1095 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Greek (Page 46)

Robin Wright makes her directorial debut in a tender and understated drama about a woman who isolates herself from the world after an unimaginable loss. The pain of losing our loved ones is unimaginable. It’s overwhelming and often hard to overcome. Though healing is not impossible, there’s no timetable when it comes to processing this loss. It may take weeks or months or even years for people to finally be okay again and move forward. Robin Wright’s directorial debut, Land, understands this really well. The movie delves deep into the pain and the complicated feelings that people have to face when they’re dealing with the death of their loved ones. It’s an understated character study about grief and loss, and a moving celebration of human connection and resilience. Working from a script penned by Jesse Chatham and Erin Dignam, the movie follows Edee (Wright), a woman determined to isolate herself from everyone in the wake of a devastating tragedy. When we first meet her, she’s already on her way to a remote cabin in Quincy, Wyoming. She wants to abandon everything, staying away from everyone who wants her to get better, but never allow her to process the deep sadness she’s been feeling for a while. Before arriving at the cabin, she ditches her phone and even calls a local to get rid of her rental car, leaving herself with only a bunch of canned foods and a box of her most personal possessions. But Edee is not cut out for this kind of living, so the plan she’s made seems foolhardy. Continue Reading →

Arjitpal Singh's drama about a rural family in the Himalayas struggling to get by leans on strong performances and interlocking class critiques to overcome some clunky narrative structure. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Since 2012 when Anusha Rizvi’s Peepli Live became the first Indian movie to ever debut at Sundance, the film festival has seen a more consistent inclusion of films from Indian filmmakers. This year’s edition saw two movies from India – one narrative and one documentary. Both deal with underrepresented and economically disadvantaged communities in the country and focus on women. While the documentary (Writing With Fire) is a tale of inspiration and community perseverance, the narrative feature, Arjitpal Singh’s Fire in the Mountains, is more frustrating and somber. Continue Reading →

Netflix’s new romantic drama Firefly Lane, based on the 2008 novel by Kristin Hannah, follows the multi-decade friendship of brash and bold Tully (Katherine Heigl) and smart and nerdy Kate (Sarah Chalke). They meet at age fourteen living on Firefly Lane. From there they spend years cultivating their journeys: Tully is a journalist with a wildly popular daytime talk show, and Kate took a break in her career to marry fellow journalist Ryan (a stilted Ben Lawson) and raise a daughter.  Continue Reading →

Two Of Us begins with an ethereal game of hide-and-seek, le cache-cache, in French. Unlike the English name which has a linear cause-and-result, beginning-and-end structure, literally translated as hide-hide, the French name suggests an unending cycle of hiding. Everyone is hiding. The threat of revelation or exposure lurks everywhere. And this is most certainly true in Two of Us. Continue Reading →

The Michael Greyeyes-starring Sundance debut announces Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. as an exciting new filmmaker. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) The never-ending cycle of violence and abuse is at the center of Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s directorial debut Wild Indian. Part drama thriller and part character study of historical and generational trauma, Wild Indian announces Corbine as an exciting new voice. His vision is bold, confidently going to places that are dark and unconventional, with a masterful cinematic language often only found in the works of a seasoned filmmaker. His writing is airless, tightening the tension of the story up to eleven. It’s a phenomenal debut in the truest sense. Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Continue Reading →

Nicolas Cage & Sion Sono team up for an incoherent Samurai-Western-Mad Max homage-something or other. It’s impossible to review a Nicolas Cage movie. They’re the very definition of “critic-proof,” in that they always have a dedicated audience who will declare them “the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” and forgive them for lacking in plot or competence. You don’t like it? You just don’t know how to relax and have a good time. Sion Sono’s first English language feature, Prisoners of the Ghostland fits right in: loud, garish, bereft of anything resembling a plot. Is it fun? It certainly thinks it is. Trying to explain what Prisoners of the Ghostland is about is a fool’s errand, but let’s give it a go anyway. Nicolas Cage is Hero, a notorious bank robber whose last gig got a little boy killed (but he feels bad about it, so that absolves him). He’s summoned from jail by the Governor (Bill Moseley), who runs Samurai Town, a combination of Dodge City and Neo-Tokyo, with a dash of Terry Gilliam thrown in. Hero is ordered to rescue the Governor’s missing “granddaughter” Bernice (Sofia Boutella), and is fitted into an unremovable leather jumpsuit with explosive charges at his neck, elbows and crotch. Continue Reading →

Where’s the line between a messy movie and a movie that’s a mess? Joel Schumacher’s clearly-flawed Flawless oozes with subplots while it tries to fulfill the obligations of an “unexpected buddy” movie. Like the pre-gentrification East Village that it’s built around, characters and cultures clash to chaotic, uneven results. Continue Reading →

Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein usher in the end of the world with a winsome indie comedy about seeking closure and reconciliation. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Directed by husband-and-wife duo Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein, How It Ends can be recognized immediately as a movie filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cameos abound, with each minimal character appearing on balconies, across the street, on the other side of the table. These interactions, despite any emotional connection or progress, end with a wave goodbye, air kisses, or any other touchless way of leaving a situation. As the film meanders forward, this oddness grows, as two people share a genuine moment of importance, only to walk their separate ways with no physical affirmation of that moment.  Continue Reading →

The thing about guilt is that it can wear you down until you’re more a cluster of exposed nerve endings than a human being. That, at least, is the premise behind The Night, a new psychological horror and debut film from director Kourosh Ahari. Set in Los Angeles and spoken almost entirely in Farsi, The Night is a wonderfully odd mix of being spare and a bit too much all at once.  Continue Reading →

Fran Kranz's debut is an emotional whopper of a drama, a vivid actor's exercise with incredible performances and passionate ruminations on the aftereffects of tragedy. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) One would be forgiven for thinking writer-director Fran Kranz's debut feature, Mass, was based on a play: it's a long, claustrophobic affair, set mostly around a folding card table set meticulously in the middle of a church basement by nearly pathologically-Midwestern church staff in the film's opening minutes. We don't see who's going to sit in them for quite a few minutes, but the way the kindly, empathetic Judy (Breeda Wool) talks to their facilitator Kendra (Michelle N. Carter), we know we're in for an emotionally-loaded experience. By the time Mass's two hours are finished, we're as exhausted as Kranz's subjects, but grippingly, cathartically so. Continue Reading →

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival is insightful and loving. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) The word “Woodstock” enters consciousness at a young age. It has become synonymous with classic rock, with music festivals, and with a decade of counterculture. With an estimated 400,000, Woodstock cemented itself as a part of popular culture, an ironic shift in its original meaning and its now-reformed image. Continue Reading →

Niamh Algar learns the price of prurience in Prano Bailey-Bond's neon-soaked ode to the video nasty. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) It's England in the 1980s - poverty is high, Thatcher is in office, and the so-called moral majority is sounding the alarm about the increasing ubiquity of "video nasties", gory, violent films that, as the hysteria goes, tap into the seediest, most antisocial impulses of the British people. Think Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer, or Cannibal Holocaust: eerie exercises in sociopathy that thrill their fans and terrify their detractors. For Enid (Niamh Algar), a film censor, her job isn't about protecting a sensitive public from the disturbing films she's shown (ones with titles like Deranged and Beast Man), but merely to do her job well. Even so, she's buttoned up in more ways than one, from her uptight clothing to her lack of chemistry with her coworkers. Much of that is due to years of trauma sustained from the disappearance of her sister as a teenager, which she was present for but can't remember a thing about; her parents only recently chose to declare her dead and begin to move on with their lives. Continue Reading →

Buoyed by an excellent lead performance, Frida Kempff’s psychological horror is harrowing, but ill-served by a weak ending. Sure, living in an apartment means you don’t have to worry about mortgages, property taxes or paying for new furnaces, but it also means trading in your privacy, and often being too aware of what your neighbors are doing. My upstairs neighbors seem to have either a small child or a large dog that runs back and forth across the living room floor, although I have not seen visual evidence of either. That’s an improvement over another neighbor, who I could hear cough and burp at all hours, and a third neighbor whose hobby was playing an electronic keyboard off-key. You learn to live with it, because that’s life in a box. Frida Kempff’s Knocking asks an unsettling question: what if the ordinary sounds of apartment living shouldn’t be ignored? Molly (Cecilia Milocco) is on her own after a long stay at a psychiatric hospital. Other than some vague reference to an “incident,” we don’t know the nature of what brought her to the hospital, but she seems as though she’s forgotten how to interact with the world. Still in mourning over the end of a relationship (or perhaps the death of her partner, it’s never quite clear), Molly is painfully lonely, bereft of any friends or family to comfort and support her. Continue Reading →

Ben Wheatley's pandemic-shot sci-fi effort is a derivative and predictable trip through the fog despite a few choice moments. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) A few months ago, Ben Wheatley did what seems to be en vogue as of late: make a movie mid-pandemic. It was over 15 days in August 2020 when Wheatley shot his latest from his own script, and does this one tick a few of the usual boxes. Lethal virus outbreak? Check. Lethal virus that isn’t actually COVID-19 but clearly is? Check. A non-COVID-19 lethal virus that feels extraneous overall? Yep, and yet its predictability goes beyond that. In the Earth sees Wheatley aping Andrei Tarkovsky by taking liberally from Stalker, but it also sees him aping himself by rehashing A Field in England much more predictably. It’s pretty clear stuff throughout. While the cities rage with illness, Dr. Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) heads on a mission to a test site deep in the forest. After getting to a lodge closer to civilization, he makes the acquaintance of Alma (Ellora Torchia). Alma is a park ranger tasked to guide him, and right after an anonymous figure attacks them, they come across a nature dweller named Zach (Reece Shearsmith). For whatever reason, they think he’s an all right guy to trust, but I forgot to mention that no one in this movie has even the most basic intuition, especially given their professions. Continue Reading →

Sian Heder directs a touching & funny story of having to choose between dreams & obligation. The reason why so many movies about teenagers don’t work is because they often feature too-old actors playing characters who talk like jaded 35 year-olds (or rather, like the people who wrote them). Every once in a while, however, you find a real gem, like Sian Heder’s Coda, a low-key, moving story about a teenage girl who finds herself caught between doing the thing she loves, and having to help keep her family’s business afloat. 17 year-old Ruby, played by Emilia Jones (in what will hopefully be a star-making performance) is the only hearing member of her Massachusetts fishing family. On top of trying to get through school, she must also work on the family fishing boat, serving as the ears and voice of her father, Frank (Troy Kotsur), and older brother Leo (Daniel Durant), as they try to avoid (with mixed success) getting ripped off by the local fish buyer. It’s quietly expected that Ruby, who has no real plans for college, will simply stick around as long as Leo, Frank, and her mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin) need her. Continue Reading →

There are certain places that, when you visit, you can feel the weight of time pushing up from under your feet. In 2015, I was visiting a friend in Sweden when his partner took us to the island of Oland, where you can touch the monolith headstones of the Vikings buried there. In one spot, two rows of stones met, parted, and met again in a longboat shape. I’ve thought about that day often since then, the long-dead warriors whose monuments I could touch. Less than a year later, my friend would be gone, but I will always remember that day, the way the time-worn stone felt under my hands. Continue Reading →

Sam Levinson’s gorgeously shot but obnoxious and exhausting relationship drama Malcolm & Marie is filled with plenty of big ideas — about film, about art criticism, about authenticity, about the relationship between artists and their muse. But more often than not, those big ideas are just big ideas that go unexplored. Instead of trying to make solid arguments about what it wants to say at the beginning, Malcolm & Marie is too busy being angry and whiny. So what could’ve been a compelling two-hander drama examining art and a fractured relationship instead ends up as a movie struggling to find itself, made by a man with nothing but pettiness in his mind. Continue Reading →

Syfy’s new show Resident Alien starts out with a bang: an alien crashes on Earth and hides out in the sleepy town of Patience, Colorado. The alien takes the human form of Dr. Harry Vanderspeigle (Alan Tudyk) in order to fit in and complete his as-yet-unclear mission. However, when the town doctor is found dead, local Sheriff Mike Thompson (Corey Reynolds), Deputy Liv Baker (Elizabeth Bowen), and Mayor Ben Hawthorne (Levi Fiehler) rope Harry into the murder investigation.  Continue Reading →

Tucked between Baton Rouge and New Orleans in the Southeastern corner of Louisiana, St. James Parish is home to several petrochemical plants. The state rewards billions in tax breaks for these places to operate, and in exchange, they pollute the water and air for nearby residents, who tend to live around the poverty line. This poisoning is so out of control that this stretch of highway earns the dubious title of “Cancer Alley”. Continue Reading →

Certain movies have a kind of insubstantial quality to them. They aren’t poorly made or badly acted but they nonetheless feel feather-light, as though they barely existed moments after you turn off the credits. Amelia is such a film. Continue Reading →