738 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Bulgarian (Page 25)

Marvel’s latest Disney+ series, What If…?, seems likely to be the biggest “for the nerds” MCU endeavor since Tony Stark first built Iron Man in a cave with a box of scraps. It should present an interesting test of just how completely Marvel superheroes have permeated our current pop culture landscape. Continue Reading →

When we think back to actors of the 80s, we often think of the Brat Pack, that group of young charismatic stars whose impossible good looks occasionally compensated for middling acting ability. They were cute, and likable, but often lacked that element that makes certain actors more interesting, that sense of danger and mystery. Those actors, like Mickey Rourke, Sean Penn, and Nicolas Cage, didn’t get “Dream Date of the Month” write-ups in Teen Beat, but were more talented, more versatile, and more compelling to watch.  Continue Reading →

KinoKultur is a thematic exploration of the queer, camp, weird, and radical releases Kino Lorber has to offer. Dinosaurs are the ultimate symbols of The Past. They represent deep time, natural history, and the chaos of the wild. It's no wonder that cinema has always been fascinated by them. One of the first exhibitions of what we might now call "cinema" was presented in 1922 by Sherlock Holmes' own Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “footage of moving dinosaurs” from the exhibition at the center of his 1912 novella, The Lost World. From the very beginning of the medium, creatives have sought to reanimate the awesome creatures on the silver screen. When dinosaurs appear on film, they frequently bring with them a host of cultural and ideological anxieties. Dinosaurs threaten humanity's imperial dominance on the planet. When they appear, we become prey. And they remind us that even the mightiest powers can be reduced to dust. Continue Reading →

As if chomping at the bit to show its true self, Annette immediately disrobes. Director Leos Carax, off-screen during the opening credits, tells the audience to stay silent. Audio tracks spray over shots of Los Angeles and, in a studio, he asks his musicians, “So, may we start?” He’s now speaking not to us but Ron Mael and Russell Mael of Sparks. Both of them share a story by credit, the latter having written the screenplay, and already, the film has dived feet first into its own joke. But Carax’s latest doesn’t just strip itself naked. It takes off its own skin, as a rock opera and as a movie. Continue Reading →

In Tom McCarthy’s Stillwater, Matt Damon wears a baseball hat. He notches his sunglasses, a pair of knockoff Oakleys, on the brim of his cap; the rest of his body is covered by an assortment of denim, flannel, plaid and Carhartt products. These costume choices are the movie’s way of telling us that Damon’s character, Bill Baker, is a “regular guy.” Unfortunately, outside of his wardrobe, there’s nothing that really defines Bill, and even less that makes Stillwater worth watching.  Continue Reading →

Documentarian Sonia Kennebeck has become consumed with whistleblowers and their stories. Known for her interest in how the United States government interacts with their citizens, especially citizens willing to damage the country's reputation, Kennebeck’s latest, Enemies of the State, becomes no different, devolving from a story about a small-town military family to one with espionage, hacking, anthrax, torture, and deportation. More than just a fascination, Kennebeck’s films examine the heroic complex of these people, and if they warranted the supposed justice they received. Continue Reading →

In the last decade, there have been numerous shitty attempts to replicate the success of the Marvel Studios formula, but Suicide Squad (2016) may be the worst of the worst. Writer/director David Ayer’s dark and gritty tone clashed with the pop music-heavy trailers, marketing that included songs already used by – and meant to remind viewers of – Guardians of the Galaxy. In the end, the studio hired that same trailer company to re-cut the movie, which was released into theaters as an incomprehensible mess. Noticeably missing a “2” in its title, The Suicide Squad is essentially a 200 million dollar do-over. It’s the movie Warner Brothers should’ve made five years ago.  Continue Reading →

The phenomenon of Disney adapting its own theme park rides to the silver screen will never not be fascinating to me. It's the ultimate act of corporate synergy: watch Disney movies, come to Disneyland to experience them in real life, come ride our rides, then watch the movie based on the rides. What's even more fascinating are the ones that work: Gore Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean pulled off a minor miracle in adapting a pretty groan-worthy theme park ride into a vibrant, Errol Flynn-like adventure. And in an attempt to recapture that kind of heat, we now have Jungle Cruise, which gets points for referencing the right things, even as it refuses to reinvent the wheel. Continue Reading →

It’s no more than a few minutes into its 132-minute runtime that The Green Knight lays its cards on the table. It doesn’t really subvert expectations here; it’s not like it immediately carves out its identity. Rather, it makes itself clear in the most literal of ways, although in one that doesn’t register as such immediately. After an opening in which Sir Gawain (Dev Patel) wakes up hungover and half-naked, the camera tracks him from behind through sweaty medieval corridors and out into the cloud-covered morning. As he walks through the village, text flashes across the screen declaring itself “a filmed adaptation.” Continue Reading →

No cute jokes, no games. Let’s just get the pun out of the way from the top: Old is not a film that ages well. It’s an idea movie. It’s one that pegs itself on a concept, and yet, for the first 40 minutes or so, is bolstered by its more baffling choices. The dialogue feels like it was run back and forth through Google Translate a half-dozen times. The delivery is startlingly stilted, so much so that the sheer artifice combined with the ostentatious camerawork often borders on Camp. As hard as it is to pin down, it’s actually quite stimulating. What it gives us is too specific to dismiss as naive, so why doesn’t it actually working in the end? Continue Reading →

In the decade since his cult hit Rubber, French provocauteur Quentin Dupieux has been churning out small, absurd movies at a steady clip. Mandibles – his third U.S. release since the start of the pandemic – is yet another wonky tale of le ridicule, clocking in at a mere 77 minutes. Beach bum Manu (Gregoire Luig) is hired by a rich benefactor to transport a mysterious suitcase; specifically told he must do so in a car, he stumbles on an unlocked, dusty yellow Mercedes, and picks up his buddy Jean-Gab (David Marsais). Everything’s going smoothly until the pair notice an odd rumbling emanating from the trunk of their stolen automobile. Turns out, they’ve been riding around with an enormous, disgusting fly.  Continue Reading →

Takashi (Masanori Mimoto, Yakuza Apocalypse and one of Hydra's action coordinators) is a quiet, reserved man. He's the chef at Hydra, a Tokyo bar well-loved by its regulars. To those regulars, he's a mystery wrapped in an enigma, but damn can he cook. To Rina (Miu, Netflix's Followers)—Hydra's bartender and Kenta (Tasuku Nagase, Kamen Rider Wizard)—its waiter, he and his stillness are a regular part of their lives. Rina considers him an adoptive big brother/uncle since he knew her vanished father. Kenta both admires his cool and resents his (relative) closeness to Rina. Takashi is Hydra's constant. He knows just what to cook for a regular in the middle of a bad break-up who orders "anything." He stops potential fights before they can start. And he keeps a leary eye on a sleazeball he suspects of being a sexual predator—making sure that the women the creep might be targeting get home safely. When the schmuck does indeed out himself as a date rapist, Takashi puts the fear of death into him. How is he able to do all this? He's observant. Why is he observant? Because he's a retired assassin. Continue Reading →

Blaise Pascal invented a philosophical concept that came to be known as Pascal’s Wager. He presented a pragmatic argument for belief in God. Pascal held that if you believed in the Lord and He did, in fact, exist, you would gain the infinite rewards of Heaven. And if He turned out to be a myth, well then you’ve lost nothing, or comparatively little. If you don’t believe, though, and the Creator is real, you risk the infinite horrors of Hell, the prospect of which would, in Pascal’s estimation, outweigh any meager reward disbelief might grant you on this mortal coil. Continue Reading →

The final installment in the Fear Street trilogy takes things back. Way back. While the first two entries were set in the 1990s and 1970s, Fear Street Part 3: 1666, as the title implies, shifts the backdrop to 1666. Going this far backward allows the audience to discover the true story of Sarah Fier (Elizabeth Scopel), a local woman who was reportedly a witch and still curses the town of Shadyside. However, as you’d expect if you’ve seen anything ranging from ParaNorman to The VVitch, this origin yarn reveals that Fier was a much more complicated figure who was doomed due to society’s innate desire to punish women perceived as “different.” 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 →

It’s time once again to return to Sherman Oaks High as Mindy Kaling and Lang Fisher’s bittersweet teen comedy Never Have I Ever returns to Netflix. Picking up right where season one left off, we reunite with Devi Vishwakumar (Maitreyi Ramakrishnan), her friends, family, and the surprisingly rich cast of secondary characters.  Continue Reading →

Eleven months ago, nearly exactly to the day, I first fell in love with Ted Lasso—the show and, I suppose, the man too. As several people, including myself, have proclaimed, it seemed the perfect show for a population battered by the isolation and fear of what felt like a possibly endless pandemic at the time and, for Americans especially, the ugliness of a looming election. Lasso proved the wonderful good-hearted surprise so many of us were so in need of. Continue Reading →

Man, Escape from New York. What a picture. It's one of the standouts of director/co-writer John Carpenter's damn-near-unmatched 1976-1988 run of stupendous filmmaking, a man-on-a-mission film with a driving sense of urgency that still makes time to breathe in its mood and world. Dean Cundey’s widescreen cinematography captures the ruined prison island of New York in deep blacks and dense color and gorgeous widescreen framing. Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s score is cool and moody. The main theme alone is best described as “indelible.”The ensemble is a murderer's row of great actors with fantastic faces: Adrienne Barbeau, Isaac Hayes, Donald Pleasance, Lee Van Cleef, Ernest Borgnine, and the one-and-only Harry Dean Stanton. Each does unforgettable work. Continue Reading →

Within the opening scene of The White Lotus, it’s revealed that someone will die at some point during the show. But the question of who that someone is and how will they die isn’t really the central plot, as the six-part miniseries is much more interested in the characters and their fascinating dynamics than the mysteries and all the events leading up to the impending death. Continue Reading →

Nadja (Peri Baumeister, The Last Kingdom), a cautious, brittle woman battling a terrifying illness, boards an overnight flight from Germany to the United States. With her is Elias (Carl Anton Koch), her sweet, precocious son. They're hoping to make a new start in America, where a talented team of doctors wait to help Nadja find a cure for her sickness. While at the gate, Elias befriends Farid (Kais Setti, Dogs of Berlin)—a kind young man bound for a conference. Continue Reading →