1215 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Italian (Page 56)

Amazon's adaptation of the Roberto Saviano novel is far too passive and jumbled to capture your interest. “Look at cocaine and all you see is powder. Look through cocaine and you see the world,” says the tagline to Roberto Saviano’s book, ZeroZeroZero. Now an eight-part mini-series on Amazon Prime, the show promises the same. It purports to be the whole picture of the cocaine trade from the Italian buyers to the Mexican sellers to the American brokers. We follow the effects of a single shipment of cocaine on the lives of people spread across multiple continents. Unfortunately, showrunners Stefano Sollima, Leonardo Fasoli, and Mauricio Katz’s attempt is unwieldy and unfocused. Reviews of the source material reported similar issues, with Saviano’s narrative often lacking, well... narrative structure. You’d hope that the show would seek to correct this by streamlining Saviano’s many interviews into a cohesive picture, but it ends up replicating them instead. It does simplify the cast of characters, however. We focus mainly on three sets of people: the tumultuous relationship between an Italian mobster grandson (Giuseppe De Domenico) and his grandfather (Adriano Chiaramida) who plan to buy the cocaine shipment; the American brother (Dane DeHaan) and sister (Andrea Riseborough) brokering the deal; and the Mexican soldier turned narco (Harold Torres) doing the selling.  Continue Reading →

The much-memed movie star finds his footing again in a familiar but satisfying redemption story. Unfairly relegated to memedom thanks to his disastrous press appearances (“Darkness, my old friend…”) and midlife crisis moments like getting a dragon tattoo that Ed Hardy would call too gaudy, Ben Affleck has nonetheless experienced a fascinating and emotional onscreen transformation over the last decade of his career. Still undoubtedly a movie star in the classic sense, Affleck’s cocksure marquee attitude has now melted into a malleable melancholy. And while the rest of Affleck’s performances this decade have orbited around Gone Girl’s masterful lead role, his last few performances have been girded with a deadened soul, whether it be the jaded mercenary of Triple Frontier or the brick wall façade of his Batman performance - which always felt like it could smolder into rubble at any moment. Gavin O’Connor’s throwback addiction film, The Way Back, then feels like an apotheosis of the actor’s new persona. Reuniting with Affleck after The Accountant (yes, the autistic assassin one), The Way Back is a familiar but satisfying take on the redemption story strengthened by the palpable pain of its onscreen protagonist. Continue Reading →

Apple TV+'s reboot of the Spielberg-created anthology series gets off to a lackluster start. There’s something really special about an anthology series: it allows show creators to let their imaginations run wild and try different concepts that may not work for a movie or longer series. Apple TV+’s latest series, Amazing Stories, has the fledgling streaming service trying its hand at the format, but the episode available for preview doesn’t live up to the show’s title.  It’s actually kind of odd that Apple is rebooting Amazing Stories. The 1985 original run wasn’t a hit and while reruns played on The Sci-Fi Channel before it became Syfy, it doesn’t seem to have a large cult appeal. Still, the series does boast a producing credit by Steven Spielberg and its showrunners are Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz of Lost fame, so at least Apple has some star power to bolster the lagging nostalgic appeal.  Name recognition can only get you so far, however, and the success of the show will have to rely on its 5 episode run. Apple has only supplied one episode for critics, titled “The Cellar”, which was directed by Chris Long (The Americans). The story follows carpenter Sam Taylor (Dylan O’Brien, Bumblebee), who is restoring an old house with his brother Jack (Michah Stock, The Right Stuff).  Continue Reading →

An episode focusing on the difficulties of conception highlights some of the show's best qualities. This episode, appropriately titled “Trying,” gets at the heart of what makes Brooklyn Nine-Nine so special, and why Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg) and Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero) are the best couple on television.  Framed by two of Hitchcock’s (Dirk Blocker) divorce parties, writers Evan Susser and Van Robichaux use an episode stuffed with B, C, and D plots as a showcase for how difficult and dispiriting it can be trying to conceive. Jake, not feeling the romance in Amy’s sexy calendar invites, suggest they try to be more spontaneous in their efforts. Amy miraculously doesn’t go on a lengthy tirade about fertility windows and basal temperatures, but gamely agrees to try “the Jake way.” When that predictably doesn’t work, Amy doubles down on the rigidly scheduled lovemaking. What follows is a heartbreaking montage of Amy and Jake, frustrated and tired and completely joyless, getting one negative test after another over the course of six months. And while the constant disappointments are excruciating to watch (is there anything sadder than a completely demoralized Amy Santiago?) this sequence does a great job of featuring the unmitigated tedium that comes with trying to conceive. Ask anyone to who has spent a year or more trying, and they will tell you how boring sex can get.  Continue Reading →

FX's true crime documentary examines one man's obsessive search for the truth about his birth father. Is there more to belonging than being told you belong? Is there truly a feeling that we are out of place, out of sync, out of favor with those who surround us? Or is it a lie that gets repeated so often it becomes true? For Gary Stewart of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, these questions are what drive him beyond a simple desire to know and to belong. FX’s new four-part documentary miniseries, The Most Dangerous Animal of All, explores Stewart’s quest for understanding and the fallout of his obsession.  Told in a quiet, confessional style, Stewart stares directly into the camera, his voice occasionally choking with emotion. Abandoned as a baby, Stewart’s trust issues are understandably deep-rooted—and they’re as much a part of his identity as the color of his eyes. Despite being adopted at three months old into a loving family who raised him with strong values, he struggled with the feelings of being unloved, of not belonging anywhere and to anyone. He even has a string of broken marriages to prove it.  One thing that series creators Ross M. Dinerstein and Kief Davidson make clear from the beginning is that identity is a slippery concept. Do our genetics determine who we are or does our environment? Would Gary Stewart have been a more stable adult if he’d never discovered that his birth parents were once a sensational news story, or would the wound of not knowing where he comes from continue to fester?  Continue Reading →

Jason Segel gives us an energetic journey with compelling characters to balance a campy premise. About halfway through the first episode of AMC’s Dispatches From Elsewhere, Simone (Eve Lindley), one of the main characters, exclaims: “I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s freaking fun!” This phrase just about sums up this new show, created by and starring Jason Segel. While Dispatches is scripted entertainment, it's based on the documentary The Institute, which explores the hybrid alternate reality game and performance art piece by Oakland based artist Jeff Hull. From 2008 to 2011, Hull “inducted” thousands of people in the San Francisco Bay Area into the Jejune Institute. He created multiple “episodes” for inductees to participate in, giving them missions with instructions as silly as dancing at a phone box to things as grand as leading a parade. Segel moves the action from San Francisco to Philadelphia but retains the ridiculous and almost cult-like nature of its source material in depicting the on-screen Jejune Institute and its rival the Elsewhere Society. In the first episode, we are introduced to Peter, an average joe working a dull job. Intrigued by flyers with nonsensical adverts for dolphin communication and human forcefield testing, he calls a number and is invited to an office building downtown. He’s soon roped into a world of intrigue just below the surface of our everyday world, where two entities, the corporate Jejune Institute and more radical Elsewhere Society, frantically search for Clara (Cecilia Balagot), a mysterious inventor whose talent promises to liberate humanity from societal shackles. Continue Reading →

A touching, sensitive documentary traces actor Mark Patton’s journey from horror icon to self-imposed obscurity and back again. Somehow, a whole lot of people missed what A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge was about the first time they saw it. I certainly did as a small-town teenager in the mid 80s, having met exactly one (1) gay person up to that point. We all like to smugly claim that of course we knew it the whole time, but most of us didn’t, not back then. All we knew was that it had an odd vibe for a slasher movie, and that it was unusual for its young male protagonist, Jesse (played by Mark Patton), to be treated like a Final Girl, hero and victim at the same time. Roman Chimienti and Tyler Jensen’s documentary Scream, Queen! My Nightmare on Elm Street is an insightful, sensitive look at how Patton’s role in the film first destroyed his career, then became an touchstone for gay horror fans years later. It also touches upon the AIDS crisis, and how we’ve only barely begun to scratch the surface when it comes to Hollywood’s casual homophobia. Patton was a promising young actor who had worked with no less than Robert Altman when he was cast in Freddy’s Revenge. Though it was a modest hit, critics and audiences alike had no idea what to think of the “subtext” of Jesse being picked up by his leather-clad gym teacher at a gay bar, or that same teacher being whipped bare-ass in a shower before Freddy kills him, or the delicate, rather effete Jesse often being filmed wearing little more than his underwear, or Jesse uttering the line “He’s inside me! And he wants to take me again!” There was a certain level of having one’s cake and eating it too, particularly by director Jack Sholder and screenwriter David Chaskin, in that Freddy’s Revenge sold itself by trying something new and different, but coyly refusing to articulate what that something actually was. However, Patton knew, and grew increasingly uncomfortable with the amount of “subtext” in the film. Closeted at the time, and with a live-in lover who presented as straight in teen fan magazines (Timothy Patrick Murphy of Dallas), he knew what playing a gay character (or even one that just coded as gay) could do to one’s acting career, let alone actually being gay. As if facing a potential lifetime of typecasting before his career had barely started wasn’t bad enough, once Freddy’s Revenge was proclaimed to be “the gayest horror movie of all time,” Sholder denied it, and Chaskin blamed it on Patton. Dejected, disillusioned, and thrown under the bus, Patton abandoned his career to move off the grid to Mexico, becoming “the Greta Garbo of horror movies” for many years. Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. 2015’s Ricki and the Flash doesn’t know what’s about to happen. It doesn’t know it would silence the successful string of Singing Streep films. It doesn’t know it’s Jonathan Demme’s final film. And it doesn’t fully realize the changing conservative political tide that was about to crest over America the following year. Ricki and the Flash is a rock ‘n roll fable about Ricki, a prodigal mother (Meryl Streep) who returns to bourgeois Indiana from her life as a working-class musician to help estranged daughter Julie (Mamie Gummer) through her divorce and suicide attempt. Her return reignites hostilities with ex-husband Pete (Kevin Kline) and sons Josh and Adam (Sebastian Stan and Nick Westrate). But with a little classic rock, the atypical family learns to accept one another. Sorta. Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. Sometimes you still get a Black Panther, or a Baby Driver, but the days of carefully curated movie soundtracks peaked, for the most part, somewhere between the mid-80s and the mid-90s. Largely gone are films that seem to have been built around the incidental music played in them, in favor of original scores that provide far more dramatic weight (or, in the case of Hildur Guðnadóttir ’s Oscar winning score for Joker, even make a mediocre film seem better than it actually is). When we think “soundtracks,” we think Saturday Night Fever, John Hughes, and movies that were far outlived by the songs featured in them, like Lisa Loeb’s “Stay (I Missed You),” as heard in Reality Bites. Often left out of the conversation (suggesting that anyone other than me talks about movie soundtracks this much) is Jonathan Demme, despite his crafting some of the best, most musically diverse soundtracks of the 80s and 90s. Like Quentin Tarantino, Demme’s soundtracks seemed to be personally curated from his own music collection, featuring everything from mainstream acts like Bruce Springsteen to smaller indie bands like the Feelies to new wave to reggae. It was as if the cool middle-aged guy who ran the local used record store decided to give directing movies a try. Continue Reading →

Benh Zeitlin's follow up to "Beasts of the Southern Wild" loses its way in a muddle of fairy dust and magical realism. A person can grow up a tremendous amount in eight years. In the case of filmmaker, Benh Zeitlin, that’s how much time it took to make Wendy, a movie about not growing up, and the unfortunate fact that there’s no stopping it. It also happens to be Zeitlin’s follow up to Beasts of the Southern Wild, one of the most celebrated debut films of all-time, but sadly not talked about much these days.  Maybe it was Zeitlin’s lack of a quick second effort that made us forget about it, like a nice dream that slowly disappears as we go about our day, but now we finally have Wendy, Zeitlin’s folksy reimagining of Peter Pan, told from the perspective of Wendy Darling (Devin France). Similar to Beasts, it’s a magical realism film centered around a young girl growing up and finding her place in a big, scary world, but much like growing up, it’s a mixed bag. Instead of the London setting from the original play, this version takes place somewhere in the nameless, impoverished backwoods of America. Like Beasts, the characters are below the poverty line and off the grid. While the residents of the Bathtub in Beasts were mostly fine with  their place in the world and had fulfilling lives, for the characters in Wendy, there is a sense that  joy and imagination have already passed out of their lives, and there’s no getting it back.  Continue Reading →

Built in 1970 and finished in 1973, Chicago's Sears Tower was the epitome of neoliberalism. Whereas the other, more traditionally liberal buildings were humble and for the people, this one was better. It was bigger, taller, providing more room while taking up less space. It even beat out the Empire State Building with its 1,450 feet. Suffice it to say its edifice knew no bounds. But while it already dwarfed its sky like a capitalist Godzilla, it added antennas to grow another 279. The result was an onyx symbol that, with all its simplicity, said, “Come to me. Be my victim.” Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. Jonathan Demme's most acclaimed works are often his darkest: the grim serial killer nihilism of Silence of the Lambs, the tearjerking tragedies of Philadelphia and Beloved. But it's important to remember the late director for his moments of mirth, his celebration of music and Americana, and the little ways we allow ourselves to break out from the pack. 1986's Something Wild is more of a curio in Demme's back catalog, a manic pixie road romance that flits between goofy renditions of "Wild Thing" and blood-soaked confrontations in a suburban bathroom. It flirts with serious issues of late-capitalist malaise, but is first and foremost here to show you a good time. The opening minutes of Something Wild feel like something out of a Dear Penthouse letter: I never thought it'd happen to me, but.... It starts with gormless, straight-laced Manhattan finance guy Charlie Driggs (Jeff Daniels, paradoxically at his most Minnesotan) trying to skip out on a check at a diner, only to be intercepted by a mysterious, enticing woman named Lulu (an entrancing Melanie Griffith). In his transgression, she sees the glimmer of a fellow 'wild thing' trying to escape, someone flaunting social norms because he just needs to feel alive. Lulu, with her European bob (reminiscent of Louise Brooks' Lulu in Pabst's Pandora's Box, perhaps deliberately) and array of African jewelry, steals him away from his day job on a sojourn to a New Jersey motel, enticing him to skip work and come with her on a long weekend of sex and discovery. Continue Reading →

Clever, handsome, and rich but not necessarily in that order, Emma Woodhouse (Anya Taylor-Joy) is a self-made matchmaker. She tinkers in the personal lives of her peers; she fancies herself somewhere between a queen bee and a B-level goddess. That isn’t to say she plays god, though. She has just enough at stake for that to not be the case. It’s more that she, given her 1800s English setting and semi-detached friendships, is royalty in training. It’s an archetypal base that’s spawned adaptations both loose and tight, but when it comes to Autumn de Wilde’s, it’s a little too atrophied to be either. Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. Good movies are no stranger to trauma, hurt, or hardship. These things give the images projected and stories a truth that allows the audience to forget they’re fiction, but even in the best films, that sort of trauma is usually manicured, packaged, and made digestible in two-hour chunks. Some of the greatest works of cinema still put our collective pain into little boxes that viewers can open and close when needed. Rachel Getting Married is rife with the same sort of pain, pathos, and unfathomable tragedy that has fueled many of those films. However, it presents an uglier, more unvarnished version of those elements and emotions. There’s an unsparing realness to the story it tells, of a family celebrating a beautiful occasion and reliving their worst losses at the same time. The results are, at times, hard to watch. But that just speaks to the raw nerve and level of authenticity that director Jonathan Demme manages to achieve here. Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. Objectively, remaking The Manchurian Candidate seems a wild proposition. The 1962 version was met with strong critical praise and audience support upon its release. Furthermore, Angela Lansbury’s depiction of Eleanor Iselin has only grown to near-mythic standards of appreciation since. On top of it all, the movie was also a deeply faithful adaptation of the novel. How and why does someone re-adapt/remake something that was both universally praised and hewed so close to the source material as to make being less faithful the only option? The most compelling answer lies in Jonathan Demme’s particular fixation on humanism. As has been well-established, the director has long been considered one of the most humane directors of the late 20th and early 21st Century. Through films like Something Wild, Rachel Getting Married, Beloved, and even Ricki and the Flash, the director has time and time again created empathetic portraits of people struggling through life. Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For February, we’re celebrating acclaimed genre-bender Jonathan Demme. Read the rest of our coverage here. Jonathan Demme’s The Truth About Charlie is a miscalculation on every level. As a meat-and-potatoes thriller, it fails utterly. As an exercise in style, it’s disjointed and unimpressive. A remake of Stanley Donen’s 1963 Hitchcockian comic mystery, Charade, could’ve brought out Demme’s humor, something largely absent from his films post-1990. Instead, the movie is a joyless, dull affair, resulting in something completely unnecessary. The film follows the broad plot of the original movie: a woman on holiday in Europe meets a mysterious man. When she finds out her husband has been murdered, she gets caught up in a game of international intrigue, fortune-seeking, and mistaken identity. While the original starred Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant, The Truth About Charlie stars Thandie Newton and Mark Wahlberg. Already the film has an issue—namely, that Newton and Wahlberg are no Hepburn and Grant. A simple comparison to the original movie is warranted only because The Truth About Charlie is so hollow and unmotivated that the comparison has to be made. Otherwise, it's incomprehensible as a work of art. Continue Reading →

Pixar gets back to its tear-jerking roots with an emotionally complex modern fantasy about grief, loss, and brotherhood. Early in Pixar's Onward, lanky, nerdy elf Ian Lightfoot (Tom Holland) retreats from a harrowing day of school into his bedroom, sitting at his desk where he's effectively erected a shrine to his father. He never met his dad; the man died of illness before Ian was born. All that's left of him are a collage of photographs, which gaze lovingly at the lens (and, by extension, Ian), but without context. The only recording of his dad's voice is a rambly outtake from a tape recorder, a one-sided conversation Ian pretends to fill in with his own words. When we lose someone, especially someone we never got to have in the first place, we do what we can to emulate that experience as best we can. It may not be real, but it's the best we get. And sometimes, it can blind us to the people who are actually around us. That's the scene that finally began to unlock Pixar's Onward for me, a film whose kitschy ads and Dreamworks-level character designs made me fear the worst for the acclaimed studio's output. Pixar's long been known for their original tear-jerkers (it's easy to forget that Inside Out and Coco are two of their best films, released only in the last five years), but their continued mining of their existing franchises for whatever narrative meat is left on the bone -- and, let's be real, toy sales -- has diluted the brand somewhat. It's pleasing to say, then, that Onward, while not Pixar's best, will absolutely hit you in those finely-tuned heartstrings. The premise is somewhere between Zootopia, Frozen and Dungeons & Dragons -- imagine a Tolkien-esque fantasy world where the various races of the realm went all-in on industrialization and abandoned the wonder of magic for the reliability and convenience of electricity, automobiles, and urban development. (The timeline's admittedly a little janky, and the film can't quite settle on how long ago this cultural switch happened, but just go with it.) Enter the Lightfoots, a family of elves living their lives in the suburbs: the painfully anxious Ian, his RPG-loving screwup brother Barley (Chris Pratt), and their overworked mother Laurel (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). They're getting by, but the absence of the boys' father clearly weighs on them. Ian's in desperate need of courage, and Barley loses himself in fantasy games (which just so happen to recount the world's real history) to avoid the real responsibility of adulthood. Continue Reading →

Netflix’s latest sci-fi/drama/comedy/thriller features realistic characters, but lifts heavily from “Stranger Things,” “Carrie,” & just about everything else in the same genre. Say what you will about Netflix’s baffling business model, particularly when it comes to its practice of releasing hundreds of original programs and promoting perhaps 10% of them. It understands winning formulas, however, none so much as teenagers + supernatural powers=a guaranteed fan base. Filling the gap between seasons of Stranger Things and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (though season three of the latter only just premiered last month) is I Am Not Okay With This, yet another comedy/drama/thriller/etc. in which a teenage girl struggles with both burgeoning mystical powers, and the slings and arrows of growing up. Based on Charles Forsman’s graphic novel, it brings absolutely nothing new to the table (other than a “Dear Diary” narrative device), but features a believable, complicated, often realistically frustrating protagonist. Sophia Lillis, late of Gretel & Hansel and the IT movies, is Sydney “Syd” Novak, a lonely high school student given to outbursts of anger ever since her father committed suicide. On top of grieving, a strained relationship with her mother, new responsibilities at home, and acne in unfortunate places, Syd harbors a terrible crush on her best friend, Dina (Sofia Bryant), who is blissfully unaware of her feelings. Much to Syd’s dismay, Dina begins dating not just any jock douchebag, but the biggest douchebag of them all, football player Brad Lewis (Richard Ellis), who can’t get through a class on the reproductive system without making a snide joke. Insincerity all but oozes from Brad’s pores, but Dina is inexplicably over the moon for him, calling him “babe” and wearing his letterman’s jacket. A heartbroken Syd stares at Brad with hate in her eyes, and it’s only when Brad’s nose spontaneously starts to bleed that she realizes she possesses some sort of telekinetic power beyond her understanding. This power only seems to exhibit itself when Syd is angry, which is unfortunate, because she’s angry just about all the time. Syd is propelled by anger, stomping around her drab little Pennsylvania town and scowling at anyone who isn’t Dina or her younger brother, Liam (Aidan Wojtak-Hissong). She’s a prickly heroine, which is the lifeline I Am Not Okay With This clings to to keep from drowning in cliches. Continue Reading →

Michael Cristofer's first movie since 2001 is a low-key thriller that respects its characters, even if its setup isn't too original. As a general rule, people love to watch what other people do, especially if the person they’re watching isn’t aware of it. It gives us endless fascination to see how someone else acts when they think that they’re alone. But while knowing someone’s secrets can be fun, knowledge can also be a burden. Michael Cristofer returns to the director’s chair after an almost 20-year absence to explore what happens when you see something you shouldn’t in his drama, The Night Clerk. Bart Bromley (Tye Sheridan) likes to watch people not for unsavory reasons, but instead to learn from them. He has Asperger’s Syndrome and, to better understand human interactions, watches the guests of the hotel where he works via hidden cameras that he’s set up in the guestrooms. One night, Bart’s cameras record a woman getting murdered, causing Bart to rush to the hotel to save her. Since Bart was off at the time his appearance at his workplace rouses the suspicion of Detective Johnny Espada (John Leguizamo). While the case is being investigated, Bart is transferred to another location. There he meets and quickly becomes infatuated with guest Andrea (Ana de Armas) and as the duo bond, Bart starts to feel a little less lonely, but Andrea has secrets of her own.  Despite featuring a murder and a protagonist who records people without their consent, this is a story about loneliness and connection. Most of the plot centers on the relationship between Bart and Andrea with the crime elements being relegated to Johnny’s subplot until the climax. This isn’t a bad angle to take, but it may be a turn off for audiences who are expecting a taut thriller. Continue Reading →

Disney continues to shuffle off Fox's remaining output with this limp, awkward adaptation of the Jack London novel. Jack London started writing The Call of the Wild at the dawn of the 20th century after traveling through Yukon country during the height of the Gold Rush. It was in this period of blind human ambition and greed that he conceived of a story told through a dog’s eyes. The very good dog, Buck, starts as a civilized house pet before being stolen and sold as a sled dog in Alaska. There he gets passed from owner to owner, some much nicer than others, and along the way discovers that his destiny is not with humans but with the beasts of the wilderness, like his ancestors before him. It’s a beautifully written and visceral adventure about the brutality of man, the overwhelming power of nature, and the freedom we’re capable of when we turn our back on society’s rules. On the other hand, the new film adaptation of The Call of the Wild has all the thematic weight of an Air Bud sequel.  Director Chris Sanders, who is very accomplished in the world of animated film with credits like How to Train Your Dragon and Lilo & Stitch to his name, finds himself in no man’s land in the world of live-action. In order to really dig into the book’s themes and capture the harrowing journey Buck goes through, it’s necessary to make it a brutal animated movie like Watership Down. But that would be too much for any Disney-owned studio. Instead, we get a very saturated version of the novel that relies on a CGI dog that looks like a reject from Marmaduke.  Continue Reading →

Al Pacino leads a team of Nazi hunters in a brassy Amazon series stuffed with Holocaust pathos and comic-book sleaze. (Editor's note: this review is based on the first five episodes of the show, which is what was provided to critics prior to the show's premiere.) Amazon’s Hunters is a lot. That’s not bad, by any means, but it is a heads up. It’s funny and heartbreaking and stressful, a love letter to exploitation films, comic books, and revenge fantasies, and it is a lot. It’s also very much something that people need to see right now. Created and written by David Weil and produced by Jordan Peele, Hunters was inspired by his grandmother’s stories about World War II and the Holocaust, stories that Weil saw as a battle between good and evil (much like the comics that the show references and draws visual inspiration from). Nothing is as simple as good versus evil, of course, but Hunters does an excellent job of addressing the battles head-on. Set in 1977, the show revels in its primary NYC setting, full of grit and cigarettes and flickering subway car lights, and the visits to other locales are given equal ‘70s glory by production designer Curt Beech and set decorator Cathy T. Marshall, with loud wallpaper and lights shaped like grapes and so much carpeting. The most real and lived-in location is the modest house where 19-year old Jonah Heidelbaum (Logan Lerman) lives with his grandmother Ruth (Jeannie Berlin). After Ruth is murdered and the police handwave her death as a burglary, Jonah is approached by Meyer Offerman (Al Pacino), who knew Ruth from their time in a concentration camp and who, Jonah comes to learn, is the financier and now leader (in Ruth’s absence) of a group of Nazi hunters. While the Hunters are working from a list of Nazis who were active during the war and are now living in the United States, it becomes clear that there is a wider network at play and larger stakes than even the Hunters had suspected.  Continue Reading →