407 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Catalan (Page 20)

Ben Whishaw shakes off the shackles of Paddington Bear in Surge, an intense if meandering thriller about a man driven to the brink. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) "I am so. Fucking. TIRED!" shouts Joseph (Ben Whishaw), a twitchy airport security worker at the end of a long, aggravating day to a neighbor who won't stop revving his four-wheeler outside their apartment building. We don't know what kind of mental health history Joseph has, and Aneil Karia's propulsive thriller Surge gives us little to work on in that department. We're left to intuit whether he's had something off in his head for a while, or if this is that old Joker idiom about it only taking one bad day to turn a regular person into a maniac. But as the stresses mount, and Joseph responds accordingly to his frayed-wire madness, Surge becomes less interested in the whys than the hows of a man realizing the precarious nature of our social fabric, pulling gleefully at the threads to see if it unravels. Effectively a feature-length take on Karia's previous short Beat (which also starred Whishaw as a man on the brink), Surge is an exercise in taking our deepest, darkest impulses to their furthest conclusion. To watch Whishaw's Joseph in the latter half of this film is to watch an extended version of one of those scenes in a movie where a frustrated character trashes a room and flings things to the floor; there's a transgressive joy in it, and a deep sadness too. Continue Reading →

Florian Zeller directs a stunning feature debut starring Anthony Hopkins & Olivia Colman at the top of their game. First-time director Florian Zeller walked out on stage to rapturous applause. At least one-third of the audience attending the premiere for Zeller’s film gave a standing ovation inside one of Sundance Film Festival’s biggest venues, the Eccles Theater. The reason for this reaction? The Father, a stage play written by Zeller adapted for the screen by Christopher Hampton, starring Academy Award winners Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman. Following father Anthony (Hopkins) and daughter Anne (Colman), The Father explores a man aging sans grace, and how his growing uncertainty affects his daily routines and biggest relationship. Playing out over an unspecified amount of time yet staying in only a couple of apartments, the film corners you, becoming smaller and more intimate as time goes on. The 97-minute runtime flies by, with Hopkins commanding the screen in every scene, becoming a vehicle for him to likely receive an Oscar nomination in 2021.  The supporting cast, including an incredible actor in Colman, serves as merely a springboard for Hopkins, who plays a man struggling to understand or realize his own increasing forgetfulness and incoming dementia. Hopkins’ performance is one of his best in the last decade, blowing his Two Popes role off the screen, and showing that he continues to be one of Hollywood’s finest actors. He rips your heart out over and over again, creating a character that feels too relatable for all of us that have family members living with pain over the age of 75.  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 →

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 January we’re celebrating the work of godfather of independent film Jim Jarmusch. Read the rest of our coverage here. “What does a poet look like?”  The first (and only) documentary I ever made asked this very simple question. To answer, I lined up the poets from my creative writing program—from the sporty sorority sister to the quiet bespectacled shaggy-haired dude—and simply… asked. Their answers? Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) Continue Reading →

Sandwiched between a rough start and too tidy of an ending, Carlos López Estrada's latest finds love in its large ensemble. “The sewage water smelt like butterscotch,” a young woman (Mila Cuda) muses. The contradictions are inert, the delivery self-serious, the writing okay but sold as something much more. Elsewhere, Tyris (Tyris Winter) berates a waitress for a restaurant’s prices. They go on a rant and submit a scathing Yelp review before pretending to choke for the sake of a free meal. Their behavior reproachable and their words petty, the movie still seems to side with them. And at this point, it would seem that we’re off to the races with Summertime. Well, not quite. Carlos López Estrada’s follow-up to Blindspotting is, to say the least, the type of movie that makes a surprising about-face after 20 minutes or so. Set over the course of one July day, it takes a neorealist base and warps it into the body of a musical, following an ensemble piece of 25. But it isn’t music: with each character comes a spoken word poem, a fade between the inner and the outer. It’s incredibly uneven at points and obnoxious at its worst, but when it finds its stride, it’s that kind of livelihood that’s too infectious to deny. In some ways, that makes its missteps all the more bizarre. Estrada, who shares a story by credit with Vero Kompalic, approaches most characters with a similar empathy. All of the performers write their respective poems, but Estrada approaches most characters with a similar empathy. Its uniformity is its greatest weakness. It helps, then, when Summertime unravels its connections and its characterizations, allowing them to breathe in tandem with the environments. Continue Reading →