1420 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Mandarin (Page 29)

It’s well past time for a mainstream horror movie that addresses the very real dangers the LGBTQIA+ community faces. Self-proclaimed “allies” in particular need to see what it’s like to have your bodily autonomy, your right to love, and even your right just to live peacefully put at constant risk, by people who think they’re acting on the side of righteousness and virtue. Continue Reading →

Five strangers with deadly ambitions sit on a train speeding from Tokyo to Kyoto in the middle of the night, all connected by one mystery yet to be solved. It sounds like the setup for a modern Agatha Christie whodunit, but make those strangers dangerous hitmen, and switch out the intrigue with violent mayhem, and you get Bullet Train. Continue Reading →

A look back at the use of chimpanzees as clowns & sidekicks for humans, & how it relates to a strange & haunting subplot of Jordan Peele's hit sci-fi horror. Note: this article contains spoilers for Nope. Please read Jon Negroni’s spoiler-free review here. If you haven’t seen Nope yet, you might be a little puzzled by references to a character named Gordy, especially once you learn that Gordy is a chimpanzee. It’s understandable: there’s not so much of a glimpse of a chimpanzee in any of the promotional material for Nope, and nothing that happens in its trailers seems to suggest that a chimpanzee will play any part in it. Continue Reading →

Ron Howard has been directing feature films for almost 45 years now (his latest, Thirteen Lives, has just opened) and I think most would agree that he long ago proved himself behind the camera—he works well with actors, tells his stories cleanly and efficiently and, barring outliers like How the Grinch Stole Christmas or Hillbilly Elegy, even his films that don’t quite work never go completely off the rails into complete disasterdom. If there is a flaw to Howard’s method, it is that there is never a personal touch or sensibility to most of his films—even the most ardent auteurist would struggle to find any sort of artistic throughline connecting his work. Sure, there is something to be said for solid, sensible craftsmanship, but Howard as a filmmaker could stand to let his artistic freak flag fly once in a while.  Continue Reading →

It's fitting, really, that this year's Sundance Film Festival -- one originally planned as a hybrid festival only to go fully online due to rising COVID numbers -- was the venue by which Joe Hunting's documentary We Met in Virtual Reality premiered. After all, it's a slice-of-life doc created (and filmed) entirely online, capturing the lives, joys, and heartaches of an inviting cross-section of people who live much of their social lives on the virtual reality platform VRChat. Continue Reading →

Being a pet owner can enrich your life and open your heart to certain movies you may otherwise ignore. If I had watched DC’s new animated children’s film, League of Super-Pets, before being a proud doggy dad, I would have rolled my eyes. I likely would’ve declared it a blatant cash grab that distracts kids with cute talking animals, loud explosions, mediocre animation, and plenty of needle drops that date the film quicker than Shrek.  Continue Reading →

Lena Dunham’s latest feature, Sharp Stick, combines her best and worst tendencies. It’s a coming-of-age dramedy about a young woman’s journey of sexual and self-discovery handled with refreshing tenderness and understanding. But it’s also a story that sees Dunham unwisely wading into waters out of her depth, drowning her characters in quirky affectation that distracts from her purpose. Where the film goes is somewhere surprising, affirming, and even beautiful. The issue is its route.  Continue Reading →

The beauty of Better Call Saul is that it can generate an equal amount of excitement from a low-rent scheme to rob an Omaha department store as it can a million dollar plan to ruin a legal lion’s career. After five seasons of teases, the series finally presents the adventures of Gene Takovic (Bob Odenkirk), a simple Cinnabon manager in Nebraska. And somehow, it’s almost as thrilling as any byzantine plot from Jimmy McGill or amoral ploy from Saul Goodman. Continue Reading →

Remember the early days of the pandemic? The times in March 2020 when the world was in denial of the catastrophe heading our way? That’s the setting of Alone Together, Katie Holmes’s newest film, which she wrote and directed in addition to starring in. It’s a strong second directorial feature from Holmes, even if her script leans on some overused rom-com tropes.   Continue Reading →

We look at the return of a tokusatsu giant to the big screen, a feature-film extension of a legendary Taiwanese series, and a South Korean romp about a man and his dead dad's haunted car. (This dispatch is part of our 2022 Fantasia Film Festival coverage.) 2016's Shin Godzilla felt like such a breath of fresh air for a creature and a genre that'd long run around in circles. Hot off the back of America's take on the MonsterVerse, which traded allegory for AAA-budget Hollywood spectacle, Shinji Higuchi and Hideaki Anno reinvented the character in a huge, sprawling disaster flick that was just as much about the inefficacy of Japan's bureaucracy to handle existential threats as it was an eye-opening spectacle. Now, the pair are back (Higuchi directing, Anno writing) to adapt another classic '60s kaiju staple for the modern day with Shin Ultraman, and boy, it's a winner. Continue Reading →

A thriller with a friendship at its core, a touching story about the struggle to fit in, and a remastered 70s camp drama are just a few of the unique offerings at this year's Fantasia Film Festival. (This dispatch is part of our 2022 Fantasia Film Festival coverage.) The Fantasia Film Festival returns for another year of international genre excellence. For my first dispatch, I’m thrilled to present three films that offer human, queer, and tantalizing twists on classic film structure. Each, in their way, brings something unique to what would be an otherwise mundane story that elevates them into something captivating and worth sharing. Continue Reading →

Tuca & Bertie Season 3 finds Tuca (Tiffany Haddish) and Bertie (Ali Wong) rebuilding their lives in the season two Bird Town flooding and moss infestation aftermath. They’ve got promising leads professionally with new jobs on the horizon. Plus, they’re both in solid relations. Bertie with adorkable long-term boyfriend Speckle (Steven Yeun) and Tuca’s new beau Figgy (Matthew Rhys). The two bird besties might be leveling up in careers and personal life, but there’s always some drama waiting around the corner to pounce in and disrupt their technicolor dreams.  Continue Reading →

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 →

The Kung Fu Panda universe is no stranger to the small screen. Previously, Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness and Kung Fu Panda: The Paws of Destiny ensured that audiences could watch more antics of Po the Panda in the comfort of their home. But the newest expansion of this franchise, the Netflix program Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight, breaks new ground by being the first of these shows to feature Jack Black reprising the role as Po.  Continue Reading →

There’s no kind way to say this, so let’s get it out of the way at the top: Netflix’s production of Persuasion thinks you’re stupid. Despite being an adaptation of Jane Austen’s classic novel, this film has faith in neither its source material, nor its audience.  Continue Reading →

What is it about living through cataclysmic times that makes us crave apocalyptic entertainment? Are we just clinging to the hope that humanity gets plucky and figures shit out before it’s too late? AMC’s new sci-fi adventure Moonhaven, an uneven but…well, plucky creation of Peter Ocko tries to answer just that. Set some 200 years in the future, Moonhaven shows humanity at two very divergent stages. While things like climate change, war, famine, and plagues continue to rage on unchecked on the Earth, it’s forever Opposite Day on the Moon, where a small chunk of humanity has been living under the protective eye of IO, an artificial intelligence tasked with helping those people fix Earth, somehow. Continue Reading →

Following the 1966 death of Walt Disney, the people charged with running the film studio bearing his name went into an extended period of creative paralysis that came very close to running it into the ground. So obsessed with the notion of “What would Walt do?” that they wound up repeating formulas that had worked before, it resulted in a forgettable series of films involving place-kicking mules, overly hirsute political candidates and the further adventures of Herbie the Love Bug. As for their once-vaunted animation division, that had become increasingly moribund, because the style of animation that made Disney famous was now perceived as being too expensive and time-consuming to be profitable. Continue Reading →

A note: This movie contains several scenes of sexual assault, which, though not graphic, are intense and should be handled with caution.  Continue Reading →

Despite society’s conviction that love is everlasting, a relationship is, in fact, a fragile thing. With a single act, you can sever a bond that takes years to create. As such, the tenuous nature of romantic love is a constant source of inspiration for stories across all media. Continue Reading →

In 2015, documentarian Todd Schramke began following a group of anarchists led by Jeff Berwick, who soon became an online personality pushing non-traditional, to say the least, ideas. Berwick, an entrepreneur-turned-libertarian-turned-cryptoinvestor, fell in love with this idea of anarchy, the decentralization of banking, the unschooling movement, and most essentially, with Acapulco, Mexico. Schramke followed Berwick and his growing crowd of supporters for the following six years, and HBO’s The Anarchists resulted from that half-decade of time spent. With endless footage and dozens of big personalities, Schramke armed himself to weave a great story, only to end up telling one that feels oddly--and awfully--ordinary.   Continue Reading →