916 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Japanese (Page 19)

It's safe to say that no one necessarily asked for a sequel to Ti West's X, especially six mere months after its release. Not because it was bad, mind you; it was actually quite good, a nifty throwback to Texas Chainsaw Massacre with a hefty soupcon of Debbie Does Dallas tossed in the mix. But its tale of a ragtag amateur-porn crew besieged by a murderous old country crone envious of their youthful beauty and raging libidos hardly cried out for a followup. Yet here we are with Pearl, a prequel that dabbles in decidedly different genre homages but might just be the superior slasher of the two. Continue Reading →

Ask someone if they’ve seen 2014’s Goodnight Mommy, and if their immediate response is to shudder, you’ll know they have. The Austrian cult horror film combines so many tropes – psychological horror, body horror, paranoia, twins, creepy kids, creepy moms, etc. – that it seems like it should be an incoherent mess, but is instead a tightly paced, relentless assault on the nerves. Even the trailer is creepier than many mainstream horror films, while only showing a tiny bit of how bad things get in it. Continue Reading →

God’s Country shows a place in America rarely described. There’s a vastness, an emptiness to Sandra Guidry’s (Thandiwe Newton) home. She’s moved from New Orleans out to the country. It’s the sort of place where a single man in law enforcement covers hundreds of miles of terrain. A Black professor in an all-white department at a local university, Guidry lives in her house alone on acres of land, prime hunting ground for those hoping to shoot and score. Julian Higgins’s thriller plays out like a matchstick, a burn that erodes everything until there’s nothing left to destroy.   Continue Reading →

“You’ve seen one you seen them all," says the dastardly movie director from beyond the grave. It’s the recently murdered Leo Köpernick (Adrien Brody), telling us early in the film about how stale the murder mystery genre was even by the 1950s, when See How They Run takes place. It’s also a warning to the audience that this movie will not be adding anything new, revelatory, or exciting to whodunnit cinema. Everything here has been done before, and better.  Continue Reading →

Mike Pondsmith, creator of the tabletop RPG Cyberpunk—which video game studio CD Projekt Red adapted into Cyberpunk 2077 and which in turn led to the creation of Studio TRIGGER (Promare)'s 10-episode anime Cyberpunk: Edgerunners—said this: Continue Reading →

Pinocchio is not a movie. It’s the latest in a long line of live-action remakes of classic Disney cartoons. The Mouse House’s newest excuse to print money can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are dead! Or until it only has Pocahontas and Home on the Range left to turn into live-action features, whichever comes first. If the track record of movies like The Lion King and Alice in Wonderland isn’t enough to make you discouraged about the prospects of Pinocchio, it’s worth remembering that this is also a Robert Zemeckis directorial effort made after 2001. Continue Reading →

It can be hard to write about films sometimes. No mere words, no matter how witty, insightful, or elegant, can truly capture the experience of watching the most surprising ones. Except for movies like Zach Cregger's (The Whitest Kids U'Know) new horror/thriller, Barbarian, which I can encapsulate perfectly with a few phrases: Continue Reading →

Everyone’s had that “wedding season” experience. You meet a stranger at the start of the summer and have a great time flirting—perhaps more—with them by the bar and on the dance floor. It feels like a fun one-time thing, but then you keep running into each other at every other reception over the next few months. Before you know it, you’re having a full-fledged affair and running from the police because you’re both suspected of murdering an entire wedding party. You know, standard mid-20s wedding season fun. Continue Reading →

The Patient’s Dr. Alan Strauss (Steve Carrell) is a man of ritual. One can tell it from how he cuts his fruit, interacts with clients, and even walks through his home. The deliberate editing from Amanda Pollack and Daniel A. Valverde in the pilot help emphasize this point. Ritual upon ritual surrounds him. Continue Reading →

When James Caan passed away back in July, most of the celebrations of his life and career focused on the tough guy persona that he developed via such classic films as The Godfather (1972), The Gambler (1974), and Thief (1981), to name just a few. All of those are undeniably worthy of tribute, of course. However, many remembrances failed to note his adeptness in comedies, especially those that allowed him to have fun with his macho screen image. Continue Reading →

The new horror film The Invitation opts to take a cue from Smash Mouth’s “All-Star” and hit the ground running. The very first scene of Jessica M. Thompson’s latest directorial effort depicts a woman deciding to escape a lavish home by way of suicide. With the help of a piano string and a medium-sized statue, she’s soon a corpse dangling in the living room of this mansion. Accompanied by pronounced cues on Dara Taylor’s score and claps of thunder, this demise is a striking way to kick off a movie. It’s also, unfortunately, emblematic of a critical narrative misstep from which The Invitation never quite recovers.  Continue Reading →

From Promising Young Women to Big Little Lies, we’re in a golden age of female revenge stories. Looking to add to the ranks is AppleTV+’s new series Bad Sisters. It follows the tight-knit group of sisters who slowly turn on their prick-ish brother-in-law after years of misogynistic torture. It’s a dash of thriller Big Little Lies with a sprinkle of the comedy of 9 to 5, all set in a coastal Irish town.    Continue Reading →

Thanks to all the pre-release press with show creator and head writer Jessica Gao, viewers already know what She-Hulk: Attorney At Law won’t be: a courtroom dramedy. Unfortunately, after the first episode, “A Normal Amount of Rage,” it isn’t clear what kind of show it will be either. Continue Reading →

Alright, there's only one way to start this off, so best to do it well. Continue Reading →

No one mistakes HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Los Angeles Lakers for a 30 For 30 documentary. So why does that series feel more authentic to the Golden Era of professional basketball, and the team that helped elevate the NBA into an American pastime, than a ten-hour documentary about the Lakers? Continue Reading →

Many of us have been called “old souls.” We are the people who feel out of step with our times. Director Katie Aselton’s Mack & Rita is a charming new comedy for us old gals that provides a refreshing update to the magical comedies of yesteryear. Continue Reading →

Better Call Saul is a tragedy. From the beginning, it focused on a rough-edged, yet decent man whom the audience knows will one day become an unrepentant merchant of death and destruction. What makes it so tragic, beyond the known destination, is that the series is riddled with missed exits. Time and again, Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) faced situations where -- if he’d just pulled back from the brink, if he’d only taken his lumps instead of wriggling out of them, if he’d simply chosen not to push things too far -- all of this could have been avoided. Continue Reading →

Ladies, sometimes life deals you a rough hand. Sometimes, in the blink of an eye, you can lose someone or something infinitely precious to you. Grief is so easy to slip into, it’s hard to pull yourself out of that darkness, but you know what will help? Spelunking. Or maybe ocean kayaking. Or, in the case of director Scott Mann’s Fall, climbing a 2000+ foot tv tower in the hopes that doing so will help to push through the horrifying memory of your husband’s death in a climbing accident.   Continue Reading →

Our final dispatch from Fantasia features a blend of powerful stories with dynamic female characters. (This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2022 Fantasia Film Festival.) There is perhaps no more literal or better example of Fantasia's killer run of female-centered stories this year than Amanda Kramer’s kaleidoscopic Give Me Pity! Following Sissy St. Claire (Sophie Von Haselberg) for her singular Saturday night special, this remarkable feat of staging and performance is a golden, glittery, and gothic descent into the twisted psyche of a performer desperate for acceptance. At once a TV concert, sketch show, and dramatic showcase, Give Me Pity shows off the exhaustive range of its visionary director and solo star. Continue Reading →

Welcome to Right on Cue, the podcast where we interview film, TV, and video game composers about the origins and nuances of their latest works. https://open.spotify.com/episode/4o5jRlzLYUWWtUrjCObEN9?si=63ce4a3efcae4a89 While Apple TV+ is home to some of the biggest shows on TV -- your Teds Lasso, your Severances -- some of its best, most beguiling shows and miniseries don't get talked about nearly as often. Among those hidden gems is The Essex Serpent, the six-part adaptation of the novel by Sarah Perry, starring Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston. Set in turn-of-the-century England, The Essex Serpent follows Cora Seaborne (Danes), a recently widowed Londoner, who sees her newfound freedom as the perfect excuse to pursue her love of science. That pursuit takes her to the Essex countryside, where a small town has been besieged by what's been reported to be a massive serpent. Some, including the town pastor (played by Hiddleston), doubt its veracity, but the town itself is convinced, and Cora's arrival just puts more fuel on the fire. Continue Reading →

Like many movies about people who use their phones and social media in excess, each viewer's individual enjoyment of director Halina Reijn's Bodies, Bodies, Bodies may hinge on their tolerance for Twitter jargon. Newcomer Sarah DeLappe's horror comedy screenplay is sharp and funny when it's not bogged down by an excess of 2020s slang. The heavy use of internet-speak isn't a problem for the first two acts. By the third act, though, it feels glaring.  Continue Reading →