The Latest Reviews For The Language German (Page 2)

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What makes a novel “unfilmable”? Often, it’s because it’s simply too large in scope and scale, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which depicts the lives of seven generations of the same family. Or, as with Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, it’s too dense and labyrinthian. The more successful attempts, such as Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and Netflix’s adaptation of The Sandman, have been filmed in multiple parts, while failures like 2017’s The Dark Tower condense the story down to its most basic components, checking off the most salient points (“there was a tower, it was dark”) and nothing more. Continue Reading →

As conceived in the 1987 Tom Clancy novel The Hunt for Red October, Jack Ryan was an antidote to the typical hypermasculine action hero that had gripped pop culture. Despite a tour in the Marines, he was an intellect-first guy who only ended up in the field because he outthinks everyone else. Unfortunately, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan season 3 is a reminder that that version of the character ceased to exist long ago. Continue Reading →

There’s nothing wrong with adaptations finding their own path. In fact, it should be encouraged. Slavish devotion to the source material leads to dramatically inert material. That said, there are far better ways to adapt existing works than this. Echo 3’s team, led by series creator Mark Boal, has missed the mark in interpreting Amir Gutfreund’s novel When Heroes Fly and the first television adaption from Omri Givon. Continue Reading →

Most people won’t recognize George Anthony Morton’s name. The subject of Rosa Ruth Boesten’s new documentary, Master of Light, will be an unfamiliar face for many. Importantly, most people haven’t seen his work. They haven’t seen him hold a brush. They haven’t seen him examine the light. They haven’t seen his paintings, which are, in every sense of the word, magnificent. Continue Reading →

As we lurch our way through the sixth or seventh wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve only just begun to see how much billion dollar companies (and billionaires themselves) profited from the chaos, while smaller businesses and individuals took devastating financial hits. A class war has erupted, if not in real life (yet) then certainly on social media, marked by endless heated debates over privilege, the victims and villains of capitalism, and who the “elite” really are. Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness satirizes this very unsettling period in time, putting a cheeky spin on class rage, but with an acidic undertaste that lingers long after it’s over. Continue Reading →

It's safe to say that no one necessarily asked for a sequel to Ti West's X, especially six mere months after its release. Not because it was bad, mind you; it was actually quite good, a nifty throwback to Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a hefty soupcon of Debbie Does Dallas tossed in the mix. But its tale of a ragtag amateur-porn crew besieged by a murderous old country crone envious of their youthful beauty and raging libidos hardly cried out for a followup. Yet here we are with Pearl, a prequel that dabbles in decidedly different genre homages but might just be the superior slasher of the two. Continue Reading →

Ask someone if they’ve seen 2014’s Goodnight Mommy, and if their immediate response is to shudder, you’ll know they have. The Austrian cult horror film combines so many tropes – psychological horror, body horror, paranoia, twins, creepy kids, creepy moms, etc. – that it seems like it should be an incoherent mess, but is instead a tightly paced, relentless assault on the nerves. Even the trailer is creepier than many mainstream horror films, while only showing a tiny bit of how bad things get in it. Continue Reading →

Better Call Saul is a tragedy. From the beginning, it focused on a rough-edged, yet decent man whom the audience knows will one day become an unrepentant merchant of death and destruction. What makes it so tragic, beyond the known destination, is that the series is riddled with missed exits. Time and again, Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) faced situations where -- if he’d just pulled back from the brink, if he’d only taken his lumps instead of wriggling out of them, if he’d simply chosen not to push things too far -- all of this could have been avoided. Continue Reading →

“It’s not politics. It’s poetry!” one of the many voices screams approximately half an hour into Lux Aeterna (stylized, of course, as Lux Æterna). With that line, Gaspar Noé’s 51-minute movie—now available on digital three years after its 2019 Cannes Film Festival premiere—reaches the self-awareness at which it often paws. That opener is partly a joke in and of itself: Noé’s auteur work has relatively veered toward the quote-unquote apolitical. The politics, inherent as they are to the art of cinema, have fleshed themselves out by accident. Here, the spontaneous “poetry” of Lux Aeterna—an extrapolation of sorts of his previous film, Climax—lives on a prosaic approach. Continue Reading →

Things aren’t looking good for us right now, am I right, ladies? States are passing a historic number of anti-abortion laws, and the needle has barely moved in reaching income equality with men, particularly for Black and Latinx women. The time may not be right for a whimsical take on what it’s like to be a woman in the 21st century, but Apple TV+’s anthology Roar has enough of an edge on it to make it entertaining without being condescending or out of touch. Though it suffers from the typical unevenness of an anthology series, even its weaker entries are still solid, and their blessedly short half-hour runtime makes it all go down smooth. Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

I'll say this for Simon Kinberg: he's got to be just about the nicest man in show business. After all, how do you get a second chance at the director's chair after the unmitigated disaster that was X-Men: Dark Phoenix? According to interviews, he only got that gig at the insistence of Jennifer Lawrence, who would only do the film with him in charge (he was reportedly very easy to work with when Bryan Singer went AWOL on X-Men Apocalypse, forcing Kinberg to pick up the baton). While working on Dark Phoenix, Jessica Chastain approached Kinberg with the idea of starring in and producing a female-led spy franchise a la Mission: Impossible; and so we have The 355, a film seemingly tailor-made to be the kind of mid-budget dross we get every January. Look out, Liam Neeson, you've got competition! Continue Reading →

KinoKultur is a thematic exploration of the queer, camp, weird, and radical releases Kino Lorber has to offer. Beneath the great Kino Lorber distribution partner family tree, there are a few classic presents worth opening this holiday season. Below is a brief guide to four films that offer interesting things to contemplate during this time of year, films that—in the spirit of the season, invite the audience to consider charity, capital, and country as they were when these pictures were new and today. Kino Lorber Pocketful of Miracles Continue Reading →

When Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel hit shelves in 2014, it was a standout in science-fiction. HBO’s adaptation can’t help but hit differently in 2021. It’s a post-apocalyptic tale about what’s left of the world after a deadly flu ravages the populace. The parallels to current events are glaringly obvious.  Continue Reading →

Death Valley, a new horror film from Matthew Ninaber (known best for playing PG in Psycho Goreman), wants it all. The 93-minute feature hopes to bend horror, thriller, and action—a daring attempt at a balancing act without much of a safety net. Unfortunately, in practice, Ninaber’s picture can’t put two feet into any storyline and fumbles its attempt to juggle its myriad characters, plots, and tonal shifts. Continue Reading →

In medieval morality plays, the dramatis personae always includes the likes of Charity, Death, and Temperance, named for the vices or virtues they embody. These characters are vessels, existing somewhere between allegory and literalism and imbued with the social values and anxieties of their time. French surrealist Bruno Dumont (Lil Quinquin, Slack Bay) drags this tradition into the twenty-first century with his latest film, France. Continue Reading →

If you were a respected artist named David who wanted to make a movie that would show viewers the weirdness that lay barely hidden beyond the well-manicured lawns of small-town America, the fall of 1986 was clearly your time to thrive. Of course, the most notable example of this was David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, which detonated in theaters in September of that year and caused reverberations that are still being felt today.  Continue Reading →

Madonna stands at the center of a black box stage dressed as George Washington. Complete with a tricorn hat and swimming waistcoat, she has fashioned herself as a revolutionary leader. Her latest concert film, Madame X, is supposed to be a manifesto, a call for artists to wave high the banner of agitation. Continue Reading →

Mia Hansen-Løve's latest wrestles with the creative and romantic frustrations between men and women, with Ingmar Bergman watching mindfully overhead. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 New York Film Festival.) It's an unwritten rule of film festivals that there have to be at least a few films in the program dealing with either the history of cinema or the filmmaking process. Bergman Island, the latest from Mia Hansen-Løve, covers both of those bases. It's a quietly beguiling look at a pair of filmmakers as they go about generating their latest projects, literally standing in the looming shadow of one of filmmaking's most towering figures.  Continue Reading →