1349 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Russian (Page 16)

The white lie at the center of You Hurt My Feelings isn’t harmless, nor does it spiral out to reveal lie upon lie, turning a marriage into a house of cards. Instead, it lies somewhere less explored: a trivial thing whose impact is understandably real. It’s a fine line to walk, but Nicole Holofcener does just that, and with a razor-sharp wit to boot. Continue Reading →

The spate of recent live-action Disney remakes has run the gamut in quality from pleasantly diverting (Cinderella, Pete’s Dragon) to unwatchable abominations (The Lion King, Beauty and the Beast.) Even the most well-received entries of the bunch struggle to find reasons they should exist in the first place. Rob Marshall’s The Little Mermaid is no different, but for one crucial factor that sets it apart from the rest: Halle Bailey as Ariel. Bailey is so captivating and winsome in the titular role that this remake almost feels worth it just to launch her into movie stardom. Unfortunately, sub-par CGI effects and clunky changes to Howard Ashman’s classic songs often make it feel like Bailey is left to carry the movie on the strength of her remarkable talent alone. With a shaggy runtime of two hours and fifteen minutes—a full hour longer than the original cartoon—it’s a heavy load for one performer to bear. Continue Reading →

Television has entered a new era of the citizen detective. If the boys of Only Murders In the Building are Jessica Fletcher for the 2020s and Natasha Lyonne’s Charlie of Poker Face is today’s Columbo, High Desert’s Peggy (Patricia Arquette) is the inheritor of the con artist crime fighter mantel. Think those “Characters Welcome” staples Psych or White Collar. Then trade the charismatic 30-something man running a scam for a charismatic middle-aged woman looking for an angle and maybe some pills. Continue Reading →

Folks, maybe I’m wrong, but I just don’t think we’re ready for Nazi redemption stories yet. Granted, there have already been a few, but those were from a time when the threat was neutralized. Now, in our current upside down world, they’re being normalized by both the media and Republican politicians, some of whom, like Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, would rather pretend they don’t know what “white nationalism” is than denounce it. We really don’t need a “but what if they can change?” story right now. But Paul Schrader is doing it anyway with Master Gardener, a movie that is surely well-intentioned, but ill-timed at best, and clumsy and borderline offensive at worst. Continue Reading →

Let's face it: At this point, you're either in for the overamped, Saturday-morning-cartoon lunacy of a Fast and Furious movie or you're not. Building from its humble roots as a 2001 street-racing Point Break riff to the gargantuan action tentpole it's after a whopping ten movies (eleven if you count Hobbs & Shaw), the series has built quite the convoluted lore over the decades. There are dead characters who come back to life (Sung Kang's Han), living characters who can never come back because their actors are no longer with us (see: Paul Walker's Brian), sworn enemies who join the familiar just one film later. It's dudebro soap opera, fueled by nitrous oxide and every weird, bonkers thing the filmmakers can think to do with a car. Continue Reading →

There's at once too much, and somehow not enough, of the whimsical DIY spirit of writer-director Robert Rodriguez in his latest film, the shaky B-thriller Hypnotic. The Austin native made his name in the halcyon days of '90s indie filmmaking, shooting his first feature (El Mariachi) for a mere $7,000 at the tender age of 23. Since then, he's leveraged that inventiveness into a cottage industry of his own based out of his hometown of Austin, Texas, whether it's kid-friendly fare (Spy Kids), big-budget CGI blockbusters (Alita: Battle Angel), moody noirs (Sin City) or grindhouse splatterfests (Planet Terror, From Dusk Till Dawn). Hypnotic is all and none of those things, a chintzy lo-fi Christopher Nolan riff that doesn't have nearly enough life to work. And yet, there are just enough charming elements to save it from outright dismissal. Continue Reading →

Crater begins centuries into the future in an era where man has colonized the Moon. Rather than being home to thriving cities, though, Earth’s only natural satellite is the site of a run-down mining colony. People toil away, hoping to make it to another luxurious planet known as Omega. This is where Caleb Channing (Isaiah Russell-Bailey) lives. It’s also where he receives the news that his miner father (Scott Mescudi) has died. As part of his death benefits, Caleb will be transferred, via 75 years of traveling, to the bustling world of Omega.  Continue Reading →

Jem Starling’s (Eliza Scanlen) wardrobe is too much for the Kentucky heat. Yet others say her bra is still too visible. She tries to praise the Lord through dance with attempts progressive yet accessible to her church. Still, her peers claim the music she picks is too aggressive. Her instructor, Misty (Jessamine Burgum), gently scolds her individuality in class. Meanwhile, at home, her family warns against not just sex but intimacy of any sort. Such is standard for a 17-year-old girl growing up a fundamentalist Christian. Body and soul are omnipresent in The Starling Girl, as much as they are mutually exclusive.  Continue Reading →

As an act of nostalgia, City on Fire has plenty to offer anyone who lived or spent lots of time in New York City in the summer of 2003. The new series, created by Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, evokes the era matter-of-factly. Besides nailing the look of early 21st Century Manhattan, it captures the sense of a city in transition. The groundwork for the gentrification that swept across Manhattan and Brooklyn had just been activated. Mayor Bloomberg was taking what Giuliani had begun and pushing it farther and faster than “America’s Mayor” ever managed. And while the series eventually stomps the theme into the ground, the tendency to wonder if every adverse event was evidence of terrorism was very alive. Continue Reading →

The first season of The Other Two followed down-on-their-luck Dubek siblings Cary (Drew Tarver) and Brooke (Heléne Yorke) as their teen popstar brother rose to international fame status as popstar Chase Dreams (Case Walker). Season 2 followed their mom, Pat (Molly Shannon), as the suburban mom became a beloved talk-show host. After a two-year wait, Season 3 finds Cary and Brooke gaining their own fame and success. However, the industry’s rigors take their toll. It’s a brilliantly existential comedic satire on the levels of fame as the Dubek family and friends deal with the success and failures of their star-studded lifestyle.  Continue Reading →

Welcome to the future. America is “the safest country on Earth,” as FBI Agent Tayo Michaels (Brian Tyree Henry) assures us. And it is all thanks to a program that is one part Minority Report, one part that computer Lucius Fox gets all bent out of shape about in The Dark Knight. It started as a sort of interrogation tool, but it has blossomed into a prediction machine that lets the FBI anticipate criminal activities. Comic book fans, think Force Works. Law enforcement has gotten “proactive.” Continue Reading →

With two successful seasons of Bridgerton under her belt, it's no surprise that Netflix and Shonda Rhimes would veer into spin-off territory with Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, which tells the tale of Queen Charlotte's (Golda Rosheuvel) early reign and her marriage to King George III.   Continue Reading →

By the time Silo’s action builds to a crescendo in its back third, it causes a deep ambivalence. On the one hand, after episodes of fastidiously building to this moment, it is akin to arriving at that fireworks factory. Conversely, there is a certain sadness in disrupting the series’ strange, contemplative tone. Continue Reading →

“Just brang ma baby girl back alive!” Continue Reading →

Highly lauded Romanian director Cristian Mungiu is back from a six-year hiatus with the curious R.M.N., a look at a town slowly letting itself succumb to its worst fears. Like the famous Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street,” a town gears up to combat an imaginary menace they’ve created to demonize real people and problems, simply to feel better about their own misfortune and short-sightedness. After three films that failed to capture the attention of his sophomore feature, Cannes Top Honors recipient 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, Mungiu has found an edifying middle ground between his wilder ambitions and the style in which he made his name. R.M.N. may suffer from heavy hands, but this is a film of deceptive heft from a director renewed by change. Continue Reading →

A lot's happened since we last saw the Guardians of the Galaxy (well, besides their brief cameo in Thor: Love and Thunder). Writer/director James Gunn was fired from Marvel in 2018 after some problematic tweets joking about pedophilia were unearthed, in one of the few instances of a successful cancellation from the right wing. Of course, it didn't last long, considering how thin the ground was for said cancellation in the first place; and in the interim, he swanned off to DC, made the fantastic The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, and eventually found himself sharing the throne of a newly-revamped DC movie universe. Continue Reading →

Fatal Attraction is an interesting study of how a controversial movie’s takeaway message can completely change, largely because audiences have changed. It’s a stylish, well-crafted film that spawned dozens of lesser imitations, and comes off as totally different when viewed from a 21st-century perspective. The carefully delineated roles of “hero” and “villain” are something murkier: we now understand that protagonist Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) isn’t entirely clear with Alex Forrest (Glenn Close) that their torrid fling is just that, a no-strings-attached encounter that means nothing to him. We see that Alex is done dirty with a script that depicts her as a one-note monster who must be defeated in the name of preserving the nuclear family. When even the YouTube commentariat largely agrees that Dan leads Alex on, you know the tide of public opinion has turned. Continue Reading →

Behold! Netflix has created…network television! Continue Reading →

Max’s latest docudrama is just one of many times real-life killers have been given attractive makeovers for TV Premiering tomorrow on Max is Love & Death, the second (after Hulu’s Candy) of two miniseries in one year focusing on the 1980 murder of Texas housewife Betty Gore by her friend Candy Montgomery. Whereas Candy took a nuanced approach to the case, Love & Death is decidedly pro-Candy, treating her as a victim of circumstance, even though she (a) struck Betty Gore 41 times with an ax, (b) had no injuries to back up her self-defense claim, and (c) had been sleeping with Betty’s husband. That generosity extended to the casting. The real, thoroughly average Candy Montgomery, as did many people when cigarette smoking was still popular, looked older than her 30 years, and the tight perm and extra large glasses frames she wore didn’t help (whoever talked her into that hairstyle should have been brought up on charges themselves). In Love and Death, she’s played by the ethereally lovely Elizabeth Olsen, whose saucer eyes immediately convey innocence. While Hulu’s version of Candy was played by Jessica Biel, another implausible choice, an attempt was made at drabbing her down. Olson’s babydoll face is unencumbered by either a wig, or unflattering glasses. If not for the fact that her character’s name is Candy Montgomery, you wouldn’t know who she’s supposed to be at all. Continue Reading →

From Rosemary's Baby in 1968 to 2021's False Positive, Hollywood has long been interested in women's bodies and reproductive systems as a setpiece for horror: and writer-director Alexis Jacknow's Clock is no exception. From its humble beginnings as a short film, Jacknow's freshman feature has blossomed into a chilly, paranoia-ridden horror flick commanded by a captivating lead in Diana Agron. Though Clock's script is sometimes inelegant and clunky, it boasts enough personality, perspective, and ferocity to stand an exciting feature debut in the world of horror.   Continue Reading →

Ticking clocks come in many shapes and forms in movies. In the case of writer/director Rebecca Zlotowski's new film Other People's Children, a ticking clock looms large over protagonist Rachel (Virginie Efira) in the form of how long she can still conceive children. Now 40, she's been informed by medical professionals that time is slipping away if she still wants to have kids. It’s a development that reshapes her priorities and hammers home the finite nature of her very existence. Continue Reading →