1420 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Mandarin (Page 63)

Awards season is upon us, which means all the studios and streaming services are breaking out their big guns. Luckily, one of the best films of the year comes to Netflix this weekend. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, based on the play by August Wilson and starring Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman in his final role. A fictionalized snapshot in the life of the Mother of the Blues, Ma Rainey, George C. Wolfe's film imagines her in a sweaty, muggy Chicago recording studio in the 1920s, trying to record her most popular singles for white Northern audiences, far from her comfortable Black Southern crowds. Of course, tensions rise over everything from artistic freedom,  racial animus, and Coca-Cola. Continue Reading →

If Panic Room is really known for anything, it’s the opening credits. Opinions differ about the movie itself, it’s Minor Fincher, if that’s something that’s even really possible. But those credits, man, those things are dope as hell. Panic Room opens with Howard Shore’s ominous score playing over a gorgeous ninety second montage of aerial footage of Manhattan architecture and the credits displayed as words occupying physical space, hovering in the air, taking up room and casting shadows just like everything else in the world. It’s the kind of showy stylistic thing that David Fincher’s always doing that thrills his fans and irritates his critics. It’s gorgeous, sure, but does it actually mean anything? Continue Reading →

When the Harvesters attacked, they caught humanity flat-footed. We weren’t ready for the sudden arrival of a deep-space armada. Or for a fleet of spaceships armed with mind-mucking lasers. Or for an army of biomechanical Pilots powered by the washed brains of select humans. Continue Reading →

It’s the season finale of The Mandalorian Season 2, and I hope we’re all prepared to feel our feelings. Last time, Mando and the Grogu Rescue Crew (Boba Fett, Fennec Shand, and Cara Dune) sprung former Imperial sharpshooter Migs Mayfeld (Bill Burr) so he could help them get access to the Imperial intranet and get the coordinates for Moff Gideon’s light cruiser. The mission was a success, though not without its problems, as Mando (Pedro Pascal) was forced to use the terminal instead of Mayfeld, necessitating the second-ever removal of his helmet since taking the Creed. They got the intel and headed out (sans a released Mayfeld) to face off against Gideon (Giancarlo Esposito) and get back that little green guy.  Continue Reading →

The action superstar has a little fun in this affectionate tribute to old-school beat-'em-ups, with big colors and tongue-in-cheek humor galore. Scott Adkins is a busy man. In 2020, the British martial artist launched The Art of Action on his YouTube channel – a series of in-depth interviews with his fellow action stars and filmmakers. And he’s continued to push himself as actor and an action performer. Debt Collectors, which reunited him with director/writer Jesse V. Johnson and co-star Louis Mandylor, was an excellent buddy dramedy. Seized, his reunion with Ninja: Shadow of a Tear director Isaac Florentine, was a darn good lean-and-mean actioner. And now, with The Intergalactic Adventures of Max Cloud, Adkins is closing the year on a high note. Max Cloud is an affectionate, funny, and well-crafted tribute to classic beat-'em-up video games. And Adkins’ work as its bombastic title character is a big, big part of its success. Max Cloud is an intergalactic hero par excellence, capable of laying waste to a spaceship’s worth of malignant space ninjas. He’s also an obnoxious, pompous windbag who’s taped over his off switch. As a power fantasy, he’s colorful and fun. As a crewmate, he’s insufferable. Fortunately, most folks won’t ever have to put up with Max Cloud, because they can be Max Cloud – he’s the title character of a beat-‘em-up/run-and-gun/fighting videogame for a Sega Genesis/Mega Drive-esque home console. Continue Reading →

The bones of “Terra Firma Pt. II'' are good. The core of the episode pays off Emperor Georgiou’s (Michelle Yeoh) return engagement with the Mirror Universe with conviction. She chooses to keep Mirror Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) alive, attempting to break her daughter toward the Emperor’s new way of thinking rather than dispose of her. She decides to save Saru (Doug Jones) and shares the truth about the Vahar’ai with him rather than letting him die. She moves, slowly but firmly, toward peace and diplomatic solutions in lieu of total and merciless domination. Continue Reading →

As TV’s best series about mental illness and addiction comes to an end, our hero BoJack doesn’t get closure, exactly (because there’s really no such thing), but is further down the road to self-awareness and real insight than he ever was. He may end up making yet another bad decision based both on self-loathing and selfishness, but there has to be some reason he keeps getting another chance, another hit at the reset button. If you’ve ever struggled with depression and/or addiction, then you know how both wonderful and absolutely terrifying that feels. Though the final season stumbles a bit with extended bits on cancel culture and open relationships, it ends on a subtle, melancholy note: “Life’s a bitch, and then you go on living.” [Gena Radcliffe] Continue Reading →

The smell of buttery popcorn and the sounds of shuffling of plastic cases only paints a partial picture of the era of a trip to a video rental store. During the '90s, the video store reigned supreme, and there was one giant that ruled them all: Blockbuster. There was once a store opening every seventeen minutes; now they’re reduced to one lone outpost in Bend, Oregon. The rise and fall of this entertainment empire is the subject of Taylor Morden’s documentary The Last Blockbuster. This quirky documentary follows the nostalgia trail, taking us on a journey from Blockbuster’s glory days to its last stand in Bend, Oregon. Continue Reading →

You don’t watch a movie like Aaron B. Koontz's The Pale Door, you rewrite it in your head. Old West outlaws facing off against a coven of witches, that’s a good start for the story, it’s simply a question of restructuring everything else, like getting rid of the pointless backstory, or letting one of the already few non-white characters make it to the end alive, or maybe cutting down the number of hypermacho mustachioed men to two rather than five, or giving the witches any other motivation for their behavior than needing virgin blood to survive. Any one of those changes would have at least slightly improved The Pale Door. Sadly, it’s an inert, dreadfully dull mess that tries for some From Dusk Till Dawn-style “you thought it was this kind of movie, but it’s really this kind of movie” shenanigans, and falls flat. Continue Reading →

After Ukraine Is Not a Brothel and Casting JonBenet, Kitty Green makes her first scripted feature in one of the year’s very best. Julia Garner plays Jane, a Northwestern University graduate and aspiring film producer. Now she works as an office assistant for an industry executive. She does the work one would expect her, but it’s over the course of a day that she becomes aware of the predation going on. Comparisons to Harvey Weinstein have already been made, but to relate the two is to simplify the issues on screen here. Continue Reading →

When I saw that Netflix made all ten hour-long episodes of its new ballet show, Tiny Pretty Things, available to review, I was intimidated. Even during a global pandemic, ten hours of uninterrupted solo TV time can be hard to come by on short notice. Luckily, Tiny Pretty Things was built to be binged. Fast-paced and drama-filled, the story whisks viewers away from their own lives and plunges them into a grim, seedy world of backroom dealings, sexual blackmail, Machiavellian schemes, and, finally, ballet.  Continue Reading →

Splat! In the first sixty seconds of Along Came Polly, Philip Seymour Hoffman eats pavement. Make that wax: his character, the self-absorbed Sandy Lyle, slips on the dance-floor of his best friend’s wedding, tumbling to the ground in classic slapstick fashion. Hoffman does a great drop, instantly putting a smile on my face – a smile that (unlike the actor) would rarely fall for the remainder of the runtime.  Continue Reading →

This review was written jointly by Spool staff writers Beau North and Megan Sunday. Continue Reading →

Director David Fincher’s movies are generally fascinated with creating a mythos around his characters that then breeds an egotistical obsession of oneself. It’s no wonder famous people like Mark Zuckerberg, Orson Welles, and the Zodiac Killer became points of fascination for him. He is also fascinated by propaganda and engages in it a bit himself.  Continue Reading →

At first glance, Disney+’s latest sports biopic Safety is a film about a particularly extraordinary individual. It is, after all, about a young man who faces insurmountable odds and comes out on top. But while its subject is a compelling protagonist, the real focus of the movie is an extraordinary community.  Continue Reading →

Since its premiere at this year’s Berlinale film festival, much of the press around Viktor Kossakovsky’s involving, subtly radical Gunda has fixated on the intimacy of its form. Presented without any narration, subtitles, or extraneous context and shot in stark but crucially un-distracting black and white photography (Kossakovsky has been forthright about not wanting to draw attention to beauty), this is pastoral portraiture that’s keenly aware of reflecting — but not exerting its purpose. Continue Reading →

There are two moments in The Wilds that so succinctly summarize the show’s tone, we have just have to start with them. In the first episode, Leah Rilke (Sarah Pidgeon) barrels directly down the lens of the camera and declares the life of a teenage girl in America in the 21st Century to be literal hell as if in direct conversation with the audience. Then, later in the series, Rachel Reid (Reign Edwards) searches for the word melodrama, applying it to the actions of her fellow island isolated survivors. And that’s The Wilds for you. Tremendously unsubtle and one-hundred percent aware of it. It also happens to be very good. Continue Reading →

In February 2017, Kim Jon-sam, the brother of Kim Jong-un, was walking through a Malaysian airport. Preparing for a flight back home to China, Jon-sam was suddenly hit with a substance by two women. Shortly after, Jon-sam developed a limp, went unconscious, and was dead within an hour. The brother of North Korea’s leader had died through exposure to a nerve agent called VX, one of the deadliest toxins on the planet. Continue Reading →

The Prom, the latest entry in Ryan Murphy’s incessant takeover of Netflix, follows a group of down-and-out Broadway stars (played by Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and Andrew Rannells) as they try to resurrect their waning careers with some good PR. The cause that these actors choose is that of Emma Nolan (Jo Ellen Perlman), a teenager in a small town in Indiana who wants to attend her school’s prom with her girlfriend, but the PTA won’t allow it. The group decides to charge into this small town and force them to have an inclusive prom. What ensues is a shallow but sweet musical about fighting for the chance to love -- fitting for an adaptation of a whimsical, if lightweight, 2016 Broadway musical.  Continue Reading →