1207 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Italian (Page 20)

There is a Tom Hanks factor that ends up elevating whatever material he takes on. As has often been observed, he’s the closest thing to a modern-era Jimmy Stewart. Like Stewart, Hanks has made an effort to complicate his nice guy persona in this third act of his career. A Man Called Otto is the latest comparison point. While not especially risky, this remake of the 2015 Danish film A Man Called Ove still has an edge. That the film survives its journey to the States with that sharpness intact is something audiences can chalk up to the Hanks Factor. Continue Reading →

No doubt Netflix’s goal in releasing the Witcher spinoff The Witcher: Blood Origin was to tide audiences over. They wanted to give the fans a little something while waiting for Henry Cavill’s final season as Geralt. Conveniently framed as a tale told to Jaskier (Joey Batey) by Elf storyteller Seanchaí (an always welcome Minnie Driver), Blood Origin finally digs into the Conjunction of the Spheres, which created the world of men and monsters we’ve already seen.   Continue Reading →

What makes a novel “unfilmable”? Often, it’s because it’s simply too large in scope and scale, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, which depicts the lives of seven generations of the same family. Or, as with Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, it’s too dense and labyrinthian. The more successful attempts, such as Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and Netflix’s adaptation of The Sandman, have been filmed in multiple parts, while failures like 2017’s The Dark Tower condense the story down to its most basic components, checking off the most salient points (“there was a tower, it was dark”) and nothing more. Continue Reading →

As conceived in the 1987 Tom Clancy novel The Hunt for Red October, Jack Ryan was an antidote to the typical hypermasculine action hero that had gripped pop culture. Despite a tour in the Marines, he was an intellect-first guy who only ended up in the field because he outthinks everyone else. Unfortunately, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan season 3 is a reminder that that version of the character ceased to exist long ago. Continue Reading →

Scott Cooper’s sense of place and his sense of dread go hand in hand. He was born in Abingdon, Virginia, a city with a population under 10,000, and the place’s melancholy struck him like lightning. Every one of his films is concerned with the impossibility of calling somewhere home, and he shows that even places meant to hold promise are forbidding and corrupt. From the dying factory town of Out of the Furnace to the blood-soaked frontier in Hostiles to the addiction-ravaged backwoods of Antlers, nothing can make Cooper’s America feel anything but haunted. And that's the case in his latest, The Pale Blue Eye. Continue Reading →

Look, I grew up a lonely gay kid. Locking myself in the dark and blasting Whitney Houston is what I do best. If Kasi Lemmons set out to make a divinely mixed greatest hits experience for Whitney fans to do so collectively, then she has certainly succeeded.  Continue Reading →

Catastrophe strikes about half an hour into The Poseidon Adventure, in a sequence that remains ingenious and exhilarating to this day. Slammed on New Year’s Eve by a tsunami caused by an underwater earthquake, the ocean liner SS Poseidon capsizes in swift, spectacular fashion. The bridge is first to go, instantly obliterated by the brunt of the wave, before death and destruction spread to the ballroom where the passengers have gathered to celebrate. Furniture slides and then tumbles, pianos plummet in an avalanche of ivory, pulverized glass commingles with confetti in an ominous flurry, partygoers are hurled like ragdolls and brutally crushed, with the last to fall clinging hopelessly to the floor (now the ceiling) before gravity inexorably claims them. Continue Reading →

Andor (Disney+) It’s strange how politics and bureaucracy are, in part, what made the Star Wars prequels such a stultifying affair while they give Andor a jolt that’s a large part of its charm. Nonetheless, thanks to excellent performances from the likes of Denise Gough as Imperial officer Dedra Meero and Kyle Soller as disgraced space cop Syril Karn, that was the reality of 2022. Continue Reading →

Ambulance Michael Bay, whose 1990s actioners are—for good and ill—iconic parts of the decade’s cinema, and whose 2000s and 2010s work is reliably fascinating (from the terrific Pain & Gain to the baleful Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen) delivers a bombastic chase movie that doubles as a damn good character study. Loving but criminal brothers (Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) take an ambulance hostage to escape a heist gone sideways. Along for the ride are a masterful EMT (Eiza González) resigned to personal apathy, and a critically injured cop (Jackson White). Amidst the carefully shaped chaos of burnt rubber and bullets, Bay makes space for Gyllenhaal (frenzied and in denial about how badly everything’s gone) Abdul-Mateen II (trying to keep cool even as that becomes impossible) and González (who must break out of her self-built walls if she is to survive) to bounce off each other in a pile of compelling ways. [JH] Continue Reading →

Babylon is a frenetic crash course in Hollywood history that plays fast and loose with most of its facts. However, it still paints a vivid portrait of Tinseltown from its birth to the behemoth it is today. You won’t find the meticulous and mind-boggling commitment to detail of Mank (most of Margot Robbie’s costuming looks more 2010s than 1920s). Still, director and screenwriter Damien Chazelle is less interested in getting everything right than translating that history into something an audience can feel in their bones. Continue Reading →

It’s almost difficult to imagine as much happened in one day of the year 1923 as happens in one episode of the television series 1923, the newest installment of the multigenerational Dutton saga from Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone and 1883 series. And if as much happened in 1923’s premiere episode occurred every day of the year 1923, what a truly exhausting year that would’ve been. Continue Reading →

From The Flight Attendant to The Rookie, there’s no shortage of comedy action series, flipping the script of formulaic procedurals and infusing a dose of relatable, if often quirky, characters as leads. Netflix looks to add to the roster with the new series The Recruit, which follows a dashing but stumbly new CIA lawyer Owen (Noah Centineo), as he falls deeper into internal espionage. While The Recruit gets muddled with an unbalanced tone, Centineo jumps in with enough charm and comedy to keep viewers coming back. Continue Reading →

If the National Treasure movies had existed in the ’80s, Disney totally would’ve made a TV show spin-off in the ’90s. They would’ve shifted to younger (and cheaper) teenage actors and depicted them scouring the globe for treasures connected to significant historical landmarks. It would’ve made a decent, but not exceptional mark on pop culture back in the day and now sit close to the hearts of countless 25 to 35-year-olds.  Continue Reading →

When people sit down to analyze the career of maverick filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, his 1972 thriller The Getaway is usually found wanting, and remembered mainly for the scandalous affair that developed between co-stars Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw. Coming smack in the middle of a filmmaking stretch that was preceded by the highly controversial The Wild Bunch (1969) and Straw Dogs (1971), and followed by the wildly idiosyncratic Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), it feels like an exercise in playing it safe from a director not exactly famous for doing such things. Despite that, it still works as a solid crime thriller that demonstrated that Peckinpah could play by Hollywood’s rules if he wanted to do so. Continue Reading →

As Puss in Boots: The Last Wish begins, it’s evident that this movie is aiming for a different vibe compared to not only the first Puss in Boots but the greater Shrek series as a whole.  A visual aesthetic that evokes hand-drawn animation and rapid-fire editing summons memories of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse or fellow 2022 DreamWorks Animation project The Bad Guys rather than Shrek the Third. Even the handful of pop culture references are more specific and idiosyncratic—Nicolas Cage’s take on The Wicker Man, for instance—than the very broad references the original Shrek movies became famous for.  Continue Reading →

Lars Von Trier is a complicated figure. The Danish director has ardent fans, fervent critics, and a whole host of international film watchers in-between. After 25 years of varying other projects, he returns to his favorite hospital in The Kingdom Exodus, the five-episode third and final season of his acclaimed supernatural series. The sepia-toned world hasn’t changed much, though, as Von Trier has gone through several scandals, health concerns, and personal challenges over the last two-and-a-half decades. His vision remains undeterred.   Continue Reading →

To The End opens with activist Varshini Prakash, leader of The Sunrise Movement, as she tours the destruction left in a wildfire’s wake. A bleak landscape meets her. There are houses burned and left in ruin. A car drives into the area, flames licking at the road as smoke covers the terrain. It’s a hell of a stirring beginning to Rachel Lears’ timely and extensive climate change documentary To The End.    Continue Reading →

Shudder’s Christmas Bloody Christmas, about a killer Robo-Santa that wreaks havoc in a small town, is that present that catches your eye under the tree. The wrapping paper is beautiful, and the object hidden within looks big and expensive. You finally get to open it. Alas, the magnificent gift in your head turns out to be nothing more than an Amazon box with an ugly sweater inside.  Continue Reading →

No recent film has understood the Internet quite like Searching. Aneesh Chaganty’s 2018 thriller follows John Cho as David, a father desperately searching for his missing daughter. The film is formatted entirely on screens, a new form of visual storytelling called Screenlife. We see David’s investigation through video calls, websites, and digital files. But at the heart of the story is a deep understanding of the way people, especially young people, can take on new lives through technology. Continue Reading →

While they say that love is eternal, eventually, even the greatest of love stories come to an end. Marriage vows foretell the reality of “to death do us part.” It’s an inevitability rarely explored in cinema, and even then, only in schmaltzy melodramatic weepers. Fortunately, Michael Showalter’s Spoiler Alert is free of schmaltz. Instead, the film deftly explores the process of a couple dealing with a terminal illness amid all the usual messiness of a real relationship.  Continue Reading →

At the risk of sounding a bit hyperbolic, there’s been something kind of magical about Doom Patrol. That trend continues into the fourth season's first six episodes, this writer is delighted to note. Continue Reading →