1072 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Greek (Page 51)
The Courier (In Greek: Ο Κατάσκοπος του Ψυχρού Πολέμου)
Dominic Cooke's well-crafted spy thriller doesn't try anything new, but boasts winning performances & a zippy plot.
In 2019, the buddy-car film Ford v Ferrari became the clear cut favorite of dads across American and Britain. Using well-matched leads in Christian Bale and Matt Damon, James Mangold’s film became a critical and commercial hit, showing that fathers still have the power to put a movie into the green. It looks like there’s a new dad film of 2020 though, with Dominic Cooke’s Ironbark taking its rightful spot upon the beer-bellied throne.
Ironbark tells the story of Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch), a British businessman recruited by the government to become a spy-like courier in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Wynne agrees to keep this entire operation a secret from everyone, including his wife Sheila (Jessie Buckley), growing more invested and involved and spy-ish.
Flanked by one British operative Dickie Franks (Angus Wright) and one American operative Emily Donovan (Rachel Brosnahan), Wynne begins meeting with a Russian source named Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze). Together, they smuggle nuclear information back into Britain and the U.S. in hopes of avoiding nuclear war, and eventually dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Continue Reading →
ドラゴンボールZ たったひとりの最終決戦〜フリーザに挑んだZ戦士 孫悟空の父〜 (In Greek: Dragon Ball Z: Η Αρχή του Μύθου)
Florian Zeller directs a stunning feature debut starring Anthony Hopkins & Olivia Colman at the top of their game.
First-time director Florian Zeller walked out on stage to rapturous applause. At least one-third of the audience attending the premiere for Zeller’s film gave a standing ovation inside one of Sundance Film Festival’s biggest venues, the Eccles Theater. The reason for this reaction? The Father, a stage play written by Zeller adapted for the screen by Christopher Hampton, starring Academy Award winners Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman.
Following father Anthony (Hopkins) and daughter Anne (Colman), The Father explores a man aging sans grace, and how his growing uncertainty affects his daily routines and biggest relationship. Playing out over an unspecified amount of time yet staying in only a couple of apartments, the film corners you, becoming smaller and more intimate as time goes on. The 97-minute runtime flies by, with Hopkins commanding the screen in every scene, becoming a vehicle for him to likely receive an Oscar nomination in 2021.
The supporting cast, including an incredible actor in Colman, serves as merely a springboard for Hopkins, who plays a man struggling to understand or realize his own increasing forgetfulness and incoming dementia. Hopkins’ performance is one of his best in the last decade, blowing his Two Popes role off the screen, and showing that he continues to be one of Hollywood’s finest actors. He rips your heart out over and over again, creating a character that feels too relatable for all of us that have family members living with pain over the age of 75. Continue Reading →
Mythic Quest
This softer, gentler workplace sitcom from some of the "It's Always Sunny" folks is funny but not without some glitches.
Workplace sitcoms have been an essential part of the television landscape for decades. Cast a bunch of talented comedic actors, give their characters various kinds of quirks, put them together in a work setting of any kind, write hilarious jokes, and boom-you have a fun, breezy way to spend 25 minutes.
Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day brought the workplace sitcom to depraved new heights with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Now, with the help of writer and Sunny executive producer Megan Ganz, comes their latest attempt at reinventing the sitcom wheel with Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet for Apple TV Plus.
This time, instead of a dingy bar, the setting is a tech company that produces a wildly popular World of Warcraft-esque online role-playing game called Mythic Quest. It follows the daily tribulations of its employees, starting from the top with the egotistical CEO and game creator, Ian Grimm (McElhenney, bringing that Mac energy) all the way to the bottom with the lowly game testers and coders. Continue Reading →
The Social Dilemma (In Greek: Το Κοινωνικό Δίλημμα)
Jeff Orlowski's documentary about the effects and ethics of social media lacks enough emotional depth or practical solutions to work.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.)
Did you know that the Internet is scary? Don’t worry, you're about to hear it again. Did you know that companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google store your information in order to sell it to advertisers? Of course, but maybe it'll really sink in if you hear it one more time. And—just bear with me—were you aware that these companies are so fine-tuned that they can track how long you stay on one given page, post, or picture?
Of course you did, but The Social Dilemma doesn't care about that. There are a handful of working parts to Jeff Orlowski’s latest documentary, but rather than make use of its potential to say something new, it simply sticks to the most basic information and fleshes it out with some good old fashioned fear-mongering. It's part regular doc, part dramatic reconstruction, and mostly an insipid polemic, which, when paired with its potential to comment on the ethics of privacy and social manipulation, comes off as a regurgitation of what's been said before. Continue Reading →
Locke & Key
Netflix's adaptation of the Joe Hill comic series takes a while to get going, but hits a dark-fantasy stride by the end.
For better and worse (but mostly better), Locke & Key imports the tone and feel of its comic book inspiration almost entirely to its TV adaptation. Show creator Carlton Cuse has proven increasingly adept at helming smart, faithful adaptations for television from books (The Strain) and comics.
For those unfamiliar with the source material by writer Joe Hill and artist Gabriel Rodriguez, Locke & Key concerns the titular Locke family, who, after a personal tragedy back in Seattle, move east to a small Massachusetts town. There waits a large manor home, Key House, one that deceased patriarch Rendell Locke (Bill Heck) hated so much he left in the rearview and never spoke of to his family. His brother Duncan (Aaron Ashmore) has been left caretaker, but largely avoids the property even though he remembers very little of his childhood. The Lockes, though, are in need of a change, and Key House seems to be the easiest place to start. Unfortunately, they quickly find that the home offers much less refuge (and much more danger) than they ever expected.
Part of Locke & Key’s charm is how closely it hews to the comics on which it’s based. It diverges here and there, but never in ways that existing fans will resent. In fact, they may appreciate how it gives the narrative a few surprises while maintaining what made the series so popular in the first place. It’s the rare adaptation that manages the feat of feeling like its source material while not simply being a retread. Continue Reading →
Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters (In Greek: Χάνσελ και Γκρέτελ: Κυνηγοί Μαγισσών)
Oz Perkins' latest, unceremoniously dumped into January, is a revisionist Grimm story as atmospheric as it is thin.
The original fairy tales documented by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen were often bloody, dark stories. As time passed, and we decided that children were too fragile for the originals, we reshaped them into toothless Disney stories of romance and happy endings. And as society began to critique the passive nature of these saccharine protagonists, the 2010s gave us badass butt-kicking makeovers for our heroes, like Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters.
At the dawn of the century’s third decade, however, we see fairy tales leaning harder into their older, more folkloric elements, crafting stories that mine terror out of feeling decidedly old and out-of-step with our understanding of the world. It happened with The Witch, and now we’ve got Gretel & Hansel, directed by Oz Perkins (son of Anthony), which opts for an eerie atmosphere and a decidedly dark interpretation of its source material.
The movie opens with one fairy tale framing another: Gretel’s favorite childhood story of a young child, beset by illness in their infancy. In a desperate bid to save the child’s life, her father takes her to a local witch. While the witch saves her life, she also gives the child the power of prophecy and witchcraft. As the child grows, so does her power and evil, until the townsfolk have little choice but to exile her to the woods. Continue Reading →
Nine Days (In Greek: Εννιά Ημέρες)
Edson Oda's debut feature about a group of souls looking to be born into the real world is a great premise with pretty good execution.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.)
Tones, worldviews, inspirations both obvious and implicit—it’s notable when something juggles a medley of ideas. They signal a larger ambition even when they don’t work out. Such leads to a general rule of thumb: the farther a movie’s parts are from one another, the more conversation it’ll stimulate. Then there’s Edson Oda’s Nine Days, which, while not narratively or thematically disparate, follows suit for a while but not by the end.
That isn’t to say it’s a messy movie. It’s actually quite tidy, and that’s the largest issue for a debut film that flirts with its own perspective without fully committing to one. By trying to ground its moral and ethical quandaries in something universal, it reveals its own perspective only to undo it by the end. While steady in how it approaches each character, it maintains an objective viewpoint before procuring its own perspective—until it takes the easy way out. Continue Reading →
Bliss (In Greek: Ευδαιμονία)
Joe Begos’ wild, gore-soaked drug trip of a vampire flick is not for the faint of heart.
Creative block is a particularly cruel trick our brains play on us. Sure, you have lots of wonderful ideas, and maybe even the talent to make them come to life, but when it comes time to actually do it, suddenly, the well runs dry. It’s a disheartening, infuriating cycle: when you can’t create, you get depressed, and the more you’re depressed, the less you create. It starts to feel like a great, cosmic joke. Joe Begos’ grisly sensory overload Bliss is what happens when a young artist, desperate for inspiration, descends into a hellscape of drugs and an inexplicable taste of blood.
Dezzy (Dora Madison) is falling far behind in both rent, and in producing pieces for an upcoming show. Though she’s successful enough in her field that she’s recognized out in public, a rotten attitude and a consistent failure to meet deadlines have caused Dezzy to quickly lose clout with both her agent, and her buyers. After a couple of heated exchanges with those she owes either money or work to, she decides that the best course of action to take is to go out and party. Drug dealer pal Hadrian (Graham Skipper) supplies Dezzy with the titular Bliss, a drug that’s snorted but resembles nothing so much as a bag of gunpowder. A combination of heroin, acid, meth and God only knows what else, it’s love at first sniff for Dezzy, even though Hadrian can’t really explain what’s in Bliss, or what the long-term effects of it might be.
Following a decadent (albeit barely coherent) night with friends Courtney (Tru Collins) and Ronnie (Rhys Wakefield), Dezzy wakes up the next morning desperately ill. She assumes she needs more Bliss, and while it helps a little, she feels a darker craving that she doesn’t yet understand. On the upside, she’s suddenly able to paint again, and, seemingly working non-stop (because you can when you’re unable to sleep anymore), Dezzy begins to create a beautiful but eerie mural, perhaps her greatest work yet. Sure, Bliss sends her into murderous rampages where she chews the flesh off of people’s fingers, but, finally, she’s got that artistic flow back! Continue Reading →
Star Trek: Picard
Patrick Stewart is still carrying much of the weight as "Star Trek: Picard" continues to pile on the lore & find its footing.
“Maps and Legends” improves on Star Trek: Picard’s series premiere. It’s filled to the brim with new lore and exposition and features another extended bout of table-setting. But it also features plenty of Patrick Stewart acting in one-on-one scenes, his forte, and puts him opposite performers who can hold their own. Making those conversations and confrontations a bigger focus here helps balance out the wobbly plot mechanics and less-exciting new faces the series strains to introduce.
That catch is that the series still dumps a ton of lore on the audience here. "Maps and Legends" is full of implausible and contradictory nonsense that constantly tries to top or overcomplicate (or both) whatever’s come before.
It’s not enough for the Tal Shiar, the Romulan secret police, to be involved in this conspiracy. There has to be an extra-double-secret force that’s even more hidden and even more deadly! Apparently the Romulans just hate androids and A.I. and any complex computing whatsoever, for reasons we’ve never been privy to before but which will assuredly be retconned down the line! Despite that, they still have fancy molecular reconstruction tools and can perfectly scrub a crime scene at the molecular level, but somehow not so well that Picard’s former Tal Shiar buddy can’t figure out what happened! And this new secret agency has also apparently infiltrated the highest ranks of Starfleet, where the latest corrupt commodore turns out to be a sleeper agent whose two goons are going after Dahj’s twin sister! Phew! Continue Reading →
Paterson
Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For January we’re celebrating the work of godfather of independent film Jim Jarmusch. Read the rest of our coverage here.
“What does a poet look like?”
The first (and only) documentary I ever made asked this very simple question. To answer, I lined up the poets from my creative writing program—from the sporty sorority sister to the quiet bespectacled shaggy-haired dude—and simply… asked. Their answers? Continue Reading →
The Rhythm Section
Though cinematographer Reed Morano shows some directing chops, the Blake Lively thriller is uneven in style & tone.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that Reed Morano’s bracing The Rhythm Section follows its own beat. Misleading marketing and the dreaded late January dump positioned it as a gender-reversed thriller in the vein of Liam Neeson’s recent run of revenge thrillers with expert journeyman Jaume Collet-Serra -- but the film is exhilaratingly out of step with the autopilot assassin stylings of the John Wicks of the world.
Whereas Keanu Reeves’ multiplex conquering series has largely thrived as moody but absurdist routines of grotesque precision; nothing about the capabilities of Stephanie Patrick (an unusually wan Blake Lively) could be considered automatic. If anything, DP Sean Bobbit and Morano shoot every scene with a life-or-death urgency – all trembling limbs and determined close ups – that refuse to shy away from the physical realities of a brittle frame faced with hardened professionals who won’t hesitate to pull the trigger, let alone, level a young woman with a body blow to the gut.
Stephanie isn’t a damsel in distress by any means, but the film has been almost completely drained of the usual power fantasy element that courses through these tales of vengeance to the point that she begins the film coded at her rock bottom as a sex worker and addict beaten down by losing her whole family in a mysterious plane crash. That choice outlines the film’s occasional jarring limits of empathy, but it’s nonetheless telling in placing the first half of the film closer to melodrama than genre film. Continue Reading →
Promising Young Woman (In Greek: Υποσχόμενη Νέα Γυναίκα)
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) Continue Reading →
Possessor
Brandon Cronenberg's second feature is a po-faced collection of genre tropes that wastes its cast and a modest sense of style.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.)
It’s about 45 minutes into Possessor when its most apt moment comes. A bunch of generically rich people in a generically glossy mansion turn to each other and give a toast. That toast, as it so happens, is “to boredom.”
Now, while Brandon Cronenberg’s second movie in eight years isn’t a complete failure, it’s an empty one: a grab bag of sci-fi clichés with a few spurts of violence. The occasional gore gets your attention, sure, but that’s because it’s something on the screen. The production design from Rupert Lazarus does what it sets out to do, but that aim is to recreate older, better sci-fi movies. It’s just… there, and then the color palette generously shifts from pale to neon. These tricks might have an effect if they hadn’t been done so many times before. Continue Reading →
Never Rarely Sometimes Always (In Greek: Ποτέ Σπάνια Μερικές Φορές Πάντα)
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) Continue Reading →
Jumbo (In Greek: Τζάμπο)
Portrait of a Lady on Fire's Noémie Merlant gets sweet on a theme park ride in this charming if conventionally quirky dramedy.
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.)
It's the oldest story in the book: girl meets theme park ride, girl falls in love with theme park ride, girl's mother tries to tear them apart before realizing that hey, at least the Tilt-A-Whirl never gets a headache. Okay, so it's not the most conventional story out there, but in its basic emotional beats, Zoé Wittock's quirky tale of a socially awkward loner forming a unique psychosexual attraction to a glowing, spinning piece of entertainment machinery feels curiously familiar. But maybe it's that familiarity, glommed onto such an out-there concept, that makes Jumbo worthwhile.
The girl in question is Jeanne (Portrait of a Lady on Fire's Noémie Merlant), a bowl-cut-wearing loner who works at a run-down amusement park in Belgium and lives with her mother Margarette (Emmanuelle Bercot). Her mom's a free spirit, perhaps desperately so; with her short jean skirts, jangly necklaces, and devil-may-care attitude, her joie de vivre clashes notably with Jeanne's utter lack of social skills. She's a cool mom of the Mean Girls variety, and her insistence on treating her distinctly adult daughter like a child (right down to packing her lunches) seems to backfire on her when Jeanne, who often seems in a world all her own, suddenly finds herself drawn to the new featured theme park ride: the "Move It", which Jeanne quickly nicknames Jumbo. Continue Reading →
Zola
Janicza Bravo's retelling of the 2015 viral Twitter thread boasts great performances and surprisingly solid filmmaking, even if it ends on a shrug.
In 2015, 20-year-old stripper A’Ziah “Zola” Wells met a sex worker named Jessica. Both in Detroit at the time, the two bonded over their “shared hoeism” and established something of a rapport. They spent the night dancing together; they made some money. Fast-forward a couple of hours later and Jessica is inviting her to go dance in Miami, purportedly to make thousands of dollars in one night.
This, of course, wasn’t half of it. They got involved with pimps, some gang-bangers, murder, attempted suicide, and oodles of prostitution cash—at least according to Wells’ 148-tweet thread that went viral. She’s since gone on the record to say that she turned up some of the story to 11, but guess what? Now there’s a movie credited as “Based on the Tweets by A’Ziah ‘Zola’ King,” bringing you about what you’d expect and mostly for the better.
Granted, a lot of this has a lot to do with one's tolerance for ridiculousness. Those intrigued are likely to have fun. It's raunchy, crass, and stylized, and in the pantheon of stranger-than-fiction stories, this is one to stand out. But if you want a jaunt that signals good things to come from its newcomers and further cement the talents of those already established, this is that too. Zola is aptly aggro while also about something: about race, about class, about predation from the preyed upon. And yet, it runs wonderfully. Just make sure you’re ready for a few bumps. Continue Reading →
Ema (In Greek: Έμα)
Pablo Larraín's neon-caked tale of a tattered family is ambitious if uneven eye candy that's bound to get audiences talking.
In one of the more fitting opening shots in a while, Ema opens with a traffic light on fire. Behind it stands the title character (Mariana Di Girolamo) with a flamethrower slung over her shoulder and, despite what might sound glib on paper, it’s an apt metaphor for what’s to come. No stopping, no slowing down. If it’s going to go, it’s going to go. Pablo Larraín has dealt with political upheaval and reconstructing at the ruins of one’s personal life before, and now he’s doing all of it at once.
In fact, it feels as if parts of his eighth film are to be remembered by viewers as a hallucination. There is, after all, no way some of this stuff actually happened like this, right? The dancing and domestic drama, sure. The spousal sparring, definitely. But the orgies and scorched earth? How about the day-glo visuals that would make for one hell of a rewatch during a fever? It isn’t all “there” throughout. Yet, it manages to present, annihilate, and reconstruct a multitude of fantasies, be they social or political, sexual or familial.
After that prologue comes something tangible in comparison. Ema’s husband and leader of her dance company, Gastón (Gael García Bernal), has accidentally set their house on fire. The most pressing collateral damage comes through their adopted son, Polo (Cristián Suárez). He isn’t the most amiable kid, to say the least, and now they’ve got to return him to the agency he came from. Alas, Ema nor Gastón will take full responsibility for his behavior. On second thought, maybe that stoplight was a little more approachable after all. Continue Reading →
Kunstneren og tyven (In Greek: Η ζωγράφος και ο κλέφτης)
A few years ago, Czech painter Barbora Kysilkova had two paintings on display in Oslo. It was something of a break for the artist, whose lifelong curiosity of death and nature didn’t quite fit the descriptor of “gothic.” It was a little too clean for that, but it was hers and it made her a few dollars. Then it was stolen. The question of who didn’t last long as Karl-Bertil Nordland was caught on the security footage, and while the drug-addled robber couldn’t remember much of the robbery, it didn’t really matter to the painter. Continue Reading →
Summertime (In Greek: Διακοπές στη Βενετία)
Sandwiched between a rough start and too tidy of an ending, Carlos López Estrada's latest finds love in its large ensemble.
“The sewage water smelt like butterscotch,” a young woman (Mila Cuda) muses. The contradictions are inert, the delivery self-serious, the writing okay but sold as something much more. Elsewhere, Tyris (Tyris Winter) berates a waitress for a restaurant’s prices. They go on a rant and submit a scathing Yelp review before pretending to choke for the sake of a free meal. Their behavior reproachable and their words petty, the movie still seems to side with them. And at this point, it would seem that we’re off to the races with Summertime.
Well, not quite. Carlos López Estrada’s follow-up to Blindspotting is, to say the least, the type of movie that makes a surprising about-face after 20 minutes or so. Set over the course of one July day, it takes a neorealist base and warps it into the body of a musical, following an ensemble piece of 25. But it isn’t music: with each character comes a spoken word poem, a fade between the inner and the outer. It’s incredibly uneven at points and obnoxious at its worst, but when it finds its stride, it’s that kind of livelihood that’s too infectious to deny.
In some ways, that makes its missteps all the more bizarre. Estrada, who shares a story by credit with Vero Kompalic, approaches most characters with a similar empathy. All of the performers write their respective poems, but Estrada approaches most characters with a similar empathy. Its uniformity is its greatest weakness. It helps, then, when Summertime unravels its connections and its characterizations, allowing them to breathe in tandem with the environments. Continue Reading →