89 Best Releases Translations Arabic on Hulu (Page 4)

For acclaimed actress turned first-time writer-director Rebecca Hall, her debut feature Passing is more than her first furtive steps into another facet of her expanding career. It's a deeply personal odyssey, one rooted in her own questions about her racial identity: Hall, whose grandmother is part-Black and whose mother has Black, Native American, and Dutch ancestry, has presented as white for much of her career. With this, her adaptation of the 1929 novella of the same name by Nella Larson, Hall gets to explore those myriad facets of herself, as well as the broader implications the phenomenon of 'passing' has for all of us in our respective negotiations with our identity. Continue Reading →

Despite its top shelf cast & capable direction, this drama about tourists behaving badly is nothing we haven't seen before. The Forgiven is a story about fantastically rich white people behaving badly in an “exotic” location, told by slightly less rich and hopefully better intentioned white people. So soon after HBO’s The White Lotus, it might be tempting to call this a new trend. But it’s probably more accurate to consider it business as usual.  This is not to say that it’s a bad film. The Forgiven is thoroughly competent in its writing, direction, and performances. It also happens to be — from its first scenes and the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-esque dynamic it establishes between its protagonists, to its ending which is  strongly foreshadowed to the point of telegraphing — an obvious one.  Continue Reading →

Julia Ducourneau's followup to her stunning debut Raw makes for brutal, beautiful, brilliant body horror. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.) Titane begins with the pluck of banjo strings and an extreme closeup of chrome. It’s a clash that’s jarring and compelling: the earthy, fire-and-brimstone howl of David Eugene Edwards’s take on the American folk standard “Wayfaring Stranger” set against an almost voyeuristic tour through a car’s inner workings. Continue Reading →

It’s been said (okay, only I’ve said it) that sitcoms shouldn’t run more than three or four seasons. Any longer than that, and they run the risk of getting stale, resorting to tired tactics like flashback episodes, forced romantic relationships, and adding cute wisecracking kids. So it’s a wondrous thing that, in its third season, What We Do in the Shadows, shows no signs of flagging, of having to fall back on retreads, or even having a musical episode. Despite what feels like a limiting premise, it’s as fresh and funny as ever before, somehow managing to maintain a remarkable balance between raunch and sweetness. Continue Reading →

Like its stars, Hulu original Only Murders in the Building, a 10-episode series focused on murders, podcasts, and murder podcasts, mixes the old with the new. Created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman, the often-light dramedy stars Martin alongside Selena Gomez and Martin Short, three tenants of a high-rise, upper-class New York City apartment complex. It attempts to appeal to the widest of audiences, from upstart New Yorkers to murder aficionados to TV-watchers who need their grandchildren to set up streaming services. And it (mostly) succeeds. Continue Reading →

It’s apparent that anyone at Disney or 20th Century Studios wanted with Vacation Friends was a 100-minute movie to accompany a thumbnail of John Cena and Lil Rel Howery on the front page of Hulu. That’s it. There’s no other purpose to this film’s existence. It’s just another piece of “content” that can gather dust on Hulu. Save for Space Jam: A New Legacy, you won’t find a more fitting representation in the summer of 2021 of what hollow cinema the age of algorithms and monopolistic streaming services has wrought. Put simply, Vacation Friends makes Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates look like Safety Last! Continue Reading →

As Fantasia draws to a close, we're catching up on some of the smaller films from the fest before they slip from our fingers into the Montreal air. First up is Indemnity, a surprisingly lean and confident (albeit familiar) action thriller from South Africa's Gambit Films, proof positive that the most interesting action pictures are coming from places outside Hollywood. At its core, it's a meat-and-potatoes conspiracy caper At the center of Indemnity is a traumatized firefighter named Theo Abrams (Jarrid Geduld), still reeling from the mental anguish and PTSD that came from a particularly bad blaze that killed several people around him. Meanwhile, his wife Angie (Nicole Fortuin), an investigative journalist, gets wrapped up in a conspiracy involving defense contractors and shadowy government figures -- and despite failed warnings, she ends up dead in their bed one morning, with Theo suddenly becoming the prime suspect. From there, Theo goes on the run, becoming a tense mix of John Wick and Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, smashing and crashing his way through setpieces and plot beats that would feel familiar to anyone raised on 1990s Hollywood action films. But despite this familiarity, there's a certain charm to Indemnity that makes its pastiche sing a bit more than you'd expect. Maybe it's the committed performance from Geduld (who handles his choreography with a bruiser's brutality), or the comparatively homespun nature of the production. Indemnity does a lot with a little; it clearly doesn't have Hollywood's resources, but it uses those limitations in uniquely charming ways. Dustups in prison vans and elevators have a wincing vitality that only seems to come when a film feels like it's putting its actors in real danger. Continue Reading →

The sense of rot in Pig is almost constant. There’s progression but no real growth for much of its short runtime, no feeling of true human connection through its first half. For a while, its empathy only comes from within. It comes within its hero; its intimacy only blossoms when there’s no one else to dry it from the roots up. The man in question is Robin (Nicolas Cage). He was a well-known chef but has since jumped ship, living in a shack in the Oregon wilderness and hunting truffles with his foraging pig. His only consistent human interaction is with a yuppie-type named Amir (Alex Wolff), but that’s strictly transactional. Continue Reading →

Let’s get one thing out of the way: the original Space Jam, released in 1996, isn’t a good movie. It’s an extended Nike commercial with an iconic soundtrack that tricked the brains of '90s kids into keeping it warm with nostalgia. So, it’s only fair that 25 years later, a new generation of children are forced to experience a similar kind of cash grab. Continue Reading →

If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that all that stuff about the importance of caring for your neighbors, and looking past differences in order to create a better world? Horseshit. Absolute nonsense. The phrase “I got mine, to hell with everyone else” should be emblazoned on the American flag. Not even a highly contagious, potentially fatal virus could bring us together - if anything, it divided us further, splitting the country right down the middle between “I’d like to not spread this virus to other people” and “Hey, pal, other people aren’t my fuckin’ problem.” As we slowly recover from said potentially fatal virus, it may not seem time yet to laugh at such a thing, and yet, by gosh, director Josh Ruben makes it possible in Werewolves Within, a riotously funny horror-comedy that pokes fun at neighbors who are unable to force themselves to get along even in the most dire of circumstances. Continue Reading →

Toni Collette has recently made a name for herself in the broader movie-going culture as a queen of creepy, suspense cinema, with her fantastic performances in Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Charlie Kaufman’s dark and whimsical I’m Thinking of Ending Things. It’s fun to see this resurgence of popularity nearly two decades after she gave what I consider her best performance of her career in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense.  Continue Reading →

The director-writer & star of Asia talk death, love & the immigration experience. A mother, her rebellious teen daughter, and an illness. It’s a story that’s been done and redone so many times that it’s basically become a subgenre. But in Ruthy Pribar’s feature directorial debut Asia, a tender and devastating character study about motherhood and loss, everything about the subgenre gets rejuvenated. Not because it breathes a new life into it, but because it tells the story in an understated way, with a level of realism that recalls the works of the Dardenne brothers more than it does The Fault in Our Stars. The titular character, Asia (Alena Yiv), is a 35-year-old single mother who immigrated herself and her daughter from Russia to Israel years ago to start a new life. By day (and sometimes night), Asia works tirelessly as a nurse. But when she’s not taking care of her patients, Asia likes to spend time at a bar, drinking alone and flirting with strangers, or having sex with her colleague in his car as if she’s still a teenager.  Continue Reading →

In Four Good Days, when heroin-addict Molly is asked what her triggers are, what could get her to use again, she replies, “My life’s a trigger…” Fellow addict Amanda Wendler takes things a step further, though, proclaiming, “Reality’s a trigger.” But Amanda isn’t another character in Molly’s story—she’s the inspiration behind it. In 2016, the Washington Post chronicled a few days in her fight for sobriety in their much lauded article, “How’s Amanda? A Story of Truth, Lies and American Addiction.” Continue Reading →

If you happen to stumble upon the Wikipedia page for Spiral, the ninth and newest feature film in the Saw franchise, you find a goldmine full of stories, exaggerations, and words strung together that you hardly believe are real. Chris Rock, the star and executive producer of Spiral, ran into Michael Burns, the Vice Chairman of Lionsgate, at a friend’s wedding in Brazil. They chatted about the horror genre, with Rock expressing intent to take his career on a different path.  Continue Reading →

A lot of the discourse surrounding Pose tends to focus on how groundbreaking it is, and rest assured Ryan Murphy’s drama is certainly that. Prior to the 2010s, queer media almost exclusively focused on the G in LGBT+ and most of those gay men were white and cis. By contrast, Pose’s main cast stars people of color, most of whom are trans. This diversity is behind the camera as well, being partially created by Steve Canals with writing and directing credits by Janet Mock and Our Lady J.  Continue Reading →

In the spirit of full disclosure, I need to say this: I’m not a big fan of The Handmaid’s Tale. There’s something about a show that is so unrelentingly grim—without even the occasional glimmers of light—that just makes me feel like I’ve been ground down into a salty meat paste. This is why I checked out of Game of Thrones before I even knew the words “Red Wedding,” because I couldn’t bear to watch Sansa Stark beaten, humiliated, and tortured anymore. So while I can say that Handmaid’s has strong writing and still boasts some of the most gorgeous photography of any show out there, I still don’t enjoy it. Can anyone say they actually enjoy it?  And when did the incessant castigation of women become primetime entertainment? Continue Reading →

The Law & Order: SVU and Law & Order: Organized Crime crossover event on April 1st  will mark not only the premiere of a new Law & Order spinoff, but also the return of one Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni). For the first 12 seasons of SVU Stabler and Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) were the SVU team, the perfect partners. Continue Reading →

One of the most fascinating things about Godzilla -- whether in his original Japanese provenance in his long-running series of films, or in the comparatively-recent "MonsterVerse" Westernization of the big lizard, courtesy of Warner Bros. and Legendary -- is that he's so malleable. On the one hand (as with the original 1954 Ishiro Honda film and Gareth Edwards' flawed but philosophically-intriguing 2014 reboot), he can be a poignant vehicle to explore the apocalyptic anxieties of nations ravaged by atomic bombs and climate change. Continue Reading →

Radu Jude's latest is as unsubtle as it is gripping, a strange tryptich about sex, justice, and communal madness. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Berlin Film Festival.) In Radu Jude’s Golden Bear-winning tenth feature, the zanily titled Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, there is no subtlety. The message is loud and clear from start to finish: The world is a sick place and not a lot of people are capable of empathy. For Emi (Katia Pascariu), a teacher, not having empathy from others means she could her job for a ridiculous reason: An amateur sex tape featuring Emi and her husband is circulating all around the internet, and when the parents of Emi’s students find about this, they demand the school to fire Emi. Jude, however, doesn’t address this plot point right away. Instead, he toys around first, dividing the movie into three equally bizarre parts. Continue Reading →

Befitting the moodiness of the presentation is a similarly idiosyncratic score courtesy of musician and visual artist Daniel Blumberg, who makes his feature-film composing debut. An alumnus of London's free-jazz and experimental venue Cafe Oto, Blumberg leverages his love for improvisation and atmosphere into a fragile soundtrack that's foreboding and romantic in equal measure. Clarinets and strings fill the foggy New York air and the loaded silences between Abigail and Tallie, aided capably by musicians like saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and vocalist Josephine Foster. Continue Reading →

An icon of the 20th-century jazz scene, Billie Holiday was an icon of Black culture, haunted by abuse and addiction. Her song “Strange Fruit”, based on a poem that describes a lynching, propelled her to fame – but also got the attention of the federal government, taking dramatic steps to stop her from singing the song in an effort to racialize the War on Drugs. In The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Lee Daniels tracks Holiday as the Federal Department of Narcotics begins to pursue her toward that end, in a film that ends up being a waste of potential. Continue Reading →