1229 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Czech (Page 53)

The new film from Dash Shaw and Jane Samborski uses its breadth of bold psychedelic inspirations to distract from a tepid script. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Somewhere in the forest, Amber (Louisa Krause) and Matt (Michael Cera) strip naked, have sex, and then get high. Matt relays a dream he had of—of all things—storming the Capitol and overthrowing the government. His mind’s eye blends with our objectivity, which, in turn, heightens his and our subjectivities. It’s trippy to say the bare minimum. The animation in Cryptozoo holds a breadth of inspirations. There’s the classic psychedelia of the ‘60s, sure. There’s also the choppy, two-dimensional aesthetic that Fantastic Planet popularized in 1973. Some locales look like a backlit blackboard and some are even cleaner, like in 1981’s Son of the White Mare. But that’s mostly when Dash Shaw’s latest is peaceful, and that’s not always. Minutes into Cryptozoo, Amber and Matt come across a fenced-in tower and find a collection of caged mythical creatures. Then tragedy unfolds. This isn’t this couple’s story, and there are several spurts of violence, to say the least. Our lead is Lauren Gray (Lake Bell), a veterinarian who helps the sage Joan (Grace Zabriskie) save cryptids from the government. To be fair, the plot is by far the least original and most protracted part. The visual ingenuity, on the other hand, is something to witness. Continue Reading →

Sian Heder directs a touching & funny story of having to choose between dreams & obligation. The reason why so many movies about teenagers don’t work is because they often feature too-old actors playing characters who talk like jaded 35 year-olds (or rather, like the people who wrote them). Every once in a while, however, you find a real gem, like Sian Heder’s Coda, a low-key, moving story about a teenage girl who finds herself caught between doing the thing she loves, and having to help keep her family’s business afloat. 17 year-old Ruby, played by Emilia Jones (in what will hopefully be a star-making performance) is the only hearing member of her Massachusetts fishing family. On top of trying to get through school, she must also work on the family fishing boat, serving as the ears and voice of her father, Frank (Troy Kotsur), and older brother Leo (Daniel Durant), as they try to avoid (with mixed success) getting ripped off by the local fish buyer. It’s quietly expected that Ruby, who has no real plans for college, will simply stick around as long as Leo, Frank, and her mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin) need her. Continue Reading →

The characters in Mira Nair’s films walk along a knife’s edge of great change. On one side: what was; on the other: what could be. In Mississippi Masala, a young woman of Ugandan Indian heritage and a Black American man fall in love, a relationship that causes a scandal among the conservative in both communities. In Monsoon Wedding, the chaos of a gigantic Indian wedding teases out familial secrets about infidelity and abuse. And in The Namesake, a married couple who are practically strangers move from India to America and start a life together, adapting to the strange rhythms of a new country and each other.  Continue Reading →

Sam Levinson’s gorgeously shot but obnoxious and exhausting relationship drama Malcolm & Marie is filled with plenty of big ideas — about film, about art criticism, about authenticity, about the relationship between artists and their muse. But more often than not, those big ideas are just big ideas that go unexplored. Instead of trying to make solid arguments about what it wants to say at the beginning, Malcolm & Marie is too busy being angry and whiny. So what could’ve been a compelling two-hander drama examining art and a fractured relationship instead ends up as a movie struggling to find itself, made by a man with nothing but pettiness in his mind. Continue Reading →

Syfy’s new show Resident Alien starts out with a bang: an alien crashes on Earth and hides out in the sleepy town of Patience, Colorado. The alien takes the human form of Dr. Harry Vanderspeigle (Alan Tudyk) in order to fit in and complete his as-yet-unclear mission. However, when the town doctor is found dead, local Sheriff Mike Thompson (Corey Reynolds), Deputy Liv Baker (Elizabeth Bowen), and Mayor Ben Hawthorne (Levi Fiehler) rope Harry into the murder investigation.  Continue Reading →

In order to successfully adapt a beloved novel for the screen, a filmmaker must interpret the story in a way that both expresses their unique directorial vision and faithfully renders the original narrative. Mira Nair’s adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake achieves this challenge beautifully, harmonizing with the novel while shining as a deeply touching classic in its own right, resonating both with audiences who have read and loved the book as well as those who are new to it.  Continue Reading →

Tucked between Baton Rouge and New Orleans in the Southeastern corner of Louisiana, St. James Parish is home to several petrochemical plants. The state rewards billions in tax breaks for these places to operate, and in exchange, they pollute the water and air for nearby residents, who tend to live around the poverty line. This poisoning is so out of control that this stretch of highway earns the dubious title of “Cancer Alley”. Continue Reading →

Certain movies have a kind of insubstantial quality to them. They aren’t poorly made or badly acted but they nonetheless feel feather-light, as though they barely existed moments after you turn off the credits. Amelia is such a film. Continue Reading →

Penguin Bloom director Glendyn Ivin is one of the leading names in Australian television, which checks out all too well given that the execution of this admittedly inspirational story has “made-for-TV” written all over it. Of course, the real frustrating part is that there are occasional glimpses of a better movie that's focused on exploring these characters beyond a surface-level peek of what it's like to come to terms with a disability or be a caretaker for someone who’s disabled. Continue Reading →

Is there still time for Donald Sullivan (Paul Newman)? Old enough to regret a past he knows he can’t change, Sully staggers around his small town of North Bath, New York. He’s out of work – or at least he should be – after a construction accident left him with a damaged knee and without a lawyer good enough to secure him a settlement. Long divorced, he rents a room from an old woman named Miss Beryl (Jessica Tandy). To amuse himself, he openly flirts with Toby (Melanie Griffith).  Continue Reading →

When I reviewed season one of Selena + Chef this past August, I ended on the note of “I dare not say I hope there’s a season two (because that would mean a longer time for all of us in quarantine), but if we have to spend several more months cooking at home, we might as well do it with Selena.” Little did I know that in January of 2021 the pandemic would still be a raging mess, paving the way for the second season of Selena + Chef. Rather than looking at it like the meal you didn’t order arriving at your table (you know, back when people ate in restaurants), it’s more like a surprise dessert you didn’t know you wanted, because once you dig into season two of Selena + Chef, you won’t be able to resist the charm Selena Gomez and her jovial quarantine pod cooking with chef friends. Continue Reading →

When it comes to matters of sex and desire, there are two Indias: One is the ‘land of the Kama Sutra’—the book on the art of love and lovemaking—where temples are intricately adorned with sculptures performing acrobatic-yoga sex. The other is the land that looks away from this heritage and has not only proudly adopted Victorian attitudes to everything carnal but is also violent in its defense of this misguided notion about “true Indian culture”. It is no wonder then that it breeds a sexually repressed (over)population. Continue Reading →

Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Our Friend stumbles from a surfeit of generosity. It’s perhaps inevitable given the scope of its approach. Adapted by screenwriter Brad Ingelsby from Matt Teague’s 2013 Esquire feature, the cancer drama vainly juggles the perspectives of three close-knit friends (Matt, Dane, and Nicole) as they weather the effects and repercussions of Nicole’s (Dakota Johnson) terminal cancer. Continue Reading →

The Netflix documentary series We Are: The Brooklyn Saints begins with a collection of voiceovers from Brooklyn residents. This narration talks about the misguided perceptions the general public has about Brooklyn and its denizens. “Brooklyn is more than killing and the gangs,” one man says while another notes that the borough is “more than what’s on the news." These lines reflect the thesis of the show, which is to show a whole other side of Brooklyn by following a local youth football team. Continue Reading →

Mira Nair’s 2004 adaptation of Vanity Fair opens with our famous heroine, Becky Sharp, as a young child tearfully watching her father sell off a portrait of her deceased mother. The portrait, a dark Gainsborough-esque profile with its sut-colored background, dusty white skin, and faintly rosy cheeks, means so much for young Becky, and us in Nair’s audience. As the camera tracks at child-height, watching the portrait leave the shop, Becky loses the last connection to a lineage that will both help and hinder her social mobility.  Continue Reading →

In Hulu’s new original TV miniseries The Sister, we follow Nathan (Russell Tovey) as his life is upturned by Bob Morrow (Bertie Carvel), a figure from his past bringing disturbing news about the missing and presumed dead sister of his wife Holly Fox (Amrita Acharia). This delves into the supernatural and the psychological as Nathan desperately struggles to keep his life and his sanity together. What ensues is a perfectly watchable series full of twists and turns which never quite manages to maintain its tension.   Continue Reading →

What’s a day in the life of Brandt (Philip Seymour Hoffman)? You work for a sham: though he may look like a wealthy, self-made entrepreneur, Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston) – your employer – has nothing but his self-image, without much actual money or success to back up his lavish trappings. As personal assistant to Lebowski, your job is to keep up appearances. Try to keep Lebowski’s trophy wife from doing anything too unseemly. Convince anyone and everyone that Jeffrey Lebowski really is a paragon of upper class respectability. Day in, day out, play the thankless part.  Continue Reading →

We talk with the series co-creator, writer and director about finding the balance between darkness and comedy. When it first debuted in 2016, Search Party was often compared to Girls and Broad City, mostly because all those three shows deal with the same topics of millennials and hipster culture. But to solely focus on that element will dismiss the excellent craft and surprises that co-creators Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Michael Showalter has shown throughout four seasons. After all, this is a show like no other on TV, always radically reinventing itself to keep things fresh. Season 4 — whose first three episodes were just released on HBO Max last Thursday — is no exception, finding new angles in the story while still retaining what makes the show such a delight in the first place. The only difference is, where the three previous seasons lean more towards the comedic side of the story and keep the darkness secondary, season 4 decides to do the opposite: going full in on the psychological horror of the characters’ journey by taking references from captivity dramas like Room and Misery to an unsettling effect. Continue Reading →

Two-hours and sixteen minutes. There is a version of The Empty Man that’s a solid, efficient horror flick, and then there’s the version that’s two-hours and sixteen minutes. Unfortunately, we got the latter. Adapted from an independent comic book of the same name, this poorly paced, occasionally engaging exercise staggers along like its titular demon. If only there was a way to stop it, before it’s too late.   Continue Reading →

Adapted from the Nickelodeon show Winx Club, Netflix’s new series Fate: The Winx Saga attempts to reboot the long-running favorite with gritty live action to fit on the homepage somewhere between The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Cursed. It’s a visually stunning fantasy quest centered around young women that has all the magic it needs to fly but hasn’t yet learned to focus its potential within. Continue Reading →

From the moment that the James Bond film franchise established itself as a worldwide phenomenon, everyone from the biggest Hollywood studios to fly-by-night European exploitation producers tried to jump on the bandwagon with their own. Although there were a few efforts where no expense was spared—most notably the gargantuan star-studded Casino Royale—most of them were produced on minuscule budgets that tried to replicate the lavish trappings of the typical Bond film with cheapo special effects and loads of stock footage. In addition, few of these efforts were able to find a star with the kind of instant audience appeal that Sean Connery possessed—not even when the producers of Operation Kid Brother (1967) had the ingenious idea of casting Sean’s younger brother Neil in the lead. Many of these films, realizing that they could not compete in therms of scale or star power elected to go the spoof route, but even there, they mostly failed to compete because the Bond films were themselves already semi-spoofs that rare took themselves too seriously. Continue Reading →