long ago this cultural switch happened, but just go with it.) Enter the Lightfoots, a family of elves living their lives in the suburbs: the painfully anxious Ian, his RPG-loving screwup brother Barley (Chris Pratt), and their overworked mother Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). They're getting by, but the absence of the boys' father clearly weighs on them. Ian's in desperate need of courage, and Barley loses himself in fantasy games (which just so happen to recount the world's real history) to avoid the real responsibility of adulthood. Continue Reading →

Florian Zeller directs a stunning feature debut starring Anthony Hopkins & Olivia Colman at the top of their game. First-time director Florian Zeller walked out on stage to rapturous applause. At least one-third of the audience attending the premiere for Zeller’s film gave a standing ovation inside one of Sundance Film Festival’s biggest venues, the Eccles Theater. The reason for this reaction? The Father, a stage play written by Zeller adapted for the screen by Christopher Hampton, starring Academy Award winners Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman. Following father Anthony (Hopkins) and daughter Anne (Colman), The Father explores a man aging sans grace, and how his growing uncertainty affects his daily routines and biggest relationship. Playing out over an unspecified amount of time yet staying in only a couple of apartments, the film corners you, becoming smaller and more intimate as time goes on. The 97-minute runtime flies by, with Hopkins commanding the screen in every scene, becoming a vehicle for him to likely receive an Oscar nomination in 2021.  The supporting cast, including an incredible actor in Colman, serves as merely a springboard for Hopkins, who plays a man struggling to understand or realize his own increasing forgetfulness and incoming dementia. Hopkins’ performance is one of his best in the last decade, blowing his Two Popes role off the screen, and showing that he continues to be one of Hollywood’s finest actors. He rips your heart out over and over again, creating a character that feels too relatable for all of us that have family members living with pain over the age of 75.  Continue Reading →

Will Smith & Martin Lawrence beat Guy Ritchie's latest handily in a robust-for-January weekend. Two new wide releases were no match this weekend for those Bad Boys, who continued to top the domestic box office. Bad Boys for Life dropped only 45% this weekend, a better second-weekend hold than fellow Martin Luther King Jr. weekend box office hit Ride Along. Bad Boys for Life grossed another $34 million this frame for a ten-day domestic total of $120.6 million. Having already nearly doubled its $62.5 million opening weekend and without a barrage of competition over the next month, the sky really is the limit for how high Bad Boys for Life could go at the domestic box office. At the very least, it’ll end its run in the neighborhood of $175-180 million, a significant improvement over the $138.6 million domestic total of Bad Boys II. Thanks to the lack of noteworthy new titles this week, holdover movies saw small weekend to weekend drops this frame. This included 1917, which dipped just 28% in its third weekend of wide release. Charging into battle with another $15.8 million, 1917 has now grossed $103.8  million domestically. Fellow Universal holdover Dolittle actually didn’t hold terribly this frame as it dropped 42%, not too far off from the 37% second-weekend drop of The Nut Job. However, that second-weekend hold still only yielded $12.5 million for all those talking animals. Dolittle currently has amassed a disappointing $44.6 million ten-day domestic haul and is headed for an anemic $65-70 million final domestic total. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqNYrYUiMfg The Gentlemen, meanwhile, opened to $11 million, a result that’s neither dismal nor exceptional. Struggling distributor STX Films could have used the latter type of box office player right now but at least The Gentlemen wasn’t far off from the bows of far more expensive Guy Ritchie directorial efforts like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. or King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Plus, STX apparently paid just $7 million for U.S. rights for this film, so they’ll make it out alright. Part of the reason The Gentleman didn’t become a breakout hit like past January STX action title Den of Thieves was that its marketing lived and died on its director alone. The trailers and commercials gave no indication to a broader plot or specific characters, they were just evoking prior Ritchie movies (and also, in the posters at least, the Kingsman films). That limited appeal marketing is a key reason why The Gentleman will likely end its domestic run between $30 and $35 million. Continue Reading →