644 Best Film & TV Releases Translated Into Slovak (Page 25)

In the spirit of full disclosure, I need to say this: I’m not a big fan of The Handmaid’s Tale. There’s something about a show that is so unrelentingly grim—without even the occasional glimmers of light—that just makes me feel like I’ve been ground down into a salty meat paste. This is why I checked out of Game of Thrones before I even knew the words “Red Wedding,” because I couldn’t bear to watch Sansa Stark beaten, humiliated, and tortured anymore. So while I can say that Handmaid’s has strong writing and still boasts some of the most gorgeous photography of any show out there, I still don’t enjoy it. Can anyone say they actually enjoy it?  And when did the incessant castigation of women become primetime entertainment? Continue Reading →

So there’s this fabulous sequence about three quarters of the way through Bram Stoker’s Dracula where nearly all the characters left alive are speeding to Transylvania and Dracula’s castle for the film's climax. On one side of the race are Professor Abraham Van Helsing (Anthony Hopkins) , barrister Jonathan Harker (Keanu Reeves), his fiancée Mina Murray (Winona Ryder), and three adventurers/friends. Continue Reading →

I sat down with Trapanese for a lengthy chat about the challenges of scoring an entire series of such grand scope, the creative inspirations he took from the books, and the interconnecting, interweaving musical motifs of the major characters. In a first for the podcast, Trapanese also provides commentaries explaining his process for the cues "Erase the Past" and "Royal Archives Heist." Continue Reading →

Netflix is back with the second season of The Circle, the social media reality game show where contestants compete to be influencers, wielding their power to block their rivals and win $100,000. Season one was a lovefest, with bro-y Joey Sasso winning by playing honestly (aka “The Sasso Way”) and befriending his competitors. The contestants of season two of The Circle are less interested in making friends and more interested in strategy, dialing up the drama, and building alliances within the first four episodes. Continue Reading →

This is a little embarrassing – I’m pretty sure The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was my first exposure to Philip Seymour Hoffman. As I’ve said before, he didn’t appear in many blockbusters, and when I was fifteen (watching this Hunger Games sequel on the largest screen I could find), well, I watched a lot of blockbusters. But on second look, my embarrassment isn’t warranted. Catching Fire, and Hoffman’s work in it, is far better than I’d remembered.  Continue Reading →

Mare of Easttown may at times feel like it’s kicking a dead horse. It’s a grammatically perfect post-Cardinal Bernard Law, cold-case-comes-alive thriller with rich performances by its entire cast. Yet for a story about a maverick detective purporting to be about more than crime, it follows surprisingly predictable beats, leaving little room for illuminating nuance.  Continue Reading →

Returning to score these characters for the first time since Captain America: Civil War, Jackman brings his usual fanfare and frenetic action scoring to the table, expanding themes he originated in his previous work to a much larger, longer palette. Sam's theme, formerly a three-note quick motif between action beats, gets its own blues-tinged variation to pay homage to his Louisiana roots; Bucky, meanwhile, gets a softer, more melodic version of the Winter Soldier theme to contrast with the cacophonous shriek that heralded him in his debut feature. And the Captain America theme gets its own complications, now that the man holding the shield is a little less trustworthy than he used to be. Continue Reading →

For the horror genre, April 15, 2011, marked a handful of notable dates. On one hand, it was the 15th anniversary of when Scream started filming, starting with the 11-minute sequence in which an onscreen Drew Barrymore, thought by the masses to be the star, was eviscerated in the name of her killers' pop culture fetish. The movie not only reintroduced the slasher film back into the mainstream, but it also brought back one of its maestros. Of course, that'd be Wes Craven. Continue Reading →

At face value, the original premise of Younger seems destined for a short run. After all, a story about a woman in her 40s who pretends to be 26 to get a job in publishing seems more at home as a Lifetime Original movie than a long-form series. And yet the comedy has lasted six years on TVLand, with the show never losing its charm and heart. While the seventh and final season has the series moving from TVLand to Paramount+, it still manages to keep the same spirit that won it so many fans.  Continue Reading →

In a lot of ways, I feel a bit sorry for The Nevers. A show created and conceptualized by Joss Whedon, former pop-culture wunderkind now revealed to be an abusive terror behind the scenes of some of his most high-profile works, it's already weighed down by the lodestone of its controversial creator even before it airs. Whedon left the show's production in November (presumably as a result of these allegations coming forward), the current showrunner position shifting to Philippa Goslett. Time will tell if Goslett will have the time or the opportunity to make the show her own and drag it out from the shadow of its provenance. But if the first four episodes provided to critics are any indicator, she'll have an uphill battle, as every bit of its worldbuilding and thematic concerns scream the kind of quippy, fly-by-night faux-progressivism for which Whedon's output is known. Continue Reading →

Every month, we at The Spool select a filmmaker to explore in greater depth — their themes, their deeper concerns, how their works chart the history of cinema, and the filmmaker’s own biography. For April, we revisit both the game-changing hits and low point misses of Francis Ford Coppola. Read the rest of our coverage here. Burrow into a man’s soul and see what you find. You may discover a darkness beyond comprehension or a light as bright as the flares that cut against the night sky. But if you mangle that soul in the throes of war, maim it through acts of killing, expose it to enough raw horror to blight mind and body, you can never really know. The parts of ourselves we hold dear become wrenched and twisted within that grim crucible, until they become unrecognizable. That’s the overwhelming feeling that washes over you during Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal 1979 masterpiece. Set during the Vietnam War, the film sees Captain Willard (Martin Sheen), a U.S. Army assassin, dispatched to travel upriver into Cambodia and take out the infamous Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Kurtz is a decorated officer who’s gone rogue and cultivated a following all his own, one which strikes fear into the hearts of all sides of this conflict. In that framework, the movie peers into the souls of these two men and considers what, if anything, can be gleaned from their war-ravaged psyches. Continue Reading →

Mere moments before the whole world shut down last year, I reviewed the Vin Diesel vehicle/comic adaptation Bloodshot. In that review, I talked about how the film often felt like a refuge from another time, an earlier era of superhero movies, and that there was a certain charm in that. Thunder Force similarly feels like a holdover from a different time, but as an anachronism, it offers far less charm. If Bloodshot felt like a pale but pleasant copy of films from the Raimi Spider-Man portion of the era, Thunder Force feels a bit more like Sky High’s cousin, obsessed with seeming more mature. Continue Reading →

What Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films portray is a perfect amalgamation of the magical and limiting aspects of Hollywood cinema in a perfectly composed, morally ambiguous fantasy. I’m only discussing the first two here because of their proximity to one another and them embodying a 70’s theme and aesthetic that prided on American stories – Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, Patton, Breaking Away, Dog Day Afternoon, and Rocky to name a few – make them distinctly different for what I want to say than the third movie, which seems like a forgotten stepchild of the 90’s.  Continue Reading →

Following on from his work on I Am Not Your Negro, Raoul Peck takes a holistic look at imperialism, the construction of whiteness, and how we form narratives about the violence of the past in HBO's four-part documentary series Exterminate All The Brutes. In doing so, Peck covers a lot of ground, moving from genocides to scientific racism to colonization and more, explicating the links between them all. He does a lot of brilliant work here, but the series doesn’t quite have the precision or focus to make it great.  Continue Reading →

Though My Blueberry Nights has been largely left untouched in the renaissance of Wong Kar-wai’s work like the pies at its center of the film, it’s finally time to cut a slice and see what can be savored. From the outside, it looks like a Kar-wai blueberry pie. It has a sugar crisped lid that’s inviting and promises hidden depths. Yet, as our fork reaches the bottom, we find it soggy.  Continue Reading →

The Law & Order: SVU and Law & Order: Organized Crime crossover event on April 1st  will mark not only the premiere of a new Law & Order spinoff, but also the return of one Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni). For the first 12 seasons of SVU Stabler and Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) were the SVU team, the perfect partners. Continue Reading →

One of the most fascinating things about Godzilla -- whether in his original Japanese provenance in his long-running series of films, or in the comparatively-recent "MonsterVerse" Westernization of the big lizard, courtesy of Warner Bros. and Legendary -- is that he's so malleable. On the one hand (as with the original 1954 Ishiro Honda film and Gareth Edwards' flawed but philosophically-intriguing 2014 reboot), he can be a poignant vehicle to explore the apocalyptic anxieties of nations ravaged by atomic bombs and climate change. Continue Reading →

A thirty-plus-year veteran of film and TV scoring, Kiner's a chameleon who can work with the themes and motifs set by other composers and spin them into broader, more dynamic cues demanded by the rigors of television storytelling. That's borne out in his work for Star Wars, especially, where at this point he's written more music for the universe than John Williams himself -- while he finds moments to work in familiar motifs and themes, Kiner also carves out room for experimentation, which you can hear in the more synth-heavy scoring for Clone Wars: The Final Season. Continue Reading →

It’s been 25 years since we last saw coach Gordon Bombay (Emilio Estevez) and his ragtag hockey team came out victorious in D3: The Mighty Ducks. But when they return in the Disney+ spinoff series The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, things are a little different. For instance, Bombay isn't the same man he was; he now hates hockey and kids. Continue Reading →

While there are many ways to adapt material to another medium, there do seem to be two prominent schools of thought. Some want adaptations of existing works to take the source material as a jumping-off point. The original text should inspire the creators of the new media, but should make their own perspective felt. On the other hand, there are those that crave pure accuracy. They want the new piece to resemble the original as closely as possible, in tone, point of view, and style. Continue Reading →