738 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Bulgarian (Page 28)

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 →

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 coming-of-age drama The Outsiders, adapted from S.E. Hinton’s classic novel by the same name, is a dreamy, soft endeavor. Despite the gritty world in which the film’s protagonist Ponyboy Curtis (C. Thomas Howell) exists, the film is a surprisingly sweet, earnest and vulnerable in a way that from some angles could be considered cloying, but ultimately succeeds in capturing the overwhelming and all-encompassing emotions of adolescence.  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 →

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 →

So there’s this fabulous sequence about three quarters of the way through Bram Stoker’s Dracula where nearly all the characters left alive are speeding to Transylvania and Dracula’s castle for the film's climax. On one side of the race are Professor Abraham Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) , barrister Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), his fiancée Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), and three adventurers/friends. Continue Reading →

PBS presents a fresh & engagingly modern take on the timeless tale of star-crossed lovers. Filmed over 17 days on a closed stage due to the global pandemic, Romeo and Juliet is an intimate and compelling production of a familiar story. The beats are all there: star-crossed lovers find each other amidst the bitter enmity of their families, people party, people die, the most convoluted plan in all of playwriting history is hatched, more people die. There have been, roughly, over 200 on-screen adaptations alone of the play, ranging from full-length movies to thematically appropriate TV episodes. The titular couple has been vampires and gnomes. What does a new version have to offer an audience who have known this story all of their lives? How do you film the most-filmed play of all time?  The National Theatre’s new Romeo and Juliet film (aired in the U.S. by PBS’ Great Performances) stars two familiar faces as the titular couple: The Crown’s Josh O’Connor and Fargo’s Jessie Buckley, but the pair vanish into their roles with ease. They are backed up by the strong supporting cast, including Fisayo Akinade as Mercutio and Tamsin Grieg as a chilling Lady Capulet. Directed by Simon Goodwin and adapted from William Shakespeare’s play by Emily Burns, the film shifts between playful cast moments in a rehearsal setting and fully staged scenes, though even the latter maintain a sparse Our Town-type feel. Romeo’s home-in-exile in Mantua is a bare storage room, which both throws his stark mental state into clear view but also feels a little on the nose. Maybe a chair? Or a blanket?  Continue Reading →

I sat down with Trapanese for a lengthy chat about the challenges of scoring an entire series of such grand scope, the creative inspirations he took from the books, and the interconnecting, interweaving musical motifs of the major characters. In a first for the podcast, Trapanese also provides commentaries explaining his process for the cues "Erase the Past" and "Royal Archives Heist." Continue Reading →

I'm hardly the first person to observe that the history of video-game adaptations has been replete with messy failures; the challenges of adapting stories that are, by necessity, flat and formulaic to allow players to project themselves onto the kharacters seem virtually insurmountable. Paul W.S. Anderson's 1995 take on Mortal Kombat was one of the few to break that mold, mostly because the charming kast, simple story, and kickin' techno soundtrack were so alchemically appealing that it coalesced into good schlock this time, rather than bad. Continue Reading →

As Gena Radcliffe laid out in her keynote, Francis Ford Coppola’s work most often reflects an ambition to blow out plot points to near-operatic proportions. Coppola makes it literal in The Godfather series, but one can observe it throughout his career—in Harry Caul’s outsized paranoia, the psychological horror of Apocalypse Now, the costuming of Dracula (and everything else come to it), the teen and gang dynamics of both The Outsiders and Rumble Fish and so on. Continue Reading →

A Black Lady Sketch Show is the first half-hour sketch comedy show which is written, directed by, and starring Black women, its first season was also nominated for three Emmys. Coming off the back of all those expectations, and with a few new cast members, the second season finds a consistent rhythm of light-hearted entertainment in which these Black women can show how hilarious they are. Continue Reading →

Netflix is back with the second season of The Circle, the social media reality game show where contestants compete to be influencers, wielding their power to block their rivals and win $100,000. Season one was a lovefest, with bro-y Joey Sasso winning by playing honestly (aka “The Sasso Way”) and befriending his competitors. The contestants of season two of The Circle are less interested in making friends and more interested in strategy, dialing up the drama, and building alliances within the first four episodes. Continue Reading →

This is a little embarrassing – I’m pretty sure The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was my first exposure to Philip Seymour Hoffman. As I’ve said before, he didn’t appear in many blockbusters, and when I was fifteen (watching this Hunger Games sequel on the largest screen I could find), well, I watched a lot of blockbusters. But on second look, my embarrassment isn’t warranted. Catching Fire, and Hoffman’s work in it, is far better than I’d remembered.  Continue Reading →

Mare of Easttown may at times feel like it’s kicking a dead horse. It’s a grammatically perfect post-Cardinal Bernard Law, cold-case-comes-alive thriller with rich performances by its entire cast. Yet for a story about a maverick detective purporting to be about more than crime, it follows surprisingly predictable beats, leaving little room for illuminating nuance.  Continue Reading →

Returning to score these characters for the first time since Captain America: Civil War, Jackman brings his usual fanfare and frenetic action scoring to the table, expanding themes he originated in his previous work to a much larger, longer palette. Sam's theme, formerly a three-note quick motif between action beats, gets its own blues-tinged variation to pay homage to his Louisiana roots; Bucky, meanwhile, gets a softer, more melodic version of the Winter Soldier theme to contrast with the cacophonous shriek that heralded him in his debut feature. And the Captain America theme gets its own complications, now that the man holding the shield is a little less trustworthy than he used to be. Continue Reading →

Green Room, Jeremy Saulnier’s serrated razor thriller that follows luckless punk band’s attempt to survive an assault by murderous neo-Nazis, is five years old (six counting its appearance at Cannes). Watching it in 2021 is a different experience compared to watching it in 2016. It’s bittersweet to take in Anton Yelchin’s terrific lead turn as bassist Pat, given his death in a horrific freak accident that year. It’s bitter to know that empty creeps like Tucker Carlson would look at Patrick Stewart’s neo-Nazi crime lord Darcy and his band of openly fascist, hate-fueled, racist goons and say “they’re doing nothing wrong” to their nationwide audience.The world shifts, and with it the experience of partaking in culture. But, while that shifting is inevitable, Green Room remains Green Room. In other words? It’s a terrific thriller that uses its geography and its carnage smartly. It handles tone precisely. And in Yelchin and Stewart, it has two stupendous performances that anchor a strong ensemble cast and contrast each other in fascinating ways.After a prologue that introduces struggling punk band the Ain’t Rights (Yelchin’s Pat – the bassist; Alia Shawkat’s Sam – the drummer; Callum Turner’s Tiger – the vocalist; and Joe Cole’s Reece – the drummer) and their dire circumstances (an unexpectedly cancelled gig strands them states away from home, and taking a last minute gig at a right-wing skinhead club’s a way to get some badly needed cash), Green Room confines itself mostly to the title location and the club that surrounds it. Director/writer Saulnier and cinematographer Sean Porter (20th Century Women) turn the setting into a tightly packed box of nightmares.Barring a brief, transcendent moment during the Ain’t Rights’ show itself – a moment in the zone where the band gel and the rancid crowd get over themselves, the set and its presentation are consistently and deliberately stifling. Sometimes, this is literally true – as when the band are playing or early in the stand-off where they’re locked in the packed green room with a murdered woman, her best friend (Imogen Poots’ Amber), the white supremacist black metal band whose leader murdered her, and the club’s mountain of a bouncer (Eric Edelstein). Continue Reading →

For the horror genre, April 15, 2011, marked a handful of notable dates. On one hand, it was the 15th anniversary of when Scream started filming, starting with the 11-minute sequence in which an onscreen Drew Barrymore, thought by the masses to be the star, was eviscerated in the name of her killers' pop culture fetish. The movie not only reintroduced the slasher film back into the mainstream, but it also brought back one of its maestros. Of course, that'd be Wes Craven. Continue Reading →

“Time is a funny thing. Time is a very peculiar item. You see, when you're young, you're a kid, you got time, you got nothing but time. Throw away a couple of years, a couple of years there... it doesn't matter. You know. The older you get you say, "Jesus, how much I got? I got thirty-five summers left." Think about it. Thirty-five summers.” Continue Reading →

At face value, the original premise of Younger seems destined for a short run. After all, a story about a woman in her 40s who pretends to be 26 to get a job in publishing seems more at home as a Lifetime Original movie than a long-form series. And yet the comedy has lasted six years on TVLand, with the show never losing its charm and heart. While the seventh and final season has the series moving from TVLand to Paramount+, it still manages to keep the same spirit that won it so many fans.  Continue Reading →

In a lot of ways, I feel a bit sorry for The Nevers. A show created and conceptualized by Joss Whedon, former pop-culture wunderkind now revealed to be an abusive terror behind the scenes of some of his most high-profile works, it's already weighed down by the lodestone of its controversial creator even before it airs. Whedon left the show's production in November (presumably as a result of these allegations coming forward), the current showrunner position shifting to Philippa Goslett. Time will tell if Goslett will have the time or the opportunity to make the show her own and drag it out from the shadow of its provenance. But if the first four episodes provided to critics are any indicator, she'll have an uphill battle, as every bit of its worldbuilding and thematic concerns scream the kind of quippy, fly-by-night faux-progressivism for which Whedon's output is known. Continue Reading →

Excalibur was hardly the first film to be made based on the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table and it was hardly the last word on the subject either. The saga has inspired everything from a bloated musical (Camelot) to one of the funniest films ever made (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) to whatever that thing was that Guy Ritchie made that you have already forgotten even existed until just about now (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword). It may not even be the best screen version—I would have to give that prize to Holy Grail on the basis of being both hysterically funny and more accurate in its depiction of the period than most of its brethren (coconuts notwithstanding). Continue Reading →

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 April, we revisit both the game-changing hits and low point misses of Francis Ford Coppola. Read the rest of our coverage here. Burrow into a man’s soul and see what you find. You may discover a darkness beyond comprehension or a light as bright as the flares that cut against the night sky. But if you mangle that soul in the throes of war, maim it through acts of killing, expose it to enough raw horror to blight mind and body, you can never really know. The parts of ourselves we hold dear become wrenched and twisted within that grim crucible, until they become unrecognizable. That’s the overwhelming feeling that washes over you during Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal 1979 masterpiece. Set during the Vietnam War, the film sees Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), a U.S. Army assassin, dispatched to travel upriver into Cambodia and take out the infamous Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Kurtz is a decorated officer who’s gone rogue and cultivated a following all his own, one which strikes fear into the hearts of all sides of this conflict. In that framework, the movie peers into the souls of these two men and considers what, if anything, can be gleaned from their war-ravaged psyches. Continue Reading →