A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
When PyeongChang, South Korea was named hosts for the 2018 Winter Olympics, the nation was automatically given a spot to compete for the gold medal in ice hockey. Between the time of the announcement and the actual Olympics, South Korea had four years to field a respectable team. Not exactly a hockey juggernaut, the host nation had to basically start from scratch to field a team.
Oh boy. David O’ Russell’s zany star-packed Amsterdam is a movie with so much going for it that nevertheless makes itself incredibly challenging to recommend. I sympathize with those who will find it simultaneously too much and not enough, or recoil from the ambitious sentimentality that animates its many excesses. I also groaned as it’s machinery sputtered and strained to draw meaning from madness. Yet! From its chaotic energy — a hallmark of a director who’s a monster on set yet consistently attracts the industry’s highest levels of talent — spring no shortage of genuinely laugh-out-loud bits and gonzo performances. Like most of his work, it’s a big-hearted mess that many will hate, but some might be able to forgive in spite of itself.
After a successful debut last year, the people at SIFF are doing another DocFest and it has a pretty impressive lineup. It …
We were thrilled to see that the Orcas Island Film Festival was planning a big return for 2022 after a slightly-subdued 2021. Since then, they’ve released their full lineup — a jaw-dropping collection of some of the top prize-winners and most buzzworthy titles from many of the year’s most prestigious festivals. Along with potentially Oscar-bound international films and heart-stirring documentaries, the re-expanded program will pose scheduling conundrums for attendees trying to decide how to best plan a weekend of seeing some of the year’s best films well in advance of their neighbors. For lovers of first-look films, it’s among the best kinds of problem to have!
Twins with such a tight relationship from birth they spoke their own language… that is, when they spoke at all. After making a pact at around age 6, June (Letitia Wright) and Jennifer (Tamara Lawrence) Gibbons remained silent for years. Much later they admitted it was meant as a fun prank in the beginning but after a while, it just became a part of life. They forgot how to socialize with anyone outside of each other so in their silence they created an entire world where the two of them could experience reality on their own terms.
Nothing wrong with a little kindness. Melancholy humor of a severed friendship from Martin McDonagh, an itinerant donkey in EO, and a true story given the Farrelly treatment.
Pearl, the prequel to writer/director Ti West’s well-received shocker X, takes a character’s origin story—the kind usually dispensed as an afterthought in a couple of sentences of exposition or two minutes of black-and-white flashback footage—and turns it into an audacious, grandly operatic standalone experience.
The follies of the wealthy are on full display in two comedy premieres in Toronto. Rian Johnson returns to the Knives Out saga with Glass Onion’s debut and Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness made landfall on North American shores during TIFF 2022.
Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed links the life and art of photographer Nan Goldin to her present-day activism surrounding the opioid epidemic; Brett Morgen contemplates David Bowie as philosopher king in IMAX proportions with Moonage Daydream.
Some twenty-eight years later, Kevin Smith has brought the characters of Randal and Dante back for a third movie. They now own the convenience store but look mostly the same. They still play hockey on the roof and still have signs up assuring you they’re open and asking to be alerted if you plan on shoplifting. Jay and Silent Bob are still hanging out in front of the video store (they run) but now they sell weed from it, with only slightly more legitimacy. The movie is, like a bag of Cheetos or a can of Red Bull or a lukewarm flauta, empty calories, unnecessary but completely comforting.
