916 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Japanese (Page 44)

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema and the filmmaker’s own biography. For January we’re celebrating the work of godfather of independent film Jim Jarmusch. Read the rest of our coverage here. “What does a poet look like?”  The first (and only) documentary I ever made asked this very simple question. To answer, I lined up the poets from my creative writing program—from the sporty sorority sister to the quiet bespectacled shaggy-haired dude—and simply… asked. Their answers? Continue Reading →

Though cinematographer Reed Morano shows some directing chops, the Blake Lively thriller is uneven in style & tone. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Reed Morano’s bracing The Rhythm Section follows its own beat. Misleading marketing and the dreaded late January dump positioned it as a gender-reversed thriller in the vein of Liam Neeson’s recent run of revenge thrillers with expert journeyman Jaume Collet-Serra -- but the film is exhilaratingly out of step with the autopilot assassin stylings of the John Wicks of the world. Whereas Keanu Reeves’ multiplex conquering series has largely thrived as moody but absurdist routines of grotesque precision; nothing about the capabilities of Stephanie Patrick (an unusually wan Blake Lively) could be considered automatic. If anything, DP Sean Bobbit and Morano shoot every scene with a life-or-death urgency – all trembling limbs and determined close ups – that refuse to shy away from the physical realities of a brittle frame faced with hardened professionals who won’t hesitate to pull the trigger, let alone, level a young woman with a body blow to the gut. Stephanie isn’t a damsel in distress by any means, but the film has been almost completely drained of the usual power fantasy element that courses through these tales of vengeance to the point that she begins the film coded at her rock bottom as a sex worker and addict beaten down by losing her whole family in a mysterious plane crash. That choice outlines the film’s occasional jarring limits of empathy, but it’s nonetheless telling in placing the first half of the film closer to melodrama than genre film. Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) Continue Reading →

Will Smith & Martin Lawrence beat Guy Ritchie's latest handily in a robust-for-January weekend. Two new wide releases were no match this weekend for those Bad Boys, who continued to top the domestic box office. Bad Boys for Life dropped only 45% this weekend, a better second-weekend hold than fellow Martin Luther King Jr. weekend box office hit Ride Along. Bad Boys for Life grossed another $34 million this frame for a ten-day domestic total of $120.6 million. Having already nearly doubled its $62.5 million opening weekend and without a barrage of competition over the next month, the sky really is the limit for how high Bad Boys for Life could go at the domestic box office. At the very least, it’ll end its run in the neighborhood of $175-180 million, a significant improvement over the $138.6 million domestic total of Bad Boys II. Thanks to the lack of noteworthy new titles this week, holdover movies saw small weekend to weekend drops this frame. This included 1917, which dipped just 28% in its third weekend of wide release. Charging into battle with another $15.8 million, 1917 has now grossed $103.8  million domestically. Fellow Universal holdover Dolittle actually didn’t hold terribly this frame as it dropped 42%, not too far off from the 37% second-weekend drop of The Nut Job. However, that second-weekend hold still only yielded $12.5 million for all those talking animals. Dolittle currently has amassed a disappointing $44.6 million ten-day domestic haul and is headed for an anemic $65-70 million final domestic total. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqNYrYUiMfg The Gentlemen, meanwhile, opened to $11 million, a result that’s neither dismal nor exceptional. Struggling distributor STX Films could have used the latter type of box office player right now but at least The Gentlemen wasn’t far off from the bows of far more expensive Guy Ritchie directorial efforts like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. or King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. Plus, STX apparently paid just $7 million for U.S. rights for this film, so they’ll make it out alright. Part of the reason The Gentleman didn’t become a breakout hit like past January STX action title Den of Thieves was that its marketing lived and died on its director alone. The trailers and commercials gave no indication to a broader plot or specific characters, they were just evoking prior Ritchie movies (and also, in the posters at least, the Kingsman films). That limited appeal marketing is a key reason why The Gentleman will likely end its domestic run between $30 and $35 million. Continue Reading →

Brandon Cronenberg's second feature is a po-faced collection of genre tropes that wastes its cast and a modest sense of style. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) It’s about 45 minutes into Possessor when its most apt moment comes. A bunch of generically rich people in a generically glossy mansion turn to each other and give a toast. That toast, as it so happens, is “to boredom.” Now, while Brandon Cronenberg’s second movie in eight years isn’t a complete failure, it’s an empty one: a grab bag of sci-fi clichés with a few spurts of violence. The occasional gore gets your attention, sure, but that’s because it’s something on the screen. The production design from Rupert Lazarus does what it sets out to do, but that aim is to recreate older, better sci-fi movies. It’s just… there, and then the color palette generously shifts from pale to neon. These tricks might have an effect if they hadn’t been done so many times before. Continue Reading →

Eugene Kotlyarenko's satire about a rideshare driver who murders for online fame lacks the bite or nuance its premise deserves. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) It was just over six years ago when Sharkeisha went viral for assaulting her friend on camera. The World Star video became a meme goldmine and made headlines, and while it seemed shocking at the time, it obviously wasn’t the last. Six months later in the wake of the Isla Vista massacres, the shooter’s face spread like wildfire as he waged polemics against those he felt had polluted the earth. He sat in his car, camera on his dashboard, and tried to justify his misogyny and racism. Now he has his own Wikipedia page. Of course, the 2010s didn’t birth this sort of infamy, but, like some sort of trickle-down economics, it helped normalize it. YouTube “comedians” like Sam Pepper churned out “prank” videos so he could justify groping women on camera. A few years later, Logan Paul went from Vine to CNN to apologize for a video in which he vlogged a dead body in a Japanese suicide forest. But what about the kids that aren’t famous, the ones that aren’t pulling pranks on the homeless? Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) Continue Reading →

Portrait of a Lady on Fire's Noémie Merlant gets sweet on a theme park ride in this charming if conventionally quirky dramedy. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) It's the oldest story in the book: girl meets theme park ride, girl falls in love with theme park ride, girl's mother tries to tear them apart before realizing that hey, at least the Tilt-A-Whirl never gets a headache. Okay, so it's not the most conventional story out there, but in its basic emotional beats, Zoé Wittock's quirky tale of a socially awkward loner forming a unique psychosexual attraction to a glowing, spinning piece of entertainment machinery feels curiously familiar. But maybe it's that familiarity, glommed onto such an out-there concept, that makes Jumbo worthwhile. The girl in question is Jeanne (Portrait of a Lady on Fire's Noémie Merlant), a bowl-cut-wearing loner who works at a run-down amusement park in Belgium and lives with her mother Margarette (Emmanuelle Bercot). Her mom's a free spirit, perhaps desperately so; with her short jean skirts, jangly necklaces, and devil-may-care attitude, her joie de vivre clashes notably with Jeanne's utter lack of social skills. She's a cool mom of the Mean Girls variety, and her insistence on treating her distinctly adult daughter like a child (right down to packing her lunches) seems to backfire on her when Jeanne, who often seems in a world all her own, suddenly finds herself drawn to the new featured theme park ride: the "Move It", which Jeanne quickly nicknames Jumbo. Continue Reading →

Despite solid performances all around, the episode struggles with tone, plotting & what kind of show it wants to be. Patrick Stewart can still act. That is, perhaps, no revelation. But the strongest moment in the series premiere of Star Trek: Picard comes when the show simply gives him a moment to emote, to condemn, to express his distress and regret over the state of the world. When pushed to explain why he left Starfleet, the fire that fueled The Next Generation smolders up, and the ghosts of Picard’s lost utopia are exercised. He left Starfleet because of xenophobia, because of isolationism, because of an abandonment of the principals of altruism and mercy and acceptance that undergirded the Federation he knew and believed in. That connection to larger ideas -- of a once noble people turning its back on those in need, out of a fear for what opening one’s doors to the world could invite in -- not only imbues this story with a real world resonance; it’s pure Trek. There’s power in one of the great architects of that interstellar community severing his ties when it shrinks from the ideals he holds so dear. But it’s not enough to simply linger with a man meditating on his legacy and the institutions that crumbled on his watch. So we need a mystery box. And we need a terrorist attack from a group of “synths” on Mars that scared the Federation into submission. And we need Romulan refugees resettling in an old Borg cube. And we need Romulan fighters trying to root out and destroy the last of artificial lifeforms. And we need a mysterious young woman -- half-River Tam and half-Daisy Johnson -- to seek out Picard’s help to sort it all out. Continue Reading →

Janicza Bravo's retelling of the 2015 viral Twitter thread boasts great performances and surprisingly solid filmmaking, even if it ends on a shrug. In 2015, 20-year-old stripper A’Ziah “Zola” Wells met a sex worker named Jessica. Both in Detroit at the time, the two bonded over their “shared hoeism” and established something of a rapport. They spent the night dancing together; they made some money. Fast-forward a couple of hours later and Jessica is inviting her to go dance in Miami, purportedly to make thousands of dollars in one night. This, of course, wasn’t half of it. They got involved with pimps, some gang-bangers, murder, attempted suicide, and oodles of prostitution cash—at least according to Wells’ 148-tweet thread that went viral. She’s since gone on the record to say that she turned up some of the story to 11, but guess what? Now there’s a movie credited as “Based on the Tweets by A’Ziah ‘Zola’ King,” bringing you about what you’d expect and mostly for the better. Granted, a lot of this has a lot to do with one's tolerance for ridiculousness. Those intrigued are likely to have fun. It's raunchy, crass, and stylized, and in the pantheon of stranger-than-fiction stories, this is one to stand out. But if you want a jaunt that signals good things to come from its newcomers and further cement the talents of those already established, this is that too. Zola is aptly aggro while also about something: about race, about class, about predation from the preyed upon. And yet, it runs wonderfully. Just make sure you’re ready for a few bumps. Continue Reading →

Pablo Larraín's neon-caked tale of a tattered family is ambitious if uneven eye candy that's bound to get audiences talking. In one of the more fitting opening shots in a while, Ema opens with a traffic light on fire. Behind it stands the title character (Mariana Di Girolamo) with a flamethrower slung over her shoulder and, despite what might sound glib on paper, it’s an apt metaphor for what’s to come. No stopping, no slowing down. If it’s going to go, it’s going to go. Pablo Larraín has dealt with political upheaval and reconstructing at the ruins of one’s personal life before, and now he’s doing all of it at once. In fact, it feels as if parts of his eighth film are to be remembered by viewers as a hallucination. There is, after all, no way some of this stuff actually happened like this, right? The dancing and domestic drama, sure. The spousal sparring, definitely. But the orgies and scorched earth? How about the day-glo visuals that would make for one hell of a rewatch during a fever? It isn’t all “there” throughout. Yet, it manages to present, annihilate, and reconstruct a multitude of fantasies, be they social or political, sexual or familial. After that prologue comes something tangible in comparison. Ema’s husband and leader of her dance company, Gastón (Gael García Bernal), has accidentally set their house on fire. The most pressing collateral damage comes through their adopted son, Polo (Cristián Suárez). He isn’t the most amiable kid, to say the least, and now they’ve got to return him to the agency he came from. Alas, Ema nor Gastón will take full responsibility for his behavior. On second thought, maybe that stoplight was a little more approachable after all. Continue Reading →

Continue Reading →