1420 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Mandarin (Page 61)

We talk with the series co-creator, writer and director about finding the balance between darkness and comedy. When it first debuted in 2016, Search Party was often compared to Girls and Broad City, mostly because all those three shows deal with the same topics of millennials and hipster culture. But to solely focus on that element will dismiss the excellent craft and surprises that co-creators Sarah-Violet Bliss, Charles Rogers, and Michael Showalter has shown throughout four seasons. After all, this is a show like no other on TV, always radically reinventing itself to keep things fresh. Season 4 — whose first three episodes were just released on HBO Max last Thursday — is no exception, finding new angles in the story while still retaining what makes the show such a delight in the first place. The only difference is, where the three previous seasons lean more towards the comedic side of the story and keep the darkness secondary, season 4 decides to do the opposite: going full in on the psychological horror of the characters’ journey by taking references from captivity dramas like Room and Misery to an unsettling effect. Continue Reading →

Two-hours and sixteen minutes. There is a version of The Empty Man that’s a solid, efficient horror flick, and then there’s the version that’s two-hours and sixteen minutes. Unfortunately, we got the latter. Adapted from an independent comic book of the same name, this poorly paced, occasionally engaging exercise staggers along like its titular demon. If only there was a way to stop it, before it’s too late.   Continue Reading →

Ethan Hawke often plays characters who internalize their passions, who tend to smolder and keep their feelings under tight restraint. Not so in The Good Lord Bird, where as star and co-creator Hawke gives the biggest, grandest performance of his career playing radical abolitionist and fighter Captain John Brown, circa 1857. His Brown is a delusional, violent prophet, flecks of spit fleeing from his mouth as he screams scripture during guerilla warfare and is sent into fits of rage by his fellow whites’ refusal to “free the Negro”. But in a country anchored by the selling and owning of human beings, where survival is often precarious at best, Brown sometimes appears to be the sanest white man of them all (sometimes). Continue Reading →

Hulu's latest release is a heartfelt coming-of-age drama with ambition, setting out to explore a multitude of themes, including loss, acceptance, deafness, and mental illness. The Ultimate Playlist of Noise strives to tackle each subject matter in the space of a hundred minutes, but the absence of pacing and depth makes for a deflating albeit sincere film, which should have had so much more to say.  Continue Reading →

Adapted from the Nickelodeon show Winx Club, Netflix’s new series Fate: The Winx Saga attempts to reboot the long-running favorite with gritty live action to fit on the homepage somewhere between The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina and Cursed. It’s a visually stunning fantasy quest centered around young women that has all the magic it needs to fly but hasn’t yet learned to focus its potential within. Continue Reading →

From the moment that the James Bond film franchise established itself as a worldwide phenomenon, everyone from the biggest Hollywood studios to fly-by-night European exploitation producers tried to jump on the bandwagon with their own. Although there were a few efforts where no expense was spared—most notably the gargantuan star-studded Casino Royale—most of them were produced on minuscule budgets that tried to replicate the lavish trappings of the typical Bond film with cheapo special effects and loads of stock footage. In addition, few of these efforts were able to find a star with the kind of instant audience appeal that Sean Connery possessed—not even when the producers of Operation Kid Brother (1967) had the ingenious idea of casting Sean’s younger brother Neil in the lead. Many of these films, realizing that they could not compete in therms of scale or star power elected to go the spoof route, but even there, they mostly failed to compete because the Bond films were themselves already semi-spoofs that rare took themselves too seriously. Continue Reading →

Now in 2021, the pandemic rages on, and most of us find ourselves stuck in lockdowns with no end in sight. We’ve dealt with glitchy video calls, adventures in cohabitation, and are stuck with the isolation blues. Here to steal our attention away from the mess is Locked Down, a diverting heist/romance film from Doug Liman, starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Continue Reading →

Admit it: we're all preemptively exhausted by Disney+'s seemingly endless onslaught of new films and franchise shows set to premiere over the next few years: we're going to be practically drowning in content, all geared toward immersing us in the brands and IPs they mercilessly control and asking audiences to buy into an ever-overwhelming web of interconnected stories. That said, ifWandaVision is a bellwether for the level of experimentation and creativity we can expect from some of these shows, we might not be in the worst hands. Continue Reading →

To watch the Apple TV+ series Servant is to frequently ask “What is this show about, exactly?” Is it about the dangers of gaslighting? The horror of postpartum psychosis? Something even more sinister than that? It seems to want to say something about all of these things, but in a sort of muddled, half-formed fashion. Season 2 is more of the same, while pushing the boundaries of how long the initial deception could last far beyond a realistic limit. Continue Reading →

On March 17, 1985, Maria Hernandez was shot by an intruder. Fortunately, the bullet ricocheted off of her keys as she used them to shield her face. Her roommate, Dayle Okazaki, was not as lucky, and the intruder shot her in the face as she cowered behind the kitchen counter. Afterward, the killer pulled Tsai-Lian "Veronica" Yu out of her car and shot her as well. Continue Reading →

Netflix has really made a play in recent years to corner the high-concept action movie market: Extraction, The Old Guard, 6 Underground, Project Power et al. feel like they fill the algorithm's innate need to fill the John Wick-sized hole in the moviegoing public's diet. It's that sweet spot that Outside the Wire is unabashedly trying to fill: sci-fi concepts right out of Black Mirror blended with brutal, highly-choreographed fight sequences. The trouble is, despite (or, more precisely, because of) its military sci-fi premise, Mikael Håfström's (1408) latest crumbles under its own sociopolitical weight. Continue Reading →

It’s not hard to see what Climate of the Hunter is going for once it really gets going. The warm glow, the celluloid look and feel, the way everything from the costuming to the soundtrack teeters on the edge of retro without ever really falling over. It’s a vampire film far more inspired by schlocky, colorful B films like Dracula AD 1972 than the modern classics like Let the Right One In. Continue Reading →

For a nation that produces hundreds of films a year in a multitude of languages, India’s presence at the Academy Awards is almost shockingly muted. India has submitted films every year since 1957, where K. Asif’s epic melodrama Mother India scored a nomination but lost to Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria. Since then, only two other films made it to the ceremony: Mira Nair’s 1988 debut feature Salaam Bombay! and Ashutosh Gowariker’s 2001 cricket drama Lagaan. That’s three films over six decades, with no nominations since 2001.  Continue Reading →

With occasional exceptions, there’s something of an unspoken agreement with an audience when they watch a slasher or survival horror film that they’ll receive some form of catharsis. It could be the voyeuristic pleasure of the kills, victims/survivors overturning their attackers, or more bluntly – just a reason to watch. Vincent Paronnaud’s Hunted doesn’t ignore this precept as much as revel in the unsatisfying imbalance between relief and lack thereof to the point of rendering it meaningless. Continue Reading →

A Perfect Planet Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JIs6xEYniM&ab_channel=discoveryplus Continue Reading →

Obvious to those in Ireland and the UK, Herself’s title carries a second meaning that will likely fly under the radar for most American viewers. It isn’t merely a reflexive pronoun, it’s a term of respect and familiarity that can also mean “a woman of consequence” or, more aptly for this film, “mistress of the house.” Because Herself is the story of how one woman ends up finding herself by building her very own home, brick by brick. Continue Reading →

Autistic people deal with a lot of stereotypes. Based on everyday public perception, autistic people are emotionless robots who act like Jim Parsons’ Sheldon Cooper. We’re self-absorbed. We’re incapable of being independent. On and on the list of toxic assumptions go. It’s daunting to confront those concepts, but that doesn’t mean autistic people haven’t fought back against them.  Continue Reading →

Some television shows feel remarkably of the moment. They seem to reflect the zeitgeist so perfectly there is almost something supernatural about them. Others anticipate the future with a kind of clarity that borders on psychic. It can feel like a magic trick. Continue Reading →

NBC’s new sitcom Mr. Mayor will inevitably be compared to 30 Rock, the network’s previous sitcom from Tina Fey and Robert Carlock. Both feature rich men in power butting heads with their female colleagues. Both shows share a composer, Jeff Richmond (also an executive producer, and Fey’s spouse) crafting another bouncy score. Different from her New York-based shows (30 Rock, Great News, Kimmy Schmidt) Fey and company take on Los Angeles politics this time. While occasionally funny, the show fails to instill a vote of confidence in the future of the series.  Continue Reading →

Like the best social justice documentaries, the outspoken Saudi journalist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was able to speak truth to power in ways that got peoples’ attention and showed us how we got into our current state, and what could be waiting for us in the future if we’re not careful. Continue Reading →