1420 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Mandarin (Page 59)

Young millennials and xennials appear in slow motion, one after another, in front of a bright pink wall—tossing their heads back in faux laughter, leaping into the air, resting hands on their hips—all to capture the perfect pic for the ‘gram. Narration lets us know that all these people snapping all these pics in front of the perfect Pepto-Bismol pink wall have made it one of the single most popular tourist attractions in Los Angeles. That’s right. A wall. Not a wall like the Great Wall of China or the Berlin Wall, but the wall of a Paul Smith, a boutique that sells $700 blazers and $150 T-shirts. Continue Reading →

The Michael Greyeyes-starring Sundance debut announces Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr. as an exciting new filmmaker. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) The never-ending cycle of violence and abuse is at the center of Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s directorial debut Wild Indian. Part drama thriller and part character study of historical and generational trauma, Wild Indian announces Corbine as an exciting new voice. His vision is bold, confidently going to places that are dark and unconventional, with a masterful cinematic language often only found in the works of a seasoned filmmaker. His writing is airless, tightening the tension of the story up to eleven. It’s a phenomenal debut in the truest sense. Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Continue Reading →

The gimmick to Kevin Macdonald's worldwide snapshot of 24 hours has lost its novelty this deep into the social media age. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) A little over 10 years ago, Kevin Macdonald & Zillah Bowes directed a documentary fully comprised of footage that people across the world recorded over one day. That was July 24, 2010, and the documentary, Life in a Day, premiered that following January. On July 25 of last year, the same production method went into effect to create Life in a Day 2020. Of course, 2020 was a much different year. Hell, it’s still going on now, and some even turned it into a meme of a year. What a difference a decade makes. The big shift here isn’t just the time. It’s the fact that the approach isn’t special at this point. We all know what 2020 was like because we all lived it, sure, but on top of that, the entire world documented it ad nauseum. There’s no reason to consolidate all of this into a movie. It doesn’t even quite feel like a movie at this point. This gimmick may have worked 10 years ago, but that’s because it was a specific time when people recorded a lot, not quite everything. The sliver of novelty is gone now. Continue Reading →

Nicolas Cage & Sion Sono team up for an incoherent Samurai-Western-Mad Max homage-something or other. It’s impossible to review a Nicolas Cage movie. They’re the very definition of “critic-proof,” in that they always have a dedicated audience who will declare them “the craziest thing I’ve ever seen,” and forgive them for lacking in plot or competence. You don’t like it? You just don’t know how to relax and have a good time. Sion Sono’s first English language feature, Prisoners of the Ghostland fits right in: loud, garish, bereft of anything resembling a plot. Is it fun? It certainly thinks it is. Trying to explain what Prisoners of the Ghostland is about is a fool’s errand, but let’s give it a go anyway. Nicolas Cage is Hero, a notorious bank robber whose last gig got a little boy killed (but he feels bad about it, so that absolves him). He’s summoned from jail by the Governor (Bill Moseley), who runs Samurai Town, a combination of Dodge City and Neo-Tokyo, with a dash of Terry Gilliam thrown in. Hero is ordered to rescue the Governor’s missing “granddaughter” Bernice (Sofia Boutella), and is fitted into an unremovable leather jumpsuit with explosive charges at his neck, elbows and crotch. Continue Reading →

Where’s the line between a messy movie and a movie that’s a mess? Joel Schumacher’s clearly-flawed Flawless oozes with subplots while it tries to fulfill the obligations of an “unexpected buddy” movie. Like the pre-gentrification East Village that it’s built around, characters and cultures clash to chaotic, uneven results. Continue Reading →

Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein usher in the end of the world with a winsome indie comedy about seeking closure and reconciliation. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Directed by husband-and-wife duo Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein, How It Ends can be recognized immediately as a movie filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cameos abound, with each minimal character appearing on balconies, across the street, on the other side of the table. These interactions, despite any emotional connection or progress, end with a wave goodbye, air kisses, or any other touchless way of leaving a situation. As the film meanders forward, this oddness grows, as two people share a genuine moment of importance, only to walk their separate ways with no physical affirmation of that moment.  Continue Reading →

Ninja Thyberg's tale of a woman's attempt to make it in the adult film industry is a feature debut that doesn't pull any punches. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Fresh from Sweden, Jessica (Sofia Kappel) has just landed in Los Angeles. The customs agent asks her a few questions, and when he inquires whether she’s here for business or pleasure, she says—you know what she says. This is the only moment Ninja Thyberg’s debut feature winks at its audience. From here on out, there’s no sense of humor to be had. Sure, characters will make jokes with each other once in a blue moon, but this is far from a fun watch. You see, Jessica is in L.A. to become an adult film star, going by Bella Cherry instead. It seems immediate that she’s on her first shoot. She meets Mike (Jason Toler), who soon becomes her agent, and lives with three other young women in the porn industry (Revika Anne Reustle, Kendra Spade, and Dana DeArmond). On paper, it’s a standard star-is-born tale. In some ways it is, but that isn’t the main approach. Pleasure, while incredibly difficult to watch, repackages that subgenre into a look at the cycle of abuse when having boundaries isn’t a commodity. Continue Reading →

James Ashcroft's hostage horror is nought but bland, sour sadism. Before the premiere screening of the New Zealand import Coming Home in the Dark, the festival programmer introducing it led off by admonishing viewers that the following film was “not for the faint of heart.” Of course, for a violent thriller appearing in the midnight slot at Sundance, such words are not so much a warning as they are a come-on designed to lure in those with more outre tastes hoping to find the next gory hit to emerge from the festival. Although the film is certainly gruesome enough, there is nothing here that average viewers will find to b that far beyond the pale. Instead, they are more likely to be put off by James Ashcroft’s hollow and increasingly tiresome exercise in empty sadism whose utter pointlessness is further underscored by its delusions that it is saying something profound. Alan “Hoaggie” Hoaganraad (Erik Thomson) is a blandly pleasant-looking teacher who is off on a car trip with his wife, Jill (Mirama McDowell )and her teenaged sons Make (Billy Paratene) and Jordan (Frankie Paratene) to the coast. All seems perfectly normal until they, in the time-honored tradition of bad cinematic car trips, decide to stop for a hike and a picnic lunch. It is while completing the latter that they are approached by two men, the extremely loquacious Mandrake (Daniel Gilles) and the more taciturn Tubs (Mathias Luafutu). After a few minutes of vaguely menacing talk, Mandrake produces a rifle and the two interlopers are soon on the road with Alan and the family—at least what remains of it—as their captives. Continue Reading →

On Christmas Day in 1831, tens of thousands of slaves in Jamaica rebelled against their masters, burning acres and acres of sugar cane. By the end of the first week of January, the rebellion had been brutally quashed by Britain. But from that point on, it was clear that the days of slavery in the colonies were coming to an end. In 1833, that’s exactly what happened. The Long Song tells the story of July (Tamara Lawrance), a slave woman who lives through this transitory period as the primary maid to Caroline Mortimer (Hayley Atwell), the mistress of the plantation. The series frames these events through the narration of an older and wiser July (Doña Croll), decades after the events of we're witness to. Continue Reading →

The thing about guilt is that it can wear you down until you’re more a cluster of exposed nerve endings than a human being. That, at least, is the premise behind The Night, a new psychological horror and debut film from director Kourosh Ahari. Set in Los Angeles and spoken almost entirely in Farsi, The Night is a wonderfully odd mix of being spare and a bit too much all at once.  Continue Reading →

Theo Anthony's new documentary threads together film theory, politics, and philosophy to great success. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Everyone is a filmmaker now. It’s so common that it isn’t particularly special in some regards, but that’s not to say we’ve reached the apex of the art form. In fact, the arc has been going for almost 150 years now since astronomer Jules Janssen created the Janssen revolver and, in the process, created what some consider to be the first film ever. Fast forward to present day and the approach hasn’t completely changed. But it’s not so much a matter of same or different: it’s a matter of more. Ubiquity is one thing, but omnipresence is another. It’d feel incomplete to approach the topic solely from a technological perspective. Thankfully, All Light, Everywhere doesn’t. Theo Anthony weaves history, film theory, philosophy, and politics to explore the limits of perception in cinema, often while playing with the syntax of documentary filmmaking. It’s a dense 105 minutes, but it’s almost always riveting. It’s part tableau and part interrogation. The lynchpin, however, is how its literacy grounds the self-awareness it seeks to deconstruct. If every example of filmmaking here hinges on a god complex, this picture is an agnostic interrogation of those very principles. Continue Reading →

Fran Kranz's debut is an emotional whopper of a drama, a vivid actor's exercise with incredible performances and passionate ruminations on the aftereffects of tragedy. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) One would be forgiven for thinking writer-director Fran Kranz's debut feature, Mass, was based on a play: it's a long, claustrophobic affair, set mostly around a folding card table set meticulously in the middle of a church basement by nearly pathologically-Midwestern church staff in the film's opening minutes. We don't see who's going to sit in them for quite a few minutes, but the way the kindly, empathetic Judy (Breeda Wool) talks to their facilitator Kendra (Michelle N. Carter), we know we're in for an emotionally-loaded experience. By the time Mass's two hours are finished, we're as exhausted as Kranz's subjects, but grippingly, cathartically so. Continue Reading →

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson's documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival is insightful and loving. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) The word “Woodstock” enters consciousness at a young age. It has become synonymous with classic rock, with music festivals, and with a decade of counterculture. With an estimated 400,000, Woodstock cemented itself as a part of popular culture, an ironic shift in its original meaning and its now-reformed image. Continue Reading →

Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli's rape revenge thriller tests the boundaries of narrative and sensibility to gruesome effect. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Take a look at the schedule of any film festival worth its salt and you will almost certainly find at least one or two slots filled works that appear to have been programmed in large part to shock and outrage viewers with their provocative storylines and/or gruesome imagery. Clearly filling that bill for this year’s Sundance is Violation, a particularly savage rape-revenge drama from the writer-director team of Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli. Here is a film that seems to have been designed to lure in viewers determined to see just how far it will go while at the same time sending others fleeing in either a huff or a hurl. (Of course, thanks to COVID, they will only be fleeing to the next room, but it is the thought that counts.) Continue Reading →

Niamh Algar learns the price of prurience in Prano Bailey-Bond's neon-soaked ode to the video nasty. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) It's England in the 1980s - poverty is high, Thatcher is in office, and the so-called moral majority is sounding the alarm about the increasing ubiquity of "video nasties", gory, violent films that, as the hysteria goes, tap into the seediest, most antisocial impulses of the British people. Think Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer, or Cannibal Holocaust: eerie exercises in sociopathy that thrill their fans and terrify their detractors. For Enid (Niamh Algar), a film censor, her job isn't about protecting a sensitive public from the disturbing films she's shown (ones with titles like Deranged and Beast Man), but merely to do her job well. Even so, she's buttoned up in more ways than one, from her uptight clothing to her lack of chemistry with her coworkers. Much of that is due to years of trauma sustained from the disappearance of her sister as a teenager, which she was present for but can't remember a thing about; her parents only recently chose to declare her dead and begin to move on with their lives. Continue Reading →

Debbie Lum’s engrossing documentary about scary-smart teens and the arduous college application process will make you both nostalgic for and glad to be done with high school. Back when I was in high school, during the Pleistocene Era, applying for college meant filling out a piece of paper, meeting once or twice with your indifferent guidance counselor, and then waiting for an envelope to come in the mail. It was a solitary experience, where often you didn’t know what schools your classmates wanted to get into until they got into them (or didn’t). Now, however, it’s a far more elaborate process, sometimes starting as early as junior year, and involving essays, interviews, and hours and hours of preparation, at the service of a gradually decreasing acceptance rate. Debbie Lum’s documentary Try Harder! focuses on a year in one high school, as its students muddle through an exhausting, often dispiriting college application experience. It’s surprisingly fascinating, and endlessly charming. San Francisco’s Lowell High School is one of the most highly ranked public high schools in the country, with a student body made up entirely of the future in science and technology. These kids are way smarter than me, and probably you, and probably most adults, with enviable confidence to go with it. They have the poise of people who have spent much of their lives always knowing the answer to the next problem, and never questioning that they have bright and successful futures in front of them. That confidence and poise wavers a bit once they discover just how competitive and disappointing applying for college can be. With college acceptance rates dropping by 50% over the past 15 years, the numbers seem to be stacked against them from the beginning, and that’s even with astonishing SAT scores and endless extracurricular activities on their resumes. Continue Reading →

Buoyed by an excellent lead performance, Frida Kempff’s psychological horror is harrowing, but ill-served by a weak ending. Sure, living in an apartment means you don’t have to worry about mortgages, property taxes or paying for new furnaces, but it also means trading in your privacy, and often being too aware of what your neighbors are doing. My upstairs neighbors seem to have either a small child or a large dog that runs back and forth across the living room floor, although I have not seen visual evidence of either. That’s an improvement over another neighbor, who I could hear cough and burp at all hours, and a third neighbor whose hobby was playing an electronic keyboard off-key. You learn to live with it, because that’s life in a box. Frida Kempff’s Knocking asks an unsettling question: what if the ordinary sounds of apartment living shouldn’t be ignored? Molly (Cecilia Milocco) is on her own after a long stay at a psychiatric hospital. Other than some vague reference to an “incident,” we don’t know the nature of what brought her to the hospital, but she seems as though she’s forgotten how to interact with the world. Still in mourning over the end of a relationship (or perhaps the death of her partner, it’s never quite clear), Molly is painfully lonely, bereft of any friends or family to comfort and support her. Continue Reading →

Ben Wheatley's pandemic-shot sci-fi effort is a derivative and predictable trip through the fog despite a few choice moments. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) A few months ago, Ben Wheatley did what seems to be en vogue as of late: make a movie mid-pandemic. It was over 15 days in August 2020 when Wheatley shot his latest from his own script, and does this one tick a few of the usual boxes. Lethal virus outbreak? Check. Lethal virus that isn’t actually COVID-19 but clearly is? Check. A non-COVID-19 lethal virus that feels extraneous overall? Yep, and yet its predictability goes beyond that. In the Earth sees Wheatley aping Andrei Tarkovsky by taking liberally from Stalker, but it also sees him aping himself by rehashing A Field in England much more predictably. It’s pretty clear stuff throughout. While the cities rage with illness, Dr. Martin Lowery (Joel Fry) heads on a mission to a test site deep in the forest. After getting to a lodge closer to civilization, he makes the acquaintance of Alma (Ellora Torchia). Alma is a park ranger tasked to guide him, and right after an anonymous figure attacks them, they come across a nature dweller named Zach (Reece Shearsmith). For whatever reason, they think he’s an all right guy to trust, but I forgot to mention that no one in this movie has even the most basic intuition, especially given their professions. Continue Reading →

Pascual Sisto's debut feature is a surprisingly toothless psychological thriller with very little on its mind. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) In what will be sure to elicit an insurmountable amount of Home Alone jokes, John and the Hole is a textbook example of a simple premise with potential. There’s John (Charlie Shotwell), a 13-year-old boy whose demeanor straddles the line between budding psychopath and awkward middle school kid. His eyes are so glazed over that they might as well be taped onto his face, and for a while, it’s really quite effective. When it stops making an impact, it’s because it’s clear there’s nothing else behind the surface. One day while exploring the woods by his house, he finds a hole. More specifically, it’s a bunker that was never completed. Soon, he drugs his mother (Jennifer Ehle), father (Michael C. Hall), and older sister (Taissa Farmiga). Then he—you guessed it—drags their bodies into the bunker. He leaves them there for days on end while he lounges around the house, supplying his family with meager amounts of food and water. Whatever cause he has for doing this sits in the dark, and while it would be fine if Nicolás Giacobone’s script didn’t try to fill in the gaps, it kind of does. Worse yet, its attempts to tie fable into metatext are just overt enough to cement how toothless it all really is. Continue Reading →

The new film from Dash Shaw and Jane Samborski uses its breadth of bold psychedelic inspirations to distract from a tepid script. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.) Somewhere in the forest, Amber (Louisa Krause) and Matt (Michael Cera) strip naked, have sex, and then get high. Matt relays a dream he had of—of all things—storming the Capitol and overthrowing the government. His mind’s eye blends with our objectivity, which, in turn, heightens his and our subjectivities. It’s trippy to say the bare minimum. The animation in Cryptozoo holds a breadth of inspirations. There’s the classic psychedelia of the ‘60s, sure. There’s also the choppy, two-dimensional aesthetic that Fantastic Planet popularized in 1973. Some locales look like a backlit blackboard and some are even cleaner, like in 1981’s Son of the White Mare. But that’s mostly when Dash Shaw’s latest is peaceful, and that’s not always. Minutes into Cryptozoo, Amber and Matt come across a fenced-in tower and find a collection of caged mythical creatures. Then tragedy unfolds. This isn’t this couple’s story, and there are several spurts of violence, to say the least. Our lead is Lauren Gray (Lake Bell), a veterinarian who helps the sage Joan (Grace Zabriskie) save cryptids from the government. To be fair, the plot is by far the least original and most protracted part. The visual ingenuity, on the other hand, is something to witness. Continue Reading →