1215 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Italian (Page 52)

Penguin Bloom director Glendyn Ivin is one of the leading names in Australian television, which checks out all too well given that the execution of this admittedly inspirational story has “made-for-TV” written all over it. Of course, the real frustrating part is that there are occasional glimpses of a better movie that's focused on exploring these characters beyond a surface-level peek of what it's like to come to terms with a disability or be a caretaker for someone who’s disabled. Continue Reading →

Is there still time for Donald Sullivan (Paul Newman)? Old enough to regret a past he knows he can’t change, Sully staggers around his small town of North Bath, New York. He’s out of work – or at least he should be – after a construction accident left him with a damaged knee and without a lawyer good enough to secure him a settlement. Long divorced, he rents a room from an old woman named Miss Beryl (Jessica Tandy). To amuse himself, he openly flirts with Toby (Melanie Griffith).  Continue Reading →

When it comes to matters of sex and desire, there are two Indias: One is the ‘land of the Kama Sutra’—the book on the art of love and lovemaking—where temples are intricately adorned with sculptures performing acrobatic-yoga sex. The other is the land that looks away from this heritage and has not only proudly adopted Victorian attitudes to everything carnal but is also violent in its defense of this misguided notion about “true Indian culture”. It is no wonder then that it breeds a sexually repressed (over)population. Continue Reading →

If you want to know everything about the past, present, and future of America, watch a presidential election unfold. If you want to know the same about India, attend an Indian wedding. Indian weddings are, by and large, a microcosm of the ‘state of the nation’ that culminates in the communion not just of two people, but two entire families. Monsoon Wedding, Mira Nair’s fifth theatrical feature, is a multi-generational epic centered around a single Indian wedding and uses the setting to examine class structures, closeted skeletons, and an oncoming cultural identity crisis of India amid globalization and the emergence of a new generation. Continue Reading →

Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Our Friend stumbles from a surfeit of generosity. It’s perhaps inevitable given the scope of its approach. Adapted by screenwriter Brad Ingelsby from Matt Teague’s 2013 Esquire feature, the cancer drama vainly juggles the perspectives of three close-knit friends (Matt, Dane, and Nicole) as they weather the effects and repercussions of Nicole’s (Dakota Johnson) terminal cancer. Continue Reading →

The Netflix documentary series We Are: The Brooklyn Saints begins with a collection of voiceovers from Brooklyn residents. This narration talks about the misguided perceptions the general public has about Brooklyn and its denizens. “Brooklyn is more than killing and the gangs,” one man says while another notes that the borough is “more than what’s on the news." These lines reflect the thesis of the show, which is to show a whole other side of Brooklyn by following a local youth football team. Continue Reading →

Mira Nair’s 2004 adaptation of Vanity Fair opens with our famous heroine, Becky Sharp, as a young child tearfully watching her father sell off a portrait of her deceased mother. The portrait, a dark Gainsborough-esque profile with its sut-colored background, dusty white skin, and faintly rosy cheeks, means so much for young Becky, and us in Nair’s audience. As the camera tracks at child-height, watching the portrait leave the shop, Becky loses the last connection to a lineage that will both help and hinder her social mobility.  Continue Reading →

Steven Kostanski’s second film, and the latest offering from the horror streaming service Shudder, Psycho Goreman attempts to be a throwback to a very specific type of kids' film that will probably never be made again. Spooky, practical effects driven movies of the 80s and 90s that were geared towards children but are actually true nightmare fuel. Films like the tiny demon filled, The Gate, or Little Monsters, a movie that assumes kids would be cool with Howie Mandel hiding under their beds.  Continue Reading →

In Hulu’s new original TV miniseries The Sister, we follow Nathan (Russell Tovey) as his life is upturned by Bob Morrow (Bertie Carvel), a figure from his past bringing disturbing news about the missing and presumed dead sister of his wife Holly Fox (Amrita Acharia). This delves into the supernatural and the psychological as Nathan desperately struggles to keep his life and his sanity together. What ensues is a perfectly watchable series full of twists and turns which never quite manages to maintain its tension.   Continue Reading →

What’s a day in the life of Brandt (Philip Seymour Hoffman)? You work for a sham: though he may look like a wealthy, self-made entrepreneur, Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston) – your employer – has nothing but his self-image, without much actual money or success to back up his lavish trappings. As personal assistant to Lebowski, your job is to keep up appearances. Try to keep Lebowski’s trophy wife from doing anything too unseemly. Convince anyone and everyone that Jeffrey Lebowski really is a paragon of upper class respectability. Day in, day out, play the thankless part.  Continue Reading →

We talk with the series co-creator, writer and director about finding the balance between darkness and comedy. When it first debuted in 2016, Search Party was often compared to Girls and Broad City, mostly because all those three shows deal with the same topics of millennials and hipster culture. But to solely focus on that element will dismiss the excellent craft and surprises that co-creators Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Michael Showalter has shown throughout four seasons. After all, this is a show like no other on TV, always radically reinventing itself to keep things fresh. Season 4 — whose first three episodes were just released on HBO Max last Thursday — is no exception, finding new angles in the story while still retaining what makes the show such a delight in the first place. The only difference is, where the three previous seasons lean more towards the comedic side of the story and keep the darkness secondary, season 4 decides to do the opposite: going full in on the psychological horror of the characters’ journey by taking references from captivity dramas like Room and Misery to an unsettling effect. Continue Reading →

Two-hours and sixteen minutes. There is a version of The Empty Man that’s a solid, efficient horror flick, and then there’s the version that’s two-hours and sixteen minutes. Unfortunately, we got the latter. Adapted from an independent comic book of the same name, this poorly paced, occasionally engaging exercise staggers along like its titular demon. If only there was a way to stop it, before it’s too late.   Continue Reading →

Ethan Hawke often plays characters who internalize their passions, who tend to smolder and keep their feelings under tight restraint. Not so in The Good Lord Bird, where as star and co-creator Hawke gives the biggest, grandest performance of his career playing radical abolitionist and fighter Captain John Brown, circa 1857. His Brown is a delusional, violent prophet, flecks of spit fleeing from his mouth as he screams scripture during guerilla warfare and is sent into fits of rage by his fellow whites’ refusal to “free the Negro”. But in a country anchored by the selling and owning of human beings, where survival is often precarious at best, Brown sometimes appears to be the sanest white man of them all (sometimes). Continue Reading →

Adapted from the Nickelodeon show Winx Club, Netflix’s new series Fate: The Winx Saga attempts to reboot the long-running favorite with gritty live action to fit on the homepage somewhere between The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Cursed. It’s a visually stunning fantasy quest centered around young women that has all the magic it needs to fly but hasn’t yet learned to focus its potential within. Continue Reading →

From the moment that the James Bond film franchise established itself as a worldwide phenomenon, everyone from the biggest Hollywood studios to fly-by-night European exploitation producers tried to jump on the bandwagon with their own. Although there were a few efforts where no expense was spared—most notably the gargantuan star-studded Casino Royale—most of them were produced on minuscule budgets that tried to replicate the lavish trappings of the typical Bond film with cheapo special effects and loads of stock footage. In addition, few of these efforts were able to find a star with the kind of instant audience appeal that Sean Connery possessed—not even when the producers of Operation Kid Brother (1967) had the ingenious idea of casting Sean’s younger brother Neil in the lead. Many of these films, realizing that they could not compete in therms of scale or star power elected to go the spoof route, but even there, they mostly failed to compete because the Bond films were themselves already semi-spoofs that rare took themselves too seriously. Continue Reading →

Now in 2021, the pandemic rages on, and most of us find ourselves stuck in lockdowns with no end in sight. We’ve dealt with glitchy video calls, adventures in cohabitation, and are stuck with the isolation blues. Here to steal our attention away from the mess is Locked Down, a diverting heist/romance film from Doug Liman, starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Continue Reading →

Admit it: we're all preemptively exhausted by Disney+'s seemingly endless onslaught of new films and franchise shows set to premiere over the next few years: we're going to be practically drowning in content, all geared toward immersing us in the brands and IPs they mercilessly control and asking audiences to buy into an ever-overwhelming web of interconnected stories. That said, ifWandaVision is a bellwether for the level of experimentation and creativity we can expect from some of these shows, we might not be in the worst hands. Continue Reading →

To watch the Apple TV+ series Servant is to frequently ask “What is this show about, exactly?” Is it about the dangers of gaslighting? The horror of postpartum psychosis? Something even more sinister than that? It seems to want to say something about all of these things, but in a sort of muddled, half-formed fashion. Season 2 is more of the same, while pushing the boundaries of how long the initial deception could last far beyond a realistic limit. Continue Reading →

Netflix has really made a play in recent years to corner the high-concept action movie market: Extraction, The Old Guard, 6 Underground, Project Power et al. feel like they fill the algorithm's innate need to fill the John Wick-sized hole in the moviegoing public's diet. It's that sweet spot that Outside the Wire is unabashedly trying to fill: sci-fi concepts right out of Black Mirror blended with brutal, highly-choreographed fight sequences. The trouble is, despite (or, more precisely, because of) its military sci-fi premise, Mikael Håfström's (1408) latest crumbles under its own sociopolitical weight. Continue Reading →

For a nation that produces hundreds of films a year in a multitude of languages, India’s presence at the Academy Awards is almost shockingly muted. India has submitted films every year since 1957, where K. Asif’s epic melodrama Mother India scored a nomination but lost to Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria. Since then, only two other films made it to the ceremony: Mira Nair’s 1988 debut feature Salaam Bombay! and Ashutosh Gowariker’s 2001 cricket drama Lagaan. That’s three films over six decades, with no nominations since 2001.  Continue Reading →