1197 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into German (Page 11)

This review is part of our coverage of the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival. Continue Reading →

Delia, oh, Delia, Delia all my life/If I hadn't have shot poor Delia/I'd have had her for my wife/Delia's gone, one more round, Delia's gone." Continue Reading →

About twenty miles or so outside of Marfa, Texas, there’s a mural dedicated to the production of George Stevens’ Giant. Big wooden standees display James Dean with his arms draped over a rifle, framing him in the iconic Christ pose which would be the last image to represent Dean in the public consciousness before he died. Giant is about a great number of things, though, fittingly, what resonates all these years later is its ideas about the passing of time. Continue Reading →

The blockbuster landscape shifted with Michael Bay's 2007 Transformers movie. It fit his directing style, with his love of explosions and male gazing, but what it amounted to was a guy playing with big, expensive cinematic toys. There was knowledge gained from those five previous installments when the 2018 spin-off Bumblebee had more personality and excitement than any of its predecessors. Continue Reading →

The immediate issue with Tina Slatter’s debut feature, Reality, is how disengaging it is as a movie. A direct adaptation from Slatter’s theatrical piece Is This a Room, the conceptual background is probably the more interesting part. That show took the recorded transcript of FBI agents and former veteran and NSA translator Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney) about Winner's leaking of classified information on Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential election and used it as a verbatim dialogue. Everything uttered on the tape is replicated almost exactly in the play and, now, the film. The stutters, pauses, coughing, dog barking, doors opening. Everything. Recreated in minute detail.   Continue Reading →

Of all the oddball trends in 2023’s multiplex movies, the strangest has to be Hollywood’s current obsession with films about the origins of familiar consumer lines and products, including Air Jordans, Tetris, and the BlackBerry PDA. The films have been okay—and Air’s genuinely quite good—but even so, when all is said and done, it is hard to shake the sense that what you have been watching is less a movie than an elaborate brand extension designed to remind viewers of the benevolence and vision of our corporate overlords. That is especially true in the case of Eva Longoria’s directorial debut Flamin’ Hot, a film whose story is almost too good to be true (more on that later) but which is, in practice, an ironically bland bit of product placement even more processed and devoid of nourishment than the snack food it celebrates.  Continue Reading →

Shin Kamen Rider became my favorite movie of the year when it ripped my heart out with a one-sided conversation. Continue Reading →

Moulin Rouge! may be one of the most artificial films committed to celluloid. At every turn, it uses sound, color, setting, camera tricks, and good old-fashioned deception to create space between the audience and the material. And yet it ends up being as naked and guileless an ode to love as any movie of its era.  Continue Reading →

It’s difficult to explain to an average human the madness that is I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson. You could say it’s a sketch comedy show that combines surrealist imagery, social satire, and existential dread into tiny bursts of joyful chaos. Or you could point to the title. Every sketch--usually three to five an episode--features a character that’s so annoying or goes against social norms in such extremely inappropriate ways you want to scream at them to leave the room immediately.  Continue Reading →

When The Purge film series began, it attempted to create a heightened, ultraviolent version of the future that was both laughably over-the-top and an accurate reflection of the current political climes. They created a dystopia that was vaguely familiar but could still leave you rolling your eyes at its implausibility. For those unfamiliar with the franchise, the concept is as follows: On one night each year, the US government legalizes all crime, including murder, in the hopes of providing an outlet for Americans’ rage. It ultimately leads to an overall decrease in crime and an (ostensibly) utopian society. Continue Reading →

Gerard Butler's CIA-agent-on-the-run thriller aims to be more than a power fantasy, but for all its virtues, it doesn't stick that landing. There's an expected cognitive dissonance that comes with watching a man-on-a-mission genre piece set in the Middle East. Whether it's a glorified shooting gallery or a power fantasy where the hero stops just short of bleeding red, white, and blue - one needs to practice a mental limbo to either ignore or maybe be pleasantly surprised with the bare minimum concessions to showing the opposite side's perspectives.  Ric Roman Waugh's expertly mounted, ambitiously scattered Kandahar is, at its core, a Stagecoach riff. One where our leading man, career CIA operative Tom Harris (Gerard Butler leveraging his soulful full-time divorced dad essence), has 30 hours to make a mad 400-mile dash across an Afghanistan desert from an impossibly large group of following forces. It's a foolproof premise, yet intriguingly, Kandahar refuses to embrace its conceptual neatness.  Continue Reading →

Mulligan may be an animated comedy about a ragtag group of survivors of an alien attack on Earth. However, Hardcore 30 Rock fans will quickly discover Netflix’s new animated series feels pretty familiar to the early-aughts sitcom. First, there’s the fast-paced comedic timing, a signature of producers Robert Carlock, Tina Fey, and Sam Means. Next, both series feature the infectious, bouncy music of Jeff Richmond. Finally, both got off to a bit of a rough start. Still, just like hang gliding over an apocalyptic alien attack, Mulligan’s an amusing, wild journey that rewards viewers who hang on for the ride.     Continue Reading →

What did your boogeyman look like? Continue Reading →

As a group, humanity has spent entirely too much time asking, “Can men and women ever be friends without sex getting in the way.” Thankfully, Platonic, by creators Nicholas Stoller and Francesca Delbanco, asks a different, perhaps more germane question. “Can women and men be friends without ruining each others’ lives?” Continue Reading →

Full disclosure: influencer culture is baffling to me. Though it’s hardly a new thing at this point, I simply do not understand the concept of looking to strangers on the internet (not even celebrities, just regular people!) for advice on everything from what to wear to what to eat to whether or not to vaccinate your children. How does this happen? Where do these people come from? Frankly, it’s a little creepy. Kurtis David Harder explores some of the aspects of it in Influencer, which doesn’t answer those questions, but is a tense, fun little thriller that takes some unexpected turns. Continue Reading →

The white lie at the center of You Hurt My Feelings isn’t harmless, nor does it spiral out to reveal lie upon lie, turning a marriage into a house of cards. Instead, it lies somewhere less explored: a trivial thing whose impact is understandably real. It’s a fine line to walk, but Nicole Holofcener does just that, and with a razor-sharp wit to boot. Continue Reading →

The spate of recent live-action Disney remakes has run the gamut in quality from pleasantly diverting (Cinderella, Pete’s Dragon) to unwatchable abominations (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast.) Even the most well-received entries of the bunch struggle to find reasons they should exist in the first place. Rob Marshall’s The Little Mermaid is no different, but for one crucial factor that sets it apart from the rest: Halle Bailey as Ariel. Bailey is so captivating and winsome in the titular role that this remake almost feels worth it just to launch her into movie stardom. Unfortunately, sub-par CGI effects and clunky changes to Howard Ashman’s classic songs often make it feel like Bailey is left to carry the movie on the strength of her remarkable talent alone. With a shaggy runtime of two hours and fifteen minutes—a full hour longer than the original cartoon—it’s a heavy load for one performer to bear. Continue Reading →

Television has entered a new era of the citizen detective. If the boys of Only Murders In the Building are Jessica Fletcher for the 2020s and Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie of Poker Face is today’s Columbo, High Desert’s Peggy (Patricia Arquette) is the inheritor of the con artist crime fighter mantel. Think those “Characters Welcome” staples Psych or White Collar. Then trade the charismatic 30-something man running a scam for a charismatic middle-aged woman looking for an angle and maybe some pills. Continue Reading →

Folks, maybe I’m wrong, but I just don’t think we’re ready for Nazi redemption stories yet. Granted, there have already been a few, but those were from a time when the threat was neutralized. Now, in our current upside down world, they’re being normalized by both the media and Republican politicians, some of whom, like Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, would rather pretend they don’t know what “white nationalism” is than denounce it. We really don’t need a “but what if they can change?” story right now. But Paul Schrader is doing it anyway with Master Gardener, a movie that is surely well-intentioned, but ill-timed at best, and clumsy and borderline offensive at worst. Continue Reading →

Let's face it: At this point, you're either in for the overamped, Saturday-morning-cartoon lunacy of a Fast and Furious movie or you're not. Building from its humble roots as a 2001 street-racing Point Break riff to the gargantuan action tentpole it's after a whopping ten movies (eleven if you count Hobbs & Shaw), the series has built quite the convoluted lore over the decades. There are dead characters who come back to life (Sung Kang's Han), living characters who can never come back because their actors are no longer with us (see: Paul Walker's Brian), sworn enemies who join the familiar just one film later. It's dudebro soap opera, fueled by nitrous oxide and every weird, bonkers thing the filmmakers can think to do with a car. Continue Reading →

This year's first program of Chicago Critics Film Festival shorts focus on the dark side of family, community & living with mental illness. The films in the first program of shorts at this year’s Chicago Critics Film Festival all concern those mythic American values of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And they do this in both content and form. Though these films never exceed twenty minutes, they are unbounded examples of the human imagination. We open on the “happy family” of Nicole Daddona and Adam Wilder’s deliciously unsettling The Mundanes. This surreal nostalgic PSA about the ideal American family is a delightful work of surreal suspense. What begins as a richly designed comment on the facelessness of the perfect family in the white nostalgic imagination soon amps up into an amusing work of comedy horror. Unspeakable delights feed the happiness of the Happy Family. You can bet ambrosia salad won’t be the most unappetizing thing on this 50s-inspired tablescape. The Mundanes serves up a sensational visual style and keen directorial perspective on a silver platter with a healthy helping of disturbing social commentary on the side. Continue Reading →