1207 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Italian (Page 45)

Just a few days after he passed, it was clear that The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2 would be Philip Seymour Hoffman’s final film. Back in 2012, Lionsgate made the financial decision to milk a fourth movie out of the Hunger Games trilogy, keeping their cash cow going until November 2015. While Catching Fire made for a worthwhile outing in its own right, the back half of the series does its best to annihilate any goodwill it’d accumulated.  Continue Reading →

Welcome to the Criterion Corner, where we break down some of the month’s new releases from the Criterion Collection. #1073: Memories of Murder (2003), dir. Bong Joon-ho Memories of Murder (Criterion) Long before he set the world on fire with Parasite, South Korean director Bong Joon-ho was carving out a powerful presence as one of the country's great cinematic masters. While he made his early furtive steps towards worldwide notoriety with the stellar 2005 monster picture The Host, his second feature, 2003's Memories of Murder, showcases his intriguing command of tone and deep fascination with moral gray areas. And thanks to a 4K restoration that's been distributed by NEON and now comes to the Criterion Collection, Western audiences have another opportunity to revisit this burgeoning classic. While discussions about police misconduct and their utility as an institution have been raging the last couple of years, Bong recognized their systemic flaws as early as Memories of Murder. Loosely based on South Korea's first big serial-killer case in the late '80s, Bong's film flits between three detectives as they try to track down a murderer of young girls in a sleepy farm town called Hwaesong. There's Park Doo-man (Bong stalwart Song Kang-ho), the head detective who's convinced he can suss out the truth by looking in a man's eyes; Cho Yong-koo (Kim Roi-ha), a blustering Dirty Harry-type much more likely to beat suspects than to negotiate with them; and Seo Tae Yoon (Kim Sang-kyung), a young but smart big-city detective from Seoul who has more hands-off methods to investigate the murders. Continue Reading →

Star Wars fans, are we ready? Because it’s time for Star Wars content to return and both delight  and hurt us all in that inimitable Dave Filoni way. We love it, though. Star Wars: The Bad Batch is the newest Star Wars series to land on Disney+ and the first in their projected slate of new Star Wars programming. “Aftermath," the feature-length premiere of The Bad Batch, written by Jennifer Corbett and Dave Filoni, and directed by Steward Lee, Saul Ruiz, and Nathaniel Villanueva, is a sweeping introduction to new challenges and new characters, but also a love letter to the stories that have come before. Continue Reading →

Apple TV’s newest drama, The Mosquito Coast (created by Neil Cross and Tom Bissell), is vibe and vibe only. Throughout the seven episodes of its first season, the plot barely moves forward, the characters’ motivations remain thin from start to finish, and the show irritatingly holds back just when something interesting is about to happen. Considering the brilliant source material they're working with — Paul Theroux’s novel of the same name — and the fact that the show easily would’ve become a soul sister to other prestige family-based dramas like Breaking Bad and Ozark, The Mosquito Coast ends up a missed opportunity. Continue Reading →

Pulsating at the heart of Twixt are pains all too familiar to legendary writer-director Francis Ford Coppola. Third-string horror novelist Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), the “bargain-basement Stephen King,” arrives for a book signing in the town of Swann Valley, where, unappreciated and unable to overcome a case of writer’s block, he’s forced to confront his insignificance, his sullied legacy, and the feeling that he has nothing valuable left to say or give. Continue Reading →

After long and celebrated careers, certain directors reach a point where they’ve accomplished most of what an artist could reasonably hope to accomplish. They’ve gotten at one time or another critical acclaim, commercial success, popular recognition, and hopefully personal satisfaction. And with time, they become that fabled thing – the Old Master. They may, at this point, lack the industry clout or the financial resources that they once had, but they retain an immortal distinction, a legacy that can’t be erased. Some of them, like George Lucas, openly fantasize about using their tremendous wealth to turn away from popular movies and into experimental work. Others, like Martin Scorsese, hold enough influence to keep making major films, but often it seems like they’re unable to make a small film again. Francis Ford Coppola went ten years without directing before returning, in his seventies, to the game with Youth Without Youth and in his 2009 film Tetro he made a most interesting thing – a young man’s film.  Continue Reading →

Come back to a simpler time. A time when people were left shocked and awestruck when a remarkable pop culture event occurred, one that dumbfounded many and helped inspire a cultural shift, one where viewpoints that had previously been derided and ignored were placed at the center of an increasing number of narratives.  Continue Reading →

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A lot of the discourse surrounding Pose tends to focus on how groundbreaking it is, and rest assured Ryan Murphy’s drama is certainly that. Prior to the 2010s, queer media almost exclusively focused on the G in LGBT+ and most of those gay men were white and cis. By contrast, Pose’s main cast stars people of color, most of whom are trans. This diversity is behind the camera as well, being partially created by Steve Canals with writing and directing credits by Janet Mock and Our Lady J.  Continue Reading →

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 coming-of-age drama The Outsiders, adapted from S.E. Hinton’s classic novel by the same name, is a dreamy, soft endeavor. Despite the gritty world in which the film’s protagonist Ponyboy Curtis (C. Thomas Howell) exists, the film is a surprisingly sweet, earnest and vulnerable in a way that from some angles could be considered cloying, but ultimately succeeds in capturing the overwhelming and all-encompassing emotions of adolescence.  Continue Reading →

There was a trend when YouTube first launched, one that still pops up from time to time, where a skilled editor will take a film such as Dumb and Dumber or Elf and recut the trailer as a horror film. These pet projects are amusing at first glance, and serve to highlight deeply disturbing elements of classic comedies generally played for laughs. They demonstrate the power certain filmmakers have to elicit a specific audience response often diametrically opposed to the given circumstances on screen.  Continue Reading →

In the spirit of full disclosure, I need to say this: I’m not a big fan of The Handmaid’s Tale. There’s something about a show that is so unrelentingly grim—without even the occasional glimmers of light—that just makes me feel like I’ve been ground down into a salty meat paste. This is why I checked out of Game of Thrones before I even knew the words “Red Wedding,” because I couldn’t bear to watch Sansa Stark beaten, humiliated, and tortured anymore. So while I can say that Handmaid’s has strong writing and still boasts some of the most gorgeous photography of any show out there, I still don’t enjoy it. Can anyone say they actually enjoy it?  And when did the incessant castigation of women become primetime entertainment? Continue Reading →

So there’s this fabulous sequence about three quarters of the way through Bram Stoker’s Dracula where nearly all the characters left alive are speeding to Transylvania and Dracula’s castle for the film's climax. On one side of the race are Professor Abraham Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) , barrister Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), his fiancée Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), and three adventurers/friends. Continue Reading →

PBS presents a fresh & engagingly modern take on the timeless tale of star-crossed lovers. Filmed over 17 days on a closed stage due to the global pandemic, Romeo and Juliet is an intimate and compelling production of a familiar story. The beats are all there: star-crossed lovers find each other amidst the bitter enmity of their families, people party, people die, the most convoluted plan in all of playwriting history is hatched, more people die. There have been, roughly, over 200 on-screen adaptations alone of the play, ranging from full-length movies to thematically appropriate TV episodes. The titular couple has been vampires and gnomes. What does a new version have to offer an audience who have known this story all of their lives? How do you film the most-filmed play of all time?  The National Theatre’s new Romeo and Juliet film (aired in the U.S. by PBS’ Great Performances) stars two familiar faces as the titular couple: The Crown’s Josh O’Connor and Fargo’s Jessie Buckley, but the pair vanish into their roles with ease. They are backed up by the strong supporting cast, including Fisayo Akinade as Mercutio and Tamsin Grieg as a chilling Lady Capulet. Directed by Simon Goodwin and adapted from William Shakespeare’s play by Emily Burns, the film shifts between playful cast moments in a rehearsal setting and fully staged scenes, though even the latter maintain a sparse Our Town-type feel. Romeo’s home-in-exile in Mantua is a bare storage room, which both throws his stark mental state into clear view but also feels a little on the nose. Maybe a chair? Or a blanket?  Continue Reading →

I sat down with Trapanese for a lengthy chat about the challenges of scoring an entire series of such grand scope, the creative inspirations he took from the books, and the interconnecting, interweaving musical motifs of the major characters. In a first for the podcast, Trapanese also provides commentaries explaining his process for the cues "Erase the Past" and "Royal Archives Heist." Continue Reading →

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 →

We Broke Up wastes no time cutting to the chase of its own title. The first scene quickly and efficiently introduces the breezy, playful dynamic between longtime partners Doug (William Jackson Harper) and Lori (Aya Cash) as they banter in a restaurant while waiting for takeout. By the end of the scene, Doug pulls a proposal out of nowhere and Lori proceeds to vomit right then and there. It's one of the few times We Broke Up even tries to push the comedy into its supposed rom-com format.  Continue Reading →

As Gena Radcliffe laid out in her keynote, Francis Ford Coppola’s work most often reflects an ambition to blow out plot points to near-operatic proportions. Coppola makes it literal in The Godfather series, but one can observe it throughout his career—in Harry Caul’s outsized paranoia, the psychological horror of Apocalypse Now, the costuming of Dracula (and everything else come to it), the teen and gang dynamics of both The Outsiders and Rumble Fish and so on. Continue Reading →

Japan. 1582. The samurai general Akechi Mitsuhide betrayed his liege lord Oda Nobunaga and sets his castle alight. Trapped by the blaze, Nobunaga elected to die by seppuku - ritual suicide. His friend and retainer Yasuke - a Black man and the first foreigner ever granted the rank of samurai - acted as his second. Not long after Nobunaga's death, Yasuke vanished from the historical record. Continue Reading →

Netflix is back with the second season of The Circle, the social media reality game show where contestants compete to be influencers, wielding their power to block their rivals and win $100,000. Season one was a lovefest, with bro-y Joey Sasso winning by playing honestly (aka “The Sasso Way”) and befriending his competitors. The contestants of season two of The Circle are less interested in making friends and more interested in strategy, dialing up the drama, and building alliances within the first four episodes. Continue Reading →

This is a little embarrassing – I’m pretty sure The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was my first exposure to Philip Seymour Hoffman. As I’ve said before, he didn’t appear in many blockbusters, and when I was fifteen (watching this Hunger Games sequel on the largest screen I could find), well, I watched a lot of blockbusters. But on second look, my embarrassment isn’t warranted. Catching Fire, and Hoffman’s work in it, is far better than I’d remembered.  Continue Reading →