1102 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Greek (Page 33)

I wasn’t alive during the days of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Muhammad Ali, and Jim Brown’s stands against violent forms of discrimination. Therefore, Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to back down from his principles despite obvious NFL blacklisting makes him the closest my generation has to a genuinely revolutionary athlete. In refusing to stand for the national anthem in the wake of racial discrimination and murder by the U.S. Government, Kaepernick demonstrated he is who certain athletes (I’m looking at you, Kyrie Irving) think they are.  Continue Reading →

Occupied France. 1941. The egomaniacal, romantic SS Colonel Von Brückner (Daniel Bernhardt) and his supposed French mistress Marie (Nina Bergman) are ambushed by the Resistance on their way to secret away gold pilfered from Von Brückner’s superiors. They survive. Continue Reading →

With her abuser out of her life, one would think it’d be easier for Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) to move from day to day. In some ways, it is; she’s no longer directly in the clutches of Anthony’s (Tom Burke) patterns of insults, flattery, and disposal. He’s now dead as a result of his drug addiction. She, however, still lives with his memory. She discusses him with her psychologist (Gail Ferguson) just as often as others refer to his passing as a “loss.” But he’s still there: in her mind, in her health, in her art. Now, in The Souvenir Part II, Julie is finalizing her graduation film for school, repurposing and compartmentalizing her emotions into her work. Continue Reading →

First things first. Just to be very clear, Animaniacs remains a funny show. The writing staff led by showrunner Wellesley Wild is undoubtedly clever. They can turn a phrase. They can develop an idea. Likewise, the voice talents, especially the trio behind Dot (Tress MacNeille), Wakko (Jess Harnell), and Yakko (Rob Paulsen, who also provides Pinky’s voice), are quite funny and haven’t lost their gift for motormouthed gab in the years since the first series. Continue Reading →

It's doubtful Dickinson Season 3 will convert any new subscribers to AppleTV+. Still, the final season provides a strong salute to wartime poet Emily Dickinson. Don't think of Dickinson in those terms? You're hardly alone.  Continue Reading →

The action all-star pushes his limits in James Nunn's tense, daring single-shot tactical shooter. Present day. Present time. A helicopter arrives on an island, home to a soon-to-be-shuttered US prison. Intelligence analyst Zoe Anderson (Ashley Greene Khoury, Accident Man) is in the field for the first time. She has come to the island to retrieve a prisoner, Amin Mansour (Waleed Elgadi, Mosul) who she believes knows the location of a dirty bomb set to go off in Washington. Anderson is accompanied by a small team of Navy SEALS, led by the cooly professional Lieutenant Jake Harris (Scott Adkins). Standing in Anderson and Harris' way is the arrogant prison chief Jack Yorke (Ryan Phillippe, The Way of the Gun), who'd rather brutalize the men in his custody to slake his desire for vengeance than do his damn job. It's about then that a joint army of Islamist radicals and bloodthirsty mercenaries attack and everything goes right to hell. Led by the cunning, sadistic, and supposed-to-have-been-dead French-Algerian freelancer Hakim Charef (UFC fighter Jess Liaudin), this vicious crew of mega-creeps wants Mansour dead. Boxed in, Anderson, Harris, his team (Emmanuel Imani, Dino Kelly, and Jack Parr) and prison staffer Tom Shields (Terence Maynard, The Witcher) must fight to re-establish contact with the outside world and keep Mansour alive. And Mansour, a grieving man with both reason to despise the U.S. and far more of a conscience than Charef, must do whatever he can to survive. Continue Reading →

When Star Trek: Deep Space Nine debuted in 1993, it was different. No longer were our heroes aboard Starfleet’s flagship. No longer did they hail exclusively from the Federation. No longer would they harmoniously explore the galaxy with a different destination every week. Instead, they were stationed on a backwater alien refinery. The show’s major players were a mix of Starfleet officers, local veterans, and civilian operators. The station was the destination, and the stories came from the various visitors passing through. Continue Reading →

Has any other director in recent years had as frustrating a creative decline as Edgar Wright? Discounting his feature debut—the 1995, no-budget A Fistful of Fingers—his streak was white-hot. Two series of Spaced both developed and prefaced his earnest eye for nerd culture, leading up to what would become his Cornetto Trilogy. His work was so loving, so finely tuned, and, especially in the case of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, some of the most pop-culturally keen around. However, Baby Driver couldn’t help but sit in neutral; it was a pet project missing heart. With that out of the way, perhaps there was something more substantial to come next. Continue Reading →

For acclaimed actress turned first-time writer-director Rebecca Hall, her debut feature Passing is more than her first furtive steps into another facet of her expanding career. It's a deeply personal odyssey, one rooted in her own questions about her racial identity: Hall, whose grandmother is part-Black and whose mother has Black, Native American, and Dutch ancestry, has presented as white for much of her career. With this, her adaptation of the 1929 novella of the same name by Nella Larson, Hall gets to explore those myriad facets of herself, as well as the broader implications the phenomenon of 'passing' has for all of us in our respective negotiations with our identity. Continue Reading →

It's funny to think about the mission creep that's escalated within the Marvel Cinematic Universe since its debut in 2008 with the first Iron Man. Watching Eternals, you can't help but wonder that all of this started, as Jeff Bridges once quipped, in a cave with a box of scraps. Now, with Thanos and the events of Eternals, the MCU truly delves into the cosmic -- the vast span of space and time, and the very fabric of the universe at stake. And yet, the bigger and longer the MCU grows (heh), the more weightless it all feels; there's heaps of ambition at play in Marvel's latest, at least within the meager confines of Kevin Feige's franchise stewardship, but its reach exceeds its grasp. Continue Reading →

There are 102.8 miles of track to Chicago’s elevated transit system. For its riders, The 'L' opens up so many possibilities that we often forget it's a closed circuit. The Loop, which circles downtown, is self-contained—but ride any train to the end of the line and you'll soon find yourself going backward. Continue Reading →

Invasion, Apple TV+’s newest foray into sci-fi television, follows “ordinary” people around the world as an alien force, well, invades. Created by Simon Kinberg (who writes and directs several episodes) and David Weil (who also created Amazon’s Hunters), Invasion is an engaging slow-burn of a thriller series, building character and atmosphere with the ever-looming threat of an unforeseen enemy. Continue Reading →

This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Chicago International Film Festival. Continue Reading →

Ron’s Gone Wrong has some lofty goals: it’s a bold attempt to talk about how social media addiction, consumerism, and technology at large has taken over kids’ lives in a way that’s not just unhealthy, but that’s actively leaving them lonelier. And if anything can be applauded about writer and director Sarah Smith’s film, it’s in the way it wants to tackle all of this head on. Only in this world, swap the iPhones and tablets for “B-bots”—cute little AIs proudly labeled “your best friend out of the box!” They follow you everywhere, learn everything about you, and use that info to help you make new friends via other kids’ B-bots. It’s the tech solution to friendship! ...And a handy little metaphor for the way tech once designed to bring us together has mutated into something else entirely. Continue Reading →

Adam Randall’s Night Teeth, Netflix’s latest foray into vampire mythmaking, finds the streaming giant betting big on name recognition and slick visuals as blood splatters across Los Angeles. Following Benny (Jorge Lendeborg Jr.), a broke college student who picks up two vampires on a mission to take over the city, the film leans on its bright, exciting initial energy. It constructs a world in which vampires and humans have coexisted peacefully for decades, giving enough information to intrigue but not enough to answer all necessary questions.   Continue Reading →

Since seeing Red Rocket, I haven’t been able to stop listening to “Bye Bye Bye.” The hum of the song’s wonky strings overlays the opening shot. As the camera zooms out from a jarring close-up of a bus seat, the synthetic beat kicks in, revealing Mikey Saber (Simon Rex), battered and bruised. NSYNC’s upbeat, indignant track lends a pulsing momentum to the opening montage as Mr. Saber disembarks from his steel chariot and starts the long walk to his ex-wife Lexi’s (Bree Elrod) domicile. “I know that I can take no more, it ain’t no lie,” indeed.   Continue Reading →

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is an alternatively madcap and melancholic retelling of the artistic and personal life of the peculiar Louis Wain by making a lot of noise but not saying much. Biographical films have to tread a very difficult line. They must tell their central characters’ life and accomplishments while humanizing them through their rituals and quirks. And they must do this all without turning the movie idealization or fetishization of such things. Narratively, what Louis Wain gets right is that focusing on the man as a deeply troubled individual and melds his artistic work along with the afflictions that he suffered. What it gets wrong is its inability to dig deeper into Louis Wain beyond his whimsies and mannerisms and the surrounding greater Victorian English culture.  Continue Reading →

With the release of The Rise of Skywalker and the upcoming Ghostbusters: Afterlife, the term “fan service” has come to mean going to extremes in order to please fickle audiences of a TV series or film franchise. Though framed as an acknowledgment and appreciation of fan support, it feels forced and phony, an Easter egg hunt where a plot should be. While David Gordon Green and Danny McBride’s 2018 reboot of Halloween was far from a perfect film, they were determined to make it their own, rather than continuing the same interminable, by then thoroughly ridiculous storyline. Its sequel, Halloween Kills, however, feels like whatever Green and McBride were originally trying to do was shoved aside in favor of winks and nods at the “true” fans of the series. The body count is much, much bigger, and almost laughably gory, but if you’re looking for any kind of coherent plot and characters not doing anything but the stupidest things imaginable, look elsewhere. Continue Reading →

R.L. Stine is best known for those iconic Goosebumps books, but those aren’t the only stories he’s written over the years. That used to be easy to forget about, but the entertainment landscape of 2021 has reaffirmed this longstanding truth. Thanks to titles like Stranger Things popularizing youth-friendly horror in modern pop culture, a series of recent adaptations of Stine’s other works (which fit into that mold nicely) has reminded us all of just how many different projects Stine has written for over the years. Continue Reading →

Next year will mark, improbably, 25 years since Diana, Princess of Wales was killed in a horrific car accident while being chased down by aggressive photographers. Like Marilyn Monroe, another unlucky blonde who was mercilessly hounded by the press before dying too young, Diana’s image has only become more indelible in the years following her death. Also like Marilyn, lots of money has been made exploiting her, in endless bullshit attempts to tell her “true” story. Musician/lyricists David Bryan and Joe DiPietro cash in on her too with the Broadway musical Diana, filmed and presented on Netflix for our viewing “pleasure.” The producers of Dear Evan Hansen owe Bryan and DiPietro a great deal of gratitude, because Evan Hansen is no longer the worst musical of 2021. Continue Reading →

When I first heard the announcement of a new adaptation of Frank Herbert’s magnum opus Dune, I think I might have groaned and said, “God, not again.” Even with the cult followings that Lynch’s now-disowned 1984 version and SyFy’s plodding 2000 miniseries have amassed, there has yet to be a version that had the kind of mass appeal that gets butts in seats.  Continue Reading →