1207 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Italian (Page 57)

Alexandre O. Philippe sits down for a long, insightful chat with the legendary filmmaker in Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) Memory: The Origins of Alien, Doc of the Dead, The People vs. George Lucas -- Alexandre O. Philippe has built quite the reputation as a chronicler of the history and sociology of genre film. His documentaries hew more toward the style of the cinematic essay, straightforward but insightful interrogations of his subjects rather than narratively-structured tales in their own right. Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist is no exception: from a distance, it's less of a fully-featured documentary in its own right and more the kind of bonus feature you'd find on an Exorcist Blu-ray. But within those confines, there's plenty of insight to be found, both on the film it's discussing and on the sensibilities of one of Hollywood's most idiosyncratic (and old-school) directors. Continue Reading →

Netflix's sequel to To All the Boys I've Loved Before keeps the charm but loses some of its edge. Netflix's algorithmic approach to satisfying the needs of its many and sundry subscribers (and its willingness to pour untold millions of dollars into producing and distributing original content) often feels like they're fishing with a shotgun -- just spray and pray. But amid the field of mediocre teen rom-coms they've put out over the last few years (Tall Girl, anyone?), the streaming service struck gold in 2018 with To All the Boys I've Loved Before, a sweet, inclusive, effortlessly charming treacle that feels like if John Hughes had a 21st-century understanding of racial and gender dynamics, and the results were shockingly warm, inviting, and downright fun. Now, Netflix is putting out a sequel just in time for Valentine's Day, To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, and while the surprise is gone, Lara Jean's story holds onto just enough of its residual charm to entertain. Making a sequel to a rom-com is never easy; what happens after 'happily ever after'? Luckily, Jenny Han's bestselling YA book has two sequels (of which Netflix plans to make a trilogy), so there's a treacly blueprint to work from. As P.S. I Still Love You begins, perpetual wallflower Lara Jean (Lana Condor) and sensitive jock Peter (Noah Centineo) are beginning the furtive first steps of their relationship: going out on dates, showing each other off to their friends, and navigating the thorny question of when/how/if to have sex. The courtship period is done, now it's time to really find out of Lara Jean and Peter are meant to be together. This question is complicated by the arrival of John Ambrose McClaren (Jordan Fisher), Lara Jean's middle-school crush and one of the subjects of the clandestinely-mailed love letters that kickstarted this whole affair in the first place. He's smart, sweet, nerdy, and thanks to their mutual volunteer work at the local retirement home (populated by a spirited Holland Taylor as Lara Jean's carefree confidante), get plenty of time to meet-cute all over each other. Continue Reading →

Hulu's gender flipped, more diverse take on Nick Hornby's modern classic about entitled men-children has charm & heart. Nick Hornby has made a career out of the unlikeable protagonist, from the philandering Doctor Katie in How to Be Good to the selfish, womanizer Will in About A Boy. By far his most popular--and most adapted--role, however, is record store owner and emotional masochist Rob in High Fidelity. Rob is a self-professed asshole who is fun to watch because we’ve all known that guy. Some of us have been that guy. In Stephen Frears’ 2000 adaptation of Hornby’s novel, Rob is portrayed by John Cusack with a kind of self-deprecating air of vagrancy that some find irresistible.  Twenty years later, though, the world looks a little different. There has been a culture shift with the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements. It isn’t quite as appealing to watch a character like Rob Gordon continuing to fail upwards as it was 20 years ago. Audiences don’t have as much patience for the sort of nostalgia-driven entitlement that Rob and other male characters like him seem to thrive on. Labeling a woman as awful for talking a lot, forcing an ex to admit that she was “not quite” assaulted, or even thinking for a second that any of these women owe Rob an explanation is no longer quite so cute.  With that in mind, why make a newer, updated version of High Fidelity? There is a grimy sort of magic to people who really, really love music and who fall in and out of love because of (or maybe in spite of) music. Hulu’s ten-episode series asks, “Why the hell not?”  While Veronica West and Sarah Kucserka’s take on High Fidelity is new and fresh—at times a painful delight—it isn’t exactly reinventing the wheel. With its expert pacing, fourth wall monologuing and a protagonist covering real emotional pain with sharp observational humor and self-depreciation, it’s hard not to compare it to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s breakout hit Fleabag. Continue Reading →

Despite solid reviews, DC's latest putting Harley Quinn front & center struggles to find an audience. This past weekend, something rare happened. A live-action title based on a Marvel Comics or DC Comics property underperformed at the box office. Usually, such movies are bulletproof at the box office but Birds of Prey proved that not everything with the DC label on it is destined for box office glory. Opening to just $33.2 million, Birds of Prey came in severely under expectations this frame and scored the lowest debut for a live-action DC title since Jonah Hex. Among prior February openers, Birds of Prey opened just below the $33.3 million debut of microbudget horror title Get Out and also below the $34.1 million opening of last years would-be WB tentpole The LEGO Movie 2. Birds of Prey is gonna need some incredible box office stamina to recover in the coming weeks, and it feels practically assured at this point that the film will become the only the eighth 21st-century live-action DC Comics project to miss $100 million domestically, following in the footsteps of Catwoman and the two RED movies. Normally you can pinpoint an exact reason these kinds of blockbuster titles went awry, but in the case of Birds of Prey, it’s hard to see what lead to this opening. The marketing was distinct and emphasized the kind of elements (action & comedy namely) audiences look for in these movies, reviews were strong, February has always been a successful launchpad for comic book fare and Harley Quinn is an incredibly popular character. Perhaps it simply boils down to the fact that sometimes, a surefire success just doesn’t turn out to be as surefire as it seemed. At least Birds of Prey only cost $84 million to make, so the financial losses will be minimal. After all, it’s a tentpole title released by an arm of AT&T, a company so financially secure that it can more than withstand a million mild underperformers like Birds of Prey. Plus, Birds of Prey did score two genuinely impressive box office feats in its opening. First off, as near as I can tell, Birds of Prey is the first time in history a live-action film directed by a woman of color topped the domestic box office. It also joins a rare group of films (which includes The Birdcage) with queer lead characters that managed to open number one at the domestic box office. Continue Reading →

John Carpenter’s tribute to campfire tales, initially a critical flop, is now a gold standard of tightly paced, bone-chilling horror. I was probably ten or so the first time I heard a genuine, told around a campfire ghost story. As it turned out, I had read the story before, but it sounded more effective being told out loud, with all the appropriate pauses and the comfortable beat of silence before the final jump scare. The story was so simple, told in under ten minutes, and it left a bunch of middle schoolers flinching at every snapped twig and cricket chirp for the rest of the night. John Carpenter’s The Fog, released forty years ago today, perfectly follows the campfire story structure: setup, slow but steady growing sense of dread and menace, misleading moment of all is well again, and then one last BOO! to ensure that the audience leaves the movie with the worst case of goosebumps they’ve ever had. Co-written with Carpenter’s frequent collaborator Debra Hill, while The Fog isn’t quite as effective as its predecessor Halloween, it shares the earlier film’s tight pacing and a villain (or, in this case, multiple villains) that always seems to be right behind you no matter how fast you run. The movie actually opens with a campfire story, told by John Houseman, in a tone that’s perhaps more serious than a movie about vengeful leper ghosts deserves, but works to its benefit. The scene was added in by Carpenter in post-production, after he was dissatisfied with his original cut. Houseman essentially explains the entire plot of the movie in less than three minutes, and the fact that The Fog makes valuable use of every frame of its ninety minute run time is a minor miracle. There’s not an extra ounce of fat on it, and it doesn’t need any. 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. The greatest concert film of all time begins with Talking Heads’ lead singer, David Byrne, sauntering onto an empty stage and putting down a boombox before mumbling, “Hi. I got a tape I want to play you.” It may be the most chill line to ever start a movie, but for Byrne, it’s his way of letting us know we’re about to go on an epic journey. It also lays the foundation for one of the most staggering on-screen performances of the 1980s. Stop Making Sense was filmed and edited together from four different concerts at Hollywood's Pantages Theater in December 1983, but, unless you study it closely, it just looks like one glorious night.   Byrne was in his early 30s, and his bandmates were already legends of the NYC art-rock scene following a string of Brian Eno-produced albums. The Stop Making Sense tour was a victory lap after achieving commercial success with their two-time platinum 1983 album, Speaking In Tongues. They were only seven years away from disbanding, but this was their moment. Continue Reading →

Jim Carrey returns as a kids' show host who stubbornly continues to choose goodness, no matter what life throws at him. Kidding picks up right where it left off in season one, with reality literally crashing in on Jeff Pickles (Jim Carrey). Season two follows the ever-moving cycle of conflict in Jeff’s life and psyche. Though no longer listed as a director for the series, Michel Gondry’s cool, icy tone (with plenty of gliding single takes) is still present. In this season, it's former Weeds showrunner Dave Holstein’s delightfully twisted sense of humor that gets to shine. The series fully embraces the absurdity of its circumstances and brings more laughs. Not to say the show is any lighter. Like Weeds, it brings the menace this season. It’s 2020; everyone's into ax play. When we last left Enlightened PBS Children’s Entertainer Jeff Pickles, things were going from bad to worse in every aspect of his life. His show was on permanent hiatus; his marriage, torn apart by the death of his son Phil, is in tatters; family estranged, and his identity is being pulled apart. All he had was the hope found in the felt-fantasy land of Picklebarrel Falls.  Carrey remains a consistent highlight throughout this season, making appropriate choices when conveying Jeff’s conflicted ethics. Jeff ticks and the wheels turn in his brain; it’s part of what makes him feel human. As the show embraces the comedy chops of its main cast, flashes of “Classic Carrey” are present and we can see that Carrey hasn’t lost his goofiness at all and that everything being acted for us is a choice. Continue Reading →

The DCEU embraces its inner Bugs Bunny, and is all the better for it. If you'd have told me two years ago that not only would I be looking forward to a sequel (such as it is) to 2015's murky, execrable Suicide Squad, but I'd end up really enjoying it, I'd have banished you to the darkest cell in Arkham Asylum. To be fair, David Ayer's overstuffed, underlit supervillain team-up came right at the wrong time: the product of post-Avengers superhero mania, but amidst the polarizing reactions to DCEU's so-called 'dark, gritty' approach to superheroes, it was the victim of a compromised vision of what was undoubtedly a bad idea in the first place -- reshoots, changes in tone, a final cut engineered by the house that did the trailers, etc. The one bright spot though? Margot Robbie's semi-Gothic-Lolita reinterpretation of the Joker's moll Harleen Quinzel (aka Harley Quinn), a brash, madcap figure imbued with scene-stealing energy by one of the greatest actors of her generation. Now, with Birds of Prey, Robbie's Quinn is given a vehicle worthy of her talents, a manically gleeful girl-power anthem that's just as energetic and irreverent as she is. As Birds of Prey (sorry, Birds of Prey: or the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn) begins, the Joker's broken up with Harley. Good, great, we hated Leto's version of the Clown Prince of Crime anyway, get rid of him. Luckily, Harley gets over him just about as quickly as we do, blowing up the Ace Chemicals plant, dusting herself off, and trying to start a new life as a bounty hunter/mercenary/thug for hire. But before she can get that business off the ground, she finds herself wrapped up in a scheme involving a secret diamond laser-encoded with the numbers needed to access a secret bank account with all the crime money in the world. (Not quite an uncut gem, but you get my gist.) Continue Reading →

Levan Akin's grounded, richly textured Georgian love story brims with dance and forbidden romance. “A man is a man, and a woman is a woman,” says a priest during a wedding homily, “but in these times of “globalization”, as they call it…” the rest is cut off, but the implication is clear: we were once strong and knew who we are, but ideas from the rest of the world have confused and weakened us. A common accusation made by homophobic countries is that homosexuality is an unwelcome import from Europe and America; as if queerness was an invasive species stowed away in Western media that's overtaking the native heterosexual population.  This tension between a traditional worldview pushing against globalization is the focal point of And Then We Danced, with its juxtaposition of traditional dance against a backdrop of a Georgia that's hungry for foreign products. The characters praise English cigarettes, dance to Swedish pop music, and fawn over anime posters all while wanting to honor their heritage. It's a tension that Levan Akin is probably familiar with, since the Swedish-born director is of Georgian descent.  Taking place in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, the film follows Merab (Levan Gelbakhiani), a young dancer vying for a place in the National Georgian Ensemble. However, his standing in the group is shaken upon the arrival of newcomer Irakli (Bachi Valishvili). Merab is frustrated by Irakli’s talent but finds himself drawn to the young man’s rebellious nature. As the pair grow closer, their growing attraction could put them in jeopardy.  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 the month of romance, we celebrate the birthday of the late great Jonathan Demme, whose output was as eclectic as it was empathetic. Read the rest of our coverage here. Hey, we all gotta start somewhere, right? Not every director can be Ari Aster, knocking it out of the park with their feature debut. William Friedkin’s first film was Good Times, a comedy musical starring Sonny and Cher. John Landis’s was a King Kong rip-off called Schlock. James Cameron’s was Piranha II: the Spawning, which sells itself right there in the title. So let’s go easy on the late Jonathan Demme for making his debut as a director with the 1974 women in prison flick Caged Heat. You might think it puzzling that the future director of Silence of the Lambs and Beloved would start his career with writing and directing an exploitation film, but it was the early 70s, and women in prison movies were an overwhelmingly popular B-picture genre, with more than 25 released just between 1970 and 1974 alone (including the 3-D Prison Girls, which Roger Ebert reviewed despite one of the lenses falling out of his 3-D glasses). Continue Reading →

Dominic Cooke's well-crafted spy thriller doesn't try anything new, but boasts winning performances & a zippy plot. In 2019, the buddy-car film Ford v Ferrari became the clear cut favorite of dads across American and Britain. Using well-matched leads in Christian Bale and Matt Damon, James Mangold’s film became a critical and commercial hit, showing that fathers still have the power to put a movie into the green. It looks like there’s a new dad film of 2020 though, with Dominic Cooke’s Ironbark taking its rightful spot upon the beer-bellied throne.  Ironbark tells the story of Greville Wynne (Benedict Cumberbatch), a British businessman recruited by the government to become a spy-like courier in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Wynne agrees to keep this entire operation a secret from everyone, including his wife Sheila (Jessie Buckley), growing more invested and involved and spy-ish.  Flanked by one British operative Dickie Franks (Angus Wright) and one American operative Emily Donovan (Rachel Brosnahan), Wynne begins meeting with a Russian source named Oleg Penkovsky (Merab Ninidze). Together, they smuggle nuclear information back into Britain and the U.S. in hopes of avoiding nuclear war, and eventually dealing with the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Continue Reading →

Florian Zeller directs a stunning feature debut starring Anthony Hopkins & Olivia Colman at the top of their game. First-time director Florian Zeller walked out on stage to rapturous applause. At least one-third of the audience attending the premiere for Zeller’s film gave a standing ovation inside one of Sundance Film Festival’s biggest venues, the Eccles Theater. The reason for this reaction? The Father, a stage play written by Zeller adapted for the screen by Christopher Hampton, starring Academy Award winners Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman. Following father Anthony (Hopkins) and daughter Anne (Colman), The Father explores a man aging sans grace, and how his growing uncertainty affects his daily routines and biggest relationship. Playing out over an unspecified amount of time yet staying in only a couple of apartments, the film corners you, becoming smaller and more intimate as time goes on. The 97-minute runtime flies by, with Hopkins commanding the screen in every scene, becoming a vehicle for him to likely receive an Oscar nomination in 2021.  The supporting cast, including an incredible actor in Colman, serves as merely a springboard for Hopkins, who plays a man struggling to understand or realize his own increasing forgetfulness and incoming dementia. Hopkins’ performance is one of his best in the last decade, blowing his Two Popes role off the screen, and showing that he continues to be one of Hollywood’s finest actors. He rips your heart out over and over again, creating a character that feels too relatable for all of us that have family members living with pain over the age of 75.  Continue Reading →

This softer, gentler workplace sitcom from some of the "It's Always Sunny" folks is funny but not without some glitches. Workplace sitcoms have been an essential part of the television landscape for decades. Cast a bunch of talented comedic actors, give their characters various kinds of quirks, put them together in a work setting of any kind, write hilarious jokes, and boom-you have a fun, breezy way to spend 25 minutes.  Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day brought the workplace sitcom to depraved new heights with It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Now, with the help of writer and Sunny executive producer Megan Ganz, comes their latest attempt at reinventing the sitcom wheel with Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet for Apple TV Plus. This time, instead of a dingy bar, the setting is a tech company that produces a wildly popular World of Warcraft-esque online role-playing game called Mythic Quest. It follows the daily tribulations of its employees, starting from the top with the egotistical CEO and game creator, Ian Grimm (McElhenney, bringing that Mac energy) all the way to the bottom with the lowly game testers and coders.   Continue Reading →

Jeff Orlowski's documentary about the effects and ethics of social media lacks enough emotional depth or practical solutions to work. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) Did you know that the Internet is scary? Don’t worry, you're about to hear it again. Did you know that companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google store your information in order to sell it to advertisers? Of course, but maybe it'll really sink in if you hear it one more time. And—just bear with me—were you aware that these companies are so fine-tuned that they can track how long you stay on one given page, post, or picture? Of course you did, but The Social Dilemma doesn't care about that. There are a handful of working parts to Jeff Orlowski’s latest documentary, but rather than make use of its potential to say something new, it simply sticks to the most basic information and fleshes it out with some good old fashioned fear-mongering. It's part regular doc, part dramatic reconstruction, and mostly an insipid polemic, which, when paired with its potential to comment on the ethics of privacy and social manipulation, comes off as a regurgitation of what's been said before. Continue Reading →

Netflix's adaptation of the Joe Hill comic series takes a while to get going, but hits a dark-fantasy stride by the end. For better and worse (but mostly better), Locke & Key imports the tone and feel of its comic book inspiration almost entirely to its TV adaptation.  Show creator Carlton Cuse has proven increasingly adept at helming smart, faithful adaptations for television from books (The Strain) and comics. For those unfamiliar with the source material by writer Joe Hill and artist Gabriel Rodriguez, Locke & Key concerns the titular Locke family, who, after a personal tragedy back in Seattle, move east to a small Massachusetts town. There waits a large manor home, Key House, one that deceased patriarch Rendell Locke (Bill Heck) hated so much he left in the rearview and never spoke of to his family. His brother Duncan (Aaron Ashmore) has been left caretaker, but largely avoids the property even though he remembers very little of his childhood. The Lockes, though, are in need of a change, and Key House seems to be the easiest place to start. Unfortunately, they quickly find that the home offers much less refuge (and much more danger) than they ever expected. Part of Locke & Key’s charm is how closely it hews to the comics on which it’s based. It diverges here and there, but never in ways that existing fans will resent. In fact, they may appreciate how it gives the narrative a few surprises while maintaining what made the series so popular in the first place. It’s the rare adaptation that manages the feat of feeling like its source material while not simply being a retread. Continue Reading →

Anabel Rodríguez Ríos's documentary about tension in the small village of Congo Mirador is both singular and specific. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) As the night sky shines a modicum of light over the Venezuelan village of Congo Mirador, the heat lighting begins. It’s a regular phenomenon too: a constant cycle of near darkness blinded by strobing curlicues that weave in and out of the clouds. Thus comes our first decent sight of the location. Mirador, located in the country’s northwest Zulian Region, bleeds from Colombia on its west to the Caribbean Sea on its northeast. The community, however, stands above Lake Maracaibo, which, ranks as one of the planet's oldest lakes at anywhere from 20 to 36 million years. It’s just recently that citizens have made it work economically and environmentally, but the once-thriving locale has begun to sink. At least, not according to Mrs. Tamara, whose allegiance to the Venezuelan government precludes any real worry about the area’s wellbeing. She sports posters Hugo Chávez on her wall; she collects dolls of the former president and displays them with pride. Continue Reading →

Oz Perkins' latest, unceremoniously dumped into January, is a revisionist Grimm story as atmospheric as it is thin. The original fairy tales documented by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen were often bloody, dark stories. As time passed, and we decided that children were too fragile for the originals, we reshaped them into toothless Disney stories of romance and happy endings. And as society began to critique the passive nature of these saccharine protagonists, the 2010s gave us badass butt-kicking makeovers for our heroes, like Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters.  At the dawn of the century’s third decade, however, we see fairy tales leaning harder into their older, more folkloric elements, crafting stories that mine terror out of feeling decidedly old and out-of-step with our understanding of the world. It happened with The Witch, and now we’ve got Gretel & Hansel, directed by Oz Perkins (son of Anthony), which opts for an eerie atmosphere and a decidedly dark interpretation of its source material. The movie opens with one fairy tale framing another: Gretel’s favorite childhood story of a young child, beset by illness in their infancy. In a desperate bid to save the child’s life, her father takes her to a local witch. While the witch saves her life, she also gives the child the power of prophecy and witchcraft. As the child grows, so does her power and evil, until the townsfolk have little choice but to exile her to the woods. Continue Reading →

Edson Oda's debut feature about a group of souls looking to be born into the real world is a great premise with pretty good execution. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) Tones, worldviews, inspirations both obvious and implicit—it’s notable when something juggles a medley of ideas. They signal a larger ambition even when they don’t work out. Such leads to a general rule of thumb: the farther a movie’s parts are from one another, the more conversation it’ll stimulate. Then there’s Edson Oda’s Nine Days, which, while not narratively or thematically disparate, follows suit for a while but not by the end. That isn’t to say it’s a messy movie. It’s actually quite tidy, and that’s the largest issue for a debut film that flirts with its own perspective without fully committing to one. By trying to ground its moral and ethical quandaries in something universal, it reveals its own perspective only to undo it by the end. While steady in how it approaches each character, it maintains an objective viewpoint before procuring its own perspective—until it takes the easy way out. Continue Reading →

Joe Begos’ wild, gore-soaked drug trip of a vampire flick is not for the faint of heart. Creative block is a particularly cruel trick our brains play on us. Sure, you have lots of wonderful ideas, and maybe even the talent to make them come to life, but when it comes time to actually do it, suddenly, the well runs dry. It’s a disheartening, infuriating cycle: when you can’t create, you get depressed, and the more you’re depressed, the less you create. It starts to feel like a great, cosmic joke. Joe Begos’ grisly sensory overload Bliss is what happens when a young artist, desperate for inspiration, descends into a hellscape of drugs and an inexplicable taste of blood. Dezzy (Dora Madison) is falling far behind in both rent, and in producing pieces for an upcoming show. Though she’s successful enough in her field that she’s recognized out in public, a rotten attitude and a consistent failure to meet deadlines have caused Dezzy to quickly lose clout with both her agent, and her buyers. After a couple of heated exchanges with those she owes either money or work to, she decides that the best course of action to take is to go out and party. Drug dealer pal Hadrian (Graham Skipper) supplies Dezzy with the titular Bliss, a drug that’s snorted but resembles nothing so much as a bag of gunpowder. A combination of heroin, acid, meth and God only knows what else, it’s love at first sniff for Dezzy, even though Hadrian can’t really explain what’s in Bliss, or what the long-term effects of it might be. Following a decadent (albeit barely coherent) night with friends Courtney (Tru Collins) and Ronnie (Rhys Wakefield), Dezzy wakes up the next morning desperately ill. She assumes she needs more Bliss, and while it helps a little, she feels a darker craving that she doesn’t yet understand. On the upside, she’s suddenly able to paint again, and, seemingly working non-stop (because you can when you’re unable to sleep anymore), Dezzy begins to create a beautiful but eerie mural, perhaps her greatest work yet. Sure, Bliss sends her into murderous rampages where she chews the flesh off of people’s fingers, but, finally, she’s got that artistic flow back! Continue Reading →

Patrick Stewart is still carrying much of the weight as "Star Trek: Picard" continues to pile on the lore & find its footing. “Maps and Legends” improves on Star Trek: Picard’s series premiere. It’s filled to the brim with new lore and exposition and features another extended bout of table-setting. But it also features plenty of Patrick Stewart acting in one-on-one scenes, his forte, and puts him opposite performers who can hold their own. Making those conversations and confrontations a bigger focus here helps balance out the wobbly plot mechanics and less-exciting new faces the series strains to introduce. That catch is that the series still dumps a ton of lore on the audience here. "Maps and Legends" is full of implausible and contradictory nonsense that constantly tries to top or overcomplicate (or both) whatever’s come before. It’s not enough for the Tal Shiar, the Romulan secret police, to be involved in this conspiracy. There has to be an extra-double-secret force that’s even more hidden and even more deadly! Apparently the Romulans just hate androids and A.I. and any complex computing whatsoever, for reasons we’ve never been privy to before but which will assuredly be retconned down the line! Despite that, they still have fancy molecular reconstruction tools and can perfectly scrub a crime scene at the molecular level, but somehow not so well that Picard’s former Tal Shiar buddy can’t figure out what happened! And this new secret agency has also apparently infiltrated the highest ranks of Starfleet, where the latest corrupt commodore turns out to be a sleeper agent whose two goons are going after Dahj’s twin sister! Phew! 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 January we’re celebrating the work of godfather of independent film Jim Jarmusch. Read the rest of our coverage here. “What does a poet look like?”  The first (and only) documentary I ever made asked this very simple question. To answer, I lined up the poets from my creative writing program—from the sporty sorority sister to the quiet bespectacled shaggy-haired dude—and simply… asked. Their answers? Continue Reading →