1190 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Hebrew (Page 44)

If you’ve ever heard the phrase “May you live in interesting times,” understand this: we’re living in them right now. It’s a historically awful time of racial unrest, an ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor, and a global pandemic that’s coldly highlighted how little many of us care about our fellow humans. Optimism is in very limited supply at the moment, and so we cling to the little things that give us joy, and a reason to keep going the next day. Things like Lil Nas X’s Twitter feed, or Ted Lasso, or Lady Gaga branded Oreo cookies. Things like Barb and Star Go to Vista del Mar, which in better times might have made barely a blip on the pop culture radar, but right now feels like a cool drink of water on a very hot day, and is a cult hit in the making. Continue Reading →

M.O.D.O.K. isn’t set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe but it is firmly set in the newest trend in adult-sewing American animation. Popularized by Rick & Morty and BoJack Horseman, these cartoons put on an exterior dick jokes and fart gags but are actually about deeper explorations of weighty turmoil’s. Considering this phenomenon has produced shows like Horseman and Harley Quinn, it’s one of the better TV trends out there. The best parts of M.O.D.O.K. exemplify why. There’s something enduringly impressive about balancing out raunchiness with genuinely insightful drama. Continue Reading →

On the heels of The Luminaries, Starz brings us another dramatic import, this time the Irish 3-episode miniseries Death and Nightingales, based on Edmund McCabe’s book of the same title and adapted/directed by Allan Cubitt. Set and filmed in County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, Death and Nightingales is one of those rare sunny day thrillers, a gorgeously filmed but raw story of a young woman trying to save herself amidst family secrets, Irish Nationalism, and an increasingly untenable homelife. Continue Reading →

Mohammad Rasoulof’s There Is No Evil begins with a slow and winding tracking shot as a car exits an underground garage. It all too perfectly sets the tone for the film, which itself is slow, winding, monotonous, and mysterious. It’s a richly humanistic contemplation on the death penalty in Iran and the questions it raises. Continue Reading →

In Las Vegas, the Queen of the Strip, comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) finds out her stranglehold on The Palmetto, her casino home, is slipping. The gambling palace’s owner (Christopher McDonald) alerts her to his plan to take away her prime weekend slots because he needs to appeal to “idiots and people in their twenties,” and Deborah gets him neither. Continue Reading →

If you happen to stumble upon the Wikipedia page for Spiral, the ninth and newest feature film in the Saw franchise, you find a goldmine full of stories, exaggerations, and words strung together that you hardly believe are real. Chris Rock, the star and executive producer of Spiral, ran into Michael Burns, the Vice Chairman of Lionsgate, at a friend’s wedding in Brazil. They chatted about the horror genre, with Rock expressing intent to take his career on a different path.  Continue Reading →

While Those Who Wish Me Dead is coming out in theaters this weekend (be safe, especially if you're not vaccinated!), it's probably the movie to benefit most from Warner Bros. pandemic-fueled decision to simultaneously throw their releases up on HBO Max. From stem to stern, Taylor Sheridan's latest feels like the kind of movie you'd find on old-school HBO in the '90s, or FX or TNT, watching with your dad over a holiday weekend. It's silly, forgettable schlock, and yet I can't get too mad at it. Continue Reading →

A running joke in early episodes of The Simpsons was McBain, an action hero parody. In one scene, a group of rich people celebrate their new product SWANK (a product 10 times more addictive than marijuana), and end with a toast: “To human misery!” After watching Alex Gibney’s two-part documentary, The Crime of the Century, it’s hard to not think this scene was based on Purdue Pharmaceutical’s owners, the Sackler family, toasting the creation of OxyContin. Continue Reading →

In the not too distant future, Las Vegas has become even more of its own world. A wall of armored shipping containers has sealed off the Entertainment Capital of the World. Sneering armed guards patrol a vicious hybrid of quarantine and refugee camp at the wall's edge. And on July 4th, on the orders of a dopey, malignant, unnamed president, Sin City will burn in nuclear fire. Why? The zombie apocalypse. Fortunately for the world, the plague of undeath was stopped in the sleepless city. With the zombies contained, Vegas was left to rot. But while the city crumbled, its infamous fortunes were preserved - sealed away in counting rooms, slot machines, and vaults. Why risk going in to retrieve it when insurance covers disaster (brain-eating or otherwise)? Because it's money. And that is the pitch Bly Tanaka (Hiroyuki Sanada) gives to haunted, lonely, zombie war hero Scott Ward (Dave Bautista).When Tanaka abandoned the Bly Casino, he left $200 million untaxable, untraceable dollars in its vault. If Ward assembles a team to go into Vegas, crack the vault, and retrieve the money, $50 million of the haul is his to do with as he will. Ward, a lost man searching for some sort of purpose and looking for a way to make things right with his estranged daughter Kate (Ella Purnell), agrees. Ward gathers his crew - his war buddies Maria Cruz (Ana de La Reguera) and Vanderhoe (Omari Hardwick), bitterly caustic helicopter pilot Peters (Tig Notaro), zombie-killing influencer Mikey Guzman (Raùl Castillo), Guzman's warrior pal Chambers (Samantha Win), oddball safecracker Dieter (Matthias Schweighöfer) and, at Tanaka's insistence, oily security man Martin (Garret Dillahunt). Kate, the mercenary coyote Lilly (Nora Arnezeder), and a loathsome guard called Burt (Theo Rossi) join them at the city proper. Continue Reading →

Even early in his career, Philip Seymour Hoffman is too good for this dull shoot-em-up. Before he passed away at the age of 46, Philip Seymour Hoffman starred in 52 feature films. Starring roles, character pieces, chameleon work—he left a legacy nearly unmatched in both quality and quantity. Now, with P.S.H. I Love You, Jonah Koslofsky wafts through the cornucopia of the man’s offerings. When you think of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s frequent collaborators, Alec Baldwin probably doesn’t come to mind. Yet these actors found themselves in the same movie on multiple occasions, appearing opposite each other three times. Their collaborations got better as time went on, with their most successful pairing coming in the genuinely funny Along Came Polly. Before that, Hoffman and Baldwin co-starred as a writer and a pervy actor, respectively, in David Mamet’s State and Main. Unfortunately, their original convergence is a rancid waste of time.  Continue Reading →

Like a modern Grimm’s fairy tale, The Djinn has some brutal lessons to teach. The most important may be to avoid reading ancient texts called "The Book of Shadows" if at all possible, but the other key takeaway is that talented artists can do a lot with very little. The second film from writer/directors David Charbonier and Justin Powell drives this home, thanks to some sharp, cost-effective horror directing, with only a few hiccups along the way. Continue Reading →

Hollywood's year-long hiatus on major comic-book adaptation movies has left ample room for streaming services to pick up the slack and then some. Amazon, for example, has wisely curated high-profile releases from existing superhero stories that subvert the genre in ways that would probably ring unfamiliar if attempted by the more mainstream Marvel and DC fare. The Boys is all about poking a gory hole in how superheroes can be vapid, unchecked, and even monstrous celebrities. Invincible just ended its first season with a bang of a finale, taking its colonizer version of Superman to task. And then there's the curious case of ‌Netflix's Jupiter's Legacy.  Continue Reading →

Guy Ritchie hasn't worked with Jason Statham, the tough-guy lad whose breakout performances in Lock, Stock and Snatch helped propel him to A-list action stardom, since 2005's twisty pseudophilosophical gangland thriller Revolver -- a film critics at the time called "impenetrable" and "stupid". It's a shame, then, that their long-overdue reunion, Wrath of Man, succumbs to many of the same tricks and traps as their previous collab, but without any of the perverse flash that made the former at least grimly interesting. Continue Reading →

NBC’s streaming app Peacock plays a strong hand in the nostalgia game. It’s the streaming home of The Office. It’s rebooted sitcom classics like Saved by the Bell and Punky Brewster. Adding to the nostalgia trip is its new original comedy Girls5eva. Created by Meredith Scardino and executive produced by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, Girls5eva might first look like pure bubblegum pop fluff, but it digs deeper as a comedic exploration of pop music’s problematic past. Continue Reading →

In a perfect world, every sitcom would have a first season that never sees the light of day. That’s because it usually takes a season for the actors to grow comfortable in their characters’ skins, and for the show’s writers to fine-tune the dynamics of the ensemble into something compelling. The new season of Apple TV+’s Mythic Quest is a perfect example of a show finding itself after taking ten episodes to figure things out.  Continue Reading →

Just a few days after he passed, it was clear that The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 would be Philip Seymour Hoffman’s final film. Back in 2012, Lionsgate made the financial decision to milk a fourth movie out of the Hunger Games trilogy, keeping their cash cow going until November 2015. While Catching Fire made for a worthwhile outing in its own right, the back half of the series does its best to annihilate any goodwill it’d accumulated.  Continue Reading →

Welcome to the Criterion Corner, where we break down some of the month’s new releases from the Criterion Collection. #1073: Memories of Murder (2003), dir. Bong Joon-ho Memories of Murder (Criterion) Long before he set the world on fire with Parasite, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho was carving out a powerful presence as one of the country's great cinematic masters. While he made his early furtive steps towards worldwide notoriety with the stellar 2005 monster picture The Host, his second feature, 2003's Memories of Murder, showcases his intriguing command of tone and deep fascination with moral gray areas. And thanks to a 4K restoration that's been distributed by NEON and now comes to the Criterion Collection, Western audiences have another opportunity to revisit this burgeoning classic. While discussions about police misconduct and their utility as an institution have been raging the last couple of years, Bong recognized their systemic flaws as early as Memories of Murder. Loosely based on South Korea's first big serial-killer case in the late '80s, Bong's film flits between three detectives as they try to track down a murderer of young girls in a sleepy farm town called Hwaesong. There's Park Doo-man (Bong stalwart Song Kang-ho), the head detective who's convinced he can suss out the truth by looking in a man's eyes; Cho Yong-koo (Kim Roi-ha), a blustering Dirty Harry-type much more likely to beat suspects than to negotiate with them; and Seo Tae Yoon (Kim Sang-kyung), a young but smart big-city detective from Seoul who has more hands-off methods to investigate the murders. Continue Reading →

Star Wars fans, are we ready? Because it’s time for Star Wars content to return and both delight  and hurt us all in that inimitable Dave Filoni way. We love it, though. Star Wars: The Bad Batch is the newest Star Wars series to land on Disney+ and the first in their projected slate of new Star Wars programming. “Aftermath," the feature-length premiere of The Bad Batch, written by Jennifer Corbett and Dave Filoni, and directed by Steward Lee, Saul Ruiz, and Nathaniel Villanueva, is a sweeping introduction to new challenges and new characters, but also a love letter to the stories that have come before. Continue Reading →

Apple TV’s newest drama, The Mosquito Coast (created by Neil Cross and Tom Bissell), is vibe and vibe only. Throughout the seven episodes of its first season, the plot barely moves forward, the characters’ motivations remain thin from start to finish, and the show irritatingly holds back just when something interesting is about to happen. Considering the brilliant source material they're working with — Paul Theroux’s novel of the same name — and the fact that the show easily would’ve become a soul sister to other prestige family-based dramas like Breaking Bad and Ozark, The Mosquito Coast ends up a missed opportunity. Continue Reading →

Pulsating at the heart of Twixt are pains all too familiar to legendary writer-director Francis Ford Coppola. Third-string horror novelist Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), the “bargain-basement Stephen King,” arrives for a book signing in the town of Swann Valley, where, unappreciated and unable to overcome a case of writer’s block, he’s forced to confront his insignificance, his sullied legacy, and the feeling that he has nothing valuable left to say or give. Continue Reading →

After long and celebrated careers, certain directors reach a point where they’ve accomplished most of what an artist could reasonably hope to accomplish. They’ve gotten at one time or another critical acclaim, commercial success, popular recognition, and hopefully personal satisfaction. And with time, they become that fabled thing – the Old Master. They may, at this point, lack the industry clout or the financial resources that they once had, but they retain an immortal distinction, a legacy that can’t be erased. Some of them, like George Lucas, openly fantasize about using their tremendous wealth to turn away from popular movies and into experimental work. Others, like Martin Scorsese, hold enough influence to keep making major films, but often it seems like they’re unable to make a small film again. Francis Ford Coppola went ten years without directing before returning, in his seventies, to the game with Youth Without Youth and in his 2009 film Tetro he made a most interesting thing – a young man’s film.  Continue Reading →