1420 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Mandarin (Page 20)

There’s something to be said for doing the usual thing very well. Sure, we all love to be surprised, to see something new or unique. But the stories we know? The beats we have memorized? There’s an art to making those fun, interesting, or exciting instead of stale. That’s the kind of skill Daisy Jones & The Six has in healthy supply. Continue Reading →

Haunted house stories have always been my favorite. There's something so thrilling and unsettling about a place that feels and reacts to the people that occupy it. As I got older, I learned that haunting could mean many things. It could mean memory. It could mean joy, despair, humor, or fear soaking into the brick and mortar or reflecting our experiences back at us. If you look at it that way, isn't every house haunted? Continue Reading →

If you’re going to do a TV reboot of any James Cameron movie, it might as well be True Lies, his weakest directorial effort that doesn’t involve flying piranhas. The 1994 Arnold Schwarzenegger/Jamie Lee Curtis action-comedy was undercut by the same fidelity to traditionalism that makes other Cameron features enjoyable. His Avatar films feel like riveting fables, for instance, while Titanic had a sweeping nature to its old-school romanticism. Tragically, True Lies was traditional in that it regurgitated stale observations on domestic married life. Then there were the uncomfortable gender and racial stereotypes that were already long outdated before the movie ever hit theaters. Continue Reading →

Old tropes never die; they just fade away, and most not a minute too soon. Among the well-trod movie and T.V. plot devices that have been retired in the past decade is the "split personality," a favorite of mystery and horror, in which a character has a hidden "evil" side that commits nefarious deeds, usually without the "good" side's knowledge. Though its roots can be found in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, its popularity peaked from the 70s well into the 90s, thanks mainly to Florence Rheta Schreiber's Sybil, purportedly a true account of a woman's struggle with split personality disorder, later called multiple personality disorder and now referred to as dissociative identity disorder, or D.I.D. for short.   Continue Reading →

First, some music to set the mood, with thanks to Paul Thomas Anderson. If it's 1985 and you've got something to do—say, going for a hike, cutting class to paint a waterfall with a pal, or retrieving a shipment of cocaine that your terrifying crime lord dad's good-for-nothing pilot dumped before getting himself killed— and it's a quiet day out, then Georgia's Chattahoochee–Oconee National Forest would seem like the place to go. The trees are tall, the grass is green, and the Cocaine Bear is on a murderous rampage. Continue Reading →

The say goes: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But they forgot a couplet: fool me three times, I’ve just watched The Happening.  Continue Reading →

A year before The Village’s release, a copy of the script was stolen and distributed to sites with zero compunction about reviewing stolen materials. If you were on the internet in the naughty aughties and a fan of movies, you know exactly the type. The flurry of reviews that followed riled up readers of such sites. It reached the point that, by the film’s 2004 release, a considerable legion of film nerds already stood poised to carve up a movie they were certain would be a turkey. Continue Reading →

I am sitting in the waiting room at an Urgent Care in Maine, waiting to see someone about a mild allergic reaction to a bee sting. It is August 2003, and I am thirteen years old. While my mother and I wait, I look up at the muted television, and suddenly I can't breathe. The news broadcast is carrying a live feed of what I recognize as the Brooklyn Bridge, and to my horror, thousands of people are streaming across it, trying to get out of New York City. My first thought, before I stammer to my mother that she needs to ask for the remote, that she needs to turn up the volume, that she needs to call our family and see if they're safe, is: It's happening again. We manage to unmute the waiting room television and watch, frightened, as the news breaks of the massive blackout that has paralyzed the Northeast. No one knows the cause, and I convince myself: It is happening again. Continue Reading →

When Christoph Waltz is at his best playing a villain in films like Inglorious Basterds, he presents as gentle and almost naively sweet before revealing an endless capacity for cruelty. At his worst, as with his Blofeld, he presents as all menace and violence and ends up with the effectiveness of a kitten. The former is delightful to behold; the latter can crash an entire film. Unfortunately, The Consultant forces Waltz to be the menacing kitten. Continue Reading →

We’ve all been there. You turn on the radio and an incredible song is playing you’ve never heard before in your life. It’s a soaring rock anthem that chills you with goosebumps and makes you feel alive. Is this an Unforgettable Fire-era U2 song? Is this my new favorite band? The music ends, and the DJ jumps in with something like, “Praise be to God. That was Soul Eternal, with their hit single “Let the Spirit Thrive” only on your Christian Rock station 104.7!”  Continue Reading →

Taking a look at the offerings of Slamdance, Park City's more indie-minded festival. Initially developed in 1995 as an alternative to the more polished version of independent cinema presented at Sundance, the Slamdance Film Festival has evolved over the past 28 years. These days, with a few exceptions, most of Slamdance’s slate could easily compete with those films chosen for that other festival. In fact, several proved better made and more interesting than much of Sundance’s selections. This year’s winner of the Slamdance Grand Jury Prize for Best Narrative Feature, Linh Tran’s Waiting for the Light to Change, proved entirely worthy of the accolades. Set at a lake house in Michigan during winter’s last gasp, the film centers on a getaway trip gone wrong. For high school sweethearts Jay (Sam Straley) and Kim (Joyce Ha), the occasion is a chance to reunite with their friend Amy (Jin Park) after she’s been several hundred miles away in California working on her Masters. Jay’s stepbrother Alex (Erik Barrientos) and Kim’s cousin from China, Lin (Qun Chi), round out the quintet.   Continue Reading →

One of the biggest downsides of making such gorgeous, sprawling fantasy television epics is the agonizing wait between seasons. This is acutely felt at Amazon, in particular, as they seem to have cornered the fantasy television market. Fans are already gnashing for a new season of big-budget offerings like The Wheel of Time, and Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Of course, no show has suffered more for the delays than Carnival Row Season 2. Season 1 aired in 2019, an interminable wait for any dedicated viewer.   Continue Reading →

For some, the hyper-vocal smug handsome guy archetype quickly wears out his welcome. That’s likely why so many seem allergic to Ryan Reynolds these days. For this writer, however, that kind of performer is like catnip. So Joel McHale’s newest sitcom turn as Frank of Seattle’s Animal Control Division is very welcome indeed. Alas, the show wrapped around him sparks more ambivalence. Continue Reading →

Hello Tomorrow! is a lot like its lead character Jack Billings (Billy Crudup). It looks great, for one. For another, it keeps dancing in the hopes that you won’t catch on to exactly how hollow its charms are, even when the music stops. And, like Billings, you almost want Hello Tomorrow! to get away with it. Unfortunately, they’re both running confidence games that they can’t land. Continue Reading →

I love mysteries and crime stories. And it's been a treat these past few years to have so many good detective stories on television (Under the Banner of Heaven, for instance) and in cinemas (Rian Johnson's Benoit Blanc mysteries, the quite charming Confess, Fletch). Would that I could count Neil Jordan's Marlowe among them. I cannot. It's a bad movie, and bad in a very frustrating fashion—no one's phoning it in, but nothing connects outside of a few stray moments save for David Holmes' no-disclaimers excellent score. Continue Reading →

We love movies about con artists, because they’re always glamorous, with attractive, elegantly dressed people slickly seducing their marks. It’s far sexier and intriguing than the sad reality of con artistry, which mostly seems to involve catfishing lonely people on dating sites, or swindling them out of cash on behalf of a made-up charity. No one likes to think about how easy it is to be fooled by someone who’s simply a good liar, it makes more sense that these things happen as part of an elaborate scheme created by a network of seasoned professionals alternately working together and stabbing each other in the back. Apple TV+’s Sharper scratches that particular itch, and looks good doing it, but ultimately feels a bit hollow, and has twists that are far more transparent than they should be. Continue Reading →

As the Marvel Cinematic Universe got bigger and bigger and bigger, it was downright refreshing to see something as fittingly small and low-stakes as the Ant-Man films break up all the universe-ending tension. It was nice; after watching the Avengers punch through an exhausting sea of robotic baddies and set up a bunch of Infinity Stone dross, along came Paul Rudd as a smirking, kinda-dumb thief who lucked his way into a shrinking suit he used on a tech heist. After Thanos snapped half the universe away, we flashed back to good ol' Scott Lang on a caper to bring his mentor Hank Pym's (Michael Douglas) wife Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) back from the Quantum Realm. They were lighter, more carefree, a much-needed sitcom wing of the MCU. Continue Reading →

Though I had in my younger days a pretty low bar as to what funny meant, Adam Sandler was quickly filed under “not for me.” I could take him in bite-sized portions on Saturday Night Live, but his brand of aggressive man-child comedy was far harder to take in feature-length films, particularly when quoted or imitated ad infinitum by men who weren’t professional comedians. To say that I greeted the announcement that he was cast as the leading man in the romantic comedy The Wedding Singer with skepticism would have been an understatement; I fully expected that it would be a “romantic comedy” made strictly for the guys, where the leading man would have to change in no appreciable way to get his co-star to fall madly in love with him. Continue Reading →

At Midnight goes by a formula that really should have worked. Set in some of the most gorgeous spots in Mexico, with two charmingly attractive leads and a premise worthy of a zany 1930s rom-com, At Midnight has everything going for it, but the pieces never quite fit. Writer-director Jonah Feingold’s script borrows from more ambitious romcoms like Jane the Virgin and Notting Hill, with limited success. Continue Reading →

The Harley Quinn animated TV series has always been about subverting expectations. The basic DNA of the show initially seemed so formulaic (a raunchy take on DC Comics superheroes, scandalous!) before morphing into something much more fun and emotionally resonant. Potentially one-joke characters like Bane have become so delightfully nuanced and messy. Continue Reading →

Sundance's Midnight section offers up a trio of films--My Animal, Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls, and Talk to Me--with strong ambitions, if not always executions. The Midnight section at Sundance has always been interesting. It’s a collection of movies who's fates vary greatly. Some end up instant horror classics. Others immediately get lost in the ever-evolving landscape of modern cinema. This year’s lineup is no different. Although the selections featured in this dispatch vary in quality, each features something palpable and commendable.  If you take a horror or queer cinema history class, one of the first things you learn is monster movies of the 1940s and 1950s were heavily queer-coded. Ghastly beings, from vampires to Frankenstein’s monster, were depicted as both dangerous and alluring, misunderstood yet manipulative. The werewolf is likely the best example of the queer monster of the era, traditionally depicted as hating their lycanthropic form and wanting to repress it as much as possible. Continue Reading →