1216 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Italian (Page 18)

Idris Elba has been playing DCI John Luther for over a decade. A mixture of James Bond and Sherlock Holmes, he’s a violent, angry, dedicated detective, doing whatever necessary to catch the grisliest criminals. Finally, after six seasons, Luther finds himself in a feature film, Luther: The Fallen Sun, with many of the trappings of his British series. A horrific serial killer is on the loose. The anti-hero detective must stop him, but there’s a major obstacle in his way. Specifically, he’s staring out at the world through the bars of a jail cell. Continue Reading →

Round three of twelve. Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan)—the fresh-out-of-retirement undisputed heavyweight champion of the world—faces Damian "Diamond Dame" Anderson (Jonathan Majors)—the ruthless-came-from-eighteen-years-in-prison reigning champ. Growing up in a group home, Adonis and Damian were brothers—united by care for one another in a callous system and a shared love of the sweet science. Continue Reading →

The story of Daisy Jones & The Six begins, fittingly, at its dramatic end. The show opens with the members of the titular band taking their seats for a series of talking-head interviews before a title card that reads, “On October 4, 1977, Daisy Jones and the Six performed to a sold-out crowd at Soldier Field in Chicago, Illinois.” Despite being one of the biggest bands in the world at that time, “It would be their final performance.” From there, we jump back in time to learn exactly how Daisy and the five members of the Six (yes, five) became a band.   Continue Reading →

Some pray high school will never end. Some feel like it goes on for a painful forever. For Maddie Nears (Peyton List), those desires and hyperbolic thoughts may have become quite literal. If you die on her high school’s campus of unnatural causes, you apparently hang around with the other ghosts until you figure out how to move on. Imagine finding out the afterlife is real and you’ll never leave your high school again in the same moment. Continue Reading →

A few weeks ago, a picture of M. Night Shyamalan and his family at the premiere of his Apple TV show Servant surfaced on my social media timeline. All five of them dressed exquisitely, Shyamalan with his goofy dad smile, his Ph.D. wife Bhavna looking glamorous, and their three adult daughters, bright with talent, love, and creative potential.  Continue Reading →

Haunted house stories have always been my favorite. There's something so thrilling and unsettling about a place that feels and reacts to the people that occupy it. As I got older, I learned that haunting could mean many things. It could mean memory. It could mean joy, despair, humor, or fear soaking into the brick and mortar or reflecting our experiences back at us. If you look at it that way, isn't every house haunted? Continue Reading →

If you’re going to do a TV reboot of any James Cameron movie, it might as well be True Lies, his weakest directorial effort that doesn’t involve flying piranhas. The 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger/Jamie Lee Curtis action-comedy was undercut by the same fidelity to traditionalism that makes other Cameron features enjoyable. His Avatar films feel like riveting fables, for instance, while Titanic had a sweeping nature to its old-school romanticism. Tragically, True Lies was traditional in that it regurgitated stale observations on domestic married life. Then there were the uncomfortable gender and racial stereotypes that were already long outdated before the movie ever hit theaters. Continue Reading →

First, some music to set the mood, with thanks to Paul Thomas Anderson. If it's 1985 and you've got something to do—say, going for a hike, cutting class to paint a waterfall with a pal, or retrieving a shipment of cocaine that your terrifying crime lord dad's good-for-nothing pilot dumped before getting himself killed— and it's a quiet day out, then Georgia's Chattahoochee–Oconee National Forest would seem like the place to go. The trees are tall, the grass is green, and the Cocaine Bear is on a murderous rampage. Continue Reading →

The say goes: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But they forgot a couplet: fool me three times, I’ve just watched The Happening.  Continue Reading →

A year before The Village’s release, a copy of the script was stolen and distributed to sites with zero compunction about reviewing stolen materials. If you were on the internet in the naughty aughties and a fan of movies, you know exactly the type. The flurry of reviews that followed riled up readers of such sites. It reached the point that, by the film’s 2004 release, a considerable legion of film nerds already stood poised to carve up a movie they were certain would be a turkey. Continue Reading →

I am sitting in the waiting room at an Urgent Care in Maine, waiting to see someone about a mild allergic reaction to a bee sting. It is August 2003, and I am thirteen years old. While my mother and I wait, I look up at the muted television, and suddenly I can't breathe. The news broadcast is carrying a live feed of what I recognize as the Brooklyn Bridge, and to my horror, thousands of people are streaming across it, trying to get out of New York City. My first thought, before I stammer to my mother that she needs to ask for the remote, that she needs to turn up the volume, that she needs to call our family and see if they're safe, is: It's happening again. We manage to unmute the waiting room television and watch, frightened, as the news breaks of the massive blackout that has paralyzed the Northeast. No one knows the cause, and I convince myself: It is happening again. Continue Reading →

When Christoph Waltz is at his best playing a villain in films like Inglorious Basterds, he presents as gentle and almost naively sweet before revealing an endless capacity for cruelty. At his worst, as with his Blofeld, he presents as all menace and violence and ends up with the effectiveness of a kitten. The former is delightful to behold; the latter can crash an entire film. Unfortunately, The Consultant forces Waltz to be the menacing kitten. Continue Reading →

We’ve all been there. You turn on the radio and an incredible song is playing you’ve never heard before in your life. It’s a soaring rock anthem that chills you with goosebumps and makes you feel alive. Is this an Unforgettable Fire-era U2 song? Is this my new favorite band? The music ends, and the DJ jumps in with something like, “Praise be to God. That was Soul Eternal, with their hit single “Let the Spirit Thrive” only on your Christian Rock station 104.7!”  Continue Reading →

Taking a look at the offerings of Slamdance, Park City's more indie-minded festival. Initially developed in 1995 as an alternative to the more polished version of independent cinema presented at Sundance, the Slamdance Film Festival has evolved over the past 28 years. These days, with a few exceptions, most of Slamdance’s slate could easily compete with those films chosen for that other festival. In fact, several proved better made and more interesting than much of Sundance’s selections. This year’s winner of the Slamdance Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature, Linh Tran’s Waiting for the Light to Change, proved entirely worthy of the accolades. Set at a lake house in Michigan during winter’s last gasp, the film centers on a getaway trip gone wrong. For high school sweethearts Jay (Sam Straley) and Kim (Joyce Ha), the occasion is a chance to reunite with their friend Amy (Jin Park) after she’s been several hundred miles away in California working on her Masters. Jay’s stepbrother Alex (Erik Barrientos) and Kim’s cousin from China, Lin (Qun Chi), round out the quintet.   Continue Reading →

One of the biggest downsides of making such gorgeous, sprawling fantasy television epics is the agonizing wait between seasons. This is acutely felt at Amazon, in particular, as they seem to have cornered the fantasy television market. Fans are already gnashing for a new season of big-budget offerings like The Wheel of Time, and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Of course, no show has suffered more for the delays than Carnival Row Season 2. Season 1 aired in 2019, an interminable wait for any dedicated viewer.   Continue Reading →

Hello Tomorrow! is a lot like its lead character Jack Billings (Billy Crudup). It looks great, for one. For another, it keeps dancing in the hopes that you won’t catch on to exactly how hollow its charms are, even when the music stops. And, like Billings, you almost want Hello Tomorrow! to get away with it. Unfortunately, they’re both running confidence games that they can’t land. Continue Reading →

I love mysteries and crime stories. And it's been a treat these past few years to have so many good detective stories on television (Under the Banner of Heaven, for instance) and in cinemas (Rian Johnson's Benoit Blanc mysteries, the quite charming Confess, Fletch). Would that I could count Neil Jordan's Marlowe among them. I cannot. It's a bad movie, and bad in a very frustrating fashion—no one's phoning it in, but nothing connects outside of a few stray moments save for David Holmes' no-disclaimers excellent score. Continue Reading →

We love movies about con artists, because they’re always glamorous, with attractive, elegantly dressed people slickly seducing their marks. It’s far sexier and intriguing than the sad reality of con artistry, which mostly seems to involve catfishing lonely people on dating sites, or swindling them out of cash on behalf of a made-up charity. No one likes to think about how easy it is to be fooled by someone who’s simply a good liar, it makes more sense that these things happen as part of an elaborate scheme created by a network of seasoned professionals alternately working together and stabbing each other in the back. Apple TV+’s Sharper scratches that particular itch, and looks good doing it, but ultimately feels a bit hollow, and has twists that are far more transparent than they should be. Continue Reading →

As the Marvel Cinematic Universe got bigger and bigger and bigger, it was downright refreshing to see something as fittingly small and low-stakes as the Ant-Man films break up all the universe-ending tension. It was nice; after watching the Avengers punch through an exhausting sea of robotic baddies and set up a bunch of Infinity Stone dross, along came Paul Rudd as a smirking, kinda-dumb thief who lucked his way into a shrinking suit he used on a tech heist. After Thanos snapped half the universe away, we flashed back to good ol' Scott Lang on a caper to bring his mentor Hank Pym's (Michael Douglas) wife Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) back from the Quantum Realm. They were lighter, more carefree, a much-needed sitcom wing of the MCU. Continue Reading →

Though I had in my younger days a pretty low bar as to what funny meant, Adam Sandler was quickly filed under “not for me.” I could take him in bite-sized portions on Saturday Night Live, but his brand of aggressive man-child comedy was far harder to take in feature-length films, particularly when quoted or imitated ad infinitum by men who weren’t professional comedians. To say that I greeted the announcement that he was cast as the leading man in the romantic comedy The Wedding Singer with skepticism would have been an understatement; I fully expected that it would be a “romantic comedy” made strictly for the guys, where the leading man would have to change in no appreciable way to get his co-star to fall madly in love with him. Continue Reading →