916 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Japanese (Page 37)

During our pandemic lockdowns, who amongst us hasn’t recruited quarantined friends and family into a baking project beyond our experience? Now imagine the pressure of concocting an elaborate bake with a pal or family member for all the world to see. With Netflix’s Nailed It! Double Trouble, bakers pair up in teams of two to recreate extravagant bakes and win $10,000. While some elements have changed in this new season, host Nicole Byer still panics at the push of a button, chef Jacques Torres still imparts wisdom to the contestants, and the bakers reach new heights of spectacular cake fails. In the words of guest judge Ron Funches, “I love a good hot mess.” Nailed It! Double Trouble is the good hot mess we need, seeing twice the fun and chaos from amateur bakers. Continue Reading →

Udo Kier gets a lovely late-career showcase, and Leah Purcell directs a brustling but unfocused feminist Western. (This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.) Much like time in a Tracy Lawrence song, the 2021 South by Southwest film festival marches on. However, while SXSW will continue on until March 20, the Narrative Spotlight section has reached its final day with two entries. The vast differences between this pair of features reinforces the level of variety found in this festival. The first of these closing Narrative Spotlight projects is a wistful yet joyous endeavor starring the one and only Udo Kier.   Continue Reading →

In Wong Kar-wai’s Fallen Angels, we follow two parallel narratives. One tells the story of a contract killer (Leon Lai) trying to get out of the game and his agent (Michelle Reis) who is infatuated with him. The other follows a chaotic and mute man, He Zhwiu (Takeshi Kaneshiro), who falls in love with a woman called Charlie (Charlie Yeung) whom he keeps running into. There’s a lot to like here, from the moodiness of Hong Kong to the music, to Wong Kar-wai’s signature stunning lighting. One specific thing which is really fascinating here is how few moments of dialogue are present here, and how that makes this film so effective.  Continue Reading →

WandaVision may have spoiled us. The first episode of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier isn’t bad. It’s a solid dose of meat-and-potatoes superhero storytelling with a big screen feel. But it’s also very traditional, in a way that the first Marvel Studios show to hit our television screens simply wasn’t. That leaves the newcomer feeling a little disappointing by comparison. Continue Reading →

There’s an art to the elevator pitch, a skill to selling something as quickly and simply as possible. You must distill the concept to its most basic elements, while still presenting something that’s been reasonably thought out. Some things, like the horror-comedy Slaxx, practically sell themselves. With the possible exception of Leprechaun 4: in Space, which explains what it’s about right in the title, Slaxx might be the easiest movie plot to explain in a single sentence: a possessed pair of pants kills a bunch of people. Continue Reading →

Curious tales of lost children, doomed startups, and the pressures of being a female stand-up stud Day 1 of SXSW's documentary offerings. (This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.) The first batch of documentaries premiering at SXSW Film Festival’s Documentary Spotlight section were high profile stories with a cultural relevance to America today that forces audiences to rethink truth and tradition. It’s a readily packaged set of docs to start out, all of them already picked up for distribution and with nationally engaging stories. While they each have their little quirks and flaws, they manage to get at a significant shift in thinking and outlook on our lives as Americans, for better and for worse.  Continue Reading →

Two old flames reuniting, a harried nursing home worker, and Dante Basco's family affair mark SXSW's Narrative Spotlight. (This dispatch is part of our coverage of the 2021 SXSW Film Festival.) One year ago, the idea of doing a virtual version of the South by Southwest film festival would have sounded like an insurmountable task. Now, it’s just one more piece of “normal” life that we take for granted. For the second year in a row, SXSW has gone online and though that’s led to a lot of changes, that hasn’t altered the fact that the festival is still home to distinctly-rendered indie projects. Some of those films can be found in the Narrative Spotlight section of the festival, which kicked off with a trio of titles, including See You Then. Continue Reading →

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is a good movie. Its cast brings the famous DC superhero team to life through performances that range from reliably solid to very strong. Its action is clear, creative, and in a few places downright stupendous. Its thematic work is interesting, both on its own and in the greater context of its long and winding road to existence. There are multiple moments that qualify as full-on fantastic filmmaking, sequences that successfully connect western superheroes to the larger-than-life feeling of mystical Arthurian lore. To put it simply, I like it. I like it a bunch. Continue Reading →

Coming 2 America Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5lrkdvEZGg&ab_channel=AmazonPrimeVideo Continue Reading →

What if during one of your worst nightmares, you couldn't wake up, no matter how hard you tried? This the brooding question hanging throughout Come True, Anthony Scott Burns' sophomore horror thriller, coming off of Our House in 2018. The director (and now screenwriter) brings his visual effects background to develop an atmospheric wasteland of pure, spine-chilling dread with just a touch of analog sci-fi. The result is an ironically snoozy slog about the horrors of sleep paralysis that gets by more on vivid aesthetic than the sheer terror of what keeps us up at night.  Continue Reading →

Back in 1988, Hong Kong filmmaker Wong Kar-wai tried his hand at directing a feature film, transitioning from soap opera screenwriting to the low-level crime underworld seen in As Tears Go By. Wong’s debut drama follows three characters with multiple storylines: Wah (Andy Lau), his cousin Ngor (Maggie Cheung), and Fly (Jackie Cheung), his stand-in little brother in criminal life. Around the age of 30, Wong’s first foray into directing landed him a critical and modest commercial success, blending elements of his style that would become staples in his own filmmaking style.  Continue Reading →

The camera in Pirate Radio won’t stop wobbling – it’s so damn annoying. At first glance, this choice makes sense: most of this rotten film is set on “Radio Rock,” a broadcasting boat sending the greatest hits of the baby boomer era across '60s British airwaves. Carl (Tom Sturridge) has been sent aboard to live with his godfather (Bill Nighy); he’s inducted into the crew’s debauchery while the posh, no-good government tries to shut down the party.  Continue Reading →

Elizabeth Lo opens her short but powerful dogumentary Stray with a classical quote positioning dogs as the measure of “true living.” Her tail of three canines living in Turkey is marked by similar quotes, establishing a long history of using dogs as a companion to philosophy (and philosopher companions) that stretches from the Classical Mediterraenian, through Donna Haraway’s concept of “significant otherness,” to this film.  Continue Reading →

In the first three episodes of Season 4 provided to critics, Good Girls one begins to feel a creeping sense of the same. The “girls”—Ruby (Retta), Beth (Christina Hendricks), and Annie (Mae Whitman)—are still jockeying for power with Rio (Manny Montana). Beth is finding herself, once more, in a sexually charge situation with a known felon—this time a hired killer named Mr. Fitzpatrick (Andrew McCarthy)—while her husband Dean (Matthew Lillard) is left in the dark in that and so many other ways. Ruby and Stan’s (Reno Wilson) child, this time their son, is getting in trouble, the kind of trouble their criminal endeavors make both easier and harder to deal with. A zealous federal agent, Phoebe Donnegan (Lauren Lapkus), is closing in on them all, too. Continue Reading →

There’s a story from Tina Fey’s Bossypants where Fey recalls a moment between Saturday Night Live castmates Amy Poehler and Jimmy Fallon. Poehler was cracking jokes, and Fallon feigned mock horror and commented “It’s not cute. I don’t like it.” Poehler reacted with “I don’t fucking care if you like it.” Poehler brings that “riot girl” attitude to her new film Moxie, a film adaptation of the 2017 book by Jennifer Mathieu. Moxie is a fun revolutionary take on the high school movie, even if it takes a while to find its footing. Continue Reading →

Early on in The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run, the third cinematic iteration of the long-running Nickelodeon series SpongeBob Squarepants -- after 2004's The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie and 2015's The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water -- the Tim Hill-directed road movie flashes us back to the childhood of our absorbent, yellow, porous protagonist (voiced by Tom Kenny) and his first meeting with his beloved snail, Gary. By the time the film's over, we'll learn that all of SpongeBob's friends -- Patrick (Bill Fagerbakke), Squidward (Rodger Bumpass), Mr. Krabs (Clancy Brown), and the rest -- all met as kids in an undersea summer camp called Kamp Koral. Continue Reading →

In the late '90s, pharmaceutical companies claimed that the opioids that they produced weren’t addictive, causing a spike in medical providers prescribing them. This claim was, of course, false, and the influx of people who became addicted to opioids has created a public health crisis that results in an economic burden of $7.85 billion a year. Even worse is the human cost. In 2018,  67,367 Americans were killed via drug overdose. Of that number 69.5% of those deaths were caused by Opioids- mainly synthetic opioids.  Continue Reading →

Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 sci-fi blockbuster Pacific Rim certainly has its core group of dedicated fans, but I was never among them. The characters fell flat, the jokes never landed, and even the action sequences lacked suspense. Far from the worst action films, but also nowhere near among the most memorable, I went into Netflix’s anime twist on the story with a healthy dose of skepticism. Continue Reading →

Céline Sciamma's followup to Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a graceful tale of rediscovered childhood. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Berlin Film Festival.) In the wake of the international success of her hypnotic, Gothic-infused romantic drama Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), it would have been natural to assume that Céline Sciamma's next film would be a major project and the center of great scrutiny. Perhaps recognizing and preferring to avoid that template, Sciamma instead went the other way. She not only follows up Portrait with the decidedly small-scale Petite Maman, she shot it so quickly and in such secrecy that most people didn't even know she was working on anything until its world premiere at Berlinale was announced.  Continue Reading →

Dan Stevens stars as a seductive but malfunctioning robot companion in Maria Schrader's refreshing, tender exploration of longing. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Berlin Film Festival.) It’s nearly impossible to not think of Spike Jonze’s romantic drama Her while watching Unorthodox creator Maria Schrader’s third feature I’m Your Man. Granted, both movies focus on a relationship between a lonely, messy human being and an AI. But where Jonze’s film tells the story from the male gaze, Schrader flips the narrative and gives the room to a complicated female character. The result is not only refreshing but also more tender and meditative, exploring love, loneliness, and longing over the technological ethics that tend to occupy these kinds of films. Continue Reading →