916 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Japanese (Page 22)

Did you leave the gas on? Or does this movie stink? I’ll be here all week, folks. Continue Reading →

Action films love using Nazis as the villains because they’re unquestionably evil, wear scary uniforms, and are fun to watch get punched in the mouth. Now that modern-day Nazism hides behind bad haircuts on television and schlubby dudes wearing hunting jackets, it’s harder to achieve that visceral thrill of seeing a Nazi get his ass kicked. The Takedown makes a strong attempt, though.  Continue Reading →

In the last 15 years since 2008's Taken, Liam Neeson has become an action hero for men over 50. Now 69 years young, Neeson continues to star in these action-focused B-movies, each riffing on the previous one. Steady paychecks seem to be cashed by the Irish actor. Filmmakers line up to direct fights in trains, planes, cars, parking lots, hospitals--anywhere there might be an ounce of criminal activity.   Continue Reading →

Shining Girls makes for a difficult review because so many details could be considered spoilers. Those familiar with the source material, the novel The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes, will know the bigger ones. However, show creator Silka Luisa structured the series so differently even those who know the material may still be surprised. This review will do its best to preserve those surprises, but, as spoilers are in the eyes of the beholder, be warned your definition and this writer’s may differ. Continue Reading →

Chances are that if you know any Mormons at all, they’re far more likely to be ex-Mormons. Despite claims that the Mormon Church is one of the fastest growing religions in the United States (source: the Mormon Church), in reality, like most organized religions in America, membership has been on a steady decline for the past decade. Along with the same issues other churches face, the Latter Day Saints also suffer from years of bad P.R., forever associated with magic underwear, child brides, and polygamy, though the latter two aren’t permitted within the modern Mormon Church, and haven’t been since the 19th century. Every church has its members who take things a little too literally, however, and that occasionally results in tragedy, as illustrated by FX’s docudrama Under the Banner of Heaven, a chilling true story about death and faith. Continue Reading →

Motherhood, particularly new motherhood, is a lonely time. No matter how much help you have, there are still long, hard hours where you’re left with a tiny life, one for which you are wholly responsible, often after putting your body through a massive ordeal. Throw in a lack of sleep, a lack of meals, then add society’s pressures (are you feeding the baby properly?), familial pressures (your cousin never did things that way), and the all-too pressing personal pressures (is this it? Is this the thing that will mess up my child for life?) and it’s a miracle the human race has ever chosen to propagate. As I wrote this review, a banner ad invited me to buy (in my child’s stead) a personalized book called The World’s Bestest Mommy, because there’s nothing like the pressure of a gift to remind you what you have to live up to. Now, imagine that on top of all of this, your child has the supernatural ability to kill those around him and you have The Baby.   Continue Reading →

Who doesn't love a good redemption arc? We want to believe the best in people. We want to believe people can change for the better. It's no surprise, then, that the reformation of a character from an unrepentant villain to a heroic figure provides a very satisfying type of catharsis.   Continue Reading →

Nicolas Cage became a national institution somewhere between stealing Huggies from a convenience store and putting the bunny back in the box. Since then, his career has been a mixture of some highs and many more lows. In the process, he’s gone from one of our most celebrated actors to a self-parody. It’s debatable whether Cage has previously leaned into his own outsized persona, but there’s no question he’s in on the joke with The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.  Continue Reading →

It’s been over a year since we saw Cassie Bowden (Kaley Cuoco) at the beginning of her sobriety, coming to terms with how the trauma and legacies of her childhood shaped her. As season two begins, we get the rundown on how that’s been going via her AA sharing. Now based in Los Angeles, Cassie is healthy, in a relationship with smoking hot photographer Marco (Santiago Cabrera). She's also still working as an international first-class flight attendant with an unspecified side hustle that definitely isn’t working with the CIA, wink.   Continue Reading →

Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District opens on a Parisian building. More specifically, on a young woman named Émilie (Lucie Zhang in her feature debut), a struggling telemarketer, singing naked in her apartment. Next to her is Camille (Makita Samba), a literary professor, her new roommate, new lover, future ex-roommate, and future ex-lover. Broken credits chop up the action, staggered throughout the first lengthy scene. There’s an ephemeral nature to all of it, the sex and romance just as fleeting as the credits only fully shown for a moment, though Audiard has no problem spending longer with the revolving bodies of this story.  Continue Reading →

If the new Mark Wahlberg movie Father Stu were a person, it would have to stay in a confessional for a whole year to list its endless shortcomings. Continue Reading →

A woman wanders a vast and empty house. Her eyes well with confusion as she seems to disappear through walls. She’s a specter in her own home, unfamiliar amongst what should be the most familiar. But she’s not a ghost. She’s just lost.  Continue Reading →

These days, when confronted with a film made in the past featuring material that comes across as somewhat outre by contemporary standards, it's practically to remark that there's no way such a thing could be made in these comparatively staid times. In the case of Paul Schrader’s Cat People (1982), one comes away from it not only thinking that it couldn’t be made today, but wondering how in the hell it was able to get made back when it did. Bloody, erotic and suffused with a level of kink rarely seen in a putatively mainstream project, this go-for-baroque spectacle was an outlier when it first came out 40 years ago and that feeling remains undiminished to this day, along with its ability to simultaneously raise eyebrows and libidos at every turn. Continue Reading →

There is a movie about metalheads. But not just any devotees to metal music, oh no. This is a film about two musicians in a metal band that love this craft and each other but are struggling to get the fame that’s constantly eluded them. This pair of pals often fight and disagree over where to take their artistic pursuit, but at the end of the day, they’ve got each other and a love for those loud and rebellious melodies. Watching this film, you can’t help but get swept up in the camaraderie and dedication to this craft, even if you don’t know Avenged Sevenfold from Slipknot. Continue Reading →

About an hour into Ambulance, Michael Bay's latest symphony of steel and bullets and explosions, the two brothers-turned-robbers at the center of this tale (Jake Gyllenhaal and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) take a moment of calm amidst their high-speed run through the alleys and freeways of LA. No, they don't stop driving; they've got a flood of cops on their tail. But the least they can do, with their lives on the line and a cop (Jackson White) bleeding out in the back of their stolen ambulance, is throw on some Airpods and sing along together to Christopher Cross' "Sailing." Continue Reading →

Everything Everywhere All at Once is glorious. Continue Reading →

Trigger Warning: assault, sexual assault, date rape  Continue Reading →

In practice, most video game movies don’t have to worry about sequels. The likes of Assassin’s Creed and Warcraft failed to make anywhere near enough money to justify follow-ups. But there are still theatrical video game movie sequels here and there, now including Sonic the Hedgehog 2.   Continue Reading →

It takes a special sort of show to go from a terrorist bombing to a fart joke. Continue Reading →

In the 1990s and 2000s, TNT had the market cornered. Every day, or at least it felt that way, the television channel would play a certain kind of action movie. They relied heavily on Tony Scott’s filmography in the early years, and on the Bourne franchise in the later years. Tarik Saleh’s The Contractor would have been a staple on the channel, likely playing favorably to middle-aged fathers on Sunday afternoons.  Continue Reading →

Much of the pre-release publicity about Moon Knight focused on the heightened brutality of the new MCU on Disney+ series. In doing so, all involved failed to mention how much stranger it would be than the average MCU streamer. Continue Reading →