105 Best Releases Translations Japanese on Hulu (Page 2)

Season 5 of What We Do in the Shadows premieres tomorrow, and you might have some difficulty parsing that it’s already there. Many sitcoms tend to run out of steam by season 5 (you’ll note that exactly when Fonzie jumped the shark), resorting to dropping plot arcs without explanation, swapping out established characters for newer, less interesting characters, setting up tiresome romances, and relying on gimmick episodes, like flashbacks, clip shows, and musicals. Despite its supernatural premise, What We Do in the Shadows still follows much of the standard sitcom structure, so it’s a minor miracle that it’s still the freshest, funniest half-hour show on television right now, without anyone having to put on a fat suit or get stuck in an elevator. Continue Reading →

One of the things I enjoy most about the moviegoing experience is coming out of a film feeling as if I've actually learned something that I didn't know before, or had not even occurred to me in the first place. That's exactly the feeling that I got while watching Sam Pollard’s The League, a documentary about the history of Negro baseball leagues in America. Going in, I suppose I knew the basics about the subject and could name such key figures as Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige, but Pollard, who previously directed MLK/FBI, and executive producer Questlove delve much deeper, and the results are indeed fascinating. Continue Reading →

In its first season, Cruel Summer was a roller coaster of a television show. It offered a new twist, loop, or drop around every corner. Cruel Summer Season 2, by contrast, feels more like the Slingshot. For one, the journey is much easier to understand and anticipate. Of course, there are still thrills to be hand. Still, it lacks a certain gonzo quality. As a result, this season is better and more logically plotted, but also significantly less likely to leave a viewer’s head spinning. Continue Reading →

Of all the oddball trends in 2023’s multiplex movies, the strangest has to be Hollywood’s current obsession with films about the origins of familiar consumer lines and products, including Air Jordans, Tetris, and the BlackBerry PDA. The films have been okay—and Air’s genuinely quite good—but even so, when all is said and done, it is hard to shake the sense that what you have been watching is less a movie than an elaborate brand extension designed to remind viewers of the benevolence and vision of our corporate overlords. That is especially true in the case of Eva Longoria’s directorial debut Flamin’ Hot, a film whose story is almost too good to be true (more on that later) but which is, in practice, an ironically bland bit of product placement even more processed and devoid of nourishment than the snack food it celebrates.  Continue Reading →

Gerard Butler's CIA-agent-on-the-run thriller aims to be more than a power fantasy, but for all its virtues, it doesn't stick that landing. There's an expected cognitive dissonance that comes with watching a man-on-a-mission genre piece set in the Middle East. Whether it's a glorified shooting gallery or a power fantasy where the hero stops just short of bleeding red, white, and blue - one needs to practice a mental limbo to either ignore or maybe be pleasantly surprised with the bare minimum concessions to showing the opposite side's perspectives.  Ric Roman Waugh's expertly mounted, ambitiously scattered Kandahar is, at its core, a Stagecoach riff. One where our leading man, career CIA operative Tom Harris (Gerard Butler leveraging his soulful full-time divorced dad essence), has 30 hours to make a mad 400-mile dash across an Afghanistan desert from an impossibly large group of following forces. It's a foolproof premise, yet intriguingly, Kandahar refuses to embrace its conceptual neatness.  Continue Reading →

Welcome to the future. America is “the safest country on Earth,” as FBI Agent Tayo Michaels (Brian Tyree Henry) assures us. And it is all thanks to a program that is one part Minority Report, one part that computer Lucius Fox gets all bent out of shape about in The Dark Knight. It started as a sort of interrogation tool, but it has blossomed into a prediction machine that lets the FBI anticipate criminal activities. Comic book fans, think Force Works. Law enforcement has gotten “proactive.” Continue Reading →

From Rosemary's Baby in 1968 to 2021's False Positive, Hollywood has long been interested in women's bodies and reproductive systems as a setpiece for horror: and writer-director Alexis Jacknow's Clock is no exception. From its humble beginnings as a short film, Jacknow's freshman feature has blossomed into a chilly, paranoia-ridden horror flick commanded by a captivating lead in Diana Agron. Though Clock's script is sometimes inelegant and clunky, it boasts enough personality, perspective, and ferocity to stand an exciting feature debut in the world of horror.   Continue Reading →

If you belonged to a certain group of very online Millennials around 2011, then the chances that a Dear Sugar letter changed your life or permanently lodged itself in your brain are high. I know it’s certainly true for me. That means I’m carrying a certain degree of baggage to Hulu’s newest series, Tiny Beautiful Things, based on the book of the same name--a collection of Dear Sugar’s best advice columns)--and Sugar herself, Cheryl Strayed, who stepped forward as the columnist in 2012.  Continue Reading →

The acclaimed documentarian joins The Spool to discuss Brooke Shields, her work, her life, and her relationship to "Brooke Shields" the image. In 1981, Roger Ebert wrote a profile on Brooke Shields in which he—quoting a press agent—said, “She will be with us for the rest of our lives.” That turned out to be remarkably prescient, but neither the agent nor Ebert could have anticipated the myriad number of ways Shields has been with us in that time. Yes, she is extraordinarily beautiful. But many equally attractive people have come and gone, while Shields remains a consistent part of pop culture’s firmament. From her early appearances in films like Pretty Baby (1978), The Blue Lagoon (1980), and Endless Love (1981) and her controversial TV ads for Calvin Klein jeans, all of which focused on her sexuality while she was literally a child, to her shift in the later Eighties to become America’s Virgin to her reinvention as a comedic actress in the Nineties to becoming an advocate for those suffering from postpartum depression (and suffering the slings and arrows of Tom Cruise in full asshole mode as a result), Shields has been a persistently relevant figure in the American popular consciousness.  While Shields has lived much of her life in the public eye, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields, a fascinating two-part documentary from Lana Wilson now streaming on Hulu, proves that she still has a great deal to say. Given access to nearly a half-century’s worth of archival material, which she presents alongside contemporary interviews with Shields, Wilson paints a fascinating, eye-opening portrait that demands a new consideration of Shields and her career. Much of her story is harrowing, be it specific to her life—her wrenching descriptions of sexual assault and her tumultuous relationship with her mother—or experiences too many young women in the spotlight share. (If you think having someone inquire about the state of your virginity sounds awful, imagine having talk show hosts do so on live television.) And yet, not only has Shields survived, she is thriving. She has found peace with herself and is able to look back on her life with a sense of control over it.  Continue Reading →

There’s been no shortage of pieces lately decrying the state of the romcom—is it on life support? Dead? In danger? If you’ve been lamenting the dearth of gems like You’ve Got Mail and Bridget Jones’s Diary, then Hulu has good news for you with its release of director Raine Allen-Miller’s feature debut: Rye Lane. It’s a quick and quippy romp through London’s Peckham neighborhood as two heartbroken twentysomethings bond over breakups and, far more deliciously, how to get back at their rotten exes. It’s a return to form that doesn’t feel stuck in the past. Rather, it’s a joyful reminder of why everyone loves a rom-com to begin with.  Continue Reading →

There’s a subset of “Will they or won’t they?” stories that are perhaps best described as “They will, then they won’t, then they will again, then they won’t again, and so on.” There are certainly fans of this kind of story. Arguably the most popular sitcom of the past 40 years, Friends, had Ross and Rachel bouncing together and apart repeatedly. Hulu’s new musical series Up Here is the latest example of that rom-com subset of a subset. Continue Reading →

Considering the lurid details of it (let alone that it was never solved), it’s curious that Netflix, America’s number one source for grisly true crime documentaries, has yet to cover the Boston Strangler. It’s a fascinating story largely because the man who was long believed to be the Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, almost certainly didn’t act alone, and may not have even killed all of the thirteen women whose deaths were originally attributed to him. DNA evidence years after the fact conclusively linked DeSalvo, convicted of rape and later murdered in prison, to just one victim. At the time of his arrest, both police and the media were so eager to bring the city-wide hysteria to an end that they pointed at him for all the murders, only quietly conceding after DeSalvo was in jail that there was likely more than one strangler, and that the case was still open. Nearly sixty years later, the other twelve murders remain unsolved. Continue Reading →

In the climactic monologue of the original Magic Mike, Mike Lane (Channing Tatum) says, “I don’t want to be a forty-year-old stripper.” It’s an affecting scene that shows that Mike understands the dead-end nature of his current lifestyle and his desire to escape, and it makes the ending where he gives stripping up a satisfying one.  Continue Reading →

Koala Man may be a brand-new Hulu cartoon, but viewers sitting down to watch its first season may feel like they’ve stumbled onto a rerun. The show’s steady stream of apocalyptic threats and graphic deaths echoes executive producer Justin Roiland’s Rick and Morty, and its animation style is disappointingly derivative of Bento Box Entertainment’s adult cartoons (Hoops or Brickleberry, for instance, though Aussie studio Princess Bento produced Koala Man itself). It may be the only small-screen program dedicated to a middle-aged dude in a koala mask fighting crime, but Koala Man is far too derivative for its own good.  Continue Reading →

Fleishman Is in Trouble, the adaptation of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel starring Jesse Eisenberg, Claire Danes, and Lizzy Caplan, has a first-act problem. Or rather, a first-episode problem. Continue Reading →

As we lurch our way through the sixth or seventh wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve only just begun to see how much billion dollar companies (and billionaires themselves) profited from the chaos, while smaller businesses and individuals took devastating financial hits. A class war has erupted, if not in real life (yet) then certainly on social media, marked by endless heated debates over privilege, the victims and villains of capitalism, and who the “elite” really are. Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness satirizes this very unsettling period in time, putting a cheeky spin on class rage, but with an acidic undertaste that lingers long after it’s over. Continue Reading →

It’s a familiar scene. A writer finds success on the independent scene with something artistic and boundary-pushing. They take a meeting and the Hollywood content machine devours them. The difference in Reboot is the writer, Hannah (Rachel Bloom), has bought into the system without hesitation. She’s after something far more compelling than art or commerce. She seeks revenge. 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 →

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 →

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 →