1420 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Mandarin (Page 68)

Brandon Cronenberg's second feature is a po-faced collection of genre tropes that wastes its cast and a modest sense of style. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) It’s about 45 minutes into Possessor when its most apt moment comes. A bunch of generically rich people in a generically glossy mansion turn to each other and give a toast. That toast, as it so happens, is “to boredom.” Now, while Brandon Cronenberg’s second movie in eight years isn’t a complete failure, it’s an empty one: a grab bag of sci-fi clichés with a few spurts of violence. The occasional gore gets your attention, sure, but that’s because it’s something on the screen. The production design from Rupert Lazarus does what it sets out to do, but that aim is to recreate older, better sci-fi movies. It’s just… there, and then the color palette generously shifts from pale to neon. These tricks might have an effect if they hadn’t been done so many times before. Continue Reading →

Eugene Kotlyarenko's satire about a rideshare driver who murders for online fame lacks the bite or nuance its premise deserves. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) It was just over six years ago when Sharkeisha went viral for assaulting her friend on camera. The World Star video became a meme goldmine and made headlines, and while it seemed shocking at the time, it obviously wasn’t the last. Six months later in the wake of the Isla Vista massacres, the shooter’s face spread like wildfire as he waged polemics against those he felt had polluted the earth. He sat in his car, camera on his dashboard, and tried to justify his misogyny and racism. Now he has his own Wikipedia page. Of course, the 2010s didn’t birth this sort of infamy, but, like some sort of trickle-down economics, it helped normalize it. YouTube “comedians” like Sam Pepper churned out “prank” videos so he could justify groping women on camera. A few years later, Logan Paul went from Vine to CNN to apologize for a video in which he vlogged a dead body in a Japanese suicide forest. But what about the kids that aren’t famous, the ones that aren’t pulling pranks on the homeless? Continue Reading →

(This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) Continue Reading →

Portrait of a Lady on Fire's Noémie Merlant gets sweet on a theme park ride in this charming if conventionally quirky dramedy. (This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.) It's the oldest story in the book: girl meets theme park ride, girl falls in love with theme park ride, girl's mother tries to tear them apart before realizing that hey, at least the Tilt-A-Whirl never gets a headache. Okay, so it's not the most conventional story out there, but in its basic emotional beats, Zoé Wittock's quirky tale of a socially awkward loner forming a unique psychosexual attraction to a glowing, spinning piece of entertainment machinery feels curiously familiar. But maybe it's that familiarity, glommed onto such an out-there concept, that makes Jumbo worthwhile. The girl in question is Jeanne (Portrait of a Lady on Fire's Noémie Merlant), a bowl-cut-wearing loner who works at a run-down amusement park in Belgium and lives with her mother Margarette (Emmanuelle Bercot). Her mom's a free spirit, perhaps desperately so; with her short jean skirts, jangly necklaces, and devil-may-care attitude, her joie de vivre clashes notably with Jeanne's utter lack of social skills. She's a cool mom of the Mean Girls variety, and her insistence on treating her distinctly adult daughter like a child (right down to packing her lunches) seems to backfire on her when Jeanne, who often seems in a world all her own, suddenly finds herself drawn to the new featured theme park ride: the "Move It", which Jeanne quickly nicknames Jumbo. Continue Reading →

Despite solid performances all around, the episode struggles with tone, plotting & what kind of show it wants to be. Patrick Stewart can still act. That is, perhaps, no revelation. But the strongest moment in the series premiere of Star Trek: Picard comes when the show simply gives him a moment to emote, to condemn, to express his distress and regret over the state of the world. When pushed to explain why he left Starfleet, the fire that fueled The Next Generation smolders up, and the ghosts of Picard’s lost utopia are exercised. He left Starfleet because of xenophobia, because of isolationism, because of an abandonment of the principals of altruism and mercy and acceptance that undergirded the Federation he knew and believed in. That connection to larger ideas -- of a once noble people turning its back on those in need, out of a fear for what opening one’s doors to the world could invite in -- not only imbues this story with a real world resonance; it’s pure Trek. There’s power in one of the great architects of that interstellar community severing his ties when it shrinks from the ideals he holds so dear. But it’s not enough to simply linger with a man meditating on his legacy and the institutions that crumbled on his watch. So we need a mystery box. And we need a terrorist attack from a group of “synths” on Mars that scared the Federation into submission. And we need Romulan refugees resettling in an old Borg cube. And we need Romulan fighters trying to root out and destroy the last of artificial lifeforms. And we need a mysterious young woman -- half-River Tam and half-Daisy Johnson -- to seek out Picard’s help to sort it all out. Continue Reading →

Janicza Bravo's retelling of the 2015 viral Twitter thread boasts great performances and surprisingly solid filmmaking, even if it ends on a shrug. In 2015, 20-year-old stripper A’Ziah “Zola” Wells met a sex worker named Jessica. Both in Detroit at the time, the two bonded over their “shared hoeism” and established something of a rapport. They spent the night dancing together; they made some money. Fast-forward a couple of hours later and Jessica is inviting her to go dance in Miami, purportedly to make thousands of dollars in one night. This, of course, wasn’t half of it. They got involved with pimps, some gang-bangers, murder, attempted suicide, and oodles of prostitution cash—at least according to Wells’ 148-tweet thread that went viral. She’s since gone on the record to say that she turned up some of the story to 11, but guess what? Now there’s a movie credited as “Based on the Tweets by A’Ziah ‘Zola’ King,” bringing you about what you’d expect and mostly for the better. Granted, a lot of this has a lot to do with one's tolerance for ridiculousness. Those intrigued are likely to have fun. It's raunchy, crass, and stylized, and in the pantheon of stranger-than-fiction stories, this is one to stand out. But if you want a jaunt that signals good things to come from its newcomers and further cement the talents of those already established, this is that too. Zola is aptly aggro while also about something: about race, about class, about predation from the preyed upon. And yet, it runs wonderfully. Just make sure you’re ready for a few bumps. Continue Reading →

Pablo Larraín's neon-caked tale of a tattered family is ambitious if uneven eye candy that's bound to get audiences talking. In one of the more fitting opening shots in a while, Ema opens with a traffic light on fire. Behind it stands the title character (Mariana Di Girolamo) with a flamethrower slung over her shoulder and, despite what might sound glib on paper, it’s an apt metaphor for what’s to come. No stopping, no slowing down. If it’s going to go, it’s going to go. Pablo Larraín has dealt with political upheaval and reconstructing at the ruins of one’s personal life before, and now he’s doing all of it at once. In fact, it feels as if parts of his eighth film are to be remembered by viewers as a hallucination. There is, after all, no way some of this stuff actually happened like this, right? The dancing and domestic drama, sure. The spousal sparring, definitely. But the orgies and scorched earth? How about the day-glo visuals that would make for one hell of a rewatch during a fever? It isn’t all “there” throughout. Yet, it manages to present, annihilate, and reconstruct a multitude of fantasies, be they social or political, sexual or familial. After that prologue comes something tangible in comparison. Ema’s husband and leader of her dance company, Gastón (Gael García Bernal), has accidentally set their house on fire. The most pressing collateral damage comes through their adopted son, Polo (Cristián Suárez). He isn’t the most amiable kid, to say the least, and now they’ve got to return him to the agency he came from. Alas, Ema nor Gastón will take full responsibility for his behavior. On second thought, maybe that stoplight was a little more approachable after all. Continue Reading →

A solid first half and great work from Andrea Riseborough aren't quite enough to make up for Zeina Durra's Egyptian indie. Having spent time treating victims of the war in Syria, it would seem as if Hana (Andrea Riseborough) has given all of her life to others. She’s something of a ghost now, and upon going on leave for a while, she does what any specter would do: she haunts. In particular, she haunts the streets of Luxor. She lived there a few years prior and, be it spiritual or mental healing, is looking for a week to recharge. What feels like a Greek choir of whispers arises as she visits the tombs and ruins, and it’s enough to make up for the more unmotivated choices. That is, for a while. Luxor, Zeina Durra’s sophomore effort, of course isn’t actually a ghost story, but it works when it does because she approaches it like one. There’s a crypt of memories to open, silences that play like music. The conflation of the mental and the spiritual blur until they’re one and the same. It’s 85 minutes too! But what starts as something subtle shows itself—and its protagonist—to be much more traditional, lessening what’s on its mind as a result. She understands the culture. She has a few friends in the area and she knows some of the locals. This all works well, her worldliness that Riseborough plays with ease. And then she starts to get on with an old friend of hers, an archeologist named Sultan (Karim Saleh). He makes a notice of it being “just like the old days” in a way the movie treats refreshingly identical to how an old pal says elsewhere in the movie, and it seems as if their relationship is going to stay strictly platonic. Continue Reading →

A few years ago, Czech painter Barbora Kysilkova had two paintings on display in Oslo. It was something of a break for the artist, whose lifelong curiosity of death and nature didn’t quite fit the descriptor of “gothic.” It was a little too clean for that, but it was hers and it made her a few dollars. Then it was stolen. The question of who didn’t last long as Karl-Bertil Nordland was caught on the security footage, and while the drug-addled robber couldn’t remember much of the robbery, it didn’t really matter to the painter. Continue Reading →

Annie makes amends & demands a place in the world in a quietly powerful sophomore season of the Hulu comedy-drama. This week season two of Hulu’s effervescent Shrill returns to give us more of the same sharply observant humor and inclusive empowerment—tempered with painful obstacles and real character growth—that made season one a breakaway hit.  Based loosely on Lindy West’s memoir Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman and geared towards a millennial audience, Shrill isn’t always an easy watch. For a show that has more than its fair share of uncomfortable moments, one of the most gutting is when Annie Easton (Aidy Bryant) introduces her boyfriend Ryan (Luka Jones) to her parents. Her mother Vera (Julia Sweeney) tells her she looks “so put together.” It’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, but it boils down to Vera being unable to tell a fat woman—her own daughter, no less—that she looks beautiful. The tension between Annie and her mother, Annie and her friends, her boss, and her boyfriend, are still very much a part of the new season, but showrunner Ali Rushfield wisely chooses to make season 2 less about Annie chafing against a world that seeks to minimize her and more about Annie learning to unapologetically take up space in that world.  After the outrageous season one finale that sees Annie blowing up almost every support she has—her friendship with Fran, her relationship with her parents, her job at the Weekly Thorn, we see Annie trying to mend those fences over the course of the season. Luckily her friendship with Fran (Lolly Adefope) is quickly repaired, in part because Fran finds herself dealing with some fallout of her own in her relationship with Vic, and Fran needs Annie as much as Annie needs Fran. Fran has her own stories to tell in this season; reconciling with the fact that she has hurt many women the way that Vic has hurt her, her continuing struggle for acceptance and understanding from her mother, and the developing friendship between her and Emily, played by writer and performer E.R. Fightmaster, a welcome addition to the cast.  Continue Reading →

Sandwiched between a rough start and too tidy of an ending, Carlos López Estrada's latest finds love in its large ensemble. “The sewage water smelt like butterscotch,” a young woman (Mila Cuda) muses. The contradictions are inert, the delivery self-serious, the writing okay but sold as something much more. Elsewhere, Tyris (Tyris Winter) berates a waitress for a restaurant’s prices. They go on a rant and submit a scathing Yelp review before pretending to choke for the sake of a free meal. Their behavior reproachable and their words petty, the movie still seems to side with them. And at this point, it would seem that we’re off to the races with Summertime. Well, not quite. Carlos López Estrada’s follow-up to Blindspotting is, to say the least, the type of movie that makes a surprising about-face after 20 minutes or so. Set over the course of one July day, it takes a neorealist base and warps it into the body of a musical, following an ensemble piece of 25. But it isn’t music: with each character comes a spoken word poem, a fade between the inner and the outer. It’s incredibly uneven at points and obnoxious at its worst, but when it finds its stride, it’s that kind of livelihood that’s too infectious to deny. In some ways, that makes its missteps all the more bizarre. Estrada, who shares a story by credit with Vero Kompalic, approaches most characters with a similar empathy. All of the performers write their respective poems, but Estrada approaches most characters with a similar empathy. Its uniformity is its greatest weakness. It helps, then, when Summertime unravels its connections and its characterizations, allowing them to breathe in tandem with the environments. Continue Reading →

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