1102 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Greek (Page 35)

(This review is part of our 2021 coverage of Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival./) Continue Reading →

Jeffrey Schwarz’s documentary on a never-was musical adaptation of Sunset Boulevard and its would-be makers is insightful if a bit scattered. (This review is part of our 2021 coverage of Reeling: The Chicago LGBTQ+ International Film Festival) “After Salome, we’ll make another picture, and another picture” and then a musical, and then a musical based on writing the musical, and then a picture about writing the musical and the musical based on writing the musical! Maybe it’s not something Norma Desmond could’ve dreamed of, but Gloria Swanson certainly would have approved. Continue Reading →

An admittedly intriguing blend of bleaker-than-bleak comedy and holiday spirit is undermined by noxious writing and character work. If you do not yet know about  Silent Night’s big twist, I’d strongly recommend you set his review aside. Talking about Camille Griffin’s directorial debut requires talking about its twist. To sum up: Silent Night is awful. It aims to blend dark comedy with sentiment via an audacious story but does little with its intriguing core idea. What it does do does not work. It’s Christmas, and married couple Nell (Keira Knightley) and Simon (Matthew Goode) are preparing to host a celebration for a group of their old school friends. Their pals include snotty Toby (Rufus Jones) and Sandra (Annabelle Wallis), obnoxious Bella (Lucy Punch) and her girlfriend Alex (Kirby Howell-Baptiste) and James (Ṣọpé Dìrísù), and his girlfriend Sophie (Lily Rose-Depp), whose youth and American heritage make her an outsider amongst the others. Continue Reading →

The third season of Laurie Nunn’s raunchy, teen dramedy Sex Education kicks off with a montage of the characters engaging in all sorts of sexual activities—some with their partners, some with their secret lovers, and some with themselves. For a show that’s always had a positive attitude when it comes to sex, it’s a fitting choice. However, Sex Education has never been just about hormones and horniness. Since its first season, the show has also proven to be a charming, often heartfelt look at adolescence. In season three, it remains committed to that approach.  Continue Reading →

Despite its top shelf cast & capable direction, this drama about tourists behaving badly is nothing we haven't seen before. The Forgiven is a story about fantastically rich white people behaving badly in an “exotic” location, told by slightly less rich and hopefully better intentioned white people. So soon after HBO’s The White Lotus, it might be tempting to call this a new trend. But it’s probably more accurate to consider it business as usual.  This is not to say that it’s a bad film. The Forgiven is thoroughly competent in its writing, direction, and performances. It also happens to be — from its first scenes and the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?-esque dynamic it establishes between its protagonists, to its ending which is  strongly foreshadowed to the point of telegraphing — an obvious one.  Continue Reading →

Ryusuke Hamaguchi adapts a Haruki Murakami short story & gives it additional depth & soul. Interpretation is a complex beast. In terms of language, not even the most literal one is left entirely untouched by the person making it. In the case of longer work, a translator can take on a far more hands-on role, making a novel or film in translation a product of its interpreter as well as its original artist. In some cases, this influence can be significant. Translators and editors have played such a massive role in the way that English audiences understand and appreciate Haruki Murakami that writer, translator, editor, and creative writing professor David Karashima wrote an entire book on the topic in 2020.  Interpreting prose for the screen comes with its own nuances, and its own symbiotic relationship between the writer’s vision and the filmmaker’s. Translating Murakami’s writing for the screen is perhaps even more complicated, given the nature of his stories and how he tells them (or at least how I understand them based on the English translations I’ve read). Continue Reading →

There’s a certain reaction one has when watching a movie that opens with the Chicken Soup for the Soul logo, and that is a labored sigh. The company that made its fortune publishing collections of inspiring true stories about overcoming adversity and beating the odds quietly moved into the movie producing business some years back. You’d be forgiven if up to this point you hadn’t heard of anything they produced--the vast majority of their projects seemed to have been created specifically for the direct to streaming market, with titles like 12 Dogs of Christmas and Paris Countdown. After a recent deal with Redbox, however, they’re looking to move into more prestige fare, starting with the comedy-drama Best Sellers. Continue Reading →

Kenneth Branagh directs a moving film about a working class Irish family impacted by the Troubles. Historical films — especially those about devastating and traumatic events — require a precarious balance. If you focus too much on the events themselves, you risk erasing the humanity of the people who experienced them, coming across like a dry textbook. Dive too deeply into the personal — especially if your characters are fictional or fictionalized — and there’s always a chance you’ll make a maudlin melodrama that uses history as little more than a backdrop. This balance becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain when your audience’s main point of access to your story is the eyes of a child, because you’re at constant risk of nostalgia muddying up the proceedings.  Given the subject matter of Belfast and Kenneth Branagh’s deep connection to it (although the film is not a memoir, there are a great deal of similarities between the fictional family and the Belfast-born writer and director’s own), he could have easily faltered with this particular story. It would have been easy to forgive him if he did. Hell, he probably would have made a decent film even if it got too sentimental. This is Kenneth Branagh we’re talking about, after all. But what he’s done instead is craft a film that’s as measured as it is miraculous.  Continue Reading →

As evil witch Natacha (Krysten Ritter) exclaims in Nightbooks, she doesn’t like stories with “happy endings.” While it’s refreshing to have a children’s horror movie that doesn’t coddle the audience, Netflix's latest is hardly the spectacular, spooky adventure it packages itself to be. Instead, it’s more like the off-brand Halloween candy a kid might get trick or treating. It technically passes as a treat, but not one that will leave kids and parents coming back for more.   Continue Reading →

Netflix is trying really, maybe embarrassingly hard to make He-Man a thing again. With He-Man and the Masters of the Universe their throw-toys-at-the-wall-until-something-sticks approach is genuinely starting to wear out the patience of new and old fans alike.  Continue Reading →

Twelve years after her last film, Jane Campion returns to the scene of feature-length filmmaking with the slow-burn, neo-western The Power of the Dog. Based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 acclaimed novel of the same name, the movie is a character study of repressed desire and masculinity that operates like an unnerving Greek tragedy. The story takes place in 1925 Montana — though the Kiwi-born filmmakers shot the film in her native New Zealand, where big hills and thick clouds create a sense of isolation — and it centers on two rancher brothers who share no resemblance in their personalities. Continue Reading →

The country soundtrack kicks in. The plain, honey-coated lens flairs coat the screen. A truck parks and out steps Mike Milo (Clint Eastwood), met with the distance of his once-good friend Howard (Dwight Yoakam) who, like a soda machine someone’s kicked loose, dispenses copious exposition about Mike’s past. The man was a great rodeo rider before dabbling in pills and drink, and, according to his old pal, his rising age doesn’t help either. Howard wants fresh blood, but it seems the movie doesn’t. The delivery, the detachment, Yoakam’s thoroughly disinterested performance—the film borders on worrying at first. Continue Reading →

For many, present company included, tales of alternate realities contain an undeniable hook to them. As people, after all, we start with so many choices to make, so many avenues to pursue. Sometimes, no matter how happy you might be, one can’t help but ponder how things could be different. What if you attended that other school? What if you went on that one blind date? Those questions sit at the center of NBC’s newest offering, Ordinary Joe. Continue Reading →

Kira Kovalenko's Unclenching the Fists, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival, is a troubling, frustrating film to sit through. Like many movies that draw their emotional power from their central character's suffering—Robert Bresson's Mouchette being the best example and Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark the worst—Kovalenko's film operates from a point of seeming inescapability from its bleak parameters. Protagonist Ada (Milana Aguzarova) is portrayed as a feeble, helpless figure and its tension is drawn from her painfully awkward attempts at communication and a suffocating existence she always seems just a little too weak to break out from. With that said, unlike Dancer in the Dark, Unclenching the Fists does not hold its audience hostage or insult their emotional investment in its characters. Continue Reading →

Kin, AMC+’s new crime drama, follows in the footsteps of those underworld sagas that came before it. Set in Dublin, mostly in the homes of members of the Kinsella family, Kin focuses on warring Irish families deep in the drug trade. While its story rarely exceeds expectations for subject matter, brutality, or surprise, its performances are excellent, thanks to a team of veteran actors who have numerous scenes full of ample, chewy dialogue to showcase their talents. Continue Reading →

Julia Ducourneau's followup to her stunning debut Raw makes for brutal, beautiful, brilliant body horror. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.) Titane begins with the pluck of banjo strings and an extreme closeup of chrome. It’s a clash that’s jarring and compelling: the earthy, fire-and-brimstone howl of David Eugene Edwards’s take on the American folk standard “Wayfaring Stranger” set against an almost voyeuristic tour through a car’s inner workings. Continue Reading →

Eva Husson directs Odessa Young to a stupendous performance of a young woman's birth as a writer in a story about the lingering impact of love. An adaptation of Graham Swift's 2016 novella of the same name, Mothering Sunday begins as a story about wartime loss and forbidden love. Directed by Eva Husson from a script penned by Alice Birch, it mostly takes place over one spring day in 1924 England, just five years after the end of the first World War. It's Mother's Day and the orphaned Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young), who works as a maid in the Nivens (Olivia Colman and Colin Firth) household, is given a day off. Since she doesn't have a mother to celebrate the holiday with, Jane decides to spend the day with the only person in her life, her secret lover Paul Sheringham (Josh O'Connor). The couple makes plans to meet at Paul's house. But on this very special day, Jane doesn't have to sneak in from the backdoor like usual. Paul's parents are not home—they're lunching with the Nivens and the Hobdays, whose daughter Emma (Emma D'Arcy) will marry Paul in about two weeks. As the three families gather at the lunch table near a beautiful river, Jane and Paul seize the opportunity to express their love for each other. They're aware that this afternoon will most likely be the last time they get to be in each other's company, so they make the most of it. Continue Reading →

Melanie Laurent's adaptation of Victoria Mas' novel about a young woman's incarceration in a cruel asylum is disappointingly flat. With its literary pedigree and reasonably lavish trappings, The Mad Women's Ball wants to be seen as a sweeping and powerful drama that examines the subjugation that women suffered in the past in large part because of their gender while suggesting that too little has changed between the late 1800s and today. In practice, it feels more like a period version of those old Women-In-Prison movies that Roger Corman produced back in the early 1970s that blended obvious exploitation elements (Nudity! Sadism! Sex! Violence!) with unexpected moments of satire and social commentary and, depending on what up-and-coming filmmaker was at the helm, perhaps even a sense of genuine cinematic style. Unfortunately, this effort from writer-director Melanie Laurent is a well-appointed, well-meaning but ultimately misfired take on an all-too-familiar narrative. Eugenie Clery (Lou de Laage) is a feisty young woman rebelling against the restrictions placed on her because of her gender. This causes a great deal of consternation for the members of her well-to-do family. And yet, despite her sneaking off to the smoke-filled cafes of Montmartre or to attend Victor Hugo's funeral, it is when Eugenie claims to be able to speak to spirits that her father elects to do what was too often done to women who refused to politely follow society's conventions—commit her to the Salpetriere Asylum.Salpetriere, a "hospital" run by noted real-life French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, swiftly proves to be little more than a warehouse in which the patients are treated for their alleged maladies with a variety of brutish quackery. Continue Reading →

Ben Platt's age is the least of our problems in Stephen Chbosky's misguided adaptation of an already misguided high school musical. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival.) There’s a scene toward the middle of Dear Evan Hansen where Larry (Danny Pino) finally allows himself to grieve the loss of his stepson, Connor (Colton Ryan). With his reserve and face crumbling in tandem, he bursts into the family home and reaches for his wife. The camera lingers behind Cynthia (Amy Adams) as Larry tucks himself into her shoulder and her hair sweeps to the side a little. This means that, in this moment of catharsis, the audience is treated to a perfectly framed Lululemon logo on the back of her jacket, right in the middle of the screen, right between a ponytail and a portrait of conquered repression.  Continue Reading →

While we spent a lot of time debating whether or not “elevated horror” is a real thing or just something film snobs made up so they didn’t have to be embarrassed about liking a scary movie, gore fell to the wayside. There was a period when we weren’t getting an acceptable amount of blood and guts, in favor of understated chills and psychological trauma. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but it’s left something lacking in the genre. With Nia DaCosta’s take on Candyman and the upcoming Halloween Kills, however, it looks like old-fashioned look-between-the-fingers horror is back in all its splattery glory. Add to that list James Wan’s Malignant, often very silly, but always with a self-aware wink at the audience, with a body count that will satisfy even the most jaded horror fans. Continue Reading →

A man stands in his living room, bent double and screaming into his closed fists. The pain is so new he’s still discovering just how deep it goes, bewildered and terrified to feel that the wound goes all the way into the bone. Watching from the floor of my office as I paint Halloween decorations, I could feel old scars tingling as the wounds under them sang remember that moment? Remember how it felt? Continue Reading →