1420 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Mandarin (Page 35)

For about five years, beginning in the late aughts and ending in the early teens, a favorite plot component emerged. Increasingly, the bad guy was getting captured about halfway through, and then it turning out it was. His. Plan. All. Along! Some, like The Dark Knight and Skyfall, used it to great effect. Others…less so. Continue Reading →

Although his name and efforts are often diminished or ignored by many histories of 1970s American cinema, Ralph Bakshi was one of the most audacious filmmakers of the era. Not only did his films tackle issues regarding race, sex, and class in graphic and sometimes profane ways, he did so within the framework of feature animation—a format that many, particularly in the U.S., equated almost entirely with family entertainment.   Continue Reading →

Known for blending horror and comedy to varying success, writer/director Richard Bates, Jr. looks to find wit and wisdom through a coven of witches in King Knight, his latest collaboration with actor Matthew Gray Gubler. As the head of the coven, Thorn (Gubler), along with his high priestess partner Willow (Angela Sarafyan), give three couples advice, organize Beltane and other holidays, and collectively recognize the power of French star Juliette Binoche. Following the coven after Thorn’s secretive lacrosse-laden past is revealed, Bates’s film meanders along a path of hallucinations, low stakes interactions, and a high school reunion that neither satisfies nor energizes a project that outstays its initial, quirky welcome. Continue Reading →

Try as they may (as of today we’re up to the ninth film in the series), no other film in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise has come close to the original. Oh, a few of them have been entertaining in their own bananas way, like part 2, but no sequel, remake, or origin story can recreate the bleak grittiness of the first film, no matter how many new members of the cannibalistic Sawyer family they add to it. Continue Reading →

The love of an animal can be transformative. The mix of companionship and responsibility that taking care of a pet entails can help create stability in an otherwise chaotic life. So it's no surprise that several movies explore the relationship between humans and canines. Continue Reading →

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Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A treasure hunter walks into a Papa John's franchise in the middle of beautiful Barcelona. He’s there to unlock a complicated puzzle in the hopes of getting one step closer to finding the gold lost during the epic journey of Ferdinand Magellan 500 years prior. The man is Victor “Sully” Sullivan, played by Mark Wahlberg, who appears to be going through the motions without any real fun or excitement, just like this movie. Continue Reading →

When we talk about what movies “couldn’t be made today,” it’s less about what tweaks would need to be employed to make them for a contemporary audience, and more about whining that P.C. culture has killed comedy and it’s never coming back. It also doesn’t take into account that pre-2000s comedy wasn’t entirely a lawless land of misogyny and casual homophobia. There are quite a few films from that era that could easily be made today, just as they were then, with virtually no tweaking or updating for an audience of “snowflakes” that doesn’t actually exist. One of those was Penelope Spheeris’s Wayne’s World, released thirty years ago today. Continue Reading →

Sean Ellis' werewolf period piece is a humorless medley of conflicting approaches that somehow ends up dull. (This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, under the film's original title "Eight for Silver." We're re-releasing it to coincide with its new title and wider release date.) It’s a well-known shorthand to criticize a movie by saying that it “should have been a short film.” Depending on whom you ask, it might even be a cliché. How’s this as a change of pace? Sean Ellis’ The Cursed shouldn’t have been a short film as much as it should have been a short story. If it were on the page, its medley of approaches probably would have worked in its favor instead of against it. It would have left more to the imagination instead of what we get here. Most importantly, its inability to choose a cohesive method to suspense wouldn’t have been so glaring. For those looking for a slow burn, this werewolf tale is too reliant on cheap jump scares. For those in the mood for gore and a good time, it’s far too slow—stagnant, even. Add in its lack of self-awareness for what’s an inherently silly script and you get something that’s just dull. Continue Reading →

Young love: Sometimes it crashes into us like lapping waves hitting a picturesque beach. Other times, it’s a car wreck, leaving a mess in its wake. The In Between, Paramount+’s new teen supernatural romance, is the latter - a subpar film that can’t be resuscitated, even at the best attempts of Joey King and a solid supporting cast. Continue Reading →

There's been a complete dearth of quality rom-coms in recent years, to the point that the bonkers premise for Marry Me probably has the casual viewer raising an eyebrow. Owen Wilson and Jennifer Lopez in a rom-com is the kind of elevator pitch that would probably headline in a movie in the mid-aughts, but viewers could hardly be blamed for assuming it falls somewhere between “fine” and “unwatchable disaster”. Yet despite the odds (and Wilson’s extremely unfortunate haircut), Marry Me is actually a delight.   Continue Reading →

Over the course of the first three episodes of Bel-Air—Peacock's downbeat reimagining of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as a modern, self-serious prestige-adjacent drama flipping the script on the original comedy's inherently sulky premise—new kid on the block Will Smith (played with smooth-as-ever charm by Jabari Banks) plays basketball, dodges a gang hit, and contends with an obnoxious cousin who is seemingly his complete opposite. So is this dramatization really all that different from the culturally-defining '90s sitcom? The answer, like the show itself, is complicated. Continue Reading →

After shopping the BigBug’s script around for four years, writer and director Jean-Pierre Jeunet finally found a home for his absurdist robot-centric comedy with Netflix in January 2020. Cue the pandemic just a few months later. Unfortunately, the ensuing delay lasted just long enough for Jeunet to add some of the most cringe-worthy Covid mentions I’ve seen to date.  Continue Reading →

Even if you’re not familiar with Agatha Christie’s vast body of works—she wrote sixty-six detective novels alone—you’ve probably heard of Hercule Poirot. He’s the world’s most famous literary detective, next to Sherlock Holmes. Death on the Nile marks Kenneth Branagh’s second outing directing one of Christie’s Poirot stories and starring as the mustachioed detective himself, following 2017’s tepidly received Murder on the Orient Express. Dogged by COVID-19 delays and scandals surrounding star Armie Hammer, Death on the Nile sometimes feels like it’s scrambling to justify its own existence, and only half-succeeds. Continue Reading →

Throughout Suspicion, Rob Williams’s English language adaptation of False Flag, teases of revelations and insights dangle in front of the audience. These remain teases. Even when the show’s final twist hits, it reveals new information without deepening our understanding of the characters. Continue Reading →

YA literature often gets a bad rap for being frivolous and superficial, caught up in meaningless fluff like who to go to the big prom with, or what kind of makeover you need in order to get the boy you like to pay attention to you. In reality, much of YA lit has a surprisingly dark streak, and is more obsessed with death and dying than Stephen King. Take a look at what novels are burning up the teen reader charts, and they’re more likely than not to feature a protagonist facing, if not their own death, then the death of a parent, a friend, or a significant other. They may still end up stuck having to choose between two people to go to the prom with, but not until after they’re able to work through their grief and learn to move on. Continue Reading →

Some of the best thrillers have to do with the home. Night House, The Invisible Man, and series like Haunting of Bly Manor and American Horror Story tap into that vein of particular terror that comes with having your safety, your shelter violated. It quite literally hits you where you live. Continue Reading →

KinoKultur is a thematic exploration of the queer, camp, weird, and radical releases Kino Lorber has to offer. Caper films are competitions. Outside of the obvious cops and robbers struggle, they, more importantly, dispute the value of things and who deserves to own them. While classically most capers are individuals vs institutions, there is a subgenre of capers that features an Odd Couple pair of thieves in a competitive mentorship and centers the push and pull between them. Semi-recent entries like Entrapment (1999) and The Score (2001) are examples where the struggle between the thieves is a generational one with the old and new guards having to learn from each other. Couched within the larger struggles of value and property, these interpersonal battles between thieves play out an additional competition over cultural differences and ideas. Continue Reading →

For many, turning thirty marks the end of your youth. A lot of people believe that you should have yourself figured out and should be on a set path by the time you complete your third decade of life. However, life often doesn’t work like that, and it’s not uncommon for people to “find themselves” well into their thirties or beyond.  Continue Reading →

The history of movies is marked by unlikely duos. Whether it’s in vintage comedy double-acts like Abbott and Costello or the lead characters in classic movies like Paper Moon, cinema has long been defined by oddball pairings that just shouldn’t be. On paper, you couldn’t get a better continuation of that theme than a movie called The Wolf and the Lion, which focuses on the friendship between the titular animals.  Unfortunately, despite the promising set-up, this new family movie proves to be a forgettable entry in the canon of unlikely duo cinema. Continue Reading →