916 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Japanese (Page 38)

(Note: We heavily encourage you to read reviews and criticism from Southeast Asian critics, who have a much more intimate and detailed understanding of the cultures from which Raya and the Last Dragon draws inspiration. This thread is a helpful primer.) Continue Reading →

Who actually wants movies like Tom & Jerry? Think back to the dregs of the Alvin & the Chipmunks movies from the aughts: the awkward blend of live action and animation, the creaky dragging of baby-boomer cartoon mascots awkwardly into present-day pop culture, the incessant noise of it all. What's worse, the characters you've come to see -- the ones your kids never knew -- come on screen in a form you hardly recognize. Continue Reading →

When Billie Eilish met with director R.J. Cutler to discuss her documentary Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry, she had an odd request: “I want it to be like The Office.” Eilish, known to be a stan of the NBC comedy (she sampled dialogue from the show in her song “my strange addiction”), wanted to drop the audience into the world of her and her family as she rises from a 13-year-old viral video sensation to a 18-year-old Grammy winner. Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry is an epic journey of the on and offstage life of the musical prodigy. Continue Reading →

Cleveland. The early 2000s. A young man (Tom Holland, The Lost City of Z) falls in love with a girl named Emily (Ciara Bravo, Wayne). It’s lovely but fraught. When she wants to go to college in Canada, he impulsively signs up for the Army. Life as a medic in the Iraq War is traumatizing, and the young man processes that trauma poorly. Drug use becomes addiction, and Emily joins him. A loathsome drug dealer (Jack Reynor, Midsommar) becomes a hated enemy and a desperate friend. Bank robbery starts to look like a good idea. The spiral devours all.  Continue Reading →

While Netflix’s Ginny & Georgia (created by Sarah Lampert) has so far been hailed as a sort of edgier Gilmore Girls, the new young adult series arguably has more in common with Richard Benjamin’s Mermaids (1990), starring Cher and Winona Ryder. In essence: what if Cher’s Mrs. Flax kept two pistols in the house? Continue Reading →

An icon of the 20th-century jazz scene, Billie Holiday was an icon of Black culture, haunted by abuse and addiction. Her song “Strange Fruit”, based on a poem that describes a lynching, propelled her to fame – but also got the attention of the federal government, taking dramatic steps to stop her from singing the song in an effort to racialize the War on Drugs. In The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Lee Daniels tracks Holiday as the Federal Department of Narcotics begins to pursue her toward that end, in a film that ends up being a waste of potential. Continue Reading →

The apocalypse is never further from our minds in science fiction, to the point where any civilization set after mankind's inevitable collapse invariably lands on a host of tropes and conventions touched on by a million stories before it. Tribes of Europa, Germany's latest addition to Netflix's sci-fi television stable after the incredible Dark, makes the head-scratching decision to use all of them. There's a Mysterious Cataclysm that knocks out all technology, roving bands of survivors battling each other for resources and power, a Magic MacGuffin that might lead to salvation and must be protected at all costs, the list goes on. And yet, there's an ineffable charm to the six too-brief episodes of its inaugural season, chiefly due to the stalwart effects work and production design, and game performances from a cast that recognizes the story's innate schlock factor. Continue Reading →

Ed Helms and Patti Harrison charm in Nikole Beckwith's refreshing, pleasurable dramedy. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Nikole Beckwith’s Together Together doesn’t break any new ground. But it doesn’t have to -- the film’s greatest pleasure lies simply in watching every part of the story fall into place the way we predict and expect it to. The dramedy is only Beckwith's second feature, but despite its familiarity, it's a pleasurable and refreshing experience. It’s light and witty, often packed with laughs and touching moments, with two stellar lead performances at its heart. Continue Reading →

Like any human being, I am predisposed to like Dwayne Johnson, aka The Rock. The man is charisma incarnate, a shockingly charming person who has proven to have not just skill, but that ineffable something that true stars possess. So know I don’t take lightly what I am about to say. Continue Reading →

It’s easy to feel like time’s been stuck in an infinite loop recently. Especially when two movies are released within a year of each other that both ask the question, “What if we remade Groundhog’s Day, but with two people instead of one?”. Unfortunately for The Map of Tiny Perfect Things, a Y.A. drama streaming on Amazon Prime, it’s now the Volcano of time loop romances (the superior Palm Springs is the Dante’s Peak, of course). Continue Reading →

Following off the success of Bridgerton, the next bestseller to be spun into Netflix gold is Sarah Pinborough’s Behind Her Eyes, a book that was so aggressively marketed around its super-secret third act twist that early readers were encouraged to use the hashtag #WTFthatending. They aren’t kidding. WTF that ending, indeed.  Continue Reading →

While the first movie in the series was stylish & unexpectedly moving, it was tainted by cheap, empty sequels that forgot what made it special. You don’t have to have seen The Crow to know the story behind it. It’s one of the great Hollywood tragedies, like the Twilight Zone crash, or the Poltergeist curse, where watching them feels a little forbidden and eerie. That’s particularly true for The Crow, because the scene in which star Brandon Lee was accidentally killed with a prop gun was left more or less intact. Granted, there’s some clever editing and use of a body double, but it’s close enough to raise the hairs on the back of your neck. I shan’t spend too much time recounting The Crow, because, again, even if you haven’t seen it, you’ve sort of seen it (and also it’s already been written about at length on this very website). I will say that I rewatched it for this project, and was surprised to see how well it holds up. It might be perhaps the most early 90s movie ever made, but unlike, say, Reality Bites, it’s in a way that’s still cool and stylish. The swooping urban landscape shots, created almost entirely with miniatures, are still a feast for the eyes, and would be put to even greater use four years later by director Alex Proyas, in his masterpiece Dark City. Sure, the villains, who have names like “Tin Tin” and “Funboy,” are laughably over the top, but they’re balanced by Lee, undoubtedly a rising star, who plays doomed hero Eric Draven with subtlety and genuine human emotion. Continue Reading →

Watching the first cut of Richard Kelly’s ultra-ambitious Donnie Darko follow-up is like riding a wave of mutilation. Southland Tales, director/writer Richard Kelly’s apocalyptic epic of a world gone berserk in the run-up to a paranoia-riven presidential election, is at long last a little closer to completion. Thanks to the fine folks at Arrow Films, the 158-minute cut of the picture that played at Cannes – as opposed to the 145-minute theatrical cut – is now widely available for the first time. Compared to the theatrical cut, The Cannes Cut lays out Kelly’s bigger picture more clearly and deepens the (famously odd) ensemble’s work. For good and ill, The Cannes Cut is still Southland Tales. It’s one of the great whatsit movies of the early 21st century, an artifact of the mid-to-late Dubya years that captures the specific tenor of the United States’ anxieties and fears from that time in amber. It’s a kinky, surreal Armageddon wounded by its early-aughts-sour-bro treatment of its ensemble’s leading women. It is, in other words, an extremely 2006 movie. In its best moments, it describes and invokes the overwhelming sensation of being alive at a time when everyone and everything has come undone. Continue Reading →

In the wide world of algorithmically-derived Netflix teen romantic comedies, surely one of the finest was 2018's To All The Boys I've Loved Before, the syrupy-sweet story of adorable bookworm Lara Jean Covey (an always-radiant Lana Condor) and her shockingly-resilient relationship with too-good-to-be-true-except-he-is jock Peter (Noah Centineo). The film did well enough to spawn an entire trilogy based on Jenny Han's YA romances; while the second, To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You, still had its fair share of charms, it started to show the cracks in the sunny, conflict-free firmament of Lara Jean's fairy tale romance. Now, the trilogy closes with To All the Boys: Always and Forever, and this time, the decision isn't between Peter and some other boy: it's between Peter and the rest of her life. Continue Reading →

A decade after their 2011 hit film Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo are back as co-writers and costars in Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar. Their new comedy romp follows Barb (Wiig) and Star (Mumolo), two Midwestern middle-aged suburbanite gal-pals looking to get “their shimmer back” on a trip to the ocean oasis of Vista Del Mar. The wide-eyed duo discovers sea-shell bracelets, hooks up with mysterious Edgar (Jamie Dornan), and accidentally becomes embedded in a murder plot involving super mosquitos. Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar plays like a five minute SNL sketch that stretches into an hour and forty-five fever dream peppered with talking crabs, musical numbers, and culottes.  Continue Reading →

Rebecca Hall adapts Nella Larsen's novella about Black social mobility (and its corresponding resentments) to haunting effect. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Nella Larsen's 1929 novella Passing is a fascinating text, a frank but elegant discussion of the intersections of race, class, and gender as cold and delicate as its subject matter. It makes sense, then, that Rebecca Hall's adaptation is similarly airy and ominous, an intimate portrait of resentment and racial/social mobility set amid the stifling backdrop of 1920s New York. Continue Reading →

Before its release, Sia’s Music has generated controversy regarding the handling of its titular autistic character, including the decision to cast neurotypical actor Maddie Zeigler in the role. Sia’s responses to these critiques have only enflamed the hubbub, but tragically, those concerns are immaterial. Not because Music does a good job of handling the perspective of an autistic person, but rather quite the opposite. Continue Reading →

I never feel the need to apologize for loving a movie. I might be more inclined to defend that love, but not apologize for it. When I see a movie so beloved and come out the other side largely unaffected, though, I feel bad. Is it my fault? Is it just that I’m a cold person? I shouldn’t feel bad for being in the minority, but maybe I should feel bad that I didn’t feel a ton else. I kind of do, to be honest. Of course everyone’s tastes are different. Of course I’m far from likely to always agree with the majority. Continue Reading →

Patch Adams is full of shit. I truly can’t think of a better way to describe it. I could come up with some convoluted metaphor and tell you that watching Tom Shadyac’s 1998 catastrophe is like going to a restaurant and having the waiter spit on your food. I could call it “Jojo Rabbit for the Clinton Era” or label it a “misguided crowd-pleaser.” But I won’t do any of that because I – unlike Patch Adams – refuse to bullshit you.  Continue Reading →

Based on an Aja Gabel short story and directed by Chad Hartigan, Little Fish follows a married couple as they try to hold onto what they love in a world ravaged by a pandemic. In a lot of ways, there are eerie similarities with our present reality, but the main difference is that the virus in this film slowly takes away memories – functioning very similarly to Alzheimer’s. In the midst of a flurry of pandemic-themed media coming out which tries to reflect the situation which the world is presently in, Little Fish manages to distinguish itself from the crowd with its brilliant leads and emotional resonance. Continue Reading →

Robin Wright makes her directorial debut in a tender and understated drama about a woman who isolates herself from the world after an unimaginable loss. The pain of losing our loved ones is unimaginable. It’s overwhelming and often hard to overcome. Though healing is not impossible, there’s no timetable when it comes to processing this loss. It may take weeks or months or even years for people to finally be okay again and move forward. Robin Wright’s directorial debut, Land, understands this really well. The movie delves deep into the pain and the complicated feelings that people have to face when they’re dealing with the death of their loved ones. It’s an understated character study about grief and loss, and a moving celebration of human connection and resilience. Working from a script penned by Jesse Chatham and Erin Dignam, the movie follows Edee (Wright), a woman determined to isolate herself from everyone in the wake of a devastating tragedy. When we first meet her, she’s already on her way to a remote cabin in Quincy, Wyoming. She wants to abandon everything, staying away from everyone who wants her to get better, but never allow her to process the deep sadness she’s been feeling for a while. Before arriving at the cabin, she ditches her phone and even calls a local to get rid of her rental car, leaving herself with only a bunch of canned foods and a box of her most personal possessions. But Edee is not cut out for this kind of living, so the plan she’s made seems foolhardy. Continue Reading →