103 Best Releases Translations Hebrew on Max (Page 5)
Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion's Revenge
SimilarBatman Returns (1992), Blown Away (1994), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), Mary Poppins (1964),
Shaft (2000) The Science of Sleep (2006), Zatoichi (2003),
I'm hardly the first person to observe that the history of video-game adaptations has been replete with messy failures; the challenges of adapting stories that are, by necessity, flat and formulaic to allow players to project themselves onto the kharacters seem virtually insurmountable. Paul W.S. Anderson's 1995 take on Mortal Kombat was one of the few to break that mold, mostly because the charming kast, simple story, and kickin' techno soundtrack were so alchemically appealing that it coalesced into good schlock this time, rather than bad. Continue Reading →
A Black Lady Sketch Show
Studio3 Arts Entertainment,
A Black Lady Sketch Show is the first half-hour sketch comedy show which is written, directed by, and starring Black women, its first season was also nominated for three Emmys. Coming off the back of all those expectations, and with a few new cast members, the second season finds a consistent rhythm of light-hearted entertainment in which these Black women can show how hilarious they are. Continue Reading →
Mare of Easttown
Mare of Easttown may at times feel like it’s kicking a dead horse. It’s a grammatically perfect post-Cardinal Bernard Law, cold-case-comes-alive thriller with rich performances by its entire cast. Yet for a story about a maverick detective purporting to be about more than crime, it follows surprisingly predictable beats, leaving little room for illuminating nuance. Continue Reading →
Scream 4
For the horror genre, April 15, 2011, marked a handful of notable dates. On one hand, it was the 15th anniversary of when Scream started filming, starting with the 11-minute sequence in which an onscreen Drew Barrymore, thought by the masses to be the star, was eviscerated in the name of her killers' pop culture fetish. The movie not only reintroduced the slasher film back into the mainstream, but it also brought back one of its maestros. Of course, that'd be Wes Craven. Continue Reading →
Our Towns
StudioHBO Documentary Films,
While it occupies an almost fetishistic place in the American mythos as the country’s heart and soul, the small town seems to be another casualty in a globalized world. Plenty of books have been written about the rural and cultural decline of the places that exist between the coasts and major metropolitan areas. Continue Reading →
Exterminate All the Brutes
StudioHBO Documentary Films,
Following on from his work on I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck takes a holistic look at imperialism, the construction of whiteness, and how we form narratives about the violence of the past in HBO's four-part documentary series Exterminate All The Brutes. In doing so, Peck covers a lot of ground, moving from genocides to scientific racism to colonization and more, explicating the links between them all. He does a lot of brilliant work here, but the series doesn’t quite have the precision or focus to make it great. Continue Reading →
Godzilla vs. Kong
SimilarGodzilla Raids Again (1955), Night at the Museum (2006),
Watch afterBlack Widow (2021), The Suicide Squad (2021),
One of the most fascinating things about Godzilla -- whether in his original Japanese provenance in his long-running series of films, or in the comparatively-recent "MonsterVerse" Westernization of the big lizard, courtesy of Warner Bros. and Legendary -- is that he's so malleable. On the one hand (as with the original 1954 Ishiro Honda film and Gareth Edwards' flawed but philosophically-intriguing 2014 reboot), he can be a poignant vehicle to explore the apocalyptic anxieties of nations ravaged by atomic bombs and climate change. Continue Reading →
春光乍洩
Like most pieces of queer cinema, Happy Together was widely misunderstood on its initial release. Looking back on its reviews in 1997 by American critics, there’s a puzzling emphasis on the narrative. Specifically, many critics at the time took umbrage for what they perceived as a “laggy” storyline. So prominent were these criticisms that they ended up giving the film a Metacritic score just one point about Star Wars: Episode III- Revenge of the Sith. Continue Reading →
TINA
Watch afterAvatar: The Way of Water (2022),
StudioHBO Documentary Films,
The first feature-length documentary dedicated to Tina Turner leaves out too much to be truly engaging.
“This film, and the musical, are a kind of closure” says executive producer Erwin Bach, who's also partner to Tina Turner for over three decades. The music icon has, in many ways, been asked to tell the same story over and over again. Even when Turner attempted to silence the nagging questions by “journalists” about the abuse in her past by writing a biography (the now infamous I, Tina), the story of her life remained outside of her control.
Directors Daniel Lindsay and T.J Martin attempt to bring an end to the unceasing cycle of questions with their new documentary, Tina. Featuring new private interviews with Turner and those closest to her, along with a stunning array of archival footage, this is the definitive documentary on the pop and soul legend. Most of her, anyway. Continue Reading →
Zack Snyder's Justice League
Watch afterBlack Widow (2021), Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), The Suicide Squad (2021),
StarringWillem Dafoe,
Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a good movie. Its cast brings the famous DC superhero team to life through performances that range from reliably solid to very strong. Its action is clear, creative, and in a few places downright stupendous. Its thematic work is interesting, both on its own and in the greater context of its long and winding road to existence. There are multiple moments that qualify as full-on fantastic filmmaking, sequences that successfully connect western superheroes to the larger-than-life feeling of mystical Arthurian lore. To put it simply, I like it. I like it a bunch. Continue Reading →
阿飛正傳
Watching any Wong Kar-wai movie in 2021 hits differently than it might have in almost any other year. He’s a director known for exploring loneliness and to watch it at a time when all of us without question are among the loneliest we’ve ever been is a striking experience. We’re now a year into a pandemic and despite the vaccinations on the horizon, it feels like it has no end. We’re counting the time since we last hugged or kissed our loved ones in months and even years at this point instead of hours. Continue Reading →
It's a Sin
NetworkChannel 4,
SimilarDante's Cove, More than Blue: The Series, Queen Cleopatra, Star and Sky: Star in My Mind,
In 1979, the Village People released the song “Ready for the 80’s” on their double-LP Live and Sleazy. The song is upbeat and bright, full of hope and promise. The group sings “I’m ready for the 80s / Ready for the time of my life” throughout the chorus, and one verse starts “Everything is gonna work out fine / I have faith in this old world of mine / We'll be loving in the bright sunshine.” Listening to this song over 40 years later, you can’t shake a sense of dramatic irony. In the end, the 80’s weren’t kind to the Village People, disco, or queer men in general. As I watched the opening episode of Russell T. Davies' latest mini-series, It’s a Sin, I kept thinking of this song and its optimistic outlook for a new decade, an optimism echoed in the fresh faces of its cast, blissfully unaware of the heartbreak awaiting them. Continue Reading →
Judas and the Black Messiah
SimilarBrubaker (1980), Chicago (2002), Freedom Writers (2007), Mississippi Burning (1988),
Primal Fear (1996) The Pursuit of Happyness (2006),
(This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Continue Reading →
Painting With John
StudioHyperobject Industries,
The first thing you need to know about Painting With John is that you won’t come away from it learning how to paint. Host John Lurie admits in the second episode that, because most of his art is intuitive, he doesn’t know how to teach it, nor does he think just anyone can paint. You won’t learn anything about the history of painting, or the process, or even what supplies one needs to pick up painting as a hobby. This show is strictly about vibing, and somehow, it works. Continue Reading →
Search Party
We talk with the series co-creator, writer and director about finding the balance between darkness and comedy.
When it first debuted in 2016, Search Party was often compared to Girls and Broad City, mostly because all those three shows deal with the same topics of millennials and hipster culture. But to solely focus on that element will dismiss the excellent craft and surprises that co-creators Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Michael Showalter has shown throughout four seasons. After all, this is a show like no other on TV, always radically reinventing itself to keep things fresh.
Season 4 — whose first three episodes were just released on HBO Max last Thursday — is no exception, finding new angles in the story while still retaining what makes the show such a delight in the first place. The only difference is, where the three previous seasons lean more towards the comedic side of the story and keep the darkness secondary, season 4 decides to do the opposite: going full in on the psychological horror of the characters’ journey by taking references from captivity dramas like Room and Misery to an unsettling effect. Continue Reading →
Greenland
Nothing heals a broken marriage like the end of the world. That’s one of the takeaways from Greenland, a disaster movie about a massive comet that has Earth, and Gerard Butler, in its crosshairs. Butler plays John Garrity, a structural engineer who finds his marriage to Allison (Morena Baccarin) falling apart, just like the giant comet (named Clarke) that’s breaking up into smaller pieces so it can spread its damage all over the planet before its big chunk hits, creating a mass extinction event. Continue Reading →
Wonder Woman
Sixty-six years after she slew Ares, the God of War, and cleared the decks for humankind to fix their proverbial shit and end World War I, Diana Prince, Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), has settled into a new life in Washington, DC. Her apartment, filled with reminders of the “Great War” and the man she loved ever so briefly, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), suggests that while she is alive, she hasn’t truly lived in some time. Continue Reading →
Let Them All Talk
SimilarEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004),
Steven Soderbergh may be best known for his remake of Ocean’s Eleven, a commercial hit featuring a cast of dashing male stars (and Julia Roberts). Who needs eleven when you’ve got Meryl Streep, Dianne Wiest, and Candice Bergen aboard a real-life ocean liner? In Soderbergh’s newest, Let Them All Talk, he embarks on a return trip to his indie filmmaking roots, bringing along celebrity pals and a few tricks of the trade he’s learned in his prolific career. Continue Reading →