1420 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Mandarin (Page 41)

It’s common to think about each of us having a “role” in society, with costumes, positions, stages, and actions to be performed. Mexican director Alonso Ruizopalacios (Gueros, Museo) deputizes this idea in A Cop Movie, which investigates policing and the line between fiction and documentary with political precision. Continue Reading →

It is difficult to imagine the people who, after Dexter’s largely despised series finale, felt that more Dexter would solve the problem. When you recall the last season of Dexter was also largely despised, it becomes even more challenging. Add in that, for many, the writing on the wall started even earlier, and it becomes damn near impossible. And yet, here is Dexter: New Blood. Continue Reading →

I must admit something upfront: I am incapable of fairly reviewing a Tom Hanks movie. I simply love him too much. Not in a thirst Tweet way, but rather in an “America’s Dad” way. I would trust him to sell me a car, even if he had never sold a car before in his life. He simply cannot do any wrong in my eyes. While it’s true that Hanks hasn’t appeared in a film that, on its own merits, was more than just “fine” since 2013’s Captain Phillips, even his recent work remains at least watchable, thanks to the warmth and humanity he brings to every performance. So too does he in Finch, Miguel Sapochnik’s sci-fi drama that wins no points for originality, but still works, thanks (T. Hanks?) to its star.  Continue Reading →

I wasn’t alive during the days of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Muhammad Ali, and Jim Brown’s stands against violent forms of discrimination. Therefore, Colin Kaepernick’s refusal to back down from his principles despite obvious NFL blacklisting makes him the closest my generation has to a genuinely revolutionary athlete. In refusing to stand for the national anthem in the wake of racial discrimination and murder by the U.S. Government, Kaepernick demonstrated he is who certain athletes (I’m looking at you, Kyrie Irving) think they are.  Continue Reading →

Occupied France. 1941. The egomaniacal, romantic SS Colonel Von Brückner (Daniel Bernhardt) and his supposed French mistress Marie (Nina Bergman) are ambushed by the Resistance on their way to secret away gold pilfered from Von Brückner’s superiors. They survive. Continue Reading →

With her abuser out of her life, one would think it’d be easier for Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) to move from day to day. In some ways, it is; she’s no longer directly in the clutches of Anthony’s (Tom Burke) patterns of insults, flattery, and disposal. He’s now dead as a result of his drug addiction. She, however, still lives with his memory. She discusses him with her psychologist (Gail Ferguson) just as often as others refer to his passing as a “loss.” But he’s still there: in her mind, in her health, in her art. Now, in The Souvenir Part II, Julie is finalizing her graduation film for school, repurposing and compartmentalizing her emotions into her work. Continue Reading →

First things first. Just to be very clear, Animaniacs remains a funny show. The writing staff led by showrunner Wellesley Wild is undoubtedly clever. They can turn a phrase. They can develop an idea. Likewise, the voice talents, especially the trio behind Dot (Tress MacNeille), Wakko (Jess Harnell), and Yakko (Rob Paulsen, who also provides Pinky’s voice), are quite funny and haven’t lost their gift for motormouthed gab in the years since the first series. Continue Reading →

The vampire has been a symbol of many things throughout history: pestilence, addiction, and even physical desire. But one of their most enduring symbolic roles is the aristocratic vampire as an allegory for the predatory wealthy. Writer/director David Verbeek adds to this rich history of parasitic oligarchs with his latest film, Dead & Beautiful. Unfortunately, this entry into the undead oeuvre lacks the bite needed to become an immortal classic.   Continue Reading →

It's doubtful Dickinson Season 3 will convert any new subscribers to AppleTV+. Still, the final season provides a strong salute to wartime poet Emily Dickinson. Don't think of Dickinson in those terms? You're hardly alone.  Continue Reading →

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The action all-star pushes his limits in James Nunn's tense, daring single-shot tactical shooter. Present day. Present time. A helicopter arrives on an island, home to a soon-to-be-shuttered US prison. Intelligence analyst Zoe Anderson (Ashley Greene Khoury, Accident Man) is in the field for the first time. She has come to the island to retrieve a prisoner, Amin Mansour (Waleed Elgadi, Mosul) who she believes knows the location of a dirty bomb set to go off in Washington. Anderson is accompanied by a small team of Navy SEALS, led by the cooly professional Lieutenant Jake Harris (Scott Adkins). Standing in Anderson and Harris' way is the arrogant prison chief Jack Yorke (Ryan Phillippe, The Way of the Gun), who'd rather brutalize the men in his custody to slake his desire for vengeance than do his damn job. It's about then that a joint army of Islamist radicals and bloodthirsty mercenaries attack and everything goes right to hell. Led by the cunning, sadistic, and supposed-to-have-been-dead French-Algerian freelancer Hakim Charef (UFC fighter Jess Liaudin), this vicious crew of mega-creeps wants Mansour dead. Boxed in, Anderson, Harris, his team (Emmanuel Imani, Dino Kelly, and Jack Parr) and prison staffer Tom Shields (Terence Maynard, The Witcher) must fight to re-establish contact with the outside world and keep Mansour alive. And Mansour, a grieving man with both reason to despise the U.S. and far more of a conscience than Charef, must do whatever he can to survive. Continue Reading →

Los Angeles. 2032. 13 years after Blade Runner Rick Deckard completed his last job for the LAPD. Ten years after the nuclear blackout that wiped the city's history clean. Four years before the brilliant but utterly vicious industrialist Niander Wallace will successfully lobby for the re-legalization of the artificial humanoids called Replicants. Seventeen years before Replicant Blade Runner KD6-3.7 will be assigned to retire rogue Replicant Sapper Morton. A young woman named Elle (voiced by Jessica Henwick of the upcoming The Matrix Resurrections) wakes up in the back of an automated shipping truck. Her memory is a shamble. The only clues she has to her identity are a mysterious device she cannot unlock, inexplicable and ferocious combat skills, and a beautiful tattoo of a black lotus on her back. Continue Reading →

When Star Trek: Deep Space Nine debuted in 1993, it was different. No longer were our heroes aboard Starfleet’s flagship. No longer did they hail exclusively from the Federation. No longer would they harmoniously explore the galaxy with a different destination every week. Instead, they were stationed on a backwater alien refinery. The show’s major players were a mix of Starfleet officers, local veterans, and civilian operators. The station was the destination, and the stories came from the various visitors passing through. Continue Reading →

Has any other director in recent years had as frustrating a creative decline as Edgar Wright? Discounting his feature debut—the 1995, no-budget A Fistful of Fingers—his streak was white-hot. Two series of Spaced both developed and prefaced his earnest eye for nerd culture, leading up to what would become his Cornetto Trilogy. His work was so loving, so finely tuned, and, especially in the case of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, some of the most pop-culturally keen around. However, Baby Driver couldn’t help but sit in neutral; it was a pet project missing heart. With that out of the way, perhaps there was something more substantial to come next. Continue Reading →

Season one of Selena + Chef found Selena Gomez picking up the basic skills of cooking during quarantine. Season two followed Gomez as she looked to advance her skills. Season three of Selena + Chef shows us a confident Gomez in the kitchen, exclaiming in episode one “We’re not playing on season three - we’re doing it!” Continue Reading →

For acclaimed actress turned first-time writer-director Rebecca Hall, her debut feature Passing is more than her first furtive steps into another facet of her expanding career. It's a deeply personal odyssey, one rooted in her own questions about her racial identity: Hall, whose grandmother is part-Black and whose mother has Black, Native American, and Dutch ancestry, has presented as white for much of her career. With this, her adaptation of the 1929 novella of the same name by Nella Larson, Hall gets to explore those myriad facets of herself, as well as the broader implications the phenomenon of 'passing' has for all of us in our respective negotiations with our identity. Continue Reading →

Sports and sports-related entertainment is not a topic I’m especially well versed in, so color me surprised that I enjoyed Apple TV’s Swagger as much as I did. Produced by NBA superstar Kevin Durant, the series is loosely based on his own life and struggles coming up in the sport. Swagger spends as much time off the court as on, as we follow the life lessons of young Jace Carson (newcomer Isaiah R. Hill).   Continue Reading →

It's funny to think about the mission creep that's escalated within the Marvel Cinematic Universe since its debut in 2008 with the first Iron Man. Watching Eternals, you can't help but wonder that all of this started, as Jeff Bridges once quipped, in a cave with a box of scraps. Now, with Thanos and the events of Eternals, the MCU truly delves into the cosmic -- the vast span of space and time, and the very fabric of the universe at stake. And yet, the bigger and longer the MCU grows (heh), the more weightless it all feels; there's heaps of ambition at play in Marvel's latest, at least within the meager confines of Kevin Feige's franchise stewardship, but its reach exceeds its grasp. Continue Reading →

There are 102.8 miles of track to Chicago’s elevated transit system. For its riders, The 'L' opens up so many possibilities that we often forget it's a closed circuit. The Loop, which circles downtown, is self-contained—but ride any train to the end of the line and you'll soon find yourself going backward. Continue Reading →

Five of the Chicago International Film Festival's fiction narrative features find truth through craft and performance. The CIFF films considered here disavow any easy distinctions between fiction and nonfiction. All five of these films reach profound emotional, spiritual, and/or systemic truths by adding performance and cinematic layers. The House of Snails begins to unwind the line by playing with fiction, folklore, and reality. Spencer builds on this by making a folkloric fiction about a true subject. The Tsugua Diaries challenges the boundaries between fiction and documentary. Acts of Love goes further and collapses them altogether. Finally, A Cop Movie politicizes these strategies and shows how they can expose ugly systemic truths. Continue Reading →

Invasion, Apple TV+’s newest foray into sci-fi television, follows “ordinary” people around the world as an alien force, well, invades. Created by Simon Kinberg (who writes and directs several episodes) and David Weil (who also created Amazon’s Hunters), Invasion is an engaging slow-burn of a thriller series, building character and atmosphere with the ever-looming threat of an unforeseen enemy. Continue Reading →