106 Best Releases Translations Dutch on Max (Page 5)

In Las Vegas, the Queen of the Strip, comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) finds out her stranglehold on The Palmetto, her casino home, is slipping. The gambling palace’s owner (Christopher McDonald) alerts her to his plan to take away her prime weekend slots because he needs to appeal to “idiots and people in their twenties,” and Deborah gets him neither. Continue Reading →

While Those Who Wish Me Dead is coming out in theaters this weekend (be safe, especially if you're not vaccinated!), it's probably the movie to benefit most from Warner Bros. pandemic-fueled decision to simultaneously throw their releases up on HBO Max. From stem to stern, Taylor Sheridan's latest feels like the kind of movie you'd find on old-school HBO in the '90s, or FX or TNT, watching with your dad over a holiday weekend. It's silly, forgettable schlock, and yet I can't get too mad at it. 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 →

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 →

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 →

One of the most fascinating things about Godzilla -- whether in his original Japanese provenance in his long-running series of films, or in the comparatively-recent "MonsterVerse" Westernization of the big lizard, courtesy of Warner Bros. and Legendary -- is that he's so malleable. On the one hand (as with the original 1954 Ishiro Honda film and Gareth Edwards' flawed but philosophically-intriguing 2014 reboot), he can be a poignant vehicle to explore the apocalyptic anxieties of nations ravaged by atomic bombs and climate change. Continue Reading →

Like most pieces of queer cinema, Happy Together was widely misunderstood on its initial release. Looking back on its reviews in 1997 by American critics, there’s a puzzling emphasis on the narrative. Specifically, many critics at the time took umbrage for what they perceived as a “laggy” storyline. So prominent were these criticisms that they ended up giving the film a Metacritic score just one point about Star Wars: Episode III- Revenge of the Sith. Continue Reading →

"Everything expires. Is there anything in this world that doesn't?" Continue Reading →

In Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels, we follow two parallel narratives. One tells the story of a contract killer (Leon Lai) trying to get out of the game and his agent (Michelle Reis) who is infatuated with him. The other follows a chaotic and mute man, He Zhwiu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who falls in love with a woman called Charlie (Charlie Yeung) whom he keeps running into. There’s a lot to like here, from the moodiness of Hong Kong to the music, to Wong Kar-wai’s signature stunning lighting. One specific thing which is really fascinating here is how few moments of dialogue are present here, and how that makes this film so effective.  Continue Reading →

The first feature-length documentary dedicated to Tina Turner leaves out too much to be truly engaging. “This film, and the musical, are a kind of closure” says executive producer Erwin Bach, who's also partner to Tina Turner for over three decades. The music icon has, in many ways, been asked to tell the same story over and over again. Even when Turner attempted to silence the nagging questions by “journalists” about the abuse in her past by writing a biography (the now infamous I, Tina), the story of her life remained outside of her control.  Directors Daniel Lindsay and T.J Martin attempt to bring an end to the unceasing cycle of questions with their new documentary, Tina. Featuring new private interviews with Turner and those closest to her, along with a stunning array of archival footage, this is the definitive documentary on the pop and soul legend. Most of her, anyway. Continue Reading →

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a good movie. Its cast brings the famous DC superhero team to life through performances that range from reliably solid to very strong. Its action is clear, creative, and in a few places downright stupendous. Its thematic work is interesting, both on its own and in the greater context of its long and winding road to existence. There are multiple moments that qualify as full-on fantastic filmmaking, sequences that successfully connect western superheroes to the larger-than-life feeling of mystical Arthurian lore. To put it simply, I like it. I like it a bunch. Continue Reading →

Watching any Wong Kar-wai movie in 2021 hits differently than it might have in almost any other year. He’s a director known for exploring loneliness and to watch it at a time when all of us without question are among the loneliest we’ve ever been is a striking experience. We’re now a year into a pandemic and despite the vaccinations on the horizon, it feels like it has no end. We’re counting the time since we last hugged or kissed our loved ones in months and even years at this point instead of hours. Continue Reading →

Back in 1988, Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai tried his hand at directing a feature film, transitioning from soap opera screenwriting to the low-level crime underworld seen in As Tears Go By. Wong’s debut drama follows three characters with multiple storylines: Wah (Andy Lau), his cousin Ngor (Maggie Cheung), and Fly (Jackie Cheung), his stand-in little brother in criminal life. Around the age of 30, Wong’s first foray into directing landed him a critical and modest commercial success, blending elements of his style that would become staples in his own filmmaking style.  Continue Reading →

Natalie Morales directs herself and Mark Duplass in a tender look at the bonds we form to save ourselves in a hard world. How are we supposed to process our grief when the closest we have to comfort is sharing feelings through zoom video calls? In Natalie Morales’ directorial debut Language Lessons, that question is explored at the center of the story. Wonderfully written and packed with heart and sensitivity, this heartwarming two-hander mumblecore celebrates the beauty of human connection in any kind of medium, depicting how the unexpected bond we have with other people, even the one only shared via computer and phone screens, can help us heal from the pain of losing our loved ones. Morales, who co-writes the script with indie darling Mark Duplass, plays Cariño, a Costa Rica-based Spanish teacher hired by a wealthy man named Will (Desean Terry) to give his husband, Adam (Duplass), a 100-hour lesson on the Spanish language. Though their first meeting starts off awkwardly, the two eventually warms up to each other, especially after Adam opens up about his life, his relationship with Will, and even his strange morning routine.  Continue Reading →

In 1979, the Village People released the song “Ready for the 80’s” on their double-LP Live and Sleazy. The song is upbeat and bright, full of hope and promise. The group sings “I’m ready for the 80s / Ready for the time of my life” throughout the chorus, and one verse starts “Everything is gonna work out fine / I have faith in this old world of mine / We'll be loving in the bright sunshine.” Listening to this song over 40 years later, you can’t shake a sense of dramatic irony. In the end, the 80’s weren’t kind to the Village People, disco, or queer men in general. As I watched the opening episode of Russell T. Davies' latest mini-series, It’s a Sin, I kept thinking of this song and its optimistic outlook for a new decade, an optimism echoed in the fresh faces of its cast, blissfully unaware of the heartbreak awaiting them.  Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Continue Reading →

The first thing you need to know about Painting With John is that you won’t come away from it learning how to paint. Host John Lurie admits in the second episode that, because most of his art is intuitive, he doesn’t know how to teach it, nor does he think just anyone can paint. You won’t learn anything about the history of painting, or the process, or even what supplies one needs to pick up painting as a hobby. This show is strictly about vibing, and somehow, it works. 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 →

Nothing heals a broken marriage like the end of the world. That’s one of the takeaways from Greenland, a disaster movie about a massive comet that has Earth, and Gerard Butler, in its crosshairs. Butler plays John Garrity, a structural engineer who finds his marriage to Allison (Morena Baccarin) falling apart, just like the giant comet (named Clarke) that’s breaking up into smaller pieces so it can spread its damage all over the planet before its big chunk hits, creating a mass extinction event.  Continue Reading →

Sixty-six years after she slew Ares, the God of War, and cleared the decks for humankind to fix their proverbial shit and end World War I, Diana Prince, Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), has settled into a new life in Washington, DC. Her apartment, filled with reminders of the “Great War” and the man she loved ever so briefly, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), suggests that while she is alive, she hasn’t truly lived in some time. Continue Reading →