1420 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Mandarin (Page 49)

Adam Leon's foggy mood piece is as endearingly formless as its amnesiac protagonist, a moody reflection on creativity and youth. This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. There's no explicit explanation given for why Alina Reynolds (Vanessa Kirby), a short story writer of some recent renown, finds herself aimlessly wandering the streets of New York City sans memory in Adam Leon's hypnotic Italian Studies. But if anyone was to thrive in the Big Apple in such a remarkable fugue state, it'd be someone so preternaturally attuned to listening and observing as Alina. And that she does for the vast majority of Italian Studies' runtime, creating a listless yet engrossing fever dream about the unexpected gifts of curiosity. Continue Reading →

Mickey Reece's latest eases you into a darkly comic take on the typical possession film, before turning an ambitious 180 into more solemn territory. This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. Oklahoma City-based filmmaker Mickey Reece is as idiosyncratic as he is prolific; Agnes is his twenty-fifth movie in the past decade. And like his previous films (Mickey Reece's Alien, Climate of the Hunter), it's just as hard to categorize. Step into Agnes totally unfamiliar, and you might expect the typical possession-horror endemic of something like The Nun or, well, the obvious nod to Agnes of God. But right from its opening minutes, Agnes sets itself apart with a winningly dark humor; wait even longer still, and its halfway point will surprise you even further. Continue Reading →

If nothing else, the new Disney+ program The Mysterious Benedict Society reaffirms that the hallmarks of Wes Anderson’s works have gone fully mainstream. As its first episode opens with a needle drop of Electric Light Orchestra’s "Livin’ Thing" plays over a montage of various adolescents living in perfectly arranged dollhouse environments, you’d be forgiven for wondering why Tony Hale is providing the opening narration instead of Bob Balaban. Like that Series of Unfortunate Events TV show, Benedict Society shows that Anderson’s style is something even kids are supposed to be aware of nowadays. Continue Reading →

Nearly a year after the series aired on HBO, there is a new episode of I’ll Be Gone In The Dark, a docuseries based on Michelle McNamara’s book of same name. This time around, the epilogue serves as a coda, bringing the story of The Golden State Killer (and the root McNamara’s obsession) full circle.  Continue Reading →

Pregnancy sucks. Though we do it all the time, because otherwise god forbid more women would choose to not subject themselves to it, it seems almost morally wrong to sugarcoat it. Even an “easy” pregnancy is uncomfortable at best, when foods you normally love become repulsive, and even tasks as simple as putting on shoes become a comedy of errors, if your feet can even still fit in them. Childbirth itself is the most excruciating pain the human body can endure, and the effort for such a “natural and beautiful” process can result in vaginal tears that can make future intercourse difficult. Mostly, we just get real weird about pregnant people. Pregnancy is perceived as a communal event, with everyone, even casual friends and co-workers pushing advice and suggestions, while often dismissing (if not shutting down outright), the pregnant person’s needs and concerns. Ilana Glazer and John Lee’s False Positive is a chillingly effective look at an expectant parent’s sharp decline from excitement to unease to paranoid terror. Her fears are brushed off as part of “mommy brain,” but there may be something to it. Continue Reading →

Adapted from Matthew Logelin’s Two Kisses for Maddy: A Memoir of Loss and Love, written/directed by Paul Weitz, and co-written by Dana Schwartz, Fatherhood follows Matt (Kevin Hart), a father forced to raise his daughter alone when his wife Liz (Deborah Ayorinde) dies just after giving birth. Hart’s first big foray into dramatic acting has some heartwarming moments but is too bogged down by an awkward script and lack of dramatic weight. Continue Reading →

Dan Chen's documentary starts as a celebration of Black success but pulls back the curtain to ask more enticing questions about racial inequities in education. This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. We've all seen those viral videos that circulated Instagram and TikTok a couple years back -- thrilling, giddy footage of young Black and Brown students crowded around another student with a laptop, bursting into cheers and elation when that student learns they're accepted into a prestigious Ivy League school. It's a moment of tremendous uplift, especially considering the dramatic divides in college acceptance rates between white and nonwhite students (to say nothing of the Ivy League). Continue Reading →

Isabelle Furhman's relentless lead performance as an obsessive aspiring athlete propels the Tribeca rowing drama forward. “Rhythm is everything,” a crew coach tells Alex (Isabelle Fuhrman) at one point during The Novice, which won awards for best U.S. narrative feature, actress, and cinematography at the Tribeca Festival this week. The coach could well be explaining how this movie, about a college student with an obsessive drive to be the best at varsity rowing, differentiates itself from Black Swan (the movie about a young woman with an obsessive drive to be the best at ballet) or Whiplash (the movie about a young man with an obsessive drive to be the best at jazz drumming) or The Social Network (the movie about a college student with an obsessive drive to be the best at something, even if it winds up destroying the world, in part because there’s no way that he can row crew)—all of which The Novice resembles in content, and sometimes form. Writer-director Lauren Hadaway’s rhythm is her own, distinct from Darren Aronofsky’s, David Fincher’s, and Damien Chazelle’s, the triumvirate of dude directors who made those previous, excellent studies in obsession. Perhaps informed by her own college rowing experience, Hadaway keys into a relentless push-pull, especially as Alex drives herself further, further, and further still before picking herself up off the floor. Continue Reading →

Typically, when we talk about a documentary, we mean a film that captures, preserves, documents a subject. With her new film Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation, director Lisa Immordino Vreeland turns the genre on its head and becomes a nonfiction work about documents themselves. Painstakingly compiled from libraries and archives of all kinds, it gives us profound insights into the lives of two famous twentieth-century literati frenemies, Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, told exclusively in their own words. Continue Reading →

The formula isn’t a new one: the hot, hyper-competent wife who gave up her master’s track to marry the boorish, underachieving man-child. Just add three cameras and some annoying in-laws/neighbors, and you could be watching King of Queens, Everybody Loves Raymond, or (God forbid) According to Jim. Some shows have put a unique spin on the formula, the most successful being Gloria Calderon Kellett’s One Day at a Time reboot. But overall, when you see a three-camera sitcom, you usually know what you’re getting. It’s like gas station coffee or dinner at Applebee’s. It’s just there. Continue Reading →

Two indie romances act as unlikely companion pieces, in both good ways and bad, in this year's Tribeca festival. Mark, Mary & Some Other People and God’s Waiting Room don’t have a lot in common beyond the fact that they’re both tumultuous romances, of a sort, that happen to be playing in the U.S. Narrative Film at this year’s Tribeca Festival. Yet they feel, somehow, insistently compatible, in their later-stage failings moreso than their early-going successes.  They also both raise some provocative questions about indie cinema, albeit not necessarily ones that the filmmakers intended. Mark, Mary & Some Other People asks: has there ever been a good movie about a couple experimenting with an open relationship, swinging, or any other kind of multi-partner sexual situation? It’s been the basis for so many indie comedies that try to offer something transgressive before beating a hasty retreat back to traditionalism that portrays non-monogamy as a kind of hellish obstacle course, even as the characters try their best to articulate why monogamy is unnatural. Continue Reading →

Sean King O'Grady directs a claustrophobic horror film that has a lot of potential, but just misses the mark. We Need to Do Something, the debut feature from Sean King O’Grady, is a horror film that can easily be read on two different levels, though your mileage with it will vary depending on which one you choose to follow. As a straightforward horror yarn, albeit with moments of grotesque black humor thrown in from time to time, it contains a few interesting elements but never finds a way to pull them together into a completely satisfying whole. On the other hand, if one regards the whole enterprise on a more overtly symbolic level, it gains a little more in terms of power and effectiveness. Yet, even then it also tends to lose its way especially once the fairly potent central metaphor gives way to less interesting instances of bloodshed. In either case, it ends on such a clunky and ineffective note that viewers may get the sense that O’Grady and screenwriter Max Booth III have just been screwing with them, a feeling enhanced by the all-too-apt choice for a key musical cue towards the end. Continue Reading →

If you graduated high school before, say, the new millennium, you’ll likely recall such phrases from television as “pinch an inch,” or “a shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, and then a sensible dinner.” You may remember a “diet candy” unfortunately named Ayds. You might even recall, with a grimace, the popular OTC supplement Dexatrim, which was basically speed. All of this was in service of encouraging already thin women to either stay thin, or get even thinner, before it was replaced by the slightly less destructive, but no less obsessive exercise craze spearheaded by celebrities like Cher and Jane Fonda. Annie Weisman’s dark comedy Physical takes place during the early 80s cusp of the transition from fad dieting to fitness, and is a scathing look at ambition and the lengths we go to in order to maintain a very specific image. Continue Reading →

Roshan Sethi (mostly) overcomes the stigma of the dreaded "sheltering in place together" movie with two lovely lead turns and a heaping helping of cultural specificity. This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival. To attend a film festival in 2021 is to endure a veritable wave of films that either a) make a big deal of being filmed under COVID-19 restrictions or b) even worse, try to glom the pandemic onto an existing genre to mine bittersweet drama from our once-in-a-lifetime hell. We've seen plenty of attempts at a "couple sheltering in place learns to live together" story in Locked Down and SXSW's The End of Us, but first-time director Roshan Sethi's 7 Days manages to break the mold in a few important ways. It's not perfect, but it makes use of its particular context to make space for two comic actors long overdue for dramatic (and romantic) consideration. Continue Reading →

Ayten Amin’s intimate drama makes good use out of excellent performances and blocking. The best scene in Souad is when the titular lead (played by Bassant Ahmed) and her sister Rabab (Basmala Elghaiesh) try on makeup and take selfies on top of a roof. The forbidden nature of their activities adds a cloud of danger to their actions, but the primary emotion in this scene is joy. Souad especially revels in the opportunity to put on vibrant lipstick and pursue what she wants. Director Ayten Amin keeps the camera close to both of these girls to create an intimate atmosphere. The quiet but no less powerful joy felt here is beautifully realized. It’s one of several spots in Souad where Amin makes the internal emotions of her characters so thoughtfully realized on-screen. Such moments come in a plot that’s divided up into three sections, each of them named after a principal character in the film. First is Souad, which focuses on this girl juggling her ambitions with the restrictive desires of her parents. Then there’s Rabab, which chronicles her coming to terms with a family tragedy. Finally, there’s Ahmed (Hussein Ghanem), which follows an encounter between Rabab and the titular social media star that Souad has a crush on. Continue Reading →

Samarth Mahajan’s documentary about life on India's borders is engaging, involving, and dense. Too often, filmmakers think they can make a documentary simply by picking a good subject. But the mark of a good documentary is not the importance or controversy of its subject, but the way that its filmmaker convinces their audience that the subject is worth exploring. Samarth Mahajan’s Borderlands accomplishes just this, and does so by pulling off the difficult task of spinning what could be disjointed or arbitrary subjects into a compelling thread that speaks to the history and dynamics of a region. Borderlands focuses on the communities of people who live near the different national borders of India. India is currently bordered by seven different countries – Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, China, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. The history of these borders is vast and dense, consisting of major wars, invasions, imperialist conquest, and political turmoil. Continue Reading →

It can’t be overstated how much the mid-90s belonged to Jim Carrey. Largely a stand-up comedian and supporting actor at first, Carrey shot to stardom thanks to In Living Color, and the grotesque characters he played on it, including the disfigured Fire Marshall Bill, and ponytailed lady bodybuilder Vera de Milo. His leap to leading roles in comedy features was swift and wildly successful, with Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber all released the same year. There hadn’t been a comic actor much like Carrey before, someone who did childish things like pretend to talk out of his butt, but also had a wild look in his eyes that suggested a hint of danger with the body contorting nonsense. Continue Reading →

No Man of God, Amber Sealey's Ted Bundy picture, is well made but does not successfully distinguish itself from its fellow study-of-a-serial-killer films. In the days leading up to the Tribeca premiere of No Man of God, there was a brief dustup in the media when its director, Amber Sealey, did interviews in which she appeared to be taking potshots at recent films that had also been centered on notorious serial killer Ted Bundy for utilizing approaches that she suggested glorified him by depicting him as this brilliant and wildly charismatic character. This didn’t sit well with fellow filmmaker Joe Berlinger, who made Bundy the subject of his Netflix documentary series Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes (2019) and the dramatic film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (2019), in which Bundy was portrayed by no less a figure than one-time teen heartthrob Zac Efron. He responded in kind by suggesting that Sealey was deliberately misrepresenting his work in order to pump up interest in her own film.Both Sealey and Berlinger have their points, I suppose. But as it turns out, this controversy may ultimately prove to be the most interesting thing about No Man of God in the end. Continue Reading →

Lisa Hanawalt’s beloved animated show Tuca & Bertie was prematurely canceled by Netflix back in July 2019. But less than a year later, Adult Swim took a risk by giving the show another life. If the first four episodes of the new season are anything to go on, the show only gets stronger, funnier, and more mature in its sophomore outing. Continue Reading →

Toni Collette has recently made a name for herself in the broader movie-going culture as a queen of creepy, suspense cinema, with her fantastic performances in Ari Aster’s Hereditary and Charlie Kaufman’s dark and whimsical I’m Thinking of Ending Things. It’s fun to see this resurgence of popularity nearly two decades after she gave what I consider her best performance of her career in M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense.  Continue Reading →

It takes almost an hour for Patrick Hughes’ The Hitman’s Wife's Bodyguard to take a break. At around the 52-minute mark, the film goes without dialogue, gunshots/explosions, or a car chase. But this short-lived, relatively still moment lasts less than a minute. Like a person terrified of an awkward silence who just keeps talking and talking to fill the void, Hughes does not let the movie ever take a second to breathe.  Continue Reading →