1269 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into German (Page 49)

Did you know Disney+ has original TV shows that don’t belong to the Marvel and Star Wars cinematic universes? It’s true! The streaming service also has a bunch of programs that are just too edgy for the Disney Channel, but not compelling enough to make it on other streaming platforms. A great example of this is the new John Stamos sports show Big Shot. Hailing from creators David E. Kelley and Brad Garrett, the show will prove revolutionary to those who have never seen any kind of inspirational sports storytelling before.  Continue Reading →

Masked killers lose their popularity, vampires come and go, but haunted houses are forever. There will always be an audience for movies in which families are driven out of their homes by diabolical forces, especially if that home is built on a Native American burial ground, or the site of a mass murder. Shudder’s latest The Banishing has all the necessary components of a good haunted house movie, with luxurious set design and actors who are taking it all very seriously, but its dearth of any real scares keeps it from truly taking off. Continue Reading →

At face value, the original premise of Younger seems destined for a short run. After all, a story about a woman in her 40s who pretends to be 26 to get a job in publishing seems more at home as a Lifetime Original movie than a long-form series. And yet the comedy has lasted six years on TVLand, with the show never losing its charm and heart. While the seventh and final season has the series moving from TVLand to Paramount+, it still manages to keep the same spirit that won it so many fans.  Continue Reading →

By the time Josie and the Pussycats premiered in theaters in April 2001, the pop culture universe of the early aughts was already in full swing. Dissenting and raging against the machine was out, and corporate partnerships and glossy production values were in. Total Request Live was the hottest television show on the air, and it had only been eleven months after Britney Spears released Oops! I Did it Again and became the official celebrity endorser for Got Milk, Clairol, and Polaroid. The Spice Girls had just gone on hiatus, and it was the height of the Backstreet Boys vs. N*SYNC fan wars. Post Y2K and only a few months before 9/11, the Dot-com bubble was imploding and consumerism was already at an all time high.  Continue Reading →

Philip Seymour Hoffman could’ve been a comedian, or at the very least, a character actor known solely for comedic roles. In Twister and later Along Came Polly, he played loud supporting parts so effectively that they enriched their movies as a whole. He didn’t just know how to be hilarious, he committed to his work in comedies with the same rigor that illuminated recursive nightmares and won him an Oscar. That said, not every comedy Hoffman showed up in brought the house down. Strangers With Candy is almost entirely incomprehensible, which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it wasn’t so constantly offensive.  Continue Reading →

By the end of the 1970s, Francis Ford Coppola was on top of the world. He'd just come off a string of films that weren't just critical and commercial successes, but masterpieces that defined cinema as an artform: The Conversation, Godfathers I & II, and Apocalypse Now -- the kind of run that basically guarantees you carte blanche to do whatever the hell you want. With that kind of blank check, Coppola didn't just set out to make an intensely personal swing for the fences: with Zoetrope Studios, and One from the Heart, he sought to revolutionize the way movies were made and carve out a space for auteurs to make intensely personal projects that didn't require four-quadrant appeal. Continue Reading →

In a lot of ways, I feel a bit sorry for The Nevers. A show created and conceptualized by Joss Whedon, former pop-culture wunderkind now revealed to be an abusive terror behind the scenes of some of his most high-profile works, it's already weighed down by the lodestone of its controversial creator even before it airs. Whedon left the show's production in November (presumably as a result of these allegations coming forward), the current showrunner position shifting to Philippa Goslett. Time will tell if Goslett will have the time or the opportunity to make the show her own and drag it out from the shadow of its provenance. But if the first four episodes provided to critics are any indicator, she'll have an uphill battle, as every bit of its worldbuilding and thematic concerns scream the kind of quippy, fly-by-night faux-progressivism for which Whedon's output is known. Continue Reading →

Excalibur was hardly the first film to be made based on the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table and it was hardly the last word on the subject either. The saga has inspired everything from a bloated musical (Camelot) to one of the funniest films ever made (Monty Python and the Holy Grail) to whatever that thing was that Guy Ritchie made that you have already forgotten even existed until just about now (King Arthur: Legend of the Sword). It may not even be the best screen version—I would have to give that prize to Holy Grail on the basis of being both hysterically funny and more accurate in its depiction of the period than most of its brethren (coconuts notwithstanding). Continue Reading →

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 April, we revisit both the game-changing hits and low point misses of Francis Ford Coppola. Read the rest of our coverage here. Burrow into a man’s soul and see what you find. You may discover a darkness beyond comprehension or a light as bright as the flares that cut against the night sky. But if you mangle that soul in the throes of war, maim it through acts of killing, expose it to enough raw horror to blight mind and body, you can never really know. The parts of ourselves we hold dear become wrenched and twisted within that grim crucible, until they become unrecognizable. That’s the overwhelming feeling that washes over you during Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal 1979 masterpiece. Set during the Vietnam War, the film sees Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), a U.S. Army assassin, dispatched to travel upriver into Cambodia and take out the infamous Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Kurtz is a decorated officer who’s gone rogue and cultivated a following all his own, one which strikes fear into the hearts of all sides of this conflict. In that framework, the movie peers into the souls of these two men and considers what, if anything, can be gleaned from their war-ravaged psyches. Continue Reading →

Mere moments before the whole world shut down last year, I reviewed the Vin Diesel vehicle/comic adaptation Bloodshot. In that review, I talked about how the film often felt like a refuge from another time, an earlier era of superhero movies, and that there was a certain charm in that. Thunder Force similarly feels like a holdover from a different time, but as an anachronism, it offers far less charm. If Bloodshot felt like a pale but pleasant copy of films from the Raimi Spider-Man portion of the era, Thunder Force feels a bit more like Sky High’s cousin, obsessed with seeming more mature. Continue Reading →

Stuck in the dark with little but her own fears, the animus of her colleagues, and the terrifying specter of a mysterious presence that haunts the hospital, Val's in for a bone-chilling night that will touch on not just her own personal traumas, but the collective trauma of abused and disbelieved women throughout history. Continue Reading →

What Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films portray is a perfect amalgamation of the magical and limiting aspects of Hollywood cinema in a perfectly composed, morally ambiguous fantasy. I’m only discussing the first two here because of their proximity to one another and them embodying a 70’s theme and aesthetic that prided on American stories – Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, Patton, Breaking Away, Dog Day Afternoon, and Rocky to name a few – make them distinctly different for what I want to say than the third movie, which seems like a forgotten stepchild of the 90’s.  Continue Reading →

Following on from his work on I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck takes a holistic look at imperialism, the construction of whiteness, and how we form narratives about the violence of the past in HBO's four-part documentary series Exterminate All The Brutes. In doing so, Peck covers a lot of ground, moving from genocides to scientific racism to colonization and more, explicating the links between them all. He does a lot of brilliant work here, but the series doesn’t quite have the precision or focus to make it great.  Continue Reading →

This might sound harsh, but God’s Pocket is a movie that has no business existing. There’s a void where its central relationship should be: set in working-class Philadelphia sometime in the mid-twentieth century, Mickey (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Jeanie (Christina Hendricks), are an inexplicably estranged married couple. She completely hates him, though “why?”  – a pretty obvious question – is never explored.  Continue Reading →

Not many artists have stretches of greatness so profound that they transcend their medium. They’re not looked at as just a musician or athlete or director, but part of the fabric of modern pop culture at a particular time. What The Beatles meant to the 1960s, or what Michael Jordan meant to the 1990s, is how Francis Ford Coppola defined the 1970s.  Continue Reading →

For the podcast, I sat down with Scherrer to discuss the unique challenges of the project, that line between being period-appropriate and too on-the-nose, and working with some of the most interesting instruments and period synthesizers of the day to craft the haunting, tension-laden score for The Serpent. (He also talks -- and plays -- us through the winding tension of the series' title theme.) Continue Reading →

“Does Danielle want to go to law school or grad school?” An almost casual question to her mother, the truth is, Danielle (Rachel Sennott) has no idea where she’s going – so she joins her family for a shiva. “Abby,” her “uncle’s second wife’s sister” has passed; Danielle takes a break from Manhattan and her final college finals to see her parents and their suburban Jewish community. Confined to the unending funeral service, Shiva Baby understands how just how terrifying the question “what are you doing next?” can ring in one’s ears.  Continue Reading →

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, 2046 feels undeniably otherworldly. The sumptuousness of the imagery, the fractured timeline, the computer-generated cityscapes of the future, the fact that everyone speaks in different languages and dialects, and yet there exists no communication confusion—all of it melds into a truly transporting experience. Like many of Wong Kar-wai’s works, however, the film roots itself deep in honest feeling. Thus, no matter how much it seems to be unfolding in a world far from our own, the viewer can understand every emotion the characters experience. Continue Reading →

From the moment that it debuted in 1961, following months of negative headlines surrounding its schedule and cost overruns that all but sealed its fate long before it ever hit theaters, a debate has raged over One-Eyed Jacks, the jumbo-sized Western that proved to be the Heaven’s Gate of its day. It also marked the beginning and the ending of the directorial career of renowned actor Marlon Brando. Was it, as some people even back then noted, a one-of-a-kind masterpiece that dared to inject overt artistry and psychology into what was normally one of the most straightforward of screen genres? Or, as others suggested, was it a pretentious and bloated misfire that did nothing but underscore the dangers of letting an actor with overweening creative ambitions take charge of a project without any sort of controls? Continue Reading →

As we continue the bleak discourse about how well pop culture of the past has aged (or hasn’t, rather), it’s probably safe to say that the vast majority of 80s comedies aren’t going to hold up to present day scrutiny. Hobbled by casual racism, sexism and homophobia (not to mention rape gags, if you’re Revenge of the Nerds), to watch many of them now is to cringe in discomfort. Teen comedies didn’t often escape it either, as evidenced by the vastly different Porky’s and Sixteen Candles, both of which aged like milk. It’s interesting that the comedies that addressed “dark” subjects, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (abortion) and Heathers (suicide) are the ones that managed to survive relatively unscathed. Continue Reading →

If repression is the ultimate aphrodisiac, there are few films that make such a case for it than Wong Kar-wai’s sumptuous 2000 masterpiece In the Mood for Love, one of the most passionate, delicately rendered on-screen odes to yearning cinema has ever produced.  Continue Reading →