1215 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Italian (Page 53)

With occasional exceptions, there’s something of an unspoken agreement with an audience when they watch a slasher or survival horror film that they’ll receive some form of catharsis. It could be the voyeuristic pleasure of the kills, victims/survivors overturning their attackers, or more bluntly – just a reason to watch. Vincent Paronnaud’s Hunted doesn’t ignore this precept as much as revel in the unsatisfying imbalance between relief and lack thereof to the point of rendering it meaningless. Continue Reading →

Obvious to those in Ireland and the UK, Herself’s title carries a second meaning that will likely fly under the radar for most American viewers. It isn’t merely a reflexive pronoun, it’s a term of respect and familiarity that can also mean “a woman of consequence” or, more aptly for this film, “mistress of the house.” Because Herself is the story of how one woman ends up finding herself by building her very own home, brick by brick. Continue Reading →

Some television shows feel remarkably of the moment. They seem to reflect the zeitgeist so perfectly there is almost something supernatural about them. Others anticipate the future with a kind of clarity that borders on psychic. It can feel like a magic trick. Continue Reading →

NBC’s new sitcom Mr. Mayor will inevitably be compared to 30 Rock, the network’s previous sitcom from Tina Fey and Robert Carlock. Both feature rich men in power butting heads with their female colleagues. Both shows share a composer, Jeff Richmond (also an executive producer, and Fey’s spouse) crafting another bouncy score. Different from her New York-based shows (30 Rock, Great News, Kimmy Schmidt) Fey and company take on Los Angeles politics this time. While occasionally funny, the show fails to instill a vote of confidence in the future of the series.  Continue Reading →

Like the best social justice documentaries, the outspoken Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was able to speak truth to power in ways that got peoples’ attention and showed us how we got into our current state, and what could be waiting for us in the future if we’re not careful. Continue Reading →

Six weeks after her father Mitch’s (Peter Gallagher) death and funeral, Zoey (Jane Levy) emerges from her self-imposed exile, spurred on by Mo (Alex Newell). In her disconnect from the world, things have changed. Joan (Lauren Graham) is on her way to greener pastures. Leif (Michael Thomas Grant) has done his best to run the fourth floor in her absence, resulting in a fraternity-like atmosphere with Tobin (Kapil Talwalkar) as the unofficial lead “brogrammer.” Her dueling love interests Simon (John Clarence Stewart) and Max (Skylar Astin) have become friends. Life moved on while she sat out and recovered. Or tried to recover, anyway. Continue Reading →

I've been told that at Christmas Time, we are honest, so in that spirit, allow me to start this look back review with my own bit of honesty. I've seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button twice before watching it for this review. The first time I hated it. The second time, I hated it until I fell asleep about 20 minutes in. Continue Reading →

If anybody could find something new to add to pop culture’s fixation with serial killers and true crime, it would likely be David Fincher. Se7en announced him as a major director while Zodiac revealed him as a master. The Fincher style – dark lighting and sickly colors, obsessive attention to detail, unblinking looks at violence – has served as a template not just for other movies, but also for TV shows of both the prestigious and potboiler variety and for the ever-increasing number of investigative podcasts and Netflix documentaries. In 2017, Fincher returned to the serial killer subgenre by taking his project Mindhunter to the streaming service. Continue Reading →

The debate over whether Die Hard is a Christmas movie is played out. It’s time for a new pop-cultural dispute to take hold, namely whether an episode of Star Trek Discovery that pays serious homage to Die Hard is, by extension, also a Christmas movie, despite having no explicit ties to the holiday. Continue Reading →

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s To the Ends of the Earth follows Yoko (Atsuko Maeda), a young Japanese woman reporter who is in Uzbekistan filming an expose of the country’s culture for a travel show. She starts off with a smile, but soon after the discrepancies of Uzbek and Japanese culture becoming a hindrance that soon seeps deeper into mental fatigue.  Continue Reading →

With its magic, monsters, and ridiculously attractive cast, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina makes no attempt at relatability. However, while its fourth and final season is filled with situations that no person will ever find themselves in, its premise of a world being assaulted with unimaginable terrors before finally succumbing to a soulless void is a #2020mood.  Continue Reading →

In David Mamet’s State and Main, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a breath of fresh air. He’s surrounded by scumbags, of course: this is a Mamet movie, though not a particularly good one. A playwright-turned-screenwriter, Joe White (Hoffman) might not survive his first film production. His period piece – well, the period piece that began as his script “The Old Mill” – needs a new location. Back in the town in which they were meant to shoot, the lead actor slept with an underage girl.  Continue Reading →

It's hard to know what to make of the '80s nostalgia boom that's hit pop culture in recent years -- that Stranger Things-y crystallization of an entire decade has permeated everything from prestige drama to Wonder Woman flicks, a throwback aesthetic revived for a newer generation (or, more accurately, the same generation who grew up in it and desperately clamors for the apparent simplicity of those times in a chaotic 21st century). But like so many things about our youth, it can be dangerous to romanticize it at the expense of our messy present. That's a lesson that, of all things, Cobra Kai understands more than most of its '80s-inspired kin. Continue Reading →

David Fincher's meticulous anti-murder-mystery is a curious marriage of thriller and romantic comedy. When glancing at David Fincher’s filmography, romance may not come to mind. There are the gruesome murders in Se7en, the unsolved mysteries in Zodiac, and the rise of social media titans in The Social Network. In 2014’s Gone Girl, adapted for the screen by Gillian Flynn from her own novel, Fincher dives deep into the marriage of Amy (Rosamund Pike) and Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck), a picturesque couple suddenly thrust into the national spotlight when Amy goes missing. As the film unravels, it becomes clear that Amy orchestrated her disappearance to teach the philandering Nick a lesson. Amy and Nick may have deceived each other, but the real master of deception Fincher. Gone Girl is packaged as a psychological thriller, but it’s also Fincher’s most romantic film, the director flirting with us by using both the conventions of the thriller and rom-com genres. As a result, it woos the audience with a twisted love story. Continue Reading →

David Fincher's 2011 adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is both a quite good movie and a deeply frustrating one. At its best, it thrillingly delves into the art of investigation through the eyes of two well-crafted and well-performed protagonists. At its worst, it falls flat on its face and takes its sweet time to get up, dust itself off, and get back into a groove. Continue Reading →

Altered States (1980) isn't so much a movie as it is a cinematic boxing match between two singular and diametrically opposed talents, duking it out to see whose approach will triumph in the end. Both combatants are unrepentant sluggers through and through, determined not just to win but to knock the other right out of the metaphorical ring. Oddly enough, it's the viewer who ends up feeling concussed. Even 40 years after its release, it boggles the mind that something like Altered States could have ever been produced in the first place, much less as an expensive A-level project for a major studio. Continue Reading →

When The Social Network premiered on October 1, 2010, Facebook had only existed for six years. It already had 400 million users. Its founder and C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, was worth $4 billion.  Continue Reading →

The Expanse has always excelled at handling the sheer bigness of its stakes: events don't just impact individual characters, but the entire system -- and, I suspect, eventually the entire universe, given the underlying threat of the weapons that killed the Ring Builders. But as comparatively terrestrial as season five's stakes have been so far, episode four of season 5, "Gaugamela," leapfrogs off the last episode's shocking final moments to shake up the status quo in literally seismic ways. As bad as things got in the final moments of episode 3, here we see an episode of chickens coming home to roost, setting up a whole host of problems for our characters to resolve in the latter half of the season. Continue Reading →

Thank goodness for Shonda Rhimes, not only for having the clout to bring a beloved historical romance to a major streaming service but for recognizing what’s been missing from historical television drama: Fun. And Bridgerton is fun, bursting at the seams with romantic tropes, six-packs, friendship, and scandal.  Continue Reading →

It feels like a lifetime ago that I saw Ariana Grande perform at Toronto’s Sound Academy, a now-defunct venue that held just a few thousand people. The fact that it was actually as recent as 2013 makes excuse me, i love you, a new Netflix film anchored by one of her 2019 shows at London’s O2 Arena, particularly awe-inspiring.      Continue Reading →