87 Best Releases Translations Italian on Max (Page 3)
Tirez sur le pianiste
“The voice you hear is not my speaking voice,” Ada (Holly Hunter) explains in The Piano’s opening voiceover. It is her “mind’s voice” explaining that she has been mute since she was six and no one, not even she knows why. There is no medical explanation, so those around her think her silence grows from sheer will, that she is determined and refuses to bend. She can only communicate through sign language, which has to be translated by her daughter Flora (Anna Paquin), or through notes written on a small notepad she keeps around her neck. Yet, she doesn’t think of herself as silent; she has her piano. The music she has studied her entire life has become her form of communication, her way of making noise and announcing herself to the world around her. But, as soon as she lands in New Zealand and enters her new life as the bride of a farmer, she is separated from her piano–it is simply too large to carry from the beach to her new home with her husband. She arrives in her new world voiceless, deprived of her primary means of expression. Continue Reading →
Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty
StudioHyperobject Industries,
We don’t step foot on an NBA court until the final minutes of the first episode of HBO’s new docu-series, Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty. This isn’t an accident; it’s a show with more on its mind than the x’s and o’s of a regular-season game. It’s not a series about the game of basketball but about the business of basketball - specifically, the moment the NBA goes from a poorly attended, barely-regarded sports league to the global entertainment juggernaut it is today. Continue Reading →
The Batman
SimilarDie Hard: With a Vengeance (1995), Hitman (2007), Mississippi Burning (1988),
Primal Fear (1996) Secret Window (2004), The Departed (2006),
Watch afterDoctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021),
The opening shot of Matt Reeves' The Batman evokes, if nothing else, the opening shot of Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation: we peer, ominously, through the binoculars of an unseen voyeur, looking at a young boy in a red ninja outfit playing with his father in a Gotham penthouse. While this isn't a flashback to young Bruce Wayne -- rather, we see Gotham's tough-on-crime Mayor Mitchell and his soon-to-be-orphaned boy -- the evocation is undeniable. By the time The Batman's three hours whiz past you, we'll have a similarly probing look into Bruce Wayne himself: what he prioritizes, what drives him, what he thinks he's doing for the city as Batman and what he realizes he should be doing. And it's that texture, that sense of interiority, that makes The Batman one of the best films of the year thus far, and one of the most fascinating cinematic adventures the character has to offer. Continue Reading →
Wayne's World
When we talk about what movies “couldn’t be made today,” it’s less about what tweaks would need to be employed to make them for a contemporary audience, and more about whining that P.C. culture has killed comedy and it’s never coming back. It also doesn’t take into account that pre-2000s comedy wasn’t entirely a lawless land of misogyny and casual homophobia. There are quite a few films from that era that could easily be made today, just as they were then, with virtually no tweaking or updating for an audience of “snowflakes” that doesn’t actually exist. One of those was Penelope Spheeris’s Wayne’s World, released thirty years ago today. Continue Reading →
Search Party
NetworkHBO Max,
Similar'Allo 'Allo!, Rescue Me,
Watch afterLove, Death & Robots, MINDHUNTER, Riverdale, The End of the F***ing World,
The Expanse The Sopranos,
WandaVision
Search Party, the TBS-turned-HBO Max comedy from co-creators Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Michael Showalter, has never been afraid of reinventing itself. While it started off as a satire of New York millennials trying (and failing) to find their own identities, the show kept evolving and playing with so many genres — from whodunit to legal drama to abduction thriller — throughout its run. The fifth and final season is no different, except this time, the story has higher stakes and doubles down even more on what makes the show so fearless and wildly entertaining in the first place. Continue Reading →
The Matrix Resurrections
SimilarFree Willy (1993), Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004),
Watch afterDon't Look Up (2021), Eternals (2021), Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021),
It's hard to overstate just how seismic The Matrix was when it was first released in 1999. Looking back on it now, in an age of focus-tested corporate franchises, extended universes, and an even more top-heavy IP landscape than we had back then, it feels positively revolutionary. Even in its imperfect but-radically-reappraised 2003 sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions, filmmakers Lana and Lilly Wachowski manage to build a world that's at once evocative of so many of its influences (cyberpunk, bullet opera, kung fu film, Star Wars) but feels highly original. And what's more, is unafraid to tackle challenging, often heady psychological questions while still revolutionizing the way action movies were made. Continue Reading →
Station Eleven
NetworkHBO Max,
SimilarAround the World in 80 Days, Helltown, In the Land of Leadale, M*A*S*H,
Planet of the Apes Santa Evita,
Sherlock Holmes The Buccaneers, The Lost World, The Summer I Turned Pretty,
StudioParamount Television Studios,
When Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel hit shelves in 2014, it was a standout in science-fiction. HBO’s adaptation can’t help but hit differently in 2021. It’s a post-apocalyptic tale about what’s left of the world after a deadly flu ravages the populace. The parallels to current events are glaringly obvious. Continue Reading →
Landscapers
There’s a sort of inflationary issue in the True Crime genre these days. This presents an immediate hurdle to HBO’s new “based on a true story” limited series Landscapers. Continue Reading →
8-Bit Christmas
SimilarEdward Scissorhands (1990), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005), Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (2001), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), The Party 2 (1982),
StudioNew Line Cinema,
To quote Mystery Science Theater 3000, “It’s the 80s! Do a lot of coke and vote for Ronald Reagan!” Continue Reading →
Rocky IV
People think the Cold War officially ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. That may technically be the right answer, but the actual end of the Cold War happened in Moscow on Christmas Day, 1985. That’s when American boxing champ Rocky Balboa knocked out Russian behemoth Ivan Drago in such a humiliating fashion that even his own countrymen were Team Rocky by the end of the slugfest. It was such a blow to morale that the USSR never recovered. Continue Reading →
Dune
SimilarResident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), Stalker (1979),
Watch afterDon't Look Up (2021), Eternals (2021), Free Guy (2021), Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021), The Batman (2022),
StarringBabs Olusanmokun, Stellan Skarsgård,
When I first heard the announcement of a new adaptation of Frank Herbert’s magnum opus Dune, I think I might have groaned and said, “God, not again.” Even with the cult followings that Lynch’s now-disowned 1984 version and SyFy’s plodding 2000 miniseries have amassed, there has yet to be a version that had the kind of mass appeal that gets butts in seats. Continue Reading →
The Many Saints of Newark
SimilarA History of Violence (2005), Brubaker (1980), The Departed (2006),
Watch afterDon't Look Up (2021), Free Guy (2021),
StudioNew Line Cinema,
When Anthony “Tony” Soprano first appears in Alan Taylor’s The Many Saints of Newark, he’s just a kid, hanging on the shoulder of his Uncle Richard “Dickie” Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola). Much like the show it precedes, Taylor’s crime drama focuses on family, a group of related and unrelated men and women influencing and subsequently controlling various parts of New Jersey. Billed as a Tony Soprano origin story, a prequel that wasn’t needed but wanted, the film never feels inherently necessary or emotional. It coasts upon characters it has already set up, actors with pedigree playing said characters, and the understanding that this David Chase-created world is still connected and worth our time. Continue Reading →
Doom Patrol
NetworkHBO Max, Max,
SimilarBatman Beyond, Birds of Prey, HAPPY!,
Justice League Marvel Disk Wars: The Avengers, Spider-Man: The New Animated Series, Static Shock,
Writing about Doom Patrol Season 3 is a surprisingly tricky task. After all, how many times can one stress that its budget aesthetics are a distinct part of its charm? How many times can you praise its willful strangeness, its willingness to embrace the bizarre without ignoring the need for characterization? How many times can a critic declare, “yes, still very good.”? Continue Reading →
The Survivor
StudioBron Studios, Endeavor Content,
The post-WWII boxing drama wastes Ben Foster and Vicky Krieps in an overfamiliar prestige drama that botches its handling of the Holocaust.
For a one-time perennial Oscar-contending director, Barry Levinson has had one of the most curious careers of the 21st century. His recent work includes thrillers and comedies like Envy, The Bay, and Man of the Year. With Bill Murray vehicle Rock the Kasbah, Levinson seemed to have mildly scraped the zeitgeist once again. Now, with The Survivor he’s plunging back into the Oscar/prestige realm with The Survivor, a black-and-white Holocaust/ boxing drama.
The Survivor is based on the life of Harry (original name Hertzko) Haft, a Jewish man who survived Auschwitz by boxing as a ringer for a Nazi commander. When this becomes public knowledge, Haft is derided as a traitor by New York’s Jewish community. In execution, The Survivor hews closely to the standard patterns of prestige drama, to the point that there is very little distinct or interesting about its craft. Continue Reading →
ドライブ・マイ・カー
Watch afterLicorice Pizza (2021),
Ryusuke Hamaguchi adapts a Haruki Murakami short story & gives it additional depth & soul.
Interpretation is a complex beast. In terms of language, not even the most literal one is left entirely untouched by the person making it. In the case of longer work, a translator can take on a far more hands-on role, making a novel or film in translation a product of its interpreter as well as its original artist. In some cases, this influence can be significant. Translators and editors have played such a massive role in the way that English audiences understand and appreciate Haruki Murakami that writer, translator, editor, and creative writing professor David Karashima wrote an entire book on the topic in 2020.
Interpreting prose for the screen comes with its own nuances, and its own symbiotic relationship between the writer’s vision and the filmmaker’s. Translating Murakami’s writing for the screen is perhaps even more complicated, given the nature of his stories and how he tells them (or at least how I understand them based on the English translations I’ve read). Continue Reading →
Cry Macho
The country soundtrack kicks in. The plain, honey-coated lens flairs coat the screen. A truck parks and out steps Mike Milo (Clint Eastwood), met with the distance of his once-good friend Howard (Dwight Yoakam) who, like a soda machine someone’s kicked loose, dispenses copious exposition about Mike’s past. The man was a great rodeo rider before dabbling in pills and drink, and, according to his old pal, his rising age doesn’t help either. Howard wants fresh blood, but it seems the movie doesn’t. The delivery, the detachment, Yoakam’s thoroughly disinterested performance—the film borders on worrying at first. Continue Reading →
Malignant
While we spent a lot of time debating whether or not “elevated horror” is a real thing or just something film snobs made up so they didn’t have to be embarrassed about liking a scary movie, gore fell to the wayside. There was a period when we weren’t getting an acceptable amount of blood and guts, in favor of understated chills and psychological trauma. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but it’s left something lacking in the genre. With Nia DaCosta’s take on Candyman and the upcoming Halloween Kills, however, it looks like old-fashioned look-between-the-fingers horror is back in all its splattery glory. Add to that list James Wan’s Malignant, often very silly, but always with a self-aware wink at the audience, with a body count that will satisfy even the most jaded horror fans. Continue Reading →
Reminiscence
SimilarEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Memento (2000), Secret Window (2004), Twelve Monkeys (1995),
Watch afterThe Suicide Squad (2021),
Hugh Jackman chases down the ghost of Rebecca Ferguson through futuristic memory tech in Lisa Joy's ponderous, limp tech-noir pastiche.
It would only be frustrating to recount exactly how many opportunities writer-director Lisa Joy (Westworld) throws away in her desperate effort to please in Warner Bros.’ latest, Reminiscence.
It’s not just that Joy fails to follow through on the noir tropes she so clearly wants to pay homage to while attempting to subvert, or a cast that features Thandiwe Newton and Hugh Jackman as jaded private gumshoes in a dystopian Miami, not to mention the near-perfect timing of this movie’s release. Noirs didn’t just come into their own in the years around WWII: some of the best examples of the genre came in the wreckage after, as people still flailing in the trauma of the Great Depression and genocide wondered what the hell was next in a new era of peace and prosperity that some found just as terrifying as what preceded it. Continue Reading →
The Suicide Squad
SimilarFree Willy (1993), Godzilla Raids Again (1955), Hellboy (2004),
Live and Let Die (1973) Superman Returns (2006), The Legend of Zorro (2005),
Watch afterBlack Widow (2021), Eternals (2021), Free Guy (2021), Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021),
StarringDee Bradley Baker,
In the last decade, there have been numerous shitty attempts to replicate the success of the Marvel Studios formula, but Suicide Squad (2016) may be the worst of the worst. Writer/director David Ayer’s dark and gritty tone clashed with the pop music-heavy trailers, marketing that included songs already used by – and meant to remind viewers of – Guardians of the Galaxy. In the end, the studio hired that same trailer company to re-cut the movie, which was released into theaters as an incomprehensible mess. Noticeably missing a “2” in its title, The Suicide Squad is essentially a 200 million dollar do-over. It’s the movie Warner Brothers should’ve made five years ago. Continue Reading →
Space Jam: A New Legacy
SimilarAnnie Hall (1977), Bring It On (2000), Fantasia (1940),
Watch afterBlack Widow (2021),
Let’s get one thing out of the way: the original Space Jam, released in 1996, isn’t a good movie. It’s an extended Nike commercial with an iconic soundtrack that tricked the brains of '90s kids into keeping it warm with nostalgia. So, it’s only fair that 25 years later, a new generation of children are forced to experience a similar kind of cash grab. Continue Reading →
The White Lotus
SimilarBroadchurch, Family Guy, Quark,
Within the opening scene of The White Lotus, it’s revealed that someone will die at some point during the show. But the question of who that someone is and how will they die isn’t really the central plot, as the six-part miniseries is much more interested in the characters and their fascinating dynamics than the mysteries and all the events leading up to the impending death. Continue Reading →