1393 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into French (Page 38)

Aadrman's original 1989 Creature Comforts did something unique. Director Nick Park took interviews with everyday Britain residents and then put those vocals into the mouths of stop-motion animated zoo animals. The result was fascinating, as two disparate elements combined to tap into the daily woes which inform our lives. Whether you’re a lion trapped in an exhibit, or a man just yearning for the space of your original home country, melancholy emotions are universal.  Continue Reading →

Annette Leos Carax and art-rock sibling duo Ron and Russell Mael (of Sparks) join forces for this sometimes lovely sometimes harrowing sometimes both musical. Marion Cotillard and Adam Driver are a creative couple (an opera singer and a scathing comedian) who love each other so much. Carax and Sparks trace what happens when that love curdles—when a person's idea of themselves eats their real self and anyone they care about. And those who don't get eaten? They're still left with scars, none more than the primarily-a-puppet title character. Carax's screen craft is daring, whether biting, sweeping, or gleefully absurd. Cotillard and Driver's dives into how love turns sour and wrath makes beasts of people are splendid both individually and as a duet. And the tunes rule, from Driver and Cotillard’s swooning to Simon Helberg laying out his duties as an accompanist. The earworms. They abound. [Justin Harrison] Continue Reading →

Contains spoilers about The Power of the Dog (read our spoiler-free review here) Continue Reading →

Evil (Paramount+) Frightening, funny, and ffffffffff…Mike Colter in those sweaters! Continue Reading →

[Note: This review does its damndest to avoid any spoilers -- really, anything that hasn't been shown in the trailers -- but if you want to go into the film knowing not even that much, wait to read until after you've seen it.] Continue Reading →

When Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel hit shelves in 2014, it was a standout in science-fiction. HBO’s adaptation can’t help but hit differently in 2021. It’s a post-apocalyptic tale about what’s left of the world after a deadly flu ravages the populace. The parallels to current events are glaringly obvious.  Continue Reading →

Early in the King's Man, Orlando Oxford (Ralph Fiennes) reads a newspaper chronicling the human cost of the then-nascent World War I. The headline for all this carnage reads "When will this misery end?" It’s fitting since I found myself constantly asking myself the same question as The King's Man dragged on and on. For some reason, a franchise that’s previously leaned heavily on anal sex jokes and Elton John beating up evil henchmen wants to get serious in the most superficial way possible. Continue Reading →

Death Valley, a new horror film from Matthew Ninaber (known best for playing PG in Psycho Goreman), wants it all. The 93-minute feature hopes to bend horror, thriller, and action—a daring attempt at a balancing act without much of a safety net. Unfortunately, in practice, Ninaber’s picture can’t put two feet into any storyline and fumbles its attempt to juggle its myriad characters, plots, and tonal shifts. Continue Reading →

The network sitcom, much like the American auto industry, is a dying breed in fields looking to modernize and capitalize on newer, flashier models. NBC’s new American Auto sadly won’t revitalize either one. It's a two-dimensional sitcom that follows an inept CEO (Ana Gasteyer) as she attempts to shake up a Detriot auto manufacturer Payne motors. Continue Reading →

If you haven’t been keeping up with college sports lately, you might have missed some of the recent headlines about the fight for student-athletes to get paid. The argument boils down to this: what right do we have to insist college ball is for amateurs when it’s morphed into a multi-billion-dollar business? Is it fair to deny those actually doing the work a piece of the pie? National Champions doesn’t just aim to explore that question, it makes a firm case that players should unionize. As a primer on the issues, it’s excellent. As a movie, it fails. Continue Reading →

Everyone’s favorite silver-haired, monster-killing hunk is back, and this time you can call him Daddy. After a ponderous first season that took the long way to find its footing, TheWitcher’s second season boasts both a more assured stride and a more ambitious scope. Thankfully dispensing with the non-linear timelines, we catch up with Geralt of Rivia and company right where ‘Much More’ left off. But while season one was a witty, delightfully horny romp, season two takes on a gloomier tone and delves into stories with uncertain outcomes. Continue Reading →

Back in 1998, Gus Van Sant released his remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It wasn’t a good movie, but it provided two decent critical talking points. Firstly, was it actually a remake, or was it another adaptation of Robert Bloch’s novel? Given that Van Sant’s film was a shot-for-shot recreation of its 1960 predecessor save for two or three differences, it was a rarity in that, given its context, it ended up being the former. It, for all its failures in execution, used semiotics to circumvent the aforementioned semantics of its identity. Continue Reading →

On December 14th, 1977, Paramount released Saturday Night Fever. Bolstered by critical acclaim and a bestselling soundtrack, the story of a working-class Brooklynite blazing through discotheques eventually grossed over $94,000,000 worldwide and brought disco to Middle America.   Continue Reading →

Far more frustrating than a disastrous mess is a film annoyingly close to being good or vastly more interesting. That's The Unforgivable, a sloppy retelling of the Sally Wainwright's (Gentleman Jack, Happy Valley) 2009 BBC miniseries.  Continue Reading →

Sometimes, it takes a moment for a movie’s subversive qualities to register. Bold artistic swings can take a moment to settle in. In the case of the new Netflix animated feature Back to the Outback, it wasn’t until after the credits began to roll that I realized something astonishing: Back to the Outback needle drops Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy”, but not Men at Work’s “Down Under.” It’s a rug pull if ever there was one. Continue Reading →

There’s a sort of inflationary issue in the True Crime genre these days. This presents an immediate hurdle to HBO’s new “based on a true story” limited series Landscapers. Continue Reading →

In medieval morality plays, the dramatis personae always includes the likes of Charity, Death, and Temperance, named for the vices or virtues they embody. These characters are vessels, existing somewhere between allegory and literalism and imbued with the social values and anxieties of their time. French surrealist Bruno Dumont (Lil Quinquin, Slack Bay) drags this tradition into the twenty-first century with his latest film, France. Continue Reading →

There’s a song that was popular in the aughts with the lyric “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end,” and it feels like the most fitting description of The Expanse. It’s a show that has changed identities more times than Sidney Bristow and managed to retain a strong, cohesive narrative, with this season bringing its final arc full circle. Not to the proto-molecule, but to the struggle of the Belters to get their fair shake from Earth and Mars, something Joe Miller (Thomas Jane) dreamed of in the very first episode, something Fred Johnson (Chad Coleman) lived and died for.  Continue Reading →

Mike Wade (Scott Adkins) thought he could make it in Mixed Martial Arts, he really did. He couldn't. With his career definitively over, Mike and his pride have to figure out what to do with themselves. A temporary gig on the crew tearing down Birmingham, Alabama's infamous Castle Heights hospital is better than nothing—it even leads to a friendship with fellow crew member George (Vas Sanchez, Cobra Kai seasons one and two). But Mike's still lost in himself, still processing the fact that his dream is capital letters DONE. And then, on the last day of demolition, mere hours before the explosives are set to go off, Mike finds a $100 bill. A $100 bill that leads to a cool three million in cash, hidden in a wall. Continue Reading →

When it was announced in 1975 that Robert Altman, then riding high on the success of his groundbreaking epic Nashville, had been hired to direct the film version of E.L. Doctorow’s sprawling novel Ragtime, it almost seemed too good to be true. After all, not only was he one of the most inventive American filmmakers of the era, he seemed uniquely qualified to bring the book to the screen. Additionally, with its sprawling cast of characters, multiple storylines, and cheeky mixture of fact and fiction, Nashville now seems like an experiment to test out potential approaches for tackling that book. Continue Reading →

While audiences and critics often bemoan the plethora of sequels and remakes that litter the media landscape, retelling a familiar story isn’t inherently bad. After all, Shakespeare’s most famous play, Romeo and Juliet, was based on earlier works, and in 1957 playwright Arthur Laurents (along with composer Leonard Bernstein and lyricist Stephen Sondheim) adapted the tale into West Side Story, which Robert Wise turned into a classic musical in 1961. Sixty years later, Steven Spielberg has thrown his hat into the ring with a new adaptation of the material. But can he make a familiar plot relevant to the 21st century?  Continue Reading →