1101 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Greek

There’s an art to movies that play well on airplanes. They must be interesting enough to maintain your attention as flight attendants jostle by with enormous beverage carts. The feature also needs to be easy enough to follow that you don’t lose the thread when the pilot interrupts to tell passengers about cruising altitude or turbulence or whatever. Thirdly, they need to look good in a way that still plays on a screen smaller than your tablet and closer to your face than any screen should ever be. Last but not least, they should be good enough that if you decide to revisit the film at home someday, they’ll still play. By these metrics, Carry-On is a plane film fit for the small seatback screen and your large at-home TV, in equal measure. The new feature from director Jaume Collet-Serra’s recently confounding filmography is good enough, in fact, it serves as a reminder of what a bummer the modern film release landscape can be. Super cool of Netflix to give it a platform, but this is the kind of solid action filmmaking that deserves to be a sleeper hit in theatres. Carry-On should be a movie like The Negotiator or Premium Rush. The sort that no one would think of placing in their top 10, but most would respond, “Oh yeah, that was a good one,” when someone mentions it. Alas, we live in fallen world etc etc. So, rather than dwell on that, let’s talk about what makes Carry-On a fun time at your streaming device. Can't tell me Jason Bateman can't do scary. (Netflix) It all starts with the plot, a relatively straight-ahead effort meticulously laid out by writer T.J. Fixman. The veteran of video game scripting shows an affinity for well-structured action writing that grows in complexity as the story progresses, leaving room for pleasing twists and turns without becoming muddy. Ethan Kopek (Taron Egerton) is a TSA worker whose Christmas gift is the news that his girlfriend, Nora Parisi (Sofia Carson), is pregnant. Unfortunately, he’s otherwise a bit of a Grinch. He has no particular love for Christmas from the jump. Even if he did, working LAX on Christmas Eve would certainly do much to sap it. Plus, he has no passion for his job, a consolation prize after failing in his bid to be a police officer. Continue Reading →

Selling a home is, at best, a time of sanitized chaos. As they say about ducks, above the surface, like during open house, everything is serene to the point of sterile. But beneath the surface, behind the scenes, it is a whirling dervish of activity and emotions. So it only makes sense No Good Deed, a series that revolves around a home for sale, would be an absolute mess. For better and worse. Ironically, the house part of the story is the easiest to grok. Lydia (Lisa Kudrow) and Paul (Ray Romano) Morgan are selling what was once their dream house. The reasons are unclear, but there are hints. Their two kids no longer live at home. Paul, a contractor, was responsible for the repairs and upgrades. Despite that, though, it still cost them a pretty penny. Lydia, a former concert pianist forced into early retirement when she developed a tremor, undoubtedly made those costs feel more dire. Regardless of the why, Paul’s anxious to unload as fast as possible. Lydia, on the other hand, feels a ton of ambivalence and will only accept the perfect new owners. Perhaps not even then. Denis Leary's energy has always screamed "friendly greeter." (Netflix) Nearly all the characters that matter show up at the Open House, the series’ first big set piece. Highly energized real estate agent Greg (Matt Rogers) oversees the whole thing, laying on the “a beautiful place to raise a family” hard. Then there’s former soap actor JD (Luke Wilson), a neighbor who covets the classic style of the Morgans’ home. The social climbing Margo (Linda Cardellini) makes an appearance, unaware that Lydia would rather burn the place down than let Margo take up her former home. Dennis (O-T Fagbenle) and Carla (Teyonah Parris) are recently married and with child. They’ve brought along Dennis’s mom, Denise (Anna Maria Horsford), for the tour, a choice the couple may not be on the same page about. Sarah (Poppy Liu) and Leslie (Abbi Jacobson), on the other hand, have given up on children and filtered that money and effort into finding a new home. Continue Reading →

In Keira Knightley’s best roles, there’s always a certain itchiness to her performance. It gives the characters she plays, no matter how confident seeming on the surface, the suggestion of a dose of imposter syndrome. It’s a quality that makes her a natural for an espionage agent who may have gone a bit emotionally soft but remains quite good at acts of physical brutality. Thus, she’s a perfect fit as Helen Webb, one of the titular Black Doves of the new Netflix series. Having taken an undercover job years earlier, Helen has fully committed to the bit. She’s married her target, British Secretary of State for Defence Wallace Webb (Andrew Buchan), and they’ve had two kids. She still sends along information to her handler Reed (Sarah Lancashire, wonderfully ice-cold), but things have slowed down considerably. Perhaps that boredom—or the fact that she married for espionage, not love—led to her affair with Jason (Andrew Koji), a civil servant whose assassination reveals a much larger conspiracy involving the CIA, a Chinese diplomat, and an assortment of underworld figures. Things get nasty and complicated so quickly that Reed has no choice but to bring in Sam (Ben Whishaw), a trigger man and friend of Helen’s living in self-imposed exile abroad. "What's cooler than being cool?" "Ice cold!" "No, I'm sorry. The answer is Sarah Lancashire." (Ludovic Robert/Netflix) If Knightley’s performance plays to her familiar—if too often underestimated skills—Whishaw’s initially dead-eye turn as an assassin reveals no skills in the actor’s toolbox. Even as he warms in the presence of his spy friend Helen and an assortment of old “civilian” buddies and romances, there’s a hollowness to him. Later revelations shed light on the why of it—revelations that the show might’ve been better to skip—but Whishaw repeatedly emphasizes something in the hitman has dried up and blown away. Continue Reading →

The suburbs may seem like bright, safe places, but there’s rot under those perfectly manicured lawns. I know, I know, this probably will come as a shock, but it’s true! And Based on a True Story Season 2 is daring to drag it all into the light. I am, of course, having a bit of fun here. Filmmakers, authors, poets, playwrights, and TV showrunners have been taking shots at the suburbs since the beginning. Maybe your first encounter was the worms in the soil shot in Blue Velvet. Perhaps it was the original Stepford Wives that clued you in. The when of it may be in question, but you’ve been treated to the thesis of darkness behind those bright white picket fences, guaranteed. So, Based on a True Story Season 2’s vision of the upper middle class American suburban life isn’t exactly groundbreaking. What’s to the series’ credit is that it knows that. Its heart doesn’t lie in pulling back the curtain on middle age (or just before) married with kids and a four-bedroom, two-bath life. Instead, it just uses that oft-played trope to have a blast. That’s not to say it is empty of message or meaning. It still has plenty to say about “life these days”. It just does it without the air of self-congratulatory “Can you believe how transgressive we are!” that one can often detect in similar tales of suburban decay. Continue Reading →

Sometimes, you end up respecting what a movie’s trying to discuss more than you enjoy the film itself. Case in point, Spellbound. In the new animated feature, Princess Ellian (Rachel Zegler) is on the eve of her 15th birthday. Sadly, the celebration is a bit muted this time around. That’s because her parents, Queen Ellsmere (Nicole Kidman, eventually) and King Solon (Javier Bardem, after a fashion), aren’t quite themselves. A year earlier, they encountered a whirling black cyclone in the woods. It turned the couple from attractive royal types into big, brightly colored, childlike monsters. Ever since, Ellian has been struggling to find a solution to their conversion while hiding it from the kingdom of Lumbria. Growing desperate after a meeting with the Oracles of the Moon and Sun (Nathan Lane and Tituss Burgess, both as hammy as you please) goes poorly, the Princess decides to drag her parents back to the Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness, where the curse began. As a plot goes, it’s fine. In practice, it often feels hobbled together from pieces of other films. There’s a bit of Brave here. A dash of How to Train Your Dragon there. If you squint, you can even spot some Frozen in its DNA. Fairy tales, by their nature, are remixed and rehashed from previous source material and other stories, so none of this is especially egregious. However, it isn’t what makes Spellbound interesting. Continue Reading →

In one of A Man on the Inside creator Michael Schur’s previous series—The Good Place—there’s a moment when one character explains that, as humans, we all know that we will someday die. That means we all walk around a little sad, even during our happiest moments. That kind of melancholic joy is where his newest series dwells. It’s a show with lots of laughs, excellent characters, and the pervasive knowledge that there is an end somewhere out on the horizon. For most of A Man on the Inside’s characters, that end feels close indeed. That’s because the action primarily focuses on a Senior Living facility in San Francisco, Pacific View Retirement Community. That’s where private investigator Julie Kavalenko (Lilah Richcreek Estrada) sends her newest hire, Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson). The mission is simple enough. Someone stole a necklace from Evan Cubbler’s (Marc Evan Jackson, doing WASP with a side of withering contempt as only he can) mother Helen (Danielle Kennedy). He wants it back and the thief hauled in. Charles, lost in many ways after the death of his wife, sees it as an opportunity to honor his daughter Emily’s (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) request he finds something to spark his passion. Julie thinks she can’t find anyone his age nearly as spry or capable of using a phone. Stephanie Beatriz and Mary Elizabeth Ellis discuss fashion and wallpaper. Specifically, how pastels and neutrals are great for both. (Colleen E. Hayes/Netflix) In other hands, this could be an invitation to a bunch of jokes about how older adults are weird and/or gross and/or dumb. Thankfully, Schur and his collaborators Emalee Burditt and Morgan Sackett are not other hands. While there are some “this person/these people are weird” bits, they’re personality, not age-based. The show doesn’t pretend the bulk of the cast isn’t seniors but they don’t use that to other anyone. That’s not surprising given Schur plays in the same kind of “humane, but hilarious” sandbox as Bill Lawrence (Scrubs, Shrinking), although Schur typically trends gentler and less ribald. Continue Reading →

About 18 months ago, I praised a new AppleTV+ series for its “frequently elegiac and hypnotic” tone. With its return, I renew that compliment. Despite growing in scope and ambition, Silo Season 2 remains committed to its quiet, insular brand of sci-fi. That’s very much a positive. The decision to split the action this season between Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) in exile in the apparently ruined, abandoned Silo 17 and the rest of the cast back at home base is more of a mixed bag. The cross-cutting action isn’t new; Season 1 also bounced between characters, levels, and subplots. However, separating the show’s two most compelling characters—Juliette and head of IT/Mayor Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins)—does deny the audience some great verbal sparring. That doesn’t mean Silo Season 2 lacks for great interactions for either, though. Juliette quickly discovers that 17 is not as abandoned as it seemed. A man, Solo (Steven Zahn), lives in that Silo’s IT vault and refuses to leave. Zahn’s vacillation between laid-back vibes and sharp temper matches Ferguson’s mix of resentment and buried empathy well. You know the performers are in the pocket when they can sell a version of the “How did you get the name Solo?” from that Star Wars spinoff with sincerity and sadness. Continue Reading →

Interior Chinatown looks great, features plenty of talent, and is rich with metatext as it explores the cliches of police procedurals and depictions of Asian Americans in media. And yet, it never quite comes together as a satisfyingly cohesive whole in the five episodes provided to critics. The overall plot, taken from showrunner Charles Yu’s novel of the same name, initially presents as reasonably straightforward. Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang) grew up in his brother’s (Chris Pang) shadow and was largely happy to do so. However, his brother’s disappearance rocked the family and left Willis rudderless. Now, Willis works at his uncle’s restaurant with his friend Fatty (Ronny Chieng), and his ambitions only reach as high as being a witness to a crime. Chloe Bennet always seems to catch the breeze just right. (Mike Taing/Hulu) When he seemingly achieves just that—seeing the abduction of a woman on the sidewalk outside the restaurant—it drops him into an increasingly surreal world populated by TV-perfect cops Turner (Sullivan Jones) and Green (Lisa Gilroy). He quickly leapfrogs from witness to a variety of cliched parts for Asian actors that double as episode titles, including “Tech Guy” and “Chinatown Expert,” teaming with Detective Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet). Like Willis, she’s an outsider hoping for hero status. Unlike him, she’s in the game and far better at faking it til you make it. Continue Reading →

White Bird, currently in theatres (or just departed, depending on where you live), spins off from surprisingly well-done Wonder. However, the true 2024 heir to the warm and unusually honest 2017 family film arrives on Disney+ this week in the form of Out of My Mind. The “kids with a chronic condition” genre is challenging to navigate. Too far to one side and the work mires itself in cliché while elevating the lead to something like sainthood. Too far in the other direction, it becomes cruel, unpleasant, cynical, and possibly devoid of empathy. It is a credit to Out of My Mind that it navigates that tightrope without visible strain. Directed by Amber Sealey from a script by Daniel Stiepleman, it does right by the tart Sharon M. Draper novel without simply being an airless recreation. There are some stumbles regarding the villains and the film’s final note, but overall, it is a quick-on-its-feet family film that doesn’t wince away from the hardships of disability and being 12. It’s clear from the early moments that plenty of thought has gone into the feature. Because Melody’s (Phoebe-Rae Taylor) cerebral palsy affects her muscle control, including that of her tongue, she cannot communicate via her voice. She still has an inner monologue and, as she points out, can give that any voice she wants. So who does she choose? Who any 12-year-old girl in 2002 would. Jennifer Aniston, of course. And see Rachel Green herself gives Melody (and the film) her voice. Continue Reading →

I saw Gladiator II two days after election day. By then, the results had been certified, sinking the country’s liberals and leftists of the country into a pit of mourning, terror, and rage. As I vacillated between feeling like a live wire and nothing at all, watching a movie was both the only and the last thing I wanted to do. I needed to watch something. Simultaneously, I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I watched anything, I might spontaneously combust, transforming into a Substance-like shower of viscera and sadness. But Ridley Scott’s historical epic would wait for no man. After about 15 or 20 minutes, I suddenly felt certain that actually? This is the only film I could have handled at that moment. In fact, maybe it’s the perfect film to counteract the feeling of dread sitting on all of our chests like a two-tonne rhino. Continue Reading →

Try as hard as one might, there is no objective evaluation of art. First, there are all the biases—conscious and unconscious—each person brings to the work. Then there are factors like mood, health, comfort, and company. Finally, there are current events. The latter is especially relevant to Joy, which chronicles the development of In vitro fertilization in 60s and 70s Britain. It’s hard not to think about the parallels to the current state of reproductive rights in America. On its own, Joy is a perfectly adequate film. Handsomely, if conventionally, shot under the direction of Ben Taylor, the film centers its point of view on nurse Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie). The script, written by the husband-and-wife team of Jack Thorne and Rachel Mason from a story by Emma Gordon and Shaun Topp, is deliberate and methodical. It drops the occasional rhetorical flourish but mostly sticks to the facts and lets the actors do their thing. It’s the kind of film that is accurate enough to be shown in class and interesting enough not to bore the students to death. But Joy doesn’t exist on its own. It wasn’t released in 2021 or in June. It’s hitting theatres in the UK and Ireland a week and a half after the American Presidential election and Netflix streaming stateside a week after that. It’s impossible to view the film without that in the back of one’s head. And in that context, Joy has a bruised, rebellious heart beating in its chest. It doesn’t provide catharsis, per se, but a perhaps heartening reminder of the previous struggles and triumphs. Continue Reading →

When it comes to storytelling, especially when adapting a character that has starred in more than 30 novels and three films, it doesn’t matter if the plot relies on tropes. It matters how one utilizes those tropes. When it comes to the Ben Watkins-created Cross, there are few actors better suited to breathing new life into the Psychology PhD having Detective Alex Cross than Aldis Hodge. Hodge, an actor who engenders goodwill no matter where he pops up, is an excellent fit for the character. He gets the mix of intellect, self-righteous fury, and tendency towards self-destructive isolation just right. Unfortunately, he’s doing it in service of a series that isn’t close to the same level. The good news is he isn’t alone in playing above Cross’s level of quality. Isaiah Mustafa brings a gruff clarity to Alex’s lifelong best friend and current partner on the force, John Sampson. His Sampson seems to get that he’d be the hero in any other story, but as long as there’s Cross, he’ll always be second on life’s call sheet. The performance isn’t heavy with jealousy, though, but rather a frustration that his friend can’t stop making choices that hurt him and his family in the name of protecting them. Alona Tal, as the duo’s FBI contact Kayla Craig, is another standout. Her mix of “one of the boys” attitude and nonstop flirtation makes her a vibrant presence on-screen. That brings important moments of lightness to a show that too often confuses dourness as proof of serious storytelling. Who wouldn't trust Ryan Eggold? Nothing suspicious about his look. (Keri Anderson/Prime Video) As alluded to above, Cross isn’t an especially unique offering. Making the smart choice to tell an original story rather than adapt a specific novel does not lead to the show avoiding most of the genre’s trappings. There is a dangerous serial killer who’s in a cat-and-mouse game with Cross and his team. Like most pop culture serial killers—but very few real-life ones—he has a bizarre gimmick. In this case, he likes to pick victims that resemble executed convicted murderers and make them look almost exactly like killers through force-feeding, haircuts, cosmetic surgery, and more. When he achieves his vision, he murders them in the same manner their look-a-likes were executed. The police, inspiringly, call him Fanboy. Continue Reading →

There is objective good in this world, and it is possible to know it. That does not, however, mean that everything done in pursuit of that good is itself objectively reasonable. That’s the underlying message of so much of Say Nothing, a nine-episode look at the Troubles in Ireland predominantly through the eyes of former IRA soldier/terrorist Dolours Price (Lola Petticrew predominantly, Maxine Peake in middle age). For instance, it is objectively true that Ireland deserves to be united and free of British rule. Does it follow, then, that bombings in British downtown centers are objectively good? Regrettable but necessary? Acts of terrorism? Similarly, the series considers (although with admittedly less zeal) the idea that it is objectively true that British citizens deserve lives free of random acts of violence. Does that make all actions to crush the organization behind that violence acceptable? Does that extend to mistreatment of the people who live next to members of that organization, people who never made a bomb or even threw a rock but also don’t report their neighbors, friends, and family for the same? Continue Reading →

Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) have the kind of meet-cute that hits with a bang, forgive the pun. A rising chef and a techie for Weetabix, respectively, they meet when she strikes him with her car. Unaware that the reason Tobias was in the road was running to get a pen to finally sign his divorce papers, Altmut buys him dinner at a kind of Americana diner cousin to the one where All of Us Strangers set its glorious heart-ripper of a climax and then invites him and his wife to dinner at her much ritzier restaurant--as a two-part act of penance. He takes her up on the invitation. Solo. In short order, they get to connecting. Despite the guilt and the neck brace, they hit it off. There’s a spark, one they run with once it becomes clear that despite being unready to shed his wedding band, Tobias is single. That’s how We Live in Time starts, but it’s not where it starts. No, director John Crowley (Brooklyn) opens years into Almut and Tobias’ partnership. Instead of meeting Almut committing an act of near vehicular homicide, the audience first encounters her blending pleasure (a morning run) and business (gathering wild ingredients for a parfait recipe she’s been experimenting with). Pugh makes a strong first impression. She’s someone who stops to smell the flowers both for joy and utility. More importantly, she's found a balance between the two that brings happiness. Continue Reading →

Like a good cop, Eli (Billy Crystal) is sure at the start of Before that if he solves this one last case, he can retire happily. The difference is Eli is a psychiatrist, not a cop. And the case isn’t some unsolved murder or wild heist. It’s a little boy, Noah (Jacobi Jupe). Noah is a child in the foster system living with Denise (Rosie Perez). He has selective mutism. When Noah speaks, he occasionally does so in a no longer used Dutch dialect. He experiences visual and auditory hallucinations that often lead to violent outbursts. He also seems to know Eli somehow and, more disconcertingly, Eli’s recently deceased wife, Lynn (Judith Light). The more Eli connects to the case, the worse it seems to get for both doctor and client. Before long, the audience, and indeed the doctor himself, must contemplate the limits of science and medicine. Is Noah mentally ill, or is there some strange and potentially dangerous supernatural force exerting a hold on him? While the concept of “mental illness or supernatural intervention” came into vogue with The Exorcist(if not sooner), the rather risible idea experienced a kind of zenith in the late 90s and early 2000s. The most common form was an aging but still bankable male star (Michael Douglas, Robert DeNiro, to name a couple) as a psychologist, psychiatrist, or social worker—Hollywood frequently doesn’t know the difference—working with a young actress poised for stardom (Brittany Murphy, Dakota Fanning) in films with fairly generic names (Don’t Say a Word, Hide and Seek). There were other variations on theme, mixing gender, age, occupation, and so on. But at their core was the same driving question: is all this wild stuff the audience seeing caused by an evil otherworldly entity or the unfortunate result of an untreated or treated improperly mental illness? Before belongs to this “proud” tradition. Continue Reading →

If you’ve ever encountered those “normal looking photos with a scary backstory” posts on social media or are interested in odd true crime stories, chances are good you’re familiar with the plot of Woman of the Hour. In broad strokes, Cheryl Bradshaw (Anna Kendrick, also in the director’s chair) is a down-on-her-luck actor. To pay the rent, she takes a gig on one of those 70s “One Single, Three Suitors” dating shows. Among her three options, Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) distinguishes himself as neither a self-entitled horndog nor a too-anxious-to-function empty suit. Rodney is also, it turns out, a prolific serial killer. It sounds like the setup for a suitably sorted erotic thriller. Perhaps, in other hands, it would be just that. However, Kendrick’s direction and Ian McDonald’s script center Alcala’s targets, not the “isn’t this wild?” aspect. In their hands, Woman of the Hour becomes commentary on the dangers these women (and too many others) faced, fought, and sadly, sometimes succumbed to. While firmly centered in the late 70s, it doesn’t take much of a squint to find the antecedents of modern issues of sexism, control, and gendered violence. Tony Hale, Anna Kendrick, Matt Visser, Jedidiah Goodacre, and Daniel Zovatto play get to know you games. All with a killer in their midst. (Leah Gallo/Netflix) The best section unfolds during the latter half of Bradshaw’s dating game appearance. Inspired by a makeup artist, she ditches the questions prepared for her by the show’s producers and ignores “benign” sexist host Ed Burke’s (Tony Hale, playing Jim Lange in all but name) passive-aggressive attempts to pull her back on message. Instead, she begins to pepper the guests with queries that quickly expose their misogyny and lack of intelligence. Only Alcala rises to the occasion, using his engrained sociopathy to present as the kind of “modern” man Bradshaw wants. Continue Reading →

Shrinking Season 2 picks up a bit down the road from where Season 1 ended in time, but it immediately reconnects with its final moments. That is when Jimmy’s (Jason Segel) client Grace (Heidi Gardner) took his guidance a bit too much to heart and violently interrupted the negative patterns in her communication with her husband. Speaking of picking up right where things left off, when I last reviewed the show? I was almost certainly a bit too harsh. Overall I recommended the series. Still, I spent much of the review vocalizing about the ways it didn’t get mental health concerns or therapy right. It can be hard to review something that revolves around your job. That’s why so many podcasters reviewing Nobody Wants This spend a considerable portion of their reviews talking about how unrealistic the show’s depiction of podcasting is. (That show’s depiction of Judaism is another matter, one I should’ve been a little more on top of, perhaps. But that’s a discussion for another day.) As I had just stopped being a therapist—perhaps for good—to write full-time, I think I was especially activated by the show’s rather…flippant depiction of the field. Jessica Williams and Christa Miller spend time in the most chaotic, best appointed therapist office ever. (AppleTV+) In Shrinking Season 2, several consequences of Jimmy’s “psychological vigilantism” come home to roost, not just with Grace. That helps refine my perspective. Additionally, with distance, the depiction of Jimmy’s rock bottom, briefly glimpsed at the beginning of Season 1, feels more honest. For once, it seems as though “tell, not show” was the better avenue to capturing his downward spiral of addiction, self-hatred, parental abdication, and general interpersonal awfulness. Continue Reading →

If you’ve seen or read enough stories about vengeance, chances are good you’ve encountered the saying, “He who seeks revenge digs two graves,” or some variation. Likely misattributed to Confucius, its meaning nonetheless carries weight. The new drama Disclaimer wrestles with the adage far more seriously than most other takes on the act of seeking catharsis through reprisal. Teacher Stephen Brigstocke (Kevin Kline) has just finished self-destructively barreling into his own firing, quite the fall for a former Teacher of the Year. He’s alone, a widower, his wife Nancy (Lesley Manville) dead after a protracted time with cancer. However, in many ways, he’s been alone since their son Jonathan (Louis Partridge) died about two decades earlier. That’s when his wife began to pull away from him and didn’t stop until her death. With his newfound time, he begins to clean out the closets and wardrobes left unused since her passing. Among the debris, he discovers a series of objects that lead to a manuscript. In its pages, Nancy lays out their son’s final days in Italy. More importantly, she places the blame for his death firmly at the feet of Catherine Ravenscroft (Cate Blanchett). Catherine is now a highly successful documentary filmmaker married to financier Robert (Sacha Baron Cohen) with an adult son, Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Continue Reading →

In description, It’s What’s Inside reads like a cousin to two great recent films. First, there's the “friends get together for a reunion and it goes very wrong” Bodies, Bodies, Bodies. Then, there the “through a devilishly simple device, people tap into something they rapidly lose control of” Talk to Me. If you have a longer memory, Flatliners may even come mind. It fails to achieve the heights of any of those movies. Nonetheless, writer-director Greg Jardin’s first feature effort boasts an intriguing premise and enough visual flair to make it worth a watch. On the night before Reuben’s (Devon Terrell) wedding, the soon-to-be groom brings together his old college running crew. Most important among them (for the film) are Cyrus (James Morosini) and Shelby (Brittany O’Grady). They've been together so long their friends repeatedly assume they're married. They are not and there's no nuptials on the horizon. Additionally, they’re the kind of couple in their 20s that says things like, “I thought we agreed we’d save our sexual energy for each other.” while trying to jumpstart their largely dormant sex life with wigs and nodding towards roleplaying as their friends. David Thompson wants to know if you'd like to try this new competitive card game. (Netflix) Surprising everyone, Forbes (David Thompson) is also on the guest list. Even more unexpected is that he shows up. He hasn’t been seen or heard from since he got kicked out of college for an incident involving trust fund lothario Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood) and Forbes’ underage sister Beatrice (Madison Davenport). Hilariously, none of the other friends seem to know what exactly happened or why Forbes got kicked out, despite them all being present for the events and at least a couple of them later giving testimony to the administration afterward. Continue Reading →

The pleasures of the romantic comedy are well-documented. When they work, they make for the best kind of fantasy. The ones where our all too numerous flaws may stall but never derail us. Of course, their failures are similarly well documented, making the ups and downs of lust and love feel like products. Moving the genre from its typical medium—film—to television with the new series Nobody Wants This carries the threat to magnify those shortcomings until they blot out anything else. And then there’s that title. Oof. If ever there was a juicy fastball down the middle for critics looking for an easy headline dunk, it’s that one. It’s more than a relief then to find that blowing out rom-com tropes from an under two-hour film to a 10-episode season helps, not harms, the storytelling. Nobody Wants This isn’t doing anything revolutionary, but it plays the hits well. It makes a thing you’ve seen a hundred permutations of feel fresh and lively. Sorry, lovers of ironically mean-spirited headlines. The story is a tale of mismatched lovers. Joanne (Kristen Bell) cohosts a podcast with her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) dedicated to their love life’s successes and failures—mostly failures. Her producer Ashley (Sherry Cola) has her over for a small gathering, warning Joanne there’s a rabbi in the house. Joanne jokes with another guest, Noah (Adam Brody), about it, their chemistry immediate. When Noah blesses dinner, Joanne realizes her error. Continue Reading →

A word of warning: this is a slightly different kind of review. I took my son, a massive fan of The Wild Robot book series, to see an advance screening of the film with me. So, there will be a paragraph with his reaction to include a 10-year-old kid’s perspective on this family feature. The rating and rest of the text are mine, though. Sorry, you have to deal with my usual nonsense to get the real opinion that matters. Sometime in the future, a robot awakens on a beach. “She’s” surrounded by broken crates and other debris makes it clear that this was not an intended destination. Programmed to be of service, she attempts to get any of the island’s denizens, all animals, to give her a task. Even after an intense software update gives her the ability to understand and speak the language of the animals, none of them will give her something to do. Soon, though, an accident provides the task. After falling down a hill, thanks to the animals’ cruelty, the robot crushes all but one goose egg in a nest. Unaware of what the eggs are or the process of imprinting, she unintentionally is in the right place, at the right time, to become the newly hatched gosling’s defacto mother. Now she has a task, one that she has no programming for and only the vaguest idea of what to do. Like all new moms. Or parents, for that matter. Continue Reading →