769 Best Releases From the Genre Drama (Page 35)
The Expanse
SimilarCrusade, Golden Years, Terra Formars: Bugs-2 2599, The Ark, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
StarringShohreh Aghdashloo,
With the announcement last month that Amazon Prime Video's The Expanse will end after season six, it's bittersweet for many fans (including myself) to see the true end of the show in front of us. Still, it's a miracle we got three more seasons of the show at all, considering Amazon's hail-Mary save after Syfy's cancelation of the show post-season 3. Season 4 (the first after its move to Amazon) was an ambitious, if slightly slower and atonal, adventure; if the first three episodes of season 5 are any indicator, The Expanse is back to what it does best, expanding its scope while getting more personal than ever. Continue Reading →
Let Them All Talk
SimilarEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004),
Steven Soderbergh may be best known for his remake of Ocean’s Eleven, a commercial hit featuring a cast of dashing male stars (and Julia Roberts). Who needs eleven when you’ve got Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest, and Candice Bergen aboard a real-life ocean liner? In Soderbergh’s newest, Let Them All Talk, he embarks on a return trip to his indie filmmaking roots, bringing along celebrity pals and a few tricks of the trade he’s learned in his prolific career. Continue Reading →
Star Trek: Discovery
SimilarALF, Battle of the Planets, Ben 10, Farscape,
Roswell Stargate SG-1 The Journey of Allen Strange, The Transformers, Valvrave the Liberator,
StarringAnthony Rapp, Blu del Barrio, David Ajala, Doug Jones, Mary Wiseman, Sonequa Martin-Green, Wilson Cruz,
It’s appropriate that the first part of “Terra Firma” debuts during the holiday season since the episode plays like a Star Trek version of A Christmas Carol. Emperor Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) is our Scrooge, the grumpy, cynical curmudgeon who sees nothing but weakness and folly in everyone around her. Continue Reading →
Songbird
Back in mid-March, Simon Boyes called Adam Mason about an idea for a pandemic thriller. The two writing partners quickly sketched out a plot outline, it began to pick up traction, and it was only a matter of days before Michael Bay came on to the project as a producer. The name would be Songbird. It’d also begin filming that July with Mason directing and come out in December, less than nine months after its inception. All of this said, it’s hard to dissect what’s worse: the fact that people exploited a global tragedy so quickly, or the final result. Continue Reading →
Wild Mountain Thyme
Watch afterBlack Widow (2021), Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023),
StarringJon Hamm,
An adaptation of his play Outside Mullingar, which was panned by Irish critics, John Patrick Shanley’s Wild Mountain Thyme follows a pair of neighboring farmers as they try to find love despite an ongoing land dispute they get caught up in. When the trailer to this film came out, it was immediately mocked for awful accents and a questionable depiction of Ireland. From watching, it turns out those criticisms were correct. This is a soulless film that does little more than create some pretty shots for the Irish tourist board. Continue Reading →
Wander Darkly
Adrienne (Sienna Miller) and Matteo (Diego Luna) are miserable together, that much is immediately clear. They snipe at each other over the course of their date night, a substitute for therapy they can’t afford that of course Matteo has forgotten about. They have a new baby at home and a new mortgage and a lot of old, festering issues that all seem to be bubbling to a head when the unthinkable happens. A car careens into theirs, cutting their argument short, killing Adrienne. Probably. She thinks. She… isn’t exactly sure. Continue Reading →
The Godfather Part III
SimilarEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003), West Side Story (2021),
Directed byFrancis Ford Coppola,
Although it’s since been cemented as a derided flop upon its release 30 years ago this month, The Godfather: Part III (1990) was neither the critical nor critical disaster people remember it to be. It was a decent financial success and would go on to be nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture. However, a number of factors cropped up to help trash its reputation. It had a chaotic production that reached its apex when red-hot star Winona Ryder, cast as Mary Corleone, left the production just before her scenes were to be shot. Francis Ford Coppola replaced her with his non-actress daughter Sofia. Continue Reading →
I Still Believe
The Erwin Brothers' Christian romance aims for crossover appeal, but can't quite rock its way into the free world.
How does one deal with grief? For many, the loss of a loved one can be devastating and lead them into depression and feelings of hopelessness. For others, the pain of loss can be used to create something beautiful and give others hope. Directing duo Jon and Andrew Erwin (I Can Only Imagine) use the story of popular Christian artist Jeremy Camp and the loss of his first wife, Melissa, as a way to inspire others who are dealing with grief in I Still Believe. The result is a movie that is often touching, but won’t do much for those outside of its target audience.
Unlike most musician biopics, which tend to showcase the artist’s entire life, I Still Believe focuses entirely on Jeremy’s relationship with Melissa. While there are multiple scenes of concerts and radio interviews, Jeremy’s musical career only features in the movie insofar as to facilitate the love story. Indeed, to call this a biopic is almost inaccurate. Although the film is biographical it’s more of an examination of love and faith than the story of Jeremy’s life.
Indeed, the first act of the film feels like your typical romantic drama. A wide-eyed Jeremy Camp (KJ Apa, Riverdale) manages to talk his way backstage for musician Jean-Luc (Nathan Parsons, Roswell: New Mexico). While there, he spots Melissa (Britt Robertson, A Dog’s Purpose) in the crowd; it’s love at first sight. Continue Reading →
Pojkarna
Liz Garbus' Sundance drama offers a gut-wrenching, if muddled, look at a true crime disappearance.
In May of 2010, Shannan Gilbert was supposed to visit her family for dinner. She never showed up. As her family searched for her, the bodies of four women were found near the Long Island community of Oak Beach. The police determined that these women were probably killed by the same person, dubbed the Long Island Serial Killer (LISK), and they most likely solicited the women as sex workers via Craigslist. Shannan’s mother Mari believed that her daughter’s disappearance was connected to the uncovered bodies, but police maintain that they were unrelated. Desperate to uncover the truth about what happened to her daughter, Mari began her own search for justice.
This search for justice inspired Robert Kolker to write “Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery”, on which Netflix’s latest crime thriller Lost Girls is based. Director Liz Garbus (What Happened, Miss Simone?) aims her documentarian eye towards narrative cinema, and the result is a gut-wrenching, if somewhat muddled, experience.
Lost Girls keeps its focus squarely on Mari (Amy Ryan, Late Night) and rarely ventures into the police investigation of the case. Indeed, Mari’s lack of insight into what the police know, as well as their apparent lack of interest in the case is the main driver of the plot. The police don’t take Shannan’s disappearance seriously, due to her status as a sex worker, and much of the first act follows her hunting down people from Shannan’s life, trying to figure out where she was last seen. Continue Reading →
The Plot Against America
David Simon and Ed Burns' adaptation of the Philip Roth novel paints a harrowing picture of an alternate America that feels all too prescient.
HBO’s latest miniseries imagines a world where renowned pilot, isolationist, and anti-Semite Charles Lindbergh runs for president and defeats FDR in 1940. What follows is a rise in anti-Semitic hate and fascism throughout America. And as you watch the series, you’d be forgiven for thinking this a pretty in-your-face way to address the Trump administration. That might be true, but the series is based on the Philip Roth novel of the same name which was released more than 15 years ago in 2004. If anything, Roth’s The Plot Against America has been frustratingly, dishearteningly prescient. It’s no wonder showrunners David Simon and Ed Burns (The Wire) were drawn to it.
The show follows the Levin family (originally the Roths in the novel) as they deal with the shifting political tide and how it strains their family bonds. Father Herman (Morgan Spector) is an outspoken liberal who finds Lindbergh distasteful and disgusting. Wife Bess (Zoe Kazan) frets constantly for the safety of her family, remembering all too well how isolating it was to be the only Jewish girl in her class growing up.
Michele K. Short/HBO
Cousin Alvin shares Herman’s political leanings, but is determined to act, eventually signing up for the Canadian army in order to “kill Nazis.” Meanwhile, impressionable young Sandy (Caleb Malis) grapples with his hero Lindbergh’s politics while his little brother Phillip (Azhy Robertson) tries to make sense of it all. Things are only further complicated when Bess’s sister Evelyn (Winona Ryder) falls for Rabbi Bengelsdorf (John Turturro), a staunch Lindbergh supporter. Continue Reading →
Feel Good
Netflix breathes new life into the tired stand-up comedian sitcom genre.
The stand-up comedy dramedy is dead. It was tired after Seinfeld, and the only person that got it right since turned out to be a monster. Every other offer in the genre has either struggled with a relationship with the world outside of comedy, or an obsession with the inside world of comedy, which is not that interesting. I am sorry to say, but I do not care about anyone’s struggles to impress a booker.
The thing that Feel Good, Netflix’s new British comedy centered on the life of queer comedian Mae Martin, gets right is that stand up is still work. It doesn’t matter if your work is talking in front of other people, or working in an office. Most of the time it’s not that interesting. Our current society is so obsessed with work that the obsession tends to bleed into our media. Feel Good isn’t a show about a stand-up comedian. It's about a person who happens to be a stand-up comedian.
Mae as a character has more important things to think about than comedy. The show navigates through its first six episodes mostly focused on Mae’s relationships with George (Charlotte Ritchie), a teacher who’s never had any queer experiences, her mother, Linda (Lisa Kudrow), and her sobriety. Martin proves themself a capable actor, painting a well-made version of a person who doesn’t just love cocaine but loves getting high on any sort of obsessive behavior. Feel Good isn’t about drugs or about being queer. It's about the day to day struggle to fight our worst aspects. Continue Reading →
First Cow
As King-Lu (Orion Lee) takes Cookie (John Magaro) to his hut, he starts preparing a fire. The sound of the axe hitting wood continues at a rhythmic pace and the woodland ambiance, tapered to an almost therapeutic constant, cushions each blow. Then, as the camera rotates to its right, Cookie grabs a blanket. He stands in the doorway and whips it back and forth. The air crashes around it. The wood continues to bonk. The walls hold against the Oregon breeze and the camera, snugly within a makeshift cave of dust and dampness, views both men in one frame and their own respective prosceniums. Continue Reading →
ఎక్స్ట్రా ఆర్డినరీ మ్యాన్
Ireland’s good-natured paranormal rom-com is uneven in spots but makes up for it with charm & wit.
Romantic comedies are a nice escape from the real world, mostly because they in no way reflect what the real world actually looks like. Everyone’s thin and gorgeous (even though the audience is supposed to buy them as plain and dowdy), with exciting careers that allow them to afford loft apartments in Manhattan. Most love stories with “regular” looking characters in non-glamorous jobs have touches of pathos to them, like John Hughes’ Only the Lonely or Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty. Mike Ahern and Enda Loughman’s Extra Ordinary is the rare lighthearted rom-com featuring normal, relatable characters who fall in love not because a cruel world pushed them together, but because they just happened to be the right person for each other. That it also involves ghost hunting and virgin sacrifice is merely a bonus.
Rose (Irish comedian Maeve Higgins) is a lonely driving instructor, and the daughter of paranormal investigator Vincent Dooley (Risteard Cooper), whose videos on the science and lore of the supernatural are featured throughout the film. Rose inherited Vincent’s ability to communicate with the dead, but gave up the family business after Vincent was killed in an accident involving a bus and a haunted pothole. Hapless widower Martin Martin (Barry Ward) hires Rose for driving lessons under false pretenses -- he really needs help with the ghost of his late wife, Bonnie, who mostly bullies him from beyond the grave about what shirts to wear, and when to pay taxes.
Though their attraction to each other is immediate (Martin is thoughtful enough to show up for his driving lesson with a sandwich, juice box, and single breath mint for Rose), Rose wants nothing to do with his spooky situation. She gives in only when Martin’s teenage daughter, Sarah (Emma Coleman) appears to become possessed. It’s not Bonnie who’s possessing Sarah, however - she’s under a spell cast by has-been rock star Christian Winter (Will Forte). Christian has made a pact with the Devil, agreeing to sacrifice a virgin in exchange for his next album becoming a hit. Falling in love along the way, Rose and Martin, who turns out to be an excellent conduit for exorcising ghosts, team up to rescue Sarah before Christian can complete his end of the deal. Continue Reading →
School Daze
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 March, we celebrate the birthday (and the decades-long filmography) of one of America’s most pioneering Black filmmakers, Spike Lee. Read the rest of our coverage here.
It’s been 32 years since the release of Spike Lee’s 1988 hit School Daze, a film that tackles the tough conversations and experiences of young educated black people through music, dance, and situational confrontation. It’s Lee’s third film, one where he’s still finding his footing, and yet he already has his finger on many of the issues that affected young black audiences at the time, and still do today.
Set in the fictional historically-black Mission College, viewers are first introduced to young black activist Dap (Larry Fishburne) when his boycott of apartheid in South Africa is interrupted by Greek life (and social order) leader Julian (Giancarlo Esposito) and his pledges. Throughout the film, the pair butt heads in more ways than one, but the confrontation at its core is who really brings power to black people. Continue Reading →
繁华似锦
Viewers expecting the season finale to have an exciting climax will be disappointed, as characters and grim reality drive the ending.
Warning: don’t read until you’ve seen the episode!
I’m just going to come right out and say it: I know I’m going to be a lot easier on “Must/Can’t,” the finale of The Outsider, than other people. With the last few episodes a whole lot of nothing (well-acted nothing, but nothing all the same), expectations that the show would end with a horror movie-like confrontation between heroes and monster were high. Well, surprise -- it’s over barely halfway through the episode, and not the most action-packed ten minutes or so of television you’ll ever see. Despite its spooky, supernatural themes, The Outsider ended up being less about monsters and more about people, for better or worse.
But let’s move on and take a look at the casualty list that’s racked up before we even get to the opening credits. Deader than disco are Alec, Detective Andy (sad face!), Howie, and Seale. So, basically everybody you expected to get killed. Yunis (Yul Vazquez) is wounded, but alive. Also in very bad shape is Jack (Marc Menchaca) who, after successfully killing off more than half the team, is rewarded for his trouble with multiple rattlesnake bites. There are bosses from Hell, and then there’s El Cuco. Continue Reading →
ZeroZeroZero
Amazon's adaptation of the Roberto Saviano novel is far too passive and jumbled to capture your interest.
“Look at cocaine and all you see is powder. Look through cocaine and you see the world,” says the tagline to Roberto Saviano’s book, ZeroZeroZero. Now an eight-part mini-series on Amazon Prime, the show promises the same. It purports to be the whole picture of the cocaine trade from the Italian buyers to the Mexican sellers to the American brokers. We follow the effects of a single shipment of cocaine on the lives of people spread across multiple continents. Unfortunately, showrunners Stefano Sollima, Leonardo Fasoli, and Mauricio Katz’s attempt is unwieldy and unfocused.
Reviews of the source material reported similar issues, with Saviano’s narrative often lacking, well... narrative structure. You’d hope that the show would seek to correct this by streamlining Saviano’s many interviews into a cohesive picture, but it ends up replicating them instead.
It does simplify the cast of characters, however. We focus mainly on three sets of people: the tumultuous relationship between an Italian mobster grandson (Giuseppe De Domenico) and his grandfather (Adriano Chiaramida) who plan to buy the cocaine shipment; the American brother (Dane DeHaan) and sister (Andrea Riseborough) brokering the deal; and the Mexican soldier turned narco (Harold Torres) doing the selling. Continue Reading →
The Way Way Back
The much-memed movie star finds his footing again in a familiar but satisfying redemption story.
Unfairly relegated to memedom thanks to his disastrous press appearances (“Darkness, my old friend…”) and midlife crisis moments like getting a dragon tattoo that Ed Hardy would call too gaudy, Ben Affleck has nonetheless experienced a fascinating and emotional onscreen transformation over the last decade of his career.
Still undoubtedly a movie star in the classic sense, Affleck’s cocksure marquee attitude has now melted into a malleable melancholy. And while the rest of Affleck’s performances this decade have orbited around Gone Girl’s masterful lead role, his last few performances have been girded with a deadened soul, whether it be the jaded mercenary of Triple Frontier or the brick wall façade of his Batman performance - which always felt like it could smolder into rubble at any moment.
Gavin O’Connor’s throwback addiction film, The Way Back, then feels like an apotheosis of the actor’s new persona. Reuniting with Affleck after The Accountant (yes, the autistic assassin one), The Way Back is a familiar but satisfying take on the redemption story strengthened by the palpable pain of its onscreen protagonist. Continue Reading →
Amazing Stories
Apple TV+'s reboot of the Spielberg-created anthology series gets off to a lackluster start.
There’s something really special about an anthology series: it allows show creators to let their imaginations run wild and try different concepts that may not work for a movie or longer series. Apple TV+’s latest series, Amazing Stories, has the fledgling streaming service trying its hand at the format, but the episode available for preview doesn’t live up to the show’s title.
It’s actually kind of odd that Apple is rebooting Amazing Stories. The 1985 original run wasn’t a hit and while reruns played on The Sci-Fi Channel before it became Syfy, it doesn’t seem to have a large cult appeal. Still, the series does boast a producing credit by Steven Spielberg and its showrunners are Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz of Lost fame, so at least Apple has some star power to bolster the lagging nostalgic appeal.
Name recognition can only get you so far, however, and the success of the show will have to rely on its 5 episode run. Apple has only supplied one episode for critics, titled “The Cellar”, which was directed by Chris Long (The Americans). The story follows carpenter Sam Taylor (Dylan O’Brien, Bumblebee), who is restoring an old house with his brother Jack (Michah Stock, The Right Stuff). Continue Reading →
Run This Town
Ricky Tollman's directorial debut has great ingredients, but they add up to a terrible stew.
Run This Town is an admirable first effort from writer/director Ricky Tollman. Unfortunately, the worse aspects of the film keep it from truly shining. While the film soars in certain performances and technical aspects, a weak script and a lead actor devoid of any charisma prevent this film from rising to the level of the journalism thrillers it is so clearly modeled after.
The film is set in 2013 Toronto, during the much-publicized last year in office of hard-partying mayor Rob Ford, played in a captivating, transformative performance by Damien Lewis. Much to the detriment of the film, Ford is only present in a few tense scenes, when the film truly feels like it’s making a statement. The focus of the film flips between the support staff trying to cover up Ford’s partying and the journalists chasing after the much-publicized video of Ford with a crack pipe in his hand that made its way around the internet in early 2014.
It’s in the cast of journalists that the film’s biggest failure is present, particularly Ben Platt’s performance as journalist Bram, who fights to get his story about Ford smoking crack past his editors David (Scott Speedman) and Judith (Jennifer Ehle). While Ehle and Speedman are fantastic as the kind of editors that any journalist would both hate to work for and also chase their approval, Platt fails to make Bram anything more than a whiny young man who lucked into the perfect story. Continue Reading →
Dispatches from Elsewhere
Jason Segel gives us an energetic journey with compelling characters to balance a campy premise.
About halfway through the first episode of AMC’s Dispatches From Elsewhere, Simone (Eve Lindley), one of the main characters, exclaims: “I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s freaking fun!” This phrase just about sums up this new show, created by and starring Jason Segel. While Dispatches is scripted entertainment, it's based on the documentary The Institute, which explores the hybrid alternate reality game and performance art piece by Oakland based artist Jeff Hull.
From 2008 to 2011, Hull “inducted” thousands of people in the San Francisco Bay Area into the Jejune Institute. He created multiple “episodes” for inductees to participate in, giving them missions with instructions as silly as dancing at a phone box to things as grand as leading a parade. Segel moves the action from San Francisco to Philadelphia but retains the ridiculous and almost cult-like nature of its source material in depicting the on-screen Jejune Institute and its rival the Elsewhere Society.
In the first episode, we are introduced to Peter, an average joe working a dull job. Intrigued by flyers with nonsensical adverts for dolphin communication and human forcefield testing, he calls a number and is invited to an office building downtown. He’s soon roped into a world of intrigue just below the surface of our everyday world, where two entities, the corporate Jejune Institute and more radical Elsewhere Society, frantically search for Clara (Cecilia Balagot), a mysterious inventor whose talent promises to liberate humanity from societal shackles. Continue Reading →
Ricki and the Flash
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 February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here.
2015’s Ricki and the Flash doesn’t know what’s about to happen. It doesn’t know it would silence the successful string of Singing Streep films. It doesn’t know it’s Jonathan Demme’s final film. And it doesn’t fully realize the changing conservative political tide that was about to crest over America the following year.
Ricki and the Flash is a rock ‘n roll fable about Ricki, a prodigal mother (Meryl Streep) who returns to bourgeois Indiana from her life as a working-class musician to help estranged daughter Julie (Mamie Gummer) through her divorce and suicide attempt. Her return reignites hostilities with ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline) and sons Josh and Adam (Sebastian Stan and Nick Westrate). But with a little classic rock, the atypical family learns to accept one another. Sorta. Continue Reading →