308 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Burmese (Page 15)

It's not the first time the two have worked together, having met to build the score for 2016's Lion and working on several projects since. Together, they've built a clear sense of collaboration which bears out in Ammonite's intimate, complicated scoring -- which echoes the growing intimacy between Winslet and Ronan as, respectively, 19th-century paleontologist Mary Anning and a young woman she's tasked to care for. Continue Reading →

Netflix's latest overstuffed fantasy adaptation is a challenge for viewers' time & patience. Visiting the source material before watching an adaptation can be a difficult decision to make. On the one hand, going into a viewing experience as fresh and free of expectations as possible typically feels like the best-case scenario. On the other hand, some level of awareness can make it easier to follow the early installments of, say, a six-episode Netflix series. To be a little less opaque, not being familiar with The Letter for the King’s source material -- the Dutch 60’s fantasy novel De brief voor de Koning -- makes the early goings of the Netflix series a bit of a slog. The first episode of newcomer showrunner Will Davies’s effort in particular feels very nearly inert. Too many characters are introduced with little clarity on their back story, and there's too much switching from location to location without giving us a true feel for the world. It's so much setup to achieve so little connection with the audience. However, as Tiuri (Amir Wilson) begins to undergo the trials of becoming a knight more in earnest in episode 2, the world starts to take shape. More important, the show starts to develop a personality. In addition to finally separating Tiuri out as our lead, the supporting characters snap into relief. We see the mix of nobility, arrogant callousness, and underhandedness of Tiuri’s adopted father and namesake Sir Tiuri the Valiant (David Wenham). Sir Fantumar’s (Omid Djalili) thirst for power and disgust for others starts to reveal itself. Additionally, characters who ultimately do not figure stronger into the narrative become easier to spot. Continue Reading →

Vin Diesel nicely keys into more stoic shootouts, but the movie around him can't weld together its medley of genre inspirations. As Ray Garrison aka Bloodshot (Vin Diesel) tumbles down an elevator in midair combat with Jimmy Dalton (Sam Heughan) and Tibbs (Alexander Hernandez), one may experience deja-vu. This, in some ways, is unsurprising—Bloodshot rarely seems interested in breaking new ground. However, the scene brings a deeper kind of recognition derived not just from familiar story beats, but also the visuals. The plasticine nature of these CGI constructs turns out to be a covert bit of nostalgia, smuggling Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man-level effects into a nastier superhero film 18 years later. The extent to which this will please viewers will, of course, vary. For this critic, there’s something charming about it. This is the kind of movie comic book fans would have been nearly thrilled to see in the early 2000s: a not-quite-faithful adaptation animated by competent direction and actors willing to embrace the content without tipping into self-seriousness. That said, it feels likely to get a different reception in 2020. The superhero film has grown so much in scope and depth so much in the past two decades. As a result, Bloodshot feels a bit unstuck in time. It’s a throwback to an era that’s passed and, depending on how inclined audiences are to take a sidelong glance at it, the film also operates as a sort of commentary. It seems to be reflecting the evolution of the action movies from their ‘80s ascendance to their superpowered present. 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 February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. Sometimes you still get a Black Panther, or a Baby Driver, but the days of carefully curated movie soundtracks peaked, for the most part, somewhere between the mid-80s and the mid-90s. Largely gone are films that seem to have been built around the incidental music played in them, in favor of original scores that provide far more dramatic weight (or, in the case of Hildur Guðnadóttir ’s Oscar winning score for Joker, even make a mediocre film seem better than it actually is). When we think “soundtracks,” we think Saturday Night Fever, John Hughes, and movies that were far outlived by the songs featured in them, like Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You),” as heard in Reality Bites. Often left out of the conversation (suggesting that anyone other than me talks about movie soundtracks this much) is Jonathan Demme, despite his crafting some of the best, most musically diverse soundtracks of the 80s and 90s. Like Quentin Tarantino, Demme’s soundtracks seemed to be personally curated from his own music collection, featuring everything from mainstream acts like Bruce Springsteen to smaller indie bands like the Feelies to new wave to reggae. It was as if the cool middle-aged guy who ran the local used record store decided to give directing movies a try. Continue Reading →

Clever, handsome, and rich but not necessarily in that order, Emma Woodhouse (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a self-made matchmaker. She tinkers in the personal lives of her peers; she fancies herself somewhere between a queen bee and a B-level goddess. That isn’t to say she plays god, though. She has just enough at stake for that to not be the case. It’s more that she, given her 1800s English setting and semi-detached friendships, is royalty in training. It’s an archetypal base that’s spawned adaptations both loose and tight, but when it comes to Autumn de Wilde’s, it’s a little too atrophied to be either. 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 February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. Objectively, remaking The Manchurian Candidate seems a wild proposition. The 1962 version was met with strong critical praise and audience support upon its release. Furthermore, Angela Lansbury’s depiction of Eleanor Iselin has only grown to near-mythic standards of appreciation since. On top of it all, the movie was also a deeply faithful adaptation of the novel. How and why does someone re-adapt/remake something that was both universally praised and hewed so close to the source material as to make being less faithful the only option? The most compelling answer lies in Jonathan Demme’s particular fixation on humanism. As has been well-established, the director has long been considered one of the most humane directors of the late 20th and early 21st Century. Through films like Something Wild, Rachel Getting Married, Beloved, and even Ricki and the Flash, the director has time and time again created empathetic portraits of people struggling through life. 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 February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. Jonathan Demme’s The Truth About Charlie is a miscalculation on every level. As a meat-and-potatoes thriller, it fails utterly. As an exercise in style, it’s disjointed and unimpressive. A remake of Stanley Donen’s 1963 Hitchcockian comic mystery, Charade, could’ve brought out Demme’s humor, something largely absent from his films post-1990. Instead, the movie is a joyless, dull affair, resulting in something completely unnecessary. The film follows the broad plot of the original movie: a woman on holiday in Europe meets a mysterious man. When she finds out her husband has been murdered, she gets caught up in a game of international intrigue, fortune-seeking, and mistaken identity. While the original starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, The Truth About Charlie stars Thandie Newton and Mark Wahlberg. Already the film has an issue—namely, that Newton and Wahlberg are no Hepburn and Grant. A simple comparison to the original movie is warranted only because The Truth About Charlie is so hollow and unmotivated that the comparison has to be made. Otherwise, it's incomprehensible as a work of art. Continue Reading →

Disney continues to shuffle off Fox's remaining output with this limp, awkward adaptation of the Jack London novel. Jack London started writing The Call of the Wild at the dawn of the 20th century after traveling through Yukon country during the height of the Gold Rush. It was in this period of blind human ambition and greed that he conceived of a story told through a dog’s eyes. The very good dog, Buck, starts as a civilized house pet before being stolen and sold as a sled dog in Alaska. There he gets passed from owner to owner, some much nicer than others, and along the way discovers that his destiny is not with humans but with the beasts of the wilderness, like his ancestors before him. It’s a beautifully written and visceral adventure about the brutality of man, the overwhelming power of nature, and the freedom we’re capable of when we turn our back on society’s rules. On the other hand, the new film adaptation of The Call of the Wild has all the thematic weight of an Air Bud sequel.  Director Chris Sanders, who is very accomplished in the world of animated film with credits like How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch to his name, finds himself in no man’s land in the world of live-action. In order to really dig into the book’s themes and capture the harrowing journey Buck goes through, it’s necessary to make it a brutal animated movie like Watership Down. But that would be too much for any Disney-owned studio. Instead, we get a very saturated version of the novel that relies on a CGI dog that looks like a reject from Marmaduke.  Continue Reading →

Al Pacino leads a team of Nazi hunters in a brassy Amazon series stuffed with Holocaust pathos and comic-book sleaze. (Editor's note: this review is based on the first five episodes of the show, which is what was provided to critics prior to the show's premiere.) Amazon’s Hunters is a lot. That’s not bad, by any means, but it is a heads up. It’s funny and heartbreaking and stressful, a love letter to exploitation films, comic books, and revenge fantasies, and it is a lot. It’s also very much something that people need to see right now. Created and written by David Weil and produced by Jordan Peele, Hunters was inspired by his grandmother’s stories about World War II and the Holocaust, stories that Weil saw as a battle between good and evil (much like the comics that the show references and draws visual inspiration from). Nothing is as simple as good versus evil, of course, but Hunters does an excellent job of addressing the battles head-on. Set in 1977, the show revels in its primary NYC setting, full of grit and cigarettes and flickering subway car lights, and the visits to other locales are given equal ‘70s glory by production designer Curt Beech and set decorator Cathy T. Marshall, with loud wallpaper and lights shaped like grapes and so much carpeting. The most real and lived-in location is the modest house where 19-year old Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman) lives with his grandmother Ruth (Jeannie Berlin). After Ruth is murdered and the police handwave her death as a burglary, Jonah is approached by Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino), who knew Ruth from their time in a concentration camp and who, Jonah comes to learn, is the financier and now leader (in Ruth’s absence) of a group of Nazi hunters. While the Hunters are working from a list of Nazis who were active during the war and are now living in the United States, it becomes clear that there is a wider network at play and larger stakes than even the Hunters had suspected.  Continue Reading →

As a printer churns out women’s headshots, none of them look particularly similar. Their hair colors vary. Some of them are angled a little differently. One of them stands out because she’s holding her hand to her chin, but their demeanors are the kind of neutral that most viewers would try projecting a sharper emotion onto. Part of the issue, however, is that the emotions in question aren’t sharp. They’re throbbing, constant, quiet. They’re easy to feel but hard to unpack. Continue Reading →

John Carpenter’s tribute to campfire tales, initially a critical flop, is now a gold standard of tightly paced, bone-chilling horror. I was probably ten or so the first time I heard a genuine, told around a campfire ghost story. As it turned out, I had read the story before, but it sounded more effective being told out loud, with all the appropriate pauses and the comfortable beat of silence before the final jump scare. The story was so simple, told in under ten minutes, and it left a bunch of middle schoolers flinching at every snapped twig and cricket chirp for the rest of the night. John Carpenter’s The Fog, released forty years ago today, perfectly follows the campfire story structure: setup, slow but steady growing sense of dread and menace, misleading moment of all is well again, and then one last BOO! to ensure that the audience leaves the movie with the worst case of goosebumps they’ve ever had. Co-written with Carpenter’s frequent collaborator Debra Hill, while The Fog isn’t quite as effective as its predecessor Halloween, it shares the earlier film’s tight pacing and a villain (or, in this case, multiple villains) that always seems to be right behind you no matter how fast you run. The movie actually opens with a campfire story, told by John Houseman, in a tone that’s perhaps more serious than a movie about vengeful leper ghosts deserves, but works to its benefit. The scene was added in by Carpenter in post-production, after he was dissatisfied with his original cut. Houseman essentially explains the entire plot of the movie in less than three minutes, and the fact that The Fog makes valuable use of every frame of its ninety minute run time is a minor miracle. There’s not an extra ounce of fat on it, and it doesn’t need any. Continue Reading →

Dominic Cooke's well-crafted spy thriller doesn't try anything new, but boasts winning performances & a zippy plot. In 2019, the buddy-car film Ford v Ferrari became the clear cut favorite of dads across American and Britain. Using well-matched leads in Christian Bale and Matt Damon, James Mangold’s film became a critical and commercial hit, showing that fathers still have the power to put a movie into the green. It looks like there’s a new dad film of 2020 though, with Dominic Cooke’s Ironbark taking its rightful spot upon the beer-bellied throne.  Ironbark tells the story of Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch), a British businessman recruited by the government to become a spy-like courier in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Wynne agrees to keep this entire operation a secret from everyone, including his wife Sheila (Jessie Buckley), growing more invested and involved and spy-ish.  Flanked by one British operative Dickie Franks (Angus Wright) and one American operative Emily Donovan (Rachel Brosnahan), Wynne begins meeting with a Russian source named Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze). Together, they smuggle nuclear information back into Britain and the U.S. in hopes of avoiding nuclear war, and eventually dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Continue Reading →

Patrick Stewart is still carrying much of the weight as "Star Trek: Picard" continues to pile on the lore & find its footing. “Maps and Legends” improves on Star Trek: Picard’s series premiere. It’s filled to the brim with new lore and exposition and features another extended bout of table-setting. But it also features plenty of Patrick Stewart acting in one-on-one scenes, his forte, and puts him opposite performers who can hold their own. Making those conversations and confrontations a bigger focus here helps balance out the wobbly plot mechanics and less-exciting new faces the series strains to introduce. That catch is that the series still dumps a ton of lore on the audience here. "Maps and Legends" is full of implausible and contradictory nonsense that constantly tries to top or overcomplicate (or both) whatever’s come before. It’s not enough for the Tal Shiar, the Romulan secret police, to be involved in this conspiracy. There has to be an extra-double-secret force that’s even more hidden and even more deadly! Apparently the Romulans just hate androids and A.I. and any complex computing whatsoever, for reasons we’ve never been privy to before but which will assuredly be retconned down the line! Despite that, they still have fancy molecular reconstruction tools and can perfectly scrub a crime scene at the molecular level, but somehow not so well that Picard’s former Tal Shiar buddy can’t figure out what happened! And this new secret agency has also apparently infiltrated the highest ranks of Starfleet, where the latest corrupt commodore turns out to be a sleeper agent whose two goons are going after Dahj’s twin sister! Phew! Continue Reading →