138 Best Releases Translations Italian on Hulu (Page 7)

The Spool Staff

Little Fish

MPAA RatingNR

Based on an Aja Gabel short story and directed by Chad Hartigan, Little Fish follows a married couple as they try to hold onto what they love in a world ravaged by a pandemic. In a lot of ways, there are eerie similarities with our present reality, but the main difference is that the virus in this film slowly takes away memories – functioning very similarly to Alzheimer’s. In the midst of a flurry of pandemic-themed media coming out which tries to reflect the situation which the world is presently in, Little Fish manages to distinguish itself from the crowd with its brilliant leads and emotional resonance. Continue Reading →

Read also:

A Glitch in the Matrix

The most profound thing that’s shared in Rodney Ascher’s latest mind-expanding documentary comes at the beginning. One of the film’s “eyewitnesses”, Paul Gude, gives a brief history lesson on how humans understand themselves based on the highest form of technology at the time.  Continue Reading →

Flawless

Where’s the line between a messy movie and a movie that’s a mess? Joel Schumacher’s clearly-flawed Flawless oozes with subplots while it tries to fulfill the obligations of an “unexpected buddy” movie. Like the pre-gentrification East Village that it’s built around, characters and cultures clash to chaotic, uneven results. Continue Reading →

Read also:

Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)

MPAA RatingPG-13

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival is insightful and loving. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) The word “Woodstock” enters consciousness at a young age. It has become synonymous with classic rock, with music festivals, and with a decade of counterculture. With an estimated 400,000, Woodstock cemented itself as a part of popular culture, an ironic shift in its original meaning and its now-reformed image. Continue Reading →

Censor

MPAA RatingNR
StudioFilm4 Productions,

Niamh Algar learns the price of prurience in Prano Bailey-Bond's neon-soaked ode to the video nasty. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) It's England in the 1980s - poverty is high, Thatcher is in office, and the so-called moral majority is sounding the alarm about the increasing ubiquity of "video nasties", gory, violent films that, as the hysteria goes, tap into the seediest, most antisocial impulses of the British people. Think Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer, or Cannibal Holocaust: eerie exercises in sociopathy that thrill their fans and terrify their detractors. For Enid (Niamh Algar), a film censor, her job isn't about protecting a sensitive public from the disturbing films she's shown (ones with titles like Deranged and Beast Man), but merely to do her job well. Even so, she's buttoned up in more ways than one, from her uptight clothing to her lack of chemistry with her coworkers. Much of that is due to years of trauma sustained from the disappearance of her sister as a teenager, which she was present for but can't remember a thing about; her parents only recently chose to declare her dead and begin to move on with their lives. Continue Reading →

Read also:

Cryptozoo

SimilarPrincess Mononoke (1997),

The new film from Dash Shaw and Jane Samborski uses its breadth of bold psychedelic inspirations to distract from a tepid script. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Somewhere in the forest, Amber (Louisa Krause) and Matt (Michael Cera) strip naked, have sex, and then get high. Matt relays a dream he had of—of all things—storming the Capitol and overthrowing the government. His mind’s eye blends with our objectivity, which, in turn, heightens his and our subjectivities. It’s trippy to say the bare minimum. The animation in Cryptozoo holds a breadth of inspirations. There’s the classic psychedelia of the ‘60s, sure. There’s also the choppy, two-dimensional aesthetic that Fantastic Planet popularized in 1973. Some locales look like a backlit blackboard and some are even cleaner, like in 1981’s Son of the White Mare. But that’s mostly when Dash Shaw’s latest is peaceful, and that’s not always. Minutes into Cryptozoo, Amber and Matt come across a fenced-in tower and find a collection of caged mythical creatures. Then tragedy unfolds. This isn’t this couple’s story, and there are several spurts of violence, to say the least. Our lead is Lauren Gray (Lake Bell), a veterinarian who helps the sage Joan (Grace Zabriskie) save cryptids from the government. To be fair, the plot is by far the least original and most protracted part. The visual ingenuity, on the other hand, is something to witness. Continue Reading →

The Empty Man

StarringRobert Aramayo,
MPAA RatingR
Studio20th Century Fox,

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 →

Read also:

Gunda

Watch afterBarbarian (2022),
MPAA RatingPG

Since its premiere at this year’s Berlinale film festival, much of the press around Viktor Kossakovsky’s involving, subtly radical Gunda has fixated on the intimacy of its form. Presented without any narration, subtitles, or extraneous context and shot in stark but crucially un-distracting black and white photography (Kossakovsky has been forthright about not wanting to draw attention to beauty), this is pastoral portraiture that’s keenly aware of reflecting — but not exerting its purpose. Continue Reading →

Ammonite

It's not the first time the two have worked together, having met to build the score for 2016's Lion and working on several projects since. Together, they've built a clear sense of collaboration which bears out in Ammonite's intimate, complicated scoring -- which echoes the growing intimacy between Winslet and Ronan as, respectively, 19th-century paleontologist Mary Anning and a young woman she's tasked to care for. Continue Reading →

Read also:

Songbird

Back in mid-March, Simon Boyes called Adam Mason about an idea for a pandemic thriller. The two writing partners quickly sketched out a plot outline, it began to pick up traction, and it was only a matter of days before Michael Bay came on to the project as a producer. The name would be Songbird. It’d also begin filming that July with Mason directing and come out in December, less than nine months after its inception. All of this said, it’s hard to dissect what’s worse: the fact that people exploited a global tragedy so quickly, or the final result. Continue Reading →

Wild Mountain Thyme

Watch afterBlack Widow (2021), Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023),
StarringJon Hamm,
MPAA RatingPG-13

An adaptation of his play Outside Mullingar, which was panned by Irish critics, John Patrick Shanley’s Wild Mountain Thyme follows a pair of neighboring farmers as they try to find love despite an ongoing land dispute they get caught up in. When the trailer to this film came out, it was immediately mocked for awful accents and a questionable depiction of Ireland. From watching, it turns out those criticisms were correct. This is a soulless film that does little more than create some pretty shots for the Irish tourist board. Continue Reading →

Read also:

Wander Darkly

MPAA RatingR

Adrienne (Sienna Miller) and Matteo (Diego Luna) are miserable together, that much is immediately clear. They snipe at each other over the course of their date night, a substitute for therapy they can’t afford that of course Matteo has forgotten about. They have a new baby at home and a new mortgage and a lot of old, festering issues that all seem to be bubbling to a head when the unthinkable happens. A car careens into theirs, cutting their argument short, killing Adrienne. Probably. She thinks. She… isn’t exactly sure. Continue Reading →