1420 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Mandarin (Page 46)

This year's Fantasia Festival offered a solid selection of horror, low-fi science fiction, and quietly paced drama. It remains unclear if movies really are back, baby, but the festival circuit continues undaunted. Montreal’s Fantasia Festival leans towards the esoteric and the out there, and this year’s selection in particular offered a strong lineup of quirky comedies, artsy horror and low-key drama. Here’s but a small sampling of some of the more notable features: Perhaps the most promising feature is Hellbender, a genuine group effort by the Adams Family, directed by dad John Adams, co-written by mom Toby Poser and daughter Zelda Adams, and starring Toby, Zelda, and other daughter Lulu Adams. Zelda plays Izzy, a lonely teenager raised in isolation by her mother, who’s convinced her that she is gravely ill with a disorder that prevents her from getting too close to other people. They spend their days alone together, either exploring the woods around their house, or playing catchy grunge rock tunes in a two person band, even wearing costumes despite not having an audience. It’s an idyllic existence, until Izzy starts asking too many questions and pushing too many boundaries, and must learn the truth about her existence. Continue Reading →

Hugh Jackman chases down the ghost of Rebecca Ferguson through futuristic memory tech in Lisa Joy's ponderous, limp tech-noir pastiche. It would only be frustrating to recount exactly how many opportunities writer-director Lisa Joy (Westworld) throws away in her desperate effort to please in Warner Bros.’ latest, Reminiscence.  It’s not just that Joy fails to follow through on the noir tropes she so clearly wants to pay homage to while attempting to subvert, or a cast that features Thandiwe Newton and Hugh Jackman as jaded private gumshoes in a dystopian Miami, not to mention the near-perfect timing of this movie’s release. Noirs didn’t just come into their own in the years around WWII: some of the best examples of the genre came in the wreckage after, as people still flailing in the trauma of the Great Depression and genocide wondered what the hell was next in a new era of peace and prosperity that some found just as terrifying as what preceded it. Continue Reading →

As sparse as it is specific, Nia DaCosta’s Candyman feels like falling into a nightmare. It has the context, but the context feels increasingly shifted. It has the gravity, but the weight at hand seems to fall onto its audience in slow motion. It has a sense of remove but also a sense of intimacy, and as the picture develops, those schisms manage to lean into one another. Bernard Rose’s 1992 original was about the outsider looking in. DaCosta’s, on the other hand, is about the insider being forcibly removed from himself, and it’s a film as attuned to its own legacy as it is the legacy that’s been hoisted upon it. Continue Reading →

Marie Kondo, the popular tidying-up expert, hit her mainstream stride back in 2019 with Netflix’s Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Millions discovered the gleeful Kondo as she exclaimed “I love mess” while teaching families her “KonMari” method of decluttering and organizing their homes. Kondo’s back with her new Netflix series Sparking Joy with Marie Kondo, applying her method not only in homes but also in businesses, relationships, and communities, charming us along the way. Continue Reading →

While Nightmare of the Wolf's storytelling struggles to build momentum, this gorgeously animated prequel to The Witcher has a climax as tremendous as it is vicious. Actions have consequences. Or, as John Wick would put it, "everything's got its price." From an intimate promise to a precisely-worded declaration before a crowd, making a play sends out an echo. And that echo can be anything and everything from magnificent to apocalyptic. In the grim world of The Witcher, the apocalyptic is more likely, whether personal, national, or global. Kwang Il Han's animated feature The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf makes this clear through splendidly choreographed action and a great heaping murder of metaphorical crows coming home to roost.Adapted from the works of author Andrzej Sapkowski, Nightmare of the Wolf is a prequel to the main Witcher stories. A generation before series protagonist Geralt of Rivia walked the continent in the pages of Sapkowski's novels, the Lauren Schmidt Hissrich-run Netflix series, and the acclaimed video game trilogy, his mentor Vesemir (voiced in English by Theo James) was as much a roguish swashbuckler as he was a professional monster hunter. Vesemir is unique among his Witcher peers. As a youth seeking a life beyond indentured servitude, he joined the alchemically mutated monster hunters of his own free will, rather than being selected by or sold to them. Netflix The life of a Witcher is extraordinarily perilous. Even with their sense- and strength-enhancing mutations, expertly crafted weapons, and potent magics, they battle the most lethal creatures in the world for a living—to say nothing of the nightmarish process that goes into transforming a baseline human boy into a Witcher. But, provided they survive these perils, there's money in monster hunting. As much as people may despise Witchers as mutants, their knowledge and skills make them the people to turn to when there's a monster on the loose. And Vesemir's damn good at monster hunting. His glyphs, swords, and potions have won him luxuries he could only dream of as a servant boy.But as much as he'd like to go from hunt to hunt and pleasure to pleasure, the world will not allow Vesemir to while away his days with hot baths and good wine. After years in decline, monsters are resurging—and mutating into new, deadly forms. Elven girls are disappearing. A powerful sorceress and politician named Tetra Gilcrest (voiced by Lara Pulver in English) leads a growing movement to drive the Witchers out of civilization. Gilcrest's political opponent Lady Zerbst (voiced by Mary McDonnell in English) is running what interference she can, but her influence is waning. Secrets of all sorts will soon slither out of their hiding places, and Vesemir will have to face them and all that they bring with them. Continue Reading →

As Fantasia draws to a close, we're catching up on some of the smaller films from the fest before they slip from our fingers into the Montreal air. First up is Indemnity, a surprisingly lean and confident (albeit familiar) action thriller from South Africa's Gambit Films, proof positive that the most interesting action pictures are coming from places outside Hollywood. At its core, it's a meat-and-potatoes conspiracy caper At the center of Indemnity is a traumatized firefighter named Theo Abrams (Jarrid Geduld), still reeling from the mental anguish and PTSD that came from a particularly bad blaze that killed several people around him. Meanwhile, his wife Angie (Nicole Fortuin), an investigative journalist, gets wrapped up in a conspiracy involving defense contractors and shadowy government figures -- and despite failed warnings, she ends up dead in their bed one morning, with Theo suddenly becoming the prime suspect. From there, Theo goes on the run, becoming a tense mix of John Wick and Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, smashing and crashing his way through setpieces and plot beats that would feel familiar to anyone raised on 1990s Hollywood action films. But despite this familiarity, there's a certain charm to Indemnity that makes its pastiche sing a bit more than you'd expect. Maybe it's the committed performance from Geduld (who handles his choreography with a bruiser's brutality), or the comparatively homespun nature of the production. Indemnity does a lot with a little; it clearly doesn't have Hollywood's resources, but it uses those limitations in uniquely charming ways. Dustups in prison vans and elevators have a wincing vitality that only seems to come when a film feels like it's putting its actors in real danger. Continue Reading →

Director Brian Andrew Mendoza and Jason Momoa go back way before their newest collaboration, the Netflix feature Sweet Girl. Not only did Mendoza serve as the cinematographer for Momoa’s 2018 action vehicle Braven, but Mendoza has also produced several other Momoa projects and even made a small appearance in the actor’s 2011 Conan the Barbarian movie! Unfortunately, their rich history together doesn't inspire a greater level of depth (or basic entertainment value) in the latest entry in the Netflix DTV action world, Sweet Girl. Continue Reading →

Hollywood is in something of a conundrum these days. Audiences have by no means lost their taste for a good action flick, but such movies are meant for a theater experience, which has become somewhat limited by necessity. Then there’s the fact that so much of our lust for violence tends to be sated by established properties such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe and its competitors, not to mention other franchises such as the Fast & the Furious and The Purge movies. Continue Reading →

Neill Blomkamp’s films have always been interested in the ways technology allows humanity to leap forward, but not enough for us to overcome our inherent nature. Demonic is his latest and most perfect example of this. Not because of anything that happens in the film, but because watching this dull movie will test audiences’ willpower not to constantly check their phones.  Continue Reading →

Big Little Lies and The Undoing creator David E. Kelley returns to the small screen for another collaboration with Nicole Kidman with Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers, an adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s 2018 bestseller. The book received mixed reviews, though, despite its commercial success, and the series struggles with the shallow nature of its story. Coming on the heels of The White Lotus, another show depicting rich, difficult people at a beautiful location, Kelley struggles to capture the suspense of his previous endeavors. Continue Reading →

It’s strange what grief does to us. Some end up reduced to quivering messes. Others feel inspired to seize their remaining days with vigor. For Beth (Rebecca Hall) in Night House, grieving the suicide of her husband Owen (Evan Jonigkeit) pushes her to sharp retorts and the kind of sarcasm that both obfuscates and reveals pain by day. By night, drinking, attempts to pack up her life, and the ever-growing sense that while Owen’s deceased, he hasn’t exactly left their home, the one he designed and built. Continue Reading →

Another week, another showcase of the latest and greatest from Montreal's Fantasia International Film Fest -- including some real barn-burners this time around from Canada and Japan, respectively. First up is a heaping helping of Southern Gothic menace with Vincent Grashaw's What Josiah Saw, a film that throws its viewers into a kettle of water and slowly turns up the temperature one degree at a time until you don't even realize you're boiling. Set among four diffuse chapters whose connections only truly unravel in the final act, What Josiah Saw tracks the estranged, diasporic Graham family, three children haunted by the suicide of their matriarch decades prior. It was an act presumably precipitated by the various and sundry sins of their despotic, controlling father Josiah (a menacing, magnetic Robert Patrick), a man who's long touted his disbelief in God and who often took his earthly rages out on his family. The kids' childhood traumas bleed through into adulthood: Eli (Nick Stahl) is an unscrupulous criminal fresh out of jail, in debt to an unscrupulous bar owner played by Jake Weber; Mary (Kelli Garner) has ostensibly escaped to normalcy, but her anxieties about potential motherhood create rifts between her and her husband (Tony Hale). Then there's Thomas (Scott Haze), the comparatively simple-minded brother who stayed, the only one still in thrall to Josiah's whims. He seems happy to be there, quietly accepting of his fate as Josiah's lapdog. This becomes especially clear when Josiah announces one morning that his mother came to him in a vision the night before: She's burning in Hell for killing herself, and Josiah knows the only way to save her. The two fix up the house and prepare for guests -- just as Eli and Kelli get word that an oil company is ready to sell their childhood home, the source of all their grief and pain, for loads of money. Continue Reading →

One of the best pieces of recent film writing (other than what can be found at The Spool, of course) is R.S. Benedict’s “Everybody is Beautiful and No One is Horny,” about how superhero movies feature actors ripped and sculpted to within an inch of their lives, and never doing anything else with those amazing bodies except punching villains. There’s been a curious desexualizing of film in general over the past few years, with most of the graphic stuff reserved for whatever sad white people miniseries HBO Max happens to be playing at the moment. Even the chemistry between actors is muted, platonic, as if filmmakers are going out of their way not to offend anyone. Continue Reading →

In an environment where film festivals are struggling to figure out how much access to give both attendees and press, The Montreal-based Fantasia International Film Festival has always been a godsend of genre offerings, especially for American press who want to cover virtually. Here we are with the 25th edition of the fest, and the first few days' worth of films have been well worth it. We'll be covering all month long, so keep an eye out for these dispatches as we go. This year's fest opened with writer/director Julien Knafo's absurdist zombie comedy Brain Freeze, in which an affluent island community off the coast of Quebec suddenly falls prey to an infestation of zombies -- created by the mutant fertilizer from a Monsanto-like agro conglomerate meant to keep the rich golfing all year long. These zombies don't necessarily lust for brains; they just want to bite and murder and spread their numbers. The only folks who don't fall prey, of course, are a slothful teenage boy named André (Iani Bédard), who drinks nothing but Diet Coke, and his baby sister Annie. They run into a paranoiac survivalist security guard named Dan (Roy Dupuis), who hauls around his zombified daughter (Marianne Fortier) in search of a cure. Zombie movies are never short on social commentary, and Knafo certainly has plenty of targets here, from the uncaring companies who do anything to hide accountability to the idleness of the rich and the obliviousness of smartphone-addicted kids. But that obviousness sometimes get in the way of more sophisticated laughs or thrills, Knafo's approach sometimes proving too dry for the Shaun of the Dead-level gags the film's clearly going for. Some jokes work great -- I'll never not laugh anytime someone has to use a severed hand to unlock a phone -- but it's in service to some pretty creaky, unoriginal commentary. (One subplot involving a far-right radio host goes particularly nowhere apart from serving as an unnecessary Greek chorus. And don't get me started on the mute, sexy twin lady corporate assassins.) Continue Reading →

Marvel’s latest Disney+ series, What If…?, seems likely to be the biggest “for the nerds” MCU endeavor since Tony Stark first built Iron Man in a cave with a box of scraps. It should present an interesting test of just how completely Marvel superheroes have permeated our current pop culture landscape. Continue Reading →

When we think back to actors of the 80s, we often think of the Brat Pack, that group of young charismatic stars whose impossible good looks occasionally compensated for middling acting ability. They were cute, and likable, but often lacked that element that makes certain actors more interesting, that sense of danger and mystery. Those actors, like Mickey Rourke, Sean Penn, and Nicolas Cage, didn’t get “Dream Date of the Month” write-ups in Teen Beat, but were more talented, more versatile, and more compelling to watch.  Continue Reading →

KinoKultur is a thematic exploration of the queer, camp, weird, and radical releases Kino Lorber has to offer. Dinosaurs are the ultimate symbols of The Past. They represent deep time, natural history, and the chaos of the wild. It's no wonder that cinema has always been fascinated by them. One of the first exhibitions of what we might now call "cinema" was presented in 1922 by Sherlock Holmes' own Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “footage of moving dinosaurs” from the exhibition at the center of his 1912 novella, The Lost World. From the very beginning of the medium, creatives have sought to reanimate the awesome creatures on the silver screen. When dinosaurs appear on film, they frequently bring with them a host of cultural and ideological anxieties. Dinosaurs threaten humanity's imperial dominance on the planet. When they appear, we become prey. And they remind us that even the mightiest powers can be reduced to dust. Continue Reading →

As if chomping at the bit to show its true self, Annette immediately disrobes. Director Leos Carax, off-screen during the opening credits, tells the audience to stay silent. Audio tracks spray over shots of Los Angeles and, in a studio, he asks his musicians, “So, may we start?” He’s now speaking not to us but Ron Mael and Russell Mael of Sparks. Both of them share a story by credit, the latter having written the screenplay, and already, the film has dived feet first into its own joke. But Carax’s latest doesn’t just strip itself naked. It takes off its own skin, as a rock opera and as a movie. Continue Reading →

Vivo, the third Sony Pictures Animation film on Netflix this year, certainly opens on a promising note. We get a full scope of a pristine, modern Cuban setting, awash in warm, vibrant colors and a more textured approach to characters compared to their previous, still-admirable effort, Wish Dragon, though still a milestone away from The Mitchells vs. the Machines, one of the best movies of the entire year. Then, well, Lin-Manuel Miranda starts rapping. Continue Reading →

In Tom McCarthy’s Stillwater, Matt Damon wears a baseball hat. He notches his sunglasses, a pair of knockoff Oakleys, on the brim of his cap; the rest of his body is covered by an assortment of denim, flannel, plaid and Carhartt products. These costume choices are the movie’s way of telling us that Damon’s character, Bill Baker, is a “regular guy.” Unfortunately, outside of his wardrobe, there’s nothing that really defines Bill, and even less that makes Stillwater worth watching.  Continue Reading →

Let me start by saying this: Evangelion 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time is the best film I have seen in 2021 so far. It's a gorgeously animated conclusion to one of 20th and 21st-century science fiction's great works. It executes both its quiet, still moments and its grand setpieces with care and precision. The voice cast (who have been playing these roles for decades, going back to the original 1995 television series Neon Genesis Evangelion) and the animation team give the cast an excellently detailed life and liveliness. 3.0+1.0's editing—particularly during its extended, tone-jumping climax—is downright sublime. The imagery? To paraphrase Sam Peckinpah, I will not be forgetting what I've seen in Evangelion 3.0+1.0 any time soon. I do not think I could. From a ruined piece of pre-Impact infrastructure twirling in a patch of broken gravity to one of the titular gargantuan combat androids going to work on a swarm of bizarre, disturbing opponents, it's indelible. Whether familiar or bizarre, beautiful or horrifying, 3.0+1.0's imagery is, without fail, flabbergasting. Continue Reading →