105 Best Releases Translations Japanese on Hulu (Page 3)

From the start, GKIDS' latest acquisition, The Deer King, can call itself the spiritual sequel to Princess Mononoke without fear. Like Studio Ghibli’s 1997 title, the adaptation of Nahoko Uehasi’s eponymous novel series also has world-building text about clashing factions and ancient magic unfolding over vivid forests and stirring music. One of this film’s directors, Masashi Ando, was a supervising animator for the other one. Wolves and elks are again the beasts with the most screen time. Continue Reading →

Things are bad, folks. They’re relentlessly bad, with no sign that it’s going to let up any time soon. All we can do to stop ourselves from spiraling into the abyss is cling to the little things in life, like an ice cream cone, petting a dog, or taking a long bath. Add to that list is What We Do in the Shadows, now in its fourth season, and still just as fresh and funny as ever, with dirty jokes that belie its gentle, loving core. Continue Reading →

With the first season of Only Murders in the Building, creators Steve Martin and John Hoffman found success through a tricky balance -- between young and old, between thriller and comedy, between murder and levity. With Selena Gomez and Martin Short returning to join Martin as the unlikely podcasting trio, the Hulu series leans on the chemistry of its three stars. The resulting second season overachieves, brimming with confidence, comedy, scares, and a balanced tone. Continue Reading →

Eugenio Derbez has followed all the proper steps for any comedic leading man, including breaking out with a movie whose success nobody saw coming (Instructions Not Included) to side roles in long-forgotten blockbusters (Geostorm). Now he's taken a cue from many other modern stars of the genre like Adam Sandler or Melissa McCarthy and moved to 'streaming service A-lister' with Hulu's latest, The Valet. 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 →

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 →

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

Sandra Oh has always had range, and her demonstration of it for viewers has always been spectacular. However, the feat she’s pulled this month will be tough to trounce. Oh has folks turning red one Friday and blanch white the next. And she pulls off the jaw-dropping swing in an on-screen mold as traditionally restrictive as “mother to a teenage daughter.” That said, whereas Mrs. Lee in Turning Red strives to adapt whenever possible, Amanda (Oh) in Umma refuses to. Continue Reading →

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A treasure hunter walks into a Papa John's franchise in the middle of beautiful Barcelona. He’s there to unlock a complicated puzzle in the hopes of getting one step closer to finding the gold lost during the epic journey of Ferdinand Magellan 500 years prior. The man is Victor “Sully” Sullivan, played by Mark Wahlberg, who appears to be going through the motions without any real fun or excitement, just like this movie. Continue Reading →

Throughout Suspicion, Rob Williams’s English language adaptation of False Flag, teases of revelations and insights dangle in front of the audience. These remain teases. Even when the show’s final twist hits, it reveals new information without deepening our understanding of the characters. Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

The latest from oddball extraordinaire Riley Stearns is a sci-fi curio about scrambling to find your will to live. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.) Writer/director Riley Stearns introduces the viewer to the offbeat world of Dual through something of a Hunger Games or Twilight Zone knock-off, with a bloody duel between two men who look exactly the same as an audience watches. It’s a smart and captivating start, one flooded with Sterns’ usual dark sense of humor, and one that introduces the core premise succinctly: in a world where you and your double both want to live, how willing and able are you to survive a duel to the death?  Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2022 Sundance Festival) Continue Reading →

Hulu’s new series How I Met Your Father attempts to recreate the magic of the - wait for it! - legendary status of the original series How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM for short). This update proves a nostalgic ride for fans of the original series and an enjoyable journey for newcomers, even if it lacks some of the fresh qualities of its predecessor.   Continue Reading →

Say what you will about the Scream movies – while they’re almost as absurd as the movies they’re satirizing, they’re also each trying to say something. While the first movie was about slasher movies in general, Scream 2 explored the nature (and necessity) of sequels, while Scream 3 attempted (to less than successful results) a pre-#MeToo spotlight on sexual harassment, and, as an answer to the rise of Facebook and Twitter, Scream 4 focused on social media culture. Wes Craven set out to not just entertain and scare audiences, but to get them to think about what they were watching, exactly, and why. Continue Reading →

This review was originally written as part of our coverage of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival; we're reposting it now that the film is available in theaters and VOD. Continue Reading →

It's hard to overstate just how seismic The Matrix was when it was first released in 1999. Looking back on it now, in an age of focus-tested corporate franchises, extended universes, and an even more top-heavy IP landscape than we had back then, it feels positively revolutionary. Even in its imperfect but-radically-reappraised 2003 sequels, Reloaded and Revolutions, filmmakers Lana and Lilly Wachowski manage to build a world that's at once evocative of so many of its influences (cyberpunk, bullet opera, kung fu film, Star Wars) but feels highly original. And what's more, is unafraid to tackle challenging, often heady psychological questions while still revolutionizing the way action movies were made. Continue Reading →

When someone tells you they never lie to their romantic partner, don’t believe them. They may not tell real whoppers, like what they really did with the money that was supposed to go towards bills, but little white lies, and especially lies of omission, are fair game. Total honesty means having to hurt the people we love, and so we obfuscate, hide things, to protect their feelings. Benjamin Cleary’s Swan Song (not to be confused with the Todd Stephens film of the same name) tells the story of a husband and father who takes a lie of omission to eerie, heart-wrenching lengths. Continue Reading →

Back in 1998, Gus Van Sant released his remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. It wasn’t a good movie, but it provided two decent critical talking points. Firstly, was it actually a remake, or was it another adaptation of Robert Bloch’s novel? Given that Van Sant’s film was a shot-for-shot recreation of its 1960 predecessor save for two or three differences, it was a rarity in that, given its context, it ended up being the former. It, for all its failures in execution, used semiotics to circumvent the aforementioned semantics of its identity. Continue Reading →

Pablo Larraín’s sympathetic “fable” about Diana, Princess of Wales, also compassionately addresses the secret shame of eating disorders. CONTENT WARNING: this article addresses eating disorders and self-injury. See our spoiler-free overview of Spencer here. If Pablo Larraín’s Spencer doesn’t change your mind about royalty being aspirational, then nothing will. Sure, you’ll have access to wealth and fancy clothes, but at the cost of your time and privacy. Every part of your life, every holiday, even “off time” with your family, is scheduled down to the last minute, and everything you do is judged according to tradition and propriety. Maybe it’ll be you who breaks tradition, who makes things different through sheer force of will. But probably not. You’ll be a dress-up doll in a glass case, to be taken out and shown off whenever the occasion calls for it, whether you want to be or not. Continue Reading →