821 Best Releases From the Genre Drama (Page 31)

Netflix is back with the second season of The Circle, the social media reality game show where contestants compete to be influencers, wielding their power to block their rivals and win $100,000. Season one was a lovefest, with bro-y Joey Sasso winning by playing honestly (aka “The Sasso Way”) and befriending his competitors. The contestants of season two of The Circle are less interested in making friends and more interested in strategy, dialing up the drama, and building alliances within the first four episodes. Continue Reading →

Mare of Easttown may at times feel like it’s kicking a dead horse. It’s a grammatically perfect post-Cardinal Bernard Law, cold-case-comes-alive thriller with rich performances by its entire cast. Yet for a story about a maverick detective purporting to be about more than crime, it follows surprisingly predictable beats, leaving little room for illuminating nuance.  Continue Reading →

Returning to score these characters for the first time since Captain America: Civil War, Jackman brings his usual fanfare and frenetic action scoring to the table, expanding themes he originated in his previous work to a much larger, longer palette. Sam's theme, formerly a three-note quick motif between action beats, gets its own blues-tinged variation to pay homage to his Louisiana roots; Bucky, meanwhile, gets a softer, more melodic version of the Winter Soldier theme to contrast with the cacophonous shriek that heralded him in his debut feature. And the Captain America theme gets its own complications, now that the man holding the shield is a little less trustworthy than he used to be. Continue Reading →

Look, we all love Dominic Cooper and slim-cut suits, and Dominic Cooper IN slim-cut suits, but are we all just a little tired of spies?  Continue Reading →

Let’s be clear from the start: there is nothing especially unique about Monday’s plot. Chloe (Denise Gough) is an immigration lawyer from America planning to return home from Greece in just a few days. Mickey (Sebastian Stan) is another ex-pat, well-rooted in Greece by now, DJing and waiting for more time with his young son. Mickey’s uncouth privileged by birth friend Argyris (Giorgos Pyrpasopoulos) introduces them in the worst way at a dance party. Mickey’s interested but embarrassed by his friend’s behavior, while Chloe is offended, but a little bit drunk and a lot angry at her ex, Christos (Andreas Konstantinou). Despite starting as a fairly ill-advised one-night stand, the two hit it off and begin to alter their plans and rearrange their lives to make a go of it. Continue Reading →

“Time is a funny thing. Time is a very peculiar item. You see, when you're young, you're a kid, you got time, you got nothing but time. Throw away a couple of years, a couple of years there... it doesn't matter. You know. The older you get you say, "Jesus, how much I got? I got thirty-five summers left." Think about it. Thirty-five summers.” Continue Reading →

Did you know Disney+ has original TV shows that don’t belong to the Marvel and Star Wars cinematic universes? It’s true! The streaming service also has a bunch of programs that are just too edgy for the Disney Channel, but not compelling enough to make it on other streaming platforms. A great example of this is the new John Stamos sports show Big Shot. Hailing from creators David E. Kelley and Brad Garrett, the show will prove revolutionary to those who have never seen any kind of inspirational sports storytelling before.  Continue Reading →

At face value, the original premise of Younger seems destined for a short run. After all, a story about a woman in her 40s who pretends to be 26 to get a job in publishing seems more at home as a Lifetime Original movie than a long-form series. And yet the comedy has lasted six years on TVLand, with the show never losing its charm and heart. While the seventh and final season has the series moving from TVLand to Paramount+, it still manages to keep the same spirit that won it so many fans.  Continue Reading →

By the end of the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola was on top of the world. He'd just come off a string of films that weren't just critical and commercial successes, but masterpieces that defined cinema as an artform: The Conversation, Godfathers I & II, and Apocalypse Now -- the kind of run that basically guarantees you carte blanche to do whatever the hell you want. With that kind of blank check, Coppola didn't just set out to make an intensely personal swing for the fences: with Zoetrope Studios, and One from the Heart, he sought to revolutionize the way movies were made and carve out a space for auteurs to make intensely personal projects that didn't require four-quadrant appeal. Continue Reading →

In a lot of ways, I feel a bit sorry for The Nevers. A show created and conceptualized by Joss Whedon, former pop-culture wunderkind now revealed to be an abusive terror behind the scenes of some of his most high-profile works, it's already weighed down by the lodestone of its controversial creator even before it airs. Whedon left the show's production in November (presumably as a result of these allegations coming forward), the current showrunner position shifting to Philippa Goslett. Time will tell if Goslett will have the time or the opportunity to make the show her own and drag it out from the shadow of its provenance. But if the first four episodes provided to critics are any indicator, she'll have an uphill battle, as every bit of its worldbuilding and thematic concerns scream the kind of quippy, fly-by-night faux-progressivism for which Whedon's output is known. Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema, and the filmmaker’s own biography. For April, we revisit both the game-changing hits and low point misses of Francis Ford Coppola. Read the rest of our coverage here. Burrow into a man’s soul and see what you find. You may discover a darkness beyond comprehension or a light as bright as the flares that cut against the night sky. But if you mangle that soul in the throes of war, maim it through acts of killing, expose it to enough raw horror to blight mind and body, you can never really know. The parts of ourselves we hold dear become wrenched and twisted within that grim crucible, until they become unrecognizable. That’s the overwhelming feeling that washes over you during Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal 1979 masterpiece. Set during the Vietnam War, the film sees Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), a U.S. Army assassin, dispatched to travel upriver into Cambodia and take out the infamous Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Kurtz is a decorated officer who’s gone rogue and cultivated a following all his own, one which strikes fear into the hearts of all sides of this conflict. In that framework, the movie peers into the souls of these two men and considers what, if anything, can be gleaned from their war-ravaged psyches. Continue Reading →

The first lesson for 15-year-old Lyz Lopez (Noée Abita) in Slalom is an appropriately harsh one, considering the film’s subject matter. To become a world-class skiing champion, she has to overcome all fear, all under the guidance of an overbearing coach (Jérémie Renier) who grooms her in more ways than one.  Continue Reading →

What Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films portray is a perfect amalgamation of the magical and limiting aspects of Hollywood cinema in a perfectly composed, morally ambiguous fantasy. I’m only discussing the first two here because of their proximity to one another and them embodying a 70’s theme and aesthetic that prided on American stories – Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, Patton, Breaking Away, Dog Day Afternoon, and Rocky to name a few – make them distinctly different for what I want to say than the third movie, which seems like a forgotten stepchild of the 90’s.  Continue Reading →

Grear Patterson's debut feature is moody, evocative, and graciously efficient, but doesn't fill its world with characters you can care about. In a world where the average blockbuster runs closer to two and a half hours than 90 minutes, the 75- to 80-minute movie is often like a breath of fresh air. Kudos then to the filmmaker that can manage to make those minutes feel like 1,000 years. It’s an impressive feat, albeit one no one wants to sit through. Unfortunately, this is where all 78 minutes of Giants Being Lonely lands. Director and screenwriter Grear Patterson’s debut is a moody little exploration of the perils of growing up. Set in the warm days at the end of the school year in the south, we follow a group of teenagers as they wrap up the year and prepare for prom. The cast is mainly comprised of unknowns, which adds to the film’s feeling of “Anyplace, USA”. There’s wayward baseball star Bobby (Jack Irv), the coach’s battered-down son Adam (Ben Irving), and Adam’s crush, Caroline (Lily Gavin). From first loves to illicit affairs and parental abuse, the kids go through it all as they wait for summer to come. Continue Reading →

Following on from his work on I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck takes a holistic look at imperialism, the construction of whiteness, and how we form narratives about the violence of the past in HBO's four-part documentary series Exterminate All The Brutes. In doing so, Peck covers a lot of ground, moving from genocides to scientific racism to colonization and more, explicating the links between them all. He does a lot of brilliant work here, but the series doesn’t quite have the precision or focus to make it great.  Continue Reading →

This might sound harsh, but God’s Pocket is a movie that has no business existing. There’s a void where its central relationship should be: set in working-class Philadelphia sometime in the mid-twentieth century, Mickey (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Jeanie (Christina Hendricks), are an inexplicably estranged married couple. She completely hates him, though “why?”  – a pretty obvious question – is never explored.  Continue Reading →

Not many artists have stretches of greatness so profound that they transcend their medium. They’re not looked at as just a musician or athlete or director, but part of the fabric of modern pop culture at a particular time. What The Beatles meant to the 1960s, or what Michael Jordan meant to the 1990s, is how Francis Ford Coppola defined the 1970s.  Continue Reading →

For the podcast, I sat down with Scherrer to discuss the unique challenges of the project, that line between being period-appropriate and too on-the-nose, and working with some of the most interesting instruments and period synthesizers of the day to craft the haunting, tension-laden score for The Serpent. (He also talks -- and plays -- us through the winding tension of the series' title theme.) Continue Reading →

“Does Danielle want to go to law school or grad school?” An almost casual question to her mother, the truth is, Danielle (Rachel Sennott) has no idea where she’s going – so she joins her family for a shiva. “Abby,” her “uncle’s second wife’s sister” has passed; Danielle takes a break from Manhattan and her final college finals to see her parents and their suburban Jewish community. Confined to the unending funeral service, Shiva Baby understands how just how terrifying the question “what are you doing next?” can ring in one’s ears.  Continue Reading →

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, 2046 feels undeniably otherworldly. The sumptuousness of the imagery, the fractured timeline, the computer-generated cityscapes of the future, the fact that everyone speaks in different languages and dialects, and yet there exists no communication confusion—all of it melds into a truly transporting experience. Like many of Wong Kar-wai’s works, however, the film roots itself deep in honest feeling. Thus, no matter how much it seems to be unfolding in a world far from our own, the viewer can understand every emotion the characters experience. Continue Reading →

Though My Blueberry Nights has been largely left untouched in the renaissance of Wong Kar-wai’s work like the pies at its center of the film, it’s finally time to cut a slice and see what can be savored. From the outside, it looks like a Kar-wai blueberry pie. It has a sugar crisped lid that’s inviting and promises hidden depths. Yet, as our fork reaches the bottom, we find it soggy.  Continue Reading →