1191 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Hebrew (Page 30)

As much of Hollywood’s current and immediate future output remains dedicated to comic book movies and Disney fare, the need for straightforward adult entertainment remains frustratingly unfulfilled. Hope blossomed anew at the announcement that Adrian Lyne, the king of classy erotic thrillers, was making a comeback with Deep Water, some two decades since the release of 2002’s Unfaithful. Everything that was revealed about the plot of Deep Water suggested that it was dipping from the same well as Unfaithful, in which infidelity in an otherwise stable marriage leads to raging jealousy, and ultimately murder. Upping the stakes is the fact that it stars hot couple for a second Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas, who met on set and presumably exhibited that sizzling chemistry in front of the camera. Surely this would be a triumphant return to form for Lyne, and a much-needed respite from trying to keep up with what phase Marvel is in at the moment. Continue Reading →

Jujutsu Kaisen 0 is a darn-good adaptation of manga artist and author Gege Akutami's equally-darn-good dark fantasy shonen battle manga. Its protagonist is compelling, his peers likable, the villain hateful but not without shading. The action is excellent. Alisa Okezahama, Yoshimasa Terui, and Hiroaki Tsutsumi's score rules. The storytelling is overstretched in places, and narrative jumping during the climax gets frustrating, but 0 works far more than it doesn't. Continue Reading →

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Amy Schumer made a name for herself in the comedy scene as a stand-up for whom sex and booze were cornerstones of her act. She was a refreshing performer, helping to break down barriers for women in comedy, and showing the world that female comedians can be just as raunchy as their male counterparts. Her newest venture is an evolution of the party girl in Hulu’s Life & Beth, with Schumer portraying titular character Beth, a woman “barreling towards 40,” amid an identity crisis. The series, like Beth, is also in an identity crisis, as structurally it struggles in its episodic format. However, there are some strong performances by Schumer and a supporting cast of comedic heavy-hitters that make the series an entertaining watch.  Continue Reading →

The thing about The Thing About Pam is that there’s no thing there. Tonally run amuck, the limited series is a whimsical take on a deadly serious story that can’t come to grips with its darkness. There are moments to enjoy, but overall the series does little to prove itself necessary. There’s a lot of play happening, but little of it is constructive. Continue Reading →

We don’t step foot on an NBA court until the final minutes of the first episode of HBO’s new docu-series, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. This isn’t an accident; it’s a show with more on its mind than the x’s and o’s of a regular-season game. It’s not a series about the game of basketball but about the business of basketball - specifically, the moment the NBA goes from a poorly attended, barely-regarded sports league to the global entertainment juggernaut it is today.  Continue Reading →

Of all David Lynch’s films, Lost Highway has confounded me since I first saw it 25 years ago. There are movies of Lynch’s that I like less, and movies of his that I’ve shifted my opinions on with time. But in those cases, I always emerged—sometimes dazed—with a grasp on what Lynch was attempting to do with the picture and a good idea of whether he’d successfully done it. Continue Reading →

The opening shot of Matt Reeves' The Batman evokes, if nothing else, the opening shot of Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation: we peer, ominously, through the binoculars of an unseen voyeur, looking at a young boy in a red ninja outfit playing with his father in a Gotham penthouse. While this isn't a flashback to young Bruce Wayne -- rather, we see Gotham's tough-on-crime Mayor Mitchell and his soon-to-be-orphaned boy -- the evocation is undeniable. By the time The Batman's three hours whiz past you, we'll have a similarly probing look into Bruce Wayne himself: what he prioritizes, what drives him, what he thinks he's doing for the city as Batman and what he realizes he should be doing. And it's that texture, that sense of interiority, that makes The Batman one of the best films of the year thus far, and one of the most fascinating cinematic adventures the character has to offer. Continue Reading →

Is Satanic panic even a thing anymore? When’s the last time we’ve heard anything about backmasking, or songs somehow influencing impressionable teenagers to kill themselves? It’s entirely possible that this is all still a thing, and I’m simply too old and out of touch to know anything about it. B.J. McDonnell’s Studio 666, the feature film debut of Foo Fighters, is a lovingly hokey homage to a time when “the Devil’s music” was such a grave concern for parents (and Tipper Gore) that Congressional hearings were held about it, and lawsuits were filed against heavy metal bands in an attempt to hold them responsible for what was more likely caused by untreated mental illness and drug abuse. Continue Reading →

Do you hate your work life infringing on your home life? Can you not stand having to deal with outside issues while at your desk? The Severance program just might be for you. Continue Reading →

Try as they may (as of today we’re up to the ninth film in the series), no other film in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise has come close to the original. Oh, a few of them have been entertaining in their own bananas way, like part 2, but no sequel, remake, or origin story can recreate the bleak grittiness of the first film, no matter how many new members of the cannibalistic Sawyer family they add to it. Continue Reading →

The love of an animal can be transformative. The mix of companionship and responsibility that taking care of a pet entails can help create stability in an otherwise chaotic life. So it's no surprise that several movies explore the relationship between humans and canines. Continue Reading →

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A treasure hunter walks into a Papa John's franchise in the middle of beautiful Barcelona. He’s there to unlock a complicated puzzle in the hopes of getting one step closer to finding the gold lost during the epic journey of Ferdinand Magellan 500 years prior. The man is Victor “Sully” Sullivan, played by Mark Wahlberg, who appears to be going through the motions without any real fun or excitement, just like this movie. Continue Reading →

When we talk about what movies “couldn’t be made today,” it’s less about what tweaks would need to be employed to make them for a contemporary audience, and more about whining that P.C. culture has killed comedy and it’s never coming back. It also doesn’t take into account that pre-2000s comedy wasn’t entirely a lawless land of misogyny and casual homophobia. There are quite a few films from that era that could easily be made today, just as they were then, with virtually no tweaking or updating for an audience of “snowflakes” that doesn’t actually exist. One of those was Penelope Spheeris’s Wayne’s World, released thirty years ago today. Continue Reading →

Sean Ellis' werewolf period piece is a humorless medley of conflicting approaches that somehow ends up dull. (This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, under the film's original title "Eight for Silver." We're re-releasing it to coincide with its new title and wider release date.) It’s a well-known shorthand to criticize a movie by saying that it “should have been a short film.” Depending on whom you ask, it might even be a cliché. How’s this as a change of pace? Sean Ellis’ The Cursed shouldn’t have been a short film as much as it should have been a short story. If it were on the page, its medley of approaches probably would have worked in its favor instead of against it. It would have left more to the imagination instead of what we get here. Most importantly, its inability to choose a cohesive method to suspense wouldn’t have been so glaring. For those looking for a slow burn, this werewolf tale is too reliant on cheap jump scares. For those in the mood for gore and a good time, it’s far too slow—stagnant, even. Add in its lack of self-awareness for what’s an inherently silly script and you get something that’s just dull. Continue Reading →

Young love: Sometimes it crashes into us like lapping waves hitting a picturesque beach. Other times, it’s a car wreck, leaving a mess in its wake. The In Between, Paramount+’s new teen supernatural romance, is the latter - a subpar film that can’t be resuscitated, even at the best attempts of Joey King and a solid supporting cast. Continue Reading →

Over the course of the first three episodes of Bel-Air—Peacock's downbeat reimagining of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as a modern, self-serious prestige-adjacent drama flipping the script on the original comedy's inherently sulky premise—new kid on the block Will Smith (played with smooth-as-ever charm by Jabari Banks) plays basketball, dodges a gang hit, and contends with an obnoxious cousin who is seemingly his complete opposite. So is this dramatization really all that different from the culturally-defining '90s sitcom? The answer, like the show itself, is complicated. Continue Reading →

After shopping the BigBug’s script around for four years, writer and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet finally found a home for his absurdist robot-centric comedy with Netflix in January 2020. Cue the pandemic just a few months later. Unfortunately, the ensuing delay lasted just long enough for Jeunet to add some of the most cringe-worthy Covid mentions I’ve seen to date.  Continue Reading →

Even if you’re not familiar with Agatha Christie’s vast body of works—she wrote sixty-six detective novels alone—you’ve probably heard of Hercule Poirot. He’s the world’s most famous literary detective, next to Sherlock Holmes. Death on the Nile marks Kenneth Branagh’s second outing directing one of Christie’s Poirot stories and starring as the mustachioed detective himself, following 2017’s tepidly received Murder on the Orient Express. Dogged by COVID-19 delays and scandals surrounding star Armie Hammer, Death on the Nile sometimes feels like it’s scrambling to justify its own existence, and only half-succeeds. Continue Reading →

Throughout Suspicion, Rob Williams’s English language adaptation of False Flag, teases of revelations and insights dangle in front of the audience. These remain teases. Even when the show’s final twist hits, it reveals new information without deepening our understanding of the characters. Continue Reading →