341 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Indonesian (Page 7)

As a group, humanity has spent entirely too much time asking, “Can men and women ever be friends without sex getting in the way.” Thankfully, Platonic, by creators Nicholas Stoller and Francesca Delbanco, asks a different, perhaps more germane question. “Can women and men be friends without ruining each others’ lives?” Continue Reading →

The spate of recent live-action Disney remakes has run the gamut in quality from pleasantly diverting (Cinderella, Pete’s Dragon) to unwatchable abominations (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast.) Even the most well-received entries of the bunch struggle to find reasons they should exist in the first place. Rob Marshall’s The Little Mermaid is no different, but for one crucial factor that sets it apart from the rest: Halle Bailey as Ariel. Bailey is so captivating and winsome in the titular role that this remake almost feels worth it just to launch her into movie stardom. Unfortunately, sub-par CGI effects and clunky changes to Howard Ashman’s classic songs often make it feel like Bailey is left to carry the movie on the strength of her remarkable talent alone. With a shaggy runtime of two hours and fifteen minutes—a full hour longer than the original cartoon—it’s a heavy load for one performer to bear. Continue Reading →

Television has entered a new era of the citizen detective. If the boys of Only Murders In the Building are Jessica Fletcher for the 2020s and Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie of Poker Face is today’s Columbo, High Desert’s Peggy (Patricia Arquette) is the inheritor of the con artist crime fighter mantel. Think those “Characters Welcome” staples Psych or White Collar. Then trade the charismatic 30-something man running a scam for a charismatic middle-aged woman looking for an angle and maybe some pills. Continue Reading →

Let's face it: At this point, you're either in for the overamped, Saturday-morning-cartoon lunacy of a Fast and Furious movie or you're not. Building from its humble roots as a 2001 street-racing Point Break riff to the gargantuan action tentpole it's after a whopping ten movies (eleven if you count Hobbs & Shaw), the series has built quite the convoluted lore over the decades. There are dead characters who come back to life (Sung Kang's Han), living characters who can never come back because their actors are no longer with us (see: Paul Walker's Brian), sworn enemies who join the familiar just one film later. It's dudebro soap opera, fueled by nitrous oxide and every weird, bonkers thing the filmmakers can think to do with a car. Continue Reading →

As an act of nostalgia, City on Fire has plenty to offer anyone who lived or spent lots of time in New York City in the summer of 2003. The new series, created by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, evokes the era matter-of-factly. Besides nailing the look of early 21st Century Manhattan, it captures the sense of a city in transition. The groundwork for the gentrification that swept across Manhattan and Brooklyn had just been activated. Mayor Bloomberg was taking what Giuliani had begun and pushing it farther and faster than “America’s Mayor” ever managed. And while the series eventually stomps the theme into the ground, the tendency to wonder if every adverse event was evidence of terrorism was very alive. Continue Reading →

By the time Silo’s action builds to a crescendo in its back third, it causes a deep ambivalence. On the one hand, after episodes of fastidiously building to this moment, it is akin to arriving at that fireworks factory. Conversely, there is a certain sadness in disrupting the series’ strange, contemplative tone. Continue Reading →

A lot's happened since we last saw the Guardians of the Galaxy (well, besides their brief cameo in Thor: Love and Thunder). Writer/director James Gunn was fired from Marvel in 2018 after some problematic tweets joking about pedophilia were unearthed, in one of the few instances of a successful cancellation from the right wing. Of course, it didn't last long, considering how thin the ground was for said cancellation in the first place; and in the interim, he swanned off to DC, made the fantastic The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, and eventually found himself sharing the throne of a newly-revamped DC movie universe. Continue Reading →

Fatal Attraction is an interesting study of how a controversial movie’s takeaway message can completely change, largely because audiences have changed. It’s a stylish, well-crafted film that spawned dozens of lesser imitations, and comes off as totally different when viewed from a 21st-century perspective. The carefully delineated roles of “hero” and “villain” are something murkier: we now understand that protagonist Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) isn’t entirely clear with Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) that their torrid fling is just that, a no-strings-attached encounter that means nothing to him. We see that Alex is done dirty with a script that depicts her as a one-note monster who must be defeated in the name of preserving the nuclear family. When even the YouTube commentariat largely agrees that Dan leads Alex on, you know the tide of public opinion has turned. Continue Reading →

Folks, I simply would not open that book. Continue Reading →

Like the Oracle said to Neo, "Everything that has a beginning has an end." But "ending" is not synonymous with "annihilation." Whether it's a literal, physical remnant (say, an amusement park that remains standing even years after being shut down) or patterns that folks continue out of habit or the hopes of feeling something (think Yūsuke Kafuku continuing to rehearse for Uncle Vanya with his late wife's recording years after her death in Drive My Car—whose co-lead Tōko Miura was a key contributor to the soundtrack of Makoto Shinkai's last film, Weathering With You). Continue Reading →

There's always been something of the vampiric in the acting style of Nicolas Cage; his dark, intense eyes, his hunched gaze, his predilection for sinking his teeth into the scenery as vociferously as he might an unsuspecting jugular. And yet, it's wild to think he's never played a gen-you-wine bloodsucker before now. Sure, there's Vampire's Kiss, the great 1988 dark comedy in which he played a manic '80s business guy who imagines himself to be one -- but those were more the panicked neuroses of your typical self-destructive Cage protagonist. But in Chris McKay's action-horror-comedy Renfield, he's the real pale deal: Count Dracula himself, complete with velvet capes, a mouth full of fangs, and an unquenchable thirst for hemoglobin. Continue Reading →

Hollywood not giving Jennifer Garner the roles she deserves is hardly its biggest sin. That said, it's fairly disappointing that the powers that be have so rarely found projects worth of the actor in the past 30 years. Continue Reading →

It takes a little while to find Beef’s groove. This critic assures you that this is not the classic of the streaming age, “give it a few episodes” warning. By the end of the first episode, you will know if the series is for you. However, everything about the show feels overwhelming in the first eight to ten minutes. Continue Reading →

It’s been almost 40 years since that little plumber in the red hat jumped into a warp pipe and into our hearts. Super Mario Bros., released for the original Nintendo system in the US in 1985, is still the perfect video game. It’s simple (you just got to jump around), it has iconic music, and its colorful world is hypnotic even with all those cute creatures trying to kill you. Continue Reading →

The John Wick films are, simply put, the standard-bearer for American action in the 21st century. When the first came out in 2014, it shook the foundations of what we felt was possible in a Hollywood action landscape predominantly concerned with CGI energy blasts: It put stuntwork front and center, crafted labyrinthine mythology as dense and unnecessary as it was innately compelling in its flavor, and -- most importantly -- brought Keanu Reeves back to the public consciousness in a big way. Basically, it's some of the few times American action movies can even hope to compete with what comes out of Eastern Europe and Asia. And now, that saga comes to a close with John Wick: Chapter 4, a film that took two years after completion to come out, and feels like a final exhale of relief after hours of unrelenting, inventive action. Continue Reading →

If only there were a word I could scream that would turn me into a superhero. I wouldn’t fight crime or fly in the heavens above. Instead, I would run really fast until time went backward. Then I would sprint into the DC Film offices circa 2020 and yell, “Please do not make Shazam! Fury of the Gods. Nobody needs this!” Alas, I have no such power. So, here we are.  Continue Reading →

Considering the lurid details of it (let alone that it was never solved), it’s curious that Netflix, America’s number one source for grisly true crime documentaries, has yet to cover the Boston Strangler. It’s a fascinating story largely because the man who was long believed to be the Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, almost certainly didn’t act alone, and may not have even killed all of the thirteen women whose deaths were originally attributed to him. DNA evidence years after the fact conclusively linked DeSalvo, convicted of rape and later murdered in prison, to just one victim. At the time of his arrest, both police and the media were so eager to bring the city-wide hysteria to an end that they pointed at him for all the murders, only quietly conceding after DeSalvo was in jail that there was likely more than one strangler, and that the case was still open. Nearly sixty years later, the other twelve murders remain unsolved. Continue Reading →

If nothing else, 65 proves that Adam Driver plays a marvelous survival hero. After his ship crash-lands on an uncharted world, his Mills is dazed and wounded—but not to the point that he does not remember what to do in an emergency. He's got a checklist memorized, and he can follow it until he's back together. As Mills treats his wound, catalogs the damage to his ship, and ultimately dons an environment suit to survey his crash site, Driver's body language shifts. Wooziness gives way to groundedness, and halting movements become smooth. Driver makes it clear that even when despairing and terrified, Mills knows what he's doing. Continue Reading →

The Scream franchise's strength has always been in its self-awareness. Initially, it turned the camera towards the audience, demanding that they ask themselves why it's so entertaining to see other people being made to suffer, and what happens if, as the tagline went, someone took their love of scary movies too far. Then it mocked the inevitability of sequels, then the movie industry in general, then how the media treats trauma victims like celebrities, with varying levels of success. The 2022 reboot, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, sought to address all of it in some fashion, with toxic fandom on top of that. It was mostly successful, despite being at times aggressively meta. Scream VI does much of the same, although this time the knowing winks and nods are starting to feel a little tired. Continue Reading →

Much of the pre-release buzz about AppleTV+’s new original series Extrapolations was concerned with its potential to be preachy. In much the same way this writer doesn’t mind a bit of emotional manipulation in entertainment, I can be fine with preachiness. Some things are worth preaching about. Extrapolations’ flaw isn’t that it has a soapbox and is using it. It’s that it’s such a mess. Continue Reading →