1354 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into French (Page 64)
Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) (In French: Birds of Prey et la fantabuleuse histoire de Harley Quinn)
The DCEU embraces its inner Bugs Bunny, and is all the better for it.
If you'd have told me two years ago that not only would I be looking forward to a sequel (such as it is) to 2015's murky, execrable Suicide Squad, but I'd end up really enjoying it, I'd have banished you to the darkest cell in Arkham Asylum. To be fair, David Ayer's overstuffed, underlit supervillain team-up came right at the wrong time: the product of post-Avengers superhero mania, but amidst the polarizing reactions to DCEU's so-called 'dark, gritty' approach to superheroes, it was the victim of a compromised vision of what was undoubtedly a bad idea in the first place -- reshoots, changes in tone, a final cut engineered by the house that did the trailers, etc.
The one bright spot though? Margot Robbie's semi-Gothic-Lolita reinterpretation of the Joker's moll Harleen Quinzel (aka Harley Quinn), a brash, madcap figure imbued with scene-stealing energy by one of the greatest actors of her generation. Now, with Birds of Prey, Robbie's Quinn is given a vehicle worthy of her talents, a manically gleeful girl-power anthem that's just as energetic and irreverent as she is.
As Birds of Prey (sorry, Birds of Prey: or the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) begins, the Joker's broken up with Harley. Good, great, we hated Leto's version of the Clown Prince of Crime anyway, get rid of him. Luckily, Harley gets over him just about as quickly as we do, blowing up the Ace Chemicals plant, dusting herself off, and trying to start a new life as a bounty hunter/mercenary/thug for hire. But before she can get that business off the ground, she finds herself wrapped up in a scheme involving a secret diamond laser-encoded with the numbers needed to access a secret bank account with all the crime money in the world. (Not quite an uncut gem, but you get my gist.) Continue Reading →
და ჩვენ ვიცეკვეთ (In French: Et puis nous danserons)
Levan Akin's grounded, richly textured Georgian love story brims with dance and forbidden romance.
“A man is a man, and a woman is a woman,” says a priest during a wedding homily, “but in these times of “globalization”, as they call it…” the rest is cut off, but the implication is clear: we were once strong and knew who we are, but ideas from the rest of the world have confused and weakened us. A common accusation made by homophobic countries is that homosexuality is an unwelcome import from Europe and America; as if queerness was an invasive species stowed away in Western media that's overtaking the native heterosexual population.
This tension between a traditional worldview pushing against globalization is the focal point of And Then We Danced, with its juxtaposition of traditional dance against a backdrop of a Georgia that's hungry for foreign products. The characters praise English cigarettes, dance to Swedish pop music, and fawn over anime posters all while wanting to honor their heritage. It's a tension that Levan Akin is probably familiar with, since the Swedish-born director is of Georgian descent.
Taking place in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, the film follows Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani), a young dancer vying for a place in the National Georgian Ensemble. However, his standing in the group is shaken upon the arrival of newcomer Irakli (Bachi Valishvili). Merab is frustrated by Irakli’s talent but finds himself drawn to the young man’s rebellious nature. As the pair grow closer, their growing attraction could put them in jeopardy. Continue Reading →
Caged Heat (In French: Cinq femmes à abattre)
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 the month of romance, we celebrate the birthday of the late great Jonathan Demme, whose output was as eclectic as it was empathetic. Read the rest of our coverage here.
Hey, we all gotta start somewhere, right? Not every director can be Ari Aster, knocking it out of the park with their feature debut. William Friedkin’s first film was Good Times, a comedy musical starring Sonny and Cher. John Landis’s was a King Kong rip-off called Schlock. James Cameron’s was Piranha II: the Spawning, which sells itself right there in the title. So let’s go easy on the late Jonathan Demme for making his debut as a director with the 1974 women in prison flick Caged Heat.
You might think it puzzling that the future director of Silence of the Lambs and Beloved would start his career with writing and directing an exploitation film, but it was the early 70s, and women in prison movies were an overwhelmingly popular B-picture genre, with more than 25 released just between 1970 and 1974 alone (including the 3-D Prison Girls, which Roger Ebert reviewed despite one of the lenses falling out of his 3-D glasses). Continue Reading →
Surge
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 →
The Courier (In French: Le messager anglais)
Dominic Cooke's well-crafted spy thriller doesn't try anything new, but boasts winning performances & a zippy plot.
In 2019, the buddy-car film Ford v Ferrari became the clear cut favorite of dads across American and Britain. Using well-matched leads in Christian Bale and Matt Damon, James Mangold’s film became a critical and commercial hit, showing that fathers still have the power to put a movie into the green. It looks like there’s a new dad film of 2020 though, with Dominic Cooke’s Ironbark taking its rightful spot upon the beer-bellied throne.
Ironbark tells the story of Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch), a British businessman recruited by the government to become a spy-like courier in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Wynne agrees to keep this entire operation a secret from everyone, including his wife Sheila (Jessie Buckley), growing more invested and involved and spy-ish.
Flanked by one British operative Dickie Franks (Angus Wright) and one American operative Emily Donovan (Rachel Brosnahan), Wynne begins meeting with a Russian source named Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze). Together, they smuggle nuclear information back into Britain and the U.S. in hopes of avoiding nuclear war, and eventually dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Continue Reading →
ドラゴンボールZ たったひとりの最終決戦〜フリーザに挑んだZ戦士 孫悟空の父〜 (In French: Dragon Ball Z - Baddack contre Freezer)
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 →
Mythic Quest
This softer, gentler workplace sitcom from some of the "It's Always Sunny" folks is funny but not without some glitches.
Workplace sitcoms have been an essential part of the television landscape for decades. Cast a bunch of talented comedic actors, give their characters various kinds of quirks, put them together in a work setting of any kind, write hilarious jokes, and boom-you have a fun, breezy way to spend 25 minutes.
Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day brought the workplace sitcom to depraved new heights with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Now, with the help of writer and Sunny executive producer Megan Ganz, comes their latest attempt at reinventing the sitcom wheel with Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet for Apple TV Plus.
This time, instead of a dingy bar, the setting is a tech company that produces a wildly popular World of Warcraft-esque online role-playing game called Mythic Quest. It follows the daily tribulations of its employees, starting from the top with the egotistical CEO and game creator, Ian Grimm (McElhenney, bringing that Mac energy) all the way to the bottom with the lowly game testers and coders. Continue Reading →
The Social Dilemma (In French: Derrière nos écrans de fumée)
Jeff Orlowski's documentary about the effects and ethics of social media lacks enough emotional depth or practical solutions to work.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.)
Did you know that the Internet is scary? Don’t worry, you're about to hear it again. Did you know that companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google store your information in order to sell it to advertisers? Of course, but maybe it'll really sink in if you hear it one more time. And—just bear with me—were you aware that these companies are so fine-tuned that they can track how long you stay on one given page, post, or picture?
Of course you did, but The Social Dilemma doesn't care about that. There are a handful of working parts to Jeff Orlowski’s latest documentary, but rather than make use of its potential to say something new, it simply sticks to the most basic information and fleshes it out with some good old fashioned fear-mongering. It's part regular doc, part dramatic reconstruction, and mostly an insipid polemic, which, when paired with its potential to comment on the ethics of privacy and social manipulation, comes off as a regurgitation of what's been said before. Continue Reading →
Locke & Key
Netflix's adaptation of the Joe Hill comic series takes a while to get going, but hits a dark-fantasy stride by the end.
For better and worse (but mostly better), Locke & Key imports the tone and feel of its comic book inspiration almost entirely to its TV adaptation. Show creator Carlton Cuse has proven increasingly adept at helming smart, faithful adaptations for television from books (The Strain) and comics.
For those unfamiliar with the source material by writer Joe Hill and artist Gabriel Rodriguez, Locke & Key concerns the titular Locke family, who, after a personal tragedy back in Seattle, move east to a small Massachusetts town. There waits a large manor home, Key House, one that deceased patriarch Rendell Locke (Bill Heck) hated so much he left in the rearview and never spoke of to his family. His brother Duncan (Aaron Ashmore) has been left caretaker, but largely avoids the property even though he remembers very little of his childhood. The Lockes, though, are in need of a change, and Key House seems to be the easiest place to start. Unfortunately, they quickly find that the home offers much less refuge (and much more danger) than they ever expected.
Part of Locke & Key’s charm is how closely it hews to the comics on which it’s based. It diverges here and there, but never in ways that existing fans will resent. In fact, they may appreciate how it gives the narrative a few surprises while maintaining what made the series so popular in the first place. It’s the rare adaptation that manages the feat of feeling like its source material while not simply being a retread. Continue Reading →
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (In French: Hansel & Gretel: Chasseurs De Sorcières)
Oz Perkins' latest, unceremoniously dumped into January, is a revisionist Grimm story as atmospheric as it is thin.
The original fairy tales documented by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen were often bloody, dark stories. As time passed, and we decided that children were too fragile for the originals, we reshaped them into toothless Disney stories of romance and happy endings. And as society began to critique the passive nature of these saccharine protagonists, the 2010s gave us badass butt-kicking makeovers for our heroes, like Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters.
At the dawn of the century’s third decade, however, we see fairy tales leaning harder into their older, more folkloric elements, crafting stories that mine terror out of feeling decidedly old and out-of-step with our understanding of the world. It happened with The Witch, and now we’ve got Gretel & Hansel, directed by Oz Perkins (son of Anthony), which opts for an eerie atmosphere and a decidedly dark interpretation of its source material.
The movie opens with one fairy tale framing another: Gretel’s favorite childhood story of a young child, beset by illness in their infancy. In a desperate bid to save the child’s life, her father takes her to a local witch. While the witch saves her life, she also gives the child the power of prophecy and witchcraft. As the child grows, so does her power and evil, until the townsfolk have little choice but to exile her to the woods. Continue Reading →
Nine Days
Edson Oda's debut feature about a group of souls looking to be born into the real world is a great premise with pretty good execution.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.)
Tones, worldviews, inspirations both obvious and implicit—it’s notable when something juggles a medley of ideas. They signal a larger ambition even when they don’t work out. Such leads to a general rule of thumb: the farther a movie’s parts are from one another, the more conversation it’ll stimulate. Then there’s Edson Oda’s Nine Days, which, while not narratively or thematically disparate, follows suit for a while but not by the end.
That isn’t to say it’s a messy movie. It’s actually quite tidy, and that’s the largest issue for a debut film that flirts with its own perspective without fully committing to one. By trying to ground its moral and ethical quandaries in something universal, it reveals its own perspective only to undo it by the end. While steady in how it approaches each character, it maintains an objective viewpoint before procuring its own perspective—until it takes the easy way out. Continue Reading →
Bliss
Joe Begos’ wild, gore-soaked drug trip of a vampire flick is not for the faint of heart.
Creative block is a particularly cruel trick our brains play on us. Sure, you have lots of wonderful ideas, and maybe even the talent to make them come to life, but when it comes time to actually do it, suddenly, the well runs dry. It’s a disheartening, infuriating cycle: when you can’t create, you get depressed, and the more you’re depressed, the less you create. It starts to feel like a great, cosmic joke. Joe Begos’ grisly sensory overload Bliss is what happens when a young artist, desperate for inspiration, descends into a hellscape of drugs and an inexplicable taste of blood.
Dezzy (Dora Madison) is falling far behind in both rent, and in producing pieces for an upcoming show. Though she’s successful enough in her field that she’s recognized out in public, a rotten attitude and a consistent failure to meet deadlines have caused Dezzy to quickly lose clout with both her agent, and her buyers. After a couple of heated exchanges with those she owes either money or work to, she decides that the best course of action to take is to go out and party. Drug dealer pal Hadrian (Graham Skipper) supplies Dezzy with the titular Bliss, a drug that’s snorted but resembles nothing so much as a bag of gunpowder. A combination of heroin, acid, meth and God only knows what else, it’s love at first sniff for Dezzy, even though Hadrian can’t really explain what’s in Bliss, or what the long-term effects of it might be.
Following a decadent (albeit barely coherent) night with friends Courtney (Tru Collins) and Ronnie (Rhys Wakefield), Dezzy wakes up the next morning desperately ill. She assumes she needs more Bliss, and while it helps a little, she feels a darker craving that she doesn’t yet understand. On the upside, she’s suddenly able to paint again, and, seemingly working non-stop (because you can when you’re unable to sleep anymore), Dezzy begins to create a beautiful but eerie mural, perhaps her greatest work yet. Sure, Bliss sends her into murderous rampages where she chews the flesh off of people’s fingers, but, finally, she’s got that artistic flow back! Continue Reading →
Star Trek: Picard
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 →
Some Kind of Heaven
Lance Oppenheim's documentary about the largest retirement village in America blends droll humor with small, salient touches.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.)
Couples dance. People drive around in golf carts. One man, firmly within poverty, lives inside his van while another—be it due to his old age, drug use or both—becomes surer and surer that he’s invincible. His wife looks on, appreciating the enlightenment he’s found but disapproving of how he’s reached it. Nonetheless, she sets old wedding anniversary cards around the house to get him ready for their 47th. It’s not so much to remind him of the upcoming one, she admits; it’s more to remind him of the ones they’ve already had in this utopia.
Welcome to The Villages, a Florida community referred to as “Disney World for retirees.” Why? It’s the size of a suburb; it also has a population of over 130,000, having grown exponentially since its inception over 40 years ago. According to founder Harold Schwartz, its initial aim was to recreate the neighborhoods its boomer residents grew up with. “What’s its story?” the designers asked him upon its creation. His response? “This is where people find the Fountain of Youth.” Continue Reading →
Paterson
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 →
The Rhythm Section (In French: La section rythmique)
Though cinematographer Reed Morano shows some directing chops, the Blake Lively thriller is uneven in style & tone.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Reed Morano’s bracing The Rhythm Section follows its own beat. Misleading marketing and the dreaded late January dump positioned it as a gender-reversed thriller in the vein of Liam Neeson’s recent run of revenge thrillers with expert journeyman Jaume Collet-Serra -- but the film is exhilaratingly out of step with the autopilot assassin stylings of the John Wicks of the world.
Whereas Keanu Reeves’ multiplex conquering series has largely thrived as moody but absurdist routines of grotesque precision; nothing about the capabilities of Stephanie Patrick (an unusually wan Blake Lively) could be considered automatic. If anything, DP Sean Bobbit and Morano shoot every scene with a life-or-death urgency – all trembling limbs and determined close ups – that refuse to shy away from the physical realities of a brittle frame faced with hardened professionals who won’t hesitate to pull the trigger, let alone, level a young woman with a body blow to the gut.
Stephanie isn’t a damsel in distress by any means, but the film has been almost completely drained of the usual power fantasy element that courses through these tales of vengeance to the point that she begins the film coded at her rock bottom as a sex worker and addict beaten down by losing her whole family in a mysterious plane crash. That choice outlines the film’s occasional jarring limits of empathy, but it’s nonetheless telling in placing the first half of the film closer to melodrama than genre film. Continue Reading →
Promising Young Woman (In French: Une jeune femme pleine de promesses)
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) Continue Reading →
ブッチギレ!
Will Smith & Martin Lawrence beat Guy Ritchie's latest handily in a robust-for-January weekend.
Two new wide releases were no match this weekend for those Bad Boys, who continued to top the domestic box office. Bad Boys for Life dropped only 45% this weekend, a better second-weekend hold than fellow Martin Luther King Jr. weekend box office hit Ride Along. Bad Boys for Life grossed another $34 million this frame for a ten-day domestic total of $120.6 million. Having already nearly doubled its $62.5 million opening weekend and without a barrage of competition over the next month, the sky really is the limit for how high Bad Boys for Life could go at the domestic box office. At the very least, it’ll end its run in the neighborhood of $175-180 million, a significant improvement over the $138.6 million domestic total of Bad Boys II.
Thanks to the lack of noteworthy new titles this week, holdover movies saw small weekend to weekend drops this frame. This included 1917, which dipped just 28% in its third weekend of wide release. Charging into battle with another $15.8 million, 1917 has now grossed $103.8 million domestically. Fellow Universal holdover Dolittle actually didn’t hold terribly this frame as it dropped 42%, not too far off from the 37% second-weekend drop of The Nut Job. However, that second-weekend hold still only yielded $12.5 million for all those talking animals. Dolittle currently has amassed a disappointing $44.6 million ten-day domestic haul and is headed for an anemic $65-70 million final domestic total.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqNYrYUiMfg
The Gentlemen, meanwhile, opened to $11 million, a result that’s neither dismal nor exceptional. Struggling distributor STX Films could have used the latter type of box office player right now but at least The Gentlemen wasn’t far off from the bows of far more expensive Guy Ritchie directorial efforts like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. or King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Plus, STX apparently paid just $7 million for U.S. rights for this film, so they’ll make it out alright. Part of the reason The Gentleman didn’t become a breakout hit like past January STX action title Den of Thieves was that its marketing lived and died on its director alone. The trailers and commercials gave no indication to a broader plot or specific characters, they were just evoking prior Ritchie movies (and also, in the posters at least, the Kingsman films). That limited appeal marketing is a key reason why The Gentleman will likely end its domestic run between $30 and $35 million. Continue Reading →
Possessor
Brandon Cronenberg's second feature is a po-faced collection of genre tropes that wastes its cast and a modest sense of style.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.)
It’s about 45 minutes into Possessor when its most apt moment comes. A bunch of generically rich people in a generically glossy mansion turn to each other and give a toast. That toast, as it so happens, is “to boredom.”
Now, while Brandon Cronenberg’s second movie in eight years isn’t a complete failure, it’s an empty one: a grab bag of sci-fi clichés with a few spurts of violence. The occasional gore gets your attention, sure, but that’s because it’s something on the screen. The production design from Rupert Lazarus does what it sets out to do, but that aim is to recreate older, better sci-fi movies. It’s just… there, and then the color palette generously shifts from pale to neon. These tricks might have an effect if they hadn’t been done so many times before. Continue Reading →
Spree
Eugene Kotlyarenko's satire about a rideshare driver who murders for online fame lacks the bite or nuance its premise deserves.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.)
It was just over six years ago when Sharkeisha went viral for assaulting her friend on camera. The World Star video became a meme goldmine and made headlines, and while it seemed shocking at the time, it obviously wasn’t the last. Six months later in the wake of the Isla Vista massacres, the shooter’s face spread like wildfire as he waged polemics against those he felt had polluted the earth. He sat in his car, camera on his dashboard, and tried to justify his misogyny and racism. Now he has his own Wikipedia page.
Of course, the 2010s didn’t birth this sort of infamy, but, like some sort of trickle-down economics, it helped normalize it. YouTube “comedians” like Sam Pepper churned out “prank” videos so he could justify groping women on camera. A few years later, Logan Paul went from Vine to CNN to apologize for a video in which he vlogged a dead body in a Japanese suicide forest. But what about the kids that aren’t famous, the ones that aren’t pulling pranks on the homeless? Continue Reading →
Never Rarely Sometimes Always
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) Continue Reading →