130 Best Releases Translations Dutch on Hulu (Page 5)
Bergman Island
StudioARTE France Cinéma,
Mia Hansen-Løve's latest wrestles with the creative and romantic frustrations between men and women, with Ingmar Bergman watching mindfully overhead.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 New York Film Festival.)
It's an unwritten rule of film festivals that there have to be at least a few films in the program dealing with either the history of cinema or the filmmaking process. Bergman Island, the latest from Mia Hansen-Løve, covers both of those bases. It's a quietly beguiling look at a pair of filmmakers as they go about generating their latest projects, literally standing in the looming shadow of one of filmmaking's most towering figures. Continue Reading →
Benedetta
In the opening scene of Benedetta, a young girl stops along the road to pray to a shrine of the Virgin Mary. A group of bandits ambushes her and her family, nobles who are well-off but by no means excessively affluent. Benedetta curses the thieves as they snatch her mother’s gold necklace, promising that the Holy Mother will haunt them for the rest of their days. Suddenly, a small bird flies from a nearby tree and shits in the eye of the bandit leader. The men laugh and toss the jewelry back to Benedetta’s mother, preferring not to risk it. Still, we’re left wondering – was this divine intervention? Or just a case of well-timed bird poop? Continue Reading →
The Nowhere Inn
In one of The Nowhere Inn’s several recurring clips, Carrie Brownstein confides in her best friend. She says that she wants to do bigger things. She declares herself as being stuck in a rut creatively and, acquiescing to the possibility that only those closest to her truly get something out of her work. As for the friend in question, she’s Annie Clark—the Annie Clark. But in spite of the casual intimacy of the conversation, there’s a clear disconnect. Carrie is Carrie, often behind the scenes. Annie is St. Vincent, on the stage and in the public eye. They’re both themselves, but one has more clout, the kind that allows for more artistic leeway. Continue Reading →
The Forgiven
StudioBFI, Film4 Productions,
Despite its top shelf cast & capable direction, this drama about tourists behaving badly is nothing we haven't seen before.
The Forgiven is a story about fantastically rich white people behaving badly in an “exotic” location, told by slightly less rich and hopefully better intentioned white people. So soon after HBO’s The White Lotus, it might be tempting to call this a new trend. But it’s probably more accurate to consider it business as usual.
This is not to say that it’s a bad film. The Forgiven is thoroughly competent in its writing, direction, and performances. It also happens to be — from its first scenes and the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-esque dynamic it establishes between its protagonists, to its ending which is strongly foreshadowed to the point of telegraphing — an obvious one. Continue Reading →
Titane
SimilarA Real Young Girl (1976), Copying Beethoven (2006),
StudioARTE France Cinéma,
Julia Ducourneau's followup to her stunning debut Raw makes for brutal, beautiful, brilliant body horror.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.)
Titane begins with the pluck of banjo strings and an extreme closeup of chrome. It’s a clash that’s jarring and compelling: the earthy, fire-and-brimstone howl of David Eugene Edwards’s take on the American folk standard “Wayfaring Stranger” set against an almost voyeuristic tour through a car’s inner workings. Continue Reading →
What We Do in the Shadows
NetworkFX,
SimilarArrested Development,
StudioFX Productions,
It’s been said (okay, only I’ve said it) that sitcoms shouldn’t run more than three or four seasons. Any longer than that, and they run the risk of getting stale, resorting to tired tactics like flashback episodes, forced romantic relationships, and adding cute wisecracking kids. So it’s a wondrous thing that, in its third season, What We Do in the Shadows, shows no signs of flagging, of having to fall back on retreads, or even having a musical episode. Despite what feels like a limiting premise, it’s as fresh and funny as ever before, somehow managing to maintain a remarkable balance between raunch and sweetness. Continue Reading →
Only Murders in the Building
Like its stars, Hulu original Only Murders in the Building, a 10-episode series focused on murders, podcasts, and murder podcasts, mixes the old with the new. Created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman, the often-light dramedy stars Martin alongside Selena Gomez and Martin Short, three tenants of a high-rise, upper-class New York City apartment complex. It attempts to appeal to the widest of audiences, from upstart New Yorkers to murder aficionados to TV-watchers who need their grandchildren to set up streaming services. And it (mostly) succeeds. Continue Reading →
Vacation Friends
StarringTawny Newsome,
Studio20th Century Studios,
It’s apparent that anyone at Disney or 20th Century Studios wanted with Vacation Friends was a 100-minute movie to accompany a thumbnail of John Cena and Lil Rel Howery on the front page of Hulu. That’s it. There’s no other purpose to this film’s existence. It’s just another piece of “content” that can gather dust on Hulu. Save for Space Jam: A New Legacy, you won’t find a more fitting representation in the summer of 2021 of what hollow cinema the age of algorithms and monopolistic streaming services has wrought. Put simply, Vacation Friends makes Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates look like Safety Last! Continue Reading →
Indemnity
As Fantasia draws to a close, we're catching up on some of the smaller films from the fest before they slip from our fingers into the Montreal air.
First up is Indemnity, a surprisingly lean and confident (albeit familiar) action thriller from South Africa's Gambit Films, proof positive that the most interesting action pictures are coming from places outside Hollywood. At its core, it's a meat-and-potatoes conspiracy caper At the center of Indemnity is a traumatized firefighter named Theo Abrams (Jarrid Geduld), still reeling from the mental anguish and PTSD that came from a particularly bad blaze that killed several people around him. Meanwhile, his wife Angie (Nicole Fortuin), an investigative journalist, gets wrapped up in a conspiracy involving defense contractors and shadowy government figures -- and despite failed warnings, she ends up dead in their bed one morning, with Theo suddenly becoming the prime suspect.
From there, Theo goes on the run, becoming a tense mix of John Wick and Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, smashing and crashing his way through setpieces and plot beats that would feel familiar to anyone raised on 1990s Hollywood action films. But despite this familiarity, there's a certain charm to Indemnity that makes its pastiche sing a bit more than you'd expect. Maybe it's the committed performance from Geduld (who handles his choreography with a bruiser's brutality), or the comparatively homespun nature of the production. Indemnity does a lot with a little; it clearly doesn't have Hollywood's resources, but it uses those limitations in uniquely charming ways. Dustups in prison vans and elevators have a wincing vitality that only seems to come when a film feels like it's putting its actors in real danger. Continue Reading →
Nine Perfect Strangers
SimilarSám vojak v poli,
StudioEndeavor Content,
Big Little Lies and The Undoing creator David E. Kelley returns to the small screen for another collaboration with Nicole Kidman with Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers, an adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s 2018 bestseller. The book received mixed reviews, though, despite its commercial success, and the series struggles with the shallow nature of its story. Coming on the heels of The White Lotus, another show depicting rich, difficult people at a beautiful location, Kelley struggles to capture the suspense of his previous endeavors. Continue Reading →
Pig
Similar28 Weeks Later (2007), I Stand Alone (1998),
StudioEndeavor Content,
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 →
Space Jam: A New Legacy
SimilarAnnie Hall (1977), Bring It On (2000), Fantasia (1940),
Watch afterBlack Widow (2021),
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 →
Werewolves Within
SimilarEdward Scissorhands (1990), Ghost (1990),
StarringSam Richardson,
If the past few years have taught us anything, it’s that all that stuff about the importance of caring for your neighbors, and looking past differences in order to create a better world? Horseshit. Absolute nonsense. The phrase “I got mine, to hell with everyone else” should be emblazoned on the American flag. Not even a highly contagious, potentially fatal virus could bring us together - if anything, it divided us further, splitting the country right down the middle between “I’d like to not spread this virus to other people” and “Hey, pal, other people aren’t my fuckin’ problem.” As we slowly recover from said potentially fatal virus, it may not seem time yet to laugh at such a thing, and yet, by gosh, director Josh Ruben makes it possible in Werewolves Within, a riotously funny horror-comedy that pokes fun at neighbors who are unable to force themselves to get along even in the most dire of circumstances. Continue Reading →
We Need to Do Something
SimilarAnatomy of a Murder (1959), Blood and Chocolate (2007), Caché (2005), Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Mystic River (2003),
Primal Fear (1996) The 39 Steps (1935),
Sean King O'Grady directs a claustrophobic horror film that has a lot of potential, but just misses the mark.
We Need to Do Something, the debut feature from Sean King O’Grady, is a horror film that can easily be read on two different levels, though your mileage with it will vary depending on which one you choose to follow. As a straightforward horror yarn, albeit with moments of grotesque black humor thrown in from time to time, it contains a few interesting elements but never finds a way to pull them together into a completely satisfying whole. On the other hand, if one regards the whole enterprise on a more overtly symbolic level, it gains a little more in terms of power and effectiveness.
Yet, even then it also tends to lose its way especially once the fairly potent central metaphor gives way to less interesting instances of bloodshed. In either case, it ends on such a clunky and ineffective note that viewers may get the sense that O’Grady and screenwriter Max Booth III have just been screwing with them, a feeling enhanced by the all-too-apt choice for a key musical cue towards the end. Continue Reading →
Dream Horse
SimilarBring It On (2000), Brubaker (1980), Freedom Writers (2007), Mississippi Burning (1988), Raging Bull (1980),
Watch afterAvatar: The Way of Water (2022),
StudioFilm4 Productions, Ingenious Media,
Toni Collette has recently made a name for herself in the broader movie-going culture as a queen of creepy, suspense cinema, with her fantastic performances in Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Charlie Kaufman’s dark and whimsical I’m Thinking of Ending Things. It’s fun to see this resurgence of popularity nearly two decades after she gave what I consider her best performance of her career in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. Continue Reading →
All the Streets Are Silent
Jeremy Elkin's documentary is a love letter to the skater culture of the '90s, and the punks and rebels that filled it.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Tribeca film festival.)
It took me towards the middle of Jeremy Elkin's documentary All the Streets Are Silent to realize that Eli Gesner, the videographer behind much of the New York skateboard culture in the 90s, was the prototype for the character Fourth Grade in Jonah Hill’s mid90s. Fourth Grade was the kid I identified with the most, being the shy and silent observer to the antics and adventures of a tight-knit crew of talented skaters and artists. All throughout that film, he captured it all with his trusty palmcorder, only to eventually debut the footage in a video mixtape at the end. Such an expression that I also didn’t realize until All the Streets Are Silent was inspired by Gesner’s work as a kid with a camera. Continue Reading →
Crazy Rich Asians
The director-writer & star of Asia talk death, love & the immigration experience.
A mother, her rebellious teen daughter, and an illness. It’s a story that’s been done and redone so many times that it’s basically become a subgenre. But in Ruthy Pribar’s feature directorial debut Asia, a tender and devastating character study about motherhood and loss, everything about the subgenre gets rejuvenated. Not because it breathes a new life into it, but because it tells the story in an understated way, with a level of realism that recalls the works of the Dardenne brothers more than it does The Fault in Our Stars.
The titular character, Asia (Alena Yiv), is a 35-year-old single mother who immigrated herself and her daughter from Russia to Israel years ago to start a new life. By day (and sometimes night), Asia works tirelessly as a nurse. But when she’s not taking care of her patients, Asia likes to spend time at a bar, drinking alone and flirting with strangers, or having sex with her colleague in his car as if she’s still a teenager. Continue Reading →
Love, Victor
SimilarNoah's Arc, Raven's Home,
Roswell Stand Up!!,
Studio20th Television,
When Greg Berlanti’s Love, Simon arrived three years ago, it was hailed as groundbreaking — mostly because it was the first major studio rom-com centering on a gay character. But valid criticisms soon came from the queer community, saying that the movie is too white and its depiction of coming-out is a tad too tidy and sanitized. Continue Reading →
Undine
StudioARTE France Cinéma,
Over the past decade, writer-director Christian Petzold has delivered three near-perfect features-- 2012’s Barbara, 2014’s Phoenix, and 2018’s Transit. His work isn't showy, but what he pulls off is challenging - making artfully crafted, sumptuously romantic stories focusing on lonely, easy-going characters finding connection with one another. His latest, Undine, follows in that tradition, and it’s one of his best. Continue Reading →
Hudson Hawk
In the 30 years since it made its infamous debut, there have been bigger critical and commercial catastrophes unleashed upon multiplexes than Hudson Hawk (1991). And yet, while most of those disasters have been duly forgotten, it continues to loom large as the ultimate Hollywood cautionary tale of what can happen when a performer riding the absolute peak of their cultural ascendancy is given the chance to make literally anything that they want and it turns out to be something that evidently no one else wanted. Continue Reading →
Four Good Days
SimilarThe Cider House Rules (1999), The Last Emperor (1987),
In Four Good Days, when heroin-addict Molly is asked what her triggers are, what could get her to use again, she replies, “My life’s a trigger…” Fellow addict Amanda Wendler takes things a step further, though, proclaiming, “Reality’s a trigger.” But Amanda isn’t another character in Molly’s story—she’s the inspiration behind it. In 2016, the Washington Post chronicled a few days in her fight for sobriety in their much lauded article, “How’s Amanda? A Story of Truth, Lies and American Addiction.” Continue Reading →