34 Best Movies To Watch After Lost in Translation (2003) (Page 2)

Gina Prince-Bythewood is indisputably one of the most interesting directors working in Hollywood today. Since breaking out with the hit sports romance Love & Basketball, her work has ranged from intimate family dramas and love stories (The Secret Life of Bees, Beyond the Lights) to action-packed superhero movies (The Old Guard). It took Prince-Bythewood seven years to bring her new film, The Woman King, to the screen. Epic, thrilling, and jam-packed with delightful character beats, The Woman King understandably feels like the culmination of Prince-Bythewood’s work so far. As masterful at shooting stunning fight sequences as she is wringing emotions from intimate dialogue scenes, Prince-Bythewood delivers a crowd-pleaser for the ages. Continue Reading →

This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Tribeca Film Festival. Continue Reading →

Campion followed The Piano with a Henry James adaptation dedicated to the magnificently fraught question of desire or duty. Artwork: Felipe Sobreiro In the wake of the critical success of The Piano, Jane Campion’s 1996 adaptation of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady barely made a splash at the box office, grossing only a fraction of The Piano’s $140 million US earnings. It too seemed to puzzle critics. Some called it  “claustrophobic” and “stifling,” and to be fair–they’re not wrong. The world that James creates in his masterful 600-page novel is at once lush and chilling, thrillingly intimate and so frustratingly tragic that as a whole it’s nearly impossible to quantify. James’s Portrait is not necessarily Campion’s, and vice versa. But few authors have had such a clear-eyed view of the inner lives of women, so it’s fitting that Campion–a director who has always portrayed women as they are, without pretense or romanticization–should be the one to adapt James’s greatest work.   Continue Reading →

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

Emma Thompson and Daryl McCormack weave effortlessly through a sizzling, intimate two-hander about the therapeutic nature of sex work. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.) There’s a moment early on in Sophie Hyde’s Good Luck to You, Leo Grande in which one of its leads says to the other, “Desires are never mundane.” It’s a simple line, but one that defines the film and the relationship at its core well; Nancy Stokes (Emma Thompson) desires a new experience and Leo Grande (Daryl McCormack) exists to fulfill that desire. Their interactions are awkward at first, as with any arrangement between a customer and someone providing a new service, but gradually shift with time and further interaction.  Continue Reading →

Much to the Republican Party’s dismay, the birth rate in the United States has been gradually on the decline, hitting an all-time low in 2020. Couples are not only waiting longer to have children, they’re having less of them, with an average of 1.6 per family. While climate change and cost of living expenses are the primary factors in the decision to have fewer children (or none at all), a small part of it can also be attributed to more people accepting a difficult truth: that raising children can be an incredibly hard and thankless task. Maggie Gyllenhaal makes an assured debut as a writer and director in her adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, a complicated and strangely moving psychological drama/thriller about two women who bond over this truth. Continue Reading →

The best sports movies uplift and invigorate. They often take their formulaic structures to greater heights than what seems achievable. They transcend the films that they’re modeled after, pushing forward different definitions of winners and losers. The classics, Rocky, Hoosiers, A League of Their Own, offer the catharsis that sports can bring; they unite an audience in rapturous applause, even if the underdog doesn’t win the title fight. Unfortunately, Halle Berry’s directorial debut, Bruised, neither elevates nor shifts this formula, resigned to a middling existence likely to get lost among the endless titles shuffling through Netflix.  Continue Reading →

While author Jojo Moyes doesn’t confine herself to the romance genre, her works do share a rosy bloom. Light-heartedness and melodrama and historical settings and yes, love, all abound. So without even reading it, you’ll probably have some idea of what to expect from the newest adaptation of her work, The Last Letter from Your Lover. There’s the French Riviera and 1960s fashion and mystery and a torrid love affair—the works. And director Augustine Frizzell doesn’t seem too interested in taking this tale off the tracks.In short? It’s your classic Netflix weepie, though perhaps a little more star-studded than usual. Felicity Jones (Rogue One) stars as Ellie, a modern London reporter with a bad case of heartbreak and a crappy attitude. While researching a basic assignment, she stumbles upon an old love letter that’s so intoxicating she becomes determined to track down who it belongs to and what happened to the couple in question. In between scenes of Ellie’s search, we see the romance play out. Jennifer (Shailene Woodley, Big Little Lies) is a 1960s housewife with a husband who doesn’t seem to know or care that she exists. So when she meets dashing reporter Anthony (Callum Turner), it isn’t long before the two become swept up in each other and fall madly in love. But you won’t know if their romance ends in tragedy or happily ever after until Ellie gets to the bottom of it. Continue Reading →

It can’t be overstated how much the mid-90s belonged to Jim Carrey. Largely a stand-up comedian and supporting actor at first, Carrey shot to stardom thanks to In Living Color, and the grotesque characters he played on it, including the disfigured Fire Marshall Bill, and ponytailed lady bodybuilder Vera de Milo. His leap to leading roles in comedy features was swift and wildly successful, with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber all released the same year. There hadn’t been a comic actor much like Carrey before, someone who did childish things like pretend to talk out of his butt, but also had a wild look in his eyes that suggested a hint of danger with the body contorting nonsense. Continue Reading →

There was a trend when YouTube first launched, one that still pops up from time to time, where a skilled editor will take a film such as Dumb and Dumber or Elf and recut the trailer as a horror film. These pet projects are amusing at first glance, and serve to highlight deeply disturbing elements of classic comedies generally played for laughs. They demonstrate the power certain filmmakers have to elicit a specific audience response often diametrically opposed to the given circumstances on screen.  Continue Reading →

If repression is the ultimate aphrodisiac, there are few films that make such a case for it than Wong Kar-wai’s sumptuous 2000 masterpiece In the Mood for Love, one of the most passionate, delicately rendered on-screen odes to yearning cinema has ever produced.  Continue Reading →

In order to successfully adapt a beloved novel for the screen, a filmmaker must interpret the story in a way that both expresses their unique directorial vision and faithfully renders the original narrative. Mira Nair’s adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake achieves this challenge beautifully, harmonizing with the novel while shining as a deeply touching classic in its own right, resonating both with audiences who have read and loved the book as well as those who are new to it.  Continue Reading →

Certain movies have a kind of insubstantial quality to them. They aren’t poorly made or badly acted but they nonetheless feel feather-light, as though they barely existed moments after you turn off the credits. Amelia is such a film. Continue Reading →