1269 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into German (Page 56)

With its magic, monsters, and ridiculously attractive cast, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina makes no attempt at relatability. However, while its fourth and final season is filled with situations that no person will ever find themselves in, its premise of a world being assaulted with unimaginable terrors before finally succumbing to a soulless void is a #2020mood.  Continue Reading →

In David Mamet’s State and Main, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a breath of fresh air. He’s surrounded by scumbags, of course: this is a Mamet movie, though not a particularly good one. A playwright-turned-screenwriter, Joe White (Hoffman) might not survive his first film production. His period piece – well, the period piece that began as his script “The Old Mill” – needs a new location. Back in the town in which they were meant to shoot, the lead actor slept with an underage girl.  Continue Reading →

It's hard to know what to make of the '80s nostalgia boom that's hit pop culture in recent years -- that Stranger Things-y crystallization of an entire decade has permeated everything from prestige drama to Wonder Woman flicks, a throwback aesthetic revived for a newer generation (or, more accurately, the same generation who grew up in it and desperately clamors for the apparent simplicity of those times in a chaotic 21st century). But like so many things about our youth, it can be dangerous to romanticize it at the expense of our messy present. That's a lesson that, of all things, Cobra Kai understands more than most of its '80s-inspired kin. Continue Reading →

David Fincher's meticulous anti-murder-mystery is a curious marriage of thriller and romantic comedy. When glancing at David Fincher’s filmography, romance may not come to mind. There are the gruesome murders in Se7en, the unsolved mysteries in Zodiac, and the rise of social media titans in The Social Network. In 2014’s Gone Girl, adapted for the screen by Gillian Flynn from her own novel, Fincher dives deep into the marriage of Amy (Rosamund Pike) and Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), a picturesque couple suddenly thrust into the national spotlight when Amy goes missing. As the film unravels, it becomes clear that Amy orchestrated her disappearance to teach the philandering Nick a lesson. Amy and Nick may have deceived each other, but the real master of deception Fincher. Gone Girl is packaged as a psychological thriller, but it’s also Fincher’s most romantic film, the director flirting with us by using both the conventions of the thriller and rom-com genres. As a result, it woos the audience with a twisted love story. Continue Reading →

David Fincher's 2011 adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is both a quite good movie and a deeply frustrating one. At its best, it thrillingly delves into the art of investigation through the eyes of two well-crafted and well-performed protagonists. At its worst, it falls flat on its face and takes its sweet time to get up, dust itself off, and get back into a groove. Continue Reading →

Altered States (1980) isn't so much a movie as it is a cinematic boxing match between two singular and diametrically opposed talents, duking it out to see whose approach will triumph in the end. Both combatants are unrepentant sluggers through and through, determined not just to win but to knock the other right out of the metaphorical ring. Oddly enough, it's the viewer who ends up feeling concussed. Even 40 years after its release, it boggles the mind that something like Altered States could have ever been produced in the first place, much less as an expensive A-level project for a major studio. Continue Reading →

When The Social Network premiered on October 1, 2010, Facebook had only existed for six years. It already had 400 million users. Its founder and C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, was worth $4 billion.  Continue Reading →

The best storytelling in Star Trek often comes down to characters making difficult choices. That could mean deciding to fire on your own captain after an enemy force has enveloped him, or acquiescing to diplomatic sabotage in the midst of war, or splitting one sentient into two after a transporter malfunction. Whatever the scenario, our favorite characters are defined by those decisions, as Starfleet officers and as people. Continue Reading →

The Expanse has always excelled at handling the sheer bigness of its stakes: events don't just impact individual characters, but the entire system -- and, I suspect, eventually the entire universe, given the underlying threat of the weapons that killed the Ring Builders. But as comparatively terrestrial as season five's stakes have been so far, episode four of season 5, "Gaugamela," leapfrogs off the last episode's shocking final moments to shake up the status quo in literally seismic ways. As bad as things got in the final moments of episode 3, here we see an episode of chickens coming home to roost, setting up a whole host of problems for our characters to resolve in the latter half of the season. Continue Reading →

Thank goodness for Shonda Rhimes, not only for having the clout to bring a beloved historical romance to a major streaming service but for recognizing what’s been missing from historical television drama: Fun. And Bridgerton is fun, bursting at the seams with romantic tropes, six-packs, friendship, and scandal.  Continue Reading →

It feels like a lifetime ago that I saw Ariana Grande perform at Toronto’s Sound Academy, a now-defunct venue that held just a few thousand people. The fact that it was actually as recent as 2013 makes excuse me, i love you, a new Netflix film anchored by one of her 2019 shows at London’s O2 Arena, particularly awe-inspiring.      Continue Reading →

First and foremost, Zodiac is a movie about seeing. Seeing patterns, seeing possibilities, seeing threads to pick up and follow, even if they don’t end up going anywhere. Like Se7en, a great deal of focus is on the tediousness of a murder investigation: the collecting and comparing of fingerprints, tired looking men discussing clues in dank, poorly-lit offices, sparring with the media, and endless, often pointless phone calls. The violence in Zodiac is shocking, but brief, reserved to the first half hour of the movie. Even the use of crime scene photos is kept to a minimum. Unlike Se7en, David Fincher isn’t rubbing the horrors we inflict on each other in the audience’s face. Here, it’s something more subtle, the creeping fear of I know I’m right...but what do I do now? Continue Reading →

"What do you get for the man who has... everything?" 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 →

Awards season is upon us, which means all the studios and streaming services are breaking out their big guns. Luckily, one of the best films of the year comes to Netflix this weekend. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, based on the play by August Wilson and starring Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman in his final role. A fictionalized snapshot in the life of the Mother of the Blues, Ma Rainey, George C. Wolfe's film imagines her in a sweaty, muggy Chicago recording studio in the 1920s, trying to record her most popular singles for white Northern audiences, far from her comfortable Black Southern crowds. Of course, tensions rise over everything from artistic freedom,  racial animus, and Coca-Cola. Continue Reading →

When the Harvesters attacked, they caught humanity flat-footed. We weren’t ready for the sudden arrival of a deep-space armada. Or for a fleet of spaceships armed with mind-mucking lasers. Or for an army of biomechanical Pilots powered by the washed brains of select humans. Continue Reading →

If Panic Room is really known for anything, it’s the opening credits. Opinions differ about the movie itself, it’s Minor Fincher, if that’s something that’s even really possible. But those credits, man, those things are dope as hell. Panic Room opens with Howard Shore’s ominous score playing over a gorgeous ninety second montage of aerial footage of Manhattan architecture and the credits displayed as words occupying physical space, hovering in the air, taking up room and casting shadows just like everything else in the world. It’s the kind of showy stylistic thing that David Fincher’s always doing that thrills his fans and irritates his critics. It’s gorgeous, sure, but does it actually mean anything? Continue Reading →

It’s the season finale of The Mandalorian Season 2, and I hope we’re all prepared to feel our feelings. Last time, Mando and the Grogu Rescue Crew (Boba Fett, Fennec Shand, and Cara Dune) sprung former Imperial sharpshooter Migs Mayfeld (Bill Burr) so he could help them get access to the Imperial intranet and get the coordinates for Moff Gideon’s light cruiser. The mission was a success, though not without its problems, as Mando (Pedro Pascal) was forced to use the terminal instead of Mayfeld, necessitating the second-ever removal of his helmet since taking the Creed. They got the intel and headed out (sans a released Mayfeld) to face off against Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito) and get back that little green guy.  Continue Reading →

The action superstar has a little fun in this affectionate tribute to old-school beat-'em-ups, with big colors and tongue-in-cheek humor galore. Scott Adkins is a busy man. In 2020, the British martial artist launched The Art of Action on his YouTube channel – a series of in-depth interviews with his fellow action stars and filmmakers. And he’s continued to push himself as actor and an action performer. Debt Collectors, which reunited him with director/writer Jesse V. Johnson and co-star Louis Mandylor, was an excellent buddy dramedy. Seized, his reunion with Ninja: Shadow of a Tear director Isaac Florentine, was a darn good lean-and-mean actioner. And now, with The Intergalactic Adventures of Max Cloud, Adkins is closing the year on a high note. Max Cloud is an affectionate, funny, and well-crafted tribute to classic beat-'em-up video games. And Adkins’ work as its bombastic title character is a big, big part of its success. Max Cloud is an intergalactic hero par excellence, capable of laying waste to a spaceship’s worth of malignant space ninjas. He’s also an obnoxious, pompous windbag who’s taped over his off switch. As a power fantasy, he’s colorful and fun. As a crewmate, he’s insufferable. Fortunately, most folks won’t ever have to put up with Max Cloud, because they can be Max Cloud – he’s the title character of a beat-‘em-up/run-and-gun/fighting videogame for a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive-esque home console. Continue Reading →