1420 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Mandarin (Page 39)

On December 14th, 1977, Paramount released Saturday Night Fever. Bolstered by critical acclaim and a bestselling soundtrack, the story of a working-class Brooklynite blazing through discotheques eventually grossed over $94,000,000 worldwide and brought disco to Middle America.   Continue Reading →

Far more frustrating than a disastrous mess is a film annoyingly close to being good or vastly more interesting. That's The Unforgivable, a sloppy retelling of the Sally Wainwright's (Gentleman Jack, Happy Valley) 2009 BBC miniseries.  Continue Reading →

Sometimes, it takes a moment for a movie’s subversive qualities to register. Bold artistic swings can take a moment to settle in. In the case of the new Netflix animated feature Back to the Outback, it wasn’t until after the credits began to roll that I realized something astonishing: Back to the Outback needle drops Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy”, but not Men at Work’s “Down Under.” It’s a rug pull if ever there was one. Continue Reading →

There’s a sort of inflationary issue in the True Crime genre these days. This presents an immediate hurdle to HBO’s new “based on a true story” limited series Landscapers. Continue Reading →

In medieval morality plays, the dramatis personae always includes the likes of Charity, Death, and Temperance, named for the vices or virtues they embody. These characters are vessels, existing somewhere between allegory and literalism and imbued with the social values and anxieties of their time. French surrealist Bruno Dumont (Lil Quinquin, Slack Bay) drags this tradition into the twenty-first century with his latest film, France. Continue Reading →

There’s a song that was popular in the aughts with the lyric “Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end,” and it feels like the most fitting description of The Expanse. It’s a show that has changed identities more times than Sidney Bristow and managed to retain a strong, cohesive narrative, with this season bringing its final arc full circle. Not to the proto-molecule, but to the struggle of the Belters to get their fair shake from Earth and Mars, something Joe Miller (Thomas Jane) dreamed of in the very first episode, something Fred Johnson (Chad Coleman) lived and died for.  Continue Reading →

Mike Wade (Scott Adkins) thought he could make it in Mixed Martial Arts, he really did. He couldn't. With his career definitively over, Mike and his pride have to figure out what to do with themselves. A temporary gig on the crew tearing down Birmingham, Alabama's infamous Castle Heights hospital is better than nothing—it even leads to a friendship with fellow crew member George (Vas Sanchez, Cobra Kai seasons one and two). But Mike's still lost in himself, still processing the fact that his dream is capital letters DONE. And then, on the last day of demolition, mere hours before the explosives are set to go off, Mike finds a $100 bill. A $100 bill that leads to a cool three million in cash, hidden in a wall. Continue Reading →

When it was announced in 1975 that Robert Altman, then riding high on the success of his groundbreaking epic Nashville, had been hired to direct the film version of E.L. Doctorow’s sprawling novel Ragtime, it almost seemed too good to be true. After all, not only was he one of the most inventive American filmmakers of the era, he seemed uniquely qualified to bring the book to the screen. Additionally, with its sprawling cast of characters, multiple storylines, and cheeky mixture of fact and fiction, Nashville now seems like an experiment to test out potential approaches for tackling that book. Continue Reading →

While audiences and critics often bemoan the plethora of sequels and remakes that litter the media landscape, retelling a familiar story isn’t inherently bad. After all, Shakespeare’s most famous play, Romeo and Juliet, was based on earlier works, and in 1957 playwright Arthur Laurents (along with composer Leonard Bernstein and lyricist Stephen Sondheim) adapted the tale into West Side Story, which Robert Wise turned into a classic musical in 1961. Sixty years later, Steven Spielberg has thrown his hat into the ring with a new adaptation of the material. But can he make a familiar plot relevant to the 21st century?  Continue Reading →

Christmas horror exists for the same reason Christmas lingerie does, to slaughter some sacred cows and try for a little “shock the normies” shenanigans. It works, sometimes: consider Silent Night, Deadly Night, which so offended Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert that they read aloud on their show the names of everyone who worked on it, from director down to the catering team, in an effort to publicly shame them. Most of the time they’re egregiously silly, as attempts to make Santa Claus (too many to count), snowmen (the version of Jack Frost that didn’t star Michael Keaton), elves (Elves), and gingerbread men (The Gingerdead Man) scary have fallen flat. Now advent calendars are given a creepy sheen in Patrick Ridremont’s The Advent Calendar, but this time it mostly works. Continue Reading →

Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest won’t be available in wide release until the end of December, so in the meantime here are a handful of movies that also capture that unique lurid sunniness of 70s & 80s Southern California to tide you over. This is that time of year when cineastes shake their fists at New York City and Los Angeles, which, in preparation for awards season, often get hot film releases more than a month before the rest of the country. So is the case with Paul Thomas Anderson’s long-awaited coming of age comedy-drama Licorice Pizza, which is currently in very limited release and unavailable to the rest of the world at large until December 25th. If you’re forced to wait, perhaps consider some of the following films to answer that call for the very strange, almost alien universe of 1970s Southern California, both its sunny facade, and the darkness that lies just beneath the surface. Boogie Nights (New Line Cinema) Boogie Nights (1997, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson) It may be a bit of a cheat to suggest one Anderson movie in place of another, but if you’re looking for the very specific feeling of an L.A. hangout film, you might as well go right to Boogie Nights. Anderson’s first major release, and one that immediately established him as a formidable talent in filmmaking, Boogie Nights is a sprawling comedy-drama about the porn industry, featuring career-best performances by Burt Reynolds and Mark Wahlberg. Reynolds is a porn mogul who treats his cast and crew like a wayward, misbegotten family, as drug abuse and the looming threat of cheaper, less artistic video porn threatens his business. When the film begins in the late 70s, the days are filled with sunshine and promise, but when the 80s come and things start to go sour, it feels like permanent nighttime has fallen. A decadent paradise now feels corrupt and ugly, a place where people go to follow a dream walk right off the edge of a cliff, never to be seen again. Continue Reading →

Across the rugged state of Uttar Pradesh in Northern India, a team of women journalists is bustling. Khabar Lahariya (‘Waves of News’), India’s only women-run newspaper, takes its responsibility to the community very seriously. These dynamic women are out amongst the people, documenting their stories, sharing them, and seeking answers on their behalf, often at great personal risk. Continue Reading →

To quote Mystery Science Theater 3000, “It’s the 80s! Do a lot of coke and vote for Ronald Reagan!” Continue Reading →

Paul Thomas Anderson set out to make a love story with Licorice Pizza, and ended up creating his most joyful flick to date. Seemingly lacking is the dark heart so many of his stories contain, whether it’s in the wildly toxic relationship between designer and muse in Phantom Thread or brutal depictions of loss and loneliness in Magnolia. Instead, Licorice Pizza has a lightness he hasn’t truly approached since Punch-Drunk Love.  Continue Reading →

The best sports movies uplift and invigorate. They often take their formulaic structures to greater heights than what seems achievable. They transcend the films that they’re modeled after, pushing forward different definitions of winners and losers. The classics, Rocky, Hoosiers, A League of Their Own, offer the catharsis that sports can bring; they unite an audience in rapturous applause, even if the underdog doesn’t win the title fight. Unfortunately, Halle Berry’s directorial debut, Bruised, neither elevates nor shifts this formula, resigned to a middling existence likely to get lost among the endless titles shuffling through Netflix.  Continue Reading →

Despite sounding like something one might hesitate to Google outside of a private browser, HBO Max's The Sex Lives of College Girls is a fairly wholesome dramedy about four young women starting off their adult lives as freshmen in college. Admittedly, yes, college freshmen who do have sex, but wholesome just the same. Created by Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble (who also write many of the episodes) TSLoCG quickly overcomes the gimmicky nature of its title.   Continue Reading →

Though their first project made exclusively for Netflix, Robin Robin brings animation studio Aardman back to familiar territory. Aardman’s big claim to fame was Wallace and Gromit shorts released as TV specials like A Grand Day Out or The Wrong Trousers. It may be dropping on a streaming platform rather than on broadcast television, but Robin Robin allows Aardman to once again cram a lot of beautiful animation and charm into 30 minutes of storytelling.   Continue Reading →

Pablo Larraín’s sympathetic “fable” about Diana, Princess of Wales, also compassionately addresses the secret shame of eating disorders. CONTENT WARNING: this article addresses eating disorders and self-injury. See our spoiler-free overview of Spencer here. If Pablo Larraín’s Spencer doesn’t change your mind about royalty being aspirational, then nothing will. Sure, you’ll have access to wealth and fancy clothes, but at the cost of your time and privacy. Every part of your life, every holiday, even “off time” with your family, is scheduled down to the last minute, and everything you do is judged according to tradition and propriety. Maybe it’ll be you who breaks tradition, who makes things different through sheer force of will. But probably not. You’ll be a dress-up doll in a glass case, to be taken out and shown off whenever the occasion calls for it, whether you want to be or not. Continue Reading →

What if they made an MCU show with almost no stakes? Would that be inviting or off-putting? Continue Reading →

Bong (Donnie Yen) is a hero cop. He's bold, decisive, and always gets his man. For good and ill, he's got no patience for the brass and their smirking politicking. And he's got even less patience for those of his peers who grin through the sleaze and kiss up to their superiors anyway. But Bong being a hero isn't the same thing as his being good. His derring-do, damn-it-if-it-doesn't-get-us-our-guy mode and his attempts to pass it on have cost people he's cared for terribly. And that cost isn't something he's fully faced. Continue Reading →

The temperatures are dropping and the stores are getting crowded, which can only mean one thing...it’s time for another installment of Netflix’s holiday cavity-maker...no, not that one. Noth that one either. That’s right, we’re talking Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star, so grab your peppermint martinis and your fuzziest slippers as we delve into the film that begs the question “Is Vanessa Hudgens using Netflix as a vehicle to kiss cute boys?” Fair warning, there are some spoilers ahead.  Continue Reading →