Given the monumental event in summer blockbuster history, Chris and Josh collected ourselves and convened a quick roundtable to chat about our experiences with Christopher Nolan’s atomic age biopic and Greta Gerwig’s big budget fantasia about the original American Icon.
Year: 2023
It’s time to embrace that this is now Barbie‘s world, we’re just living in it
Every time I saw a TV commercial or product tie-in for the new Barbie movie – and there were a lot – I had the same thought: “this movie better be good.” It gives me immense pleasure to report that, for the most part, it is an extremely well-made and enjoyable, often (literally) otherworldly, movie that will delight its audience.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning is the first great blockbuster of the summer, should you choose to accept it
Is there a long-running blockbuster movie franchise that is more dependably good than the Mission Impossible films with Tom Cruise? I don’t think there is.
It’s time to take a Joy Ride, the summer road-trip movie you won’t want to miss
Audrey (Ashley Park), is headed to China to make the deal of her young career. With her best friend Lolo (Sherry Cola), unpredictable but loyal as can be, in tow acting as translator and Lolo’s odd cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) tagging along for the ride, Audrey is already on edge. For a little moral support they meet up with her college roommate and Chinese soap star Kat (Stephanie Hsu) when they arrive. Audrey is drowning in the unfamiliar culture and to save her job and this deal she has to dig into the past she’s avoided for so long.
Roundtable: Our Favorite Movies of 2023 (So Far)
We’re just past the halfway point of 2023; so to commemorate the occasion a few of you friendly neighborhood SunBreakers took stock of the films we’ve seen so far.
The Childe is a wild ride filled with assassins, double crossing sociopaths, and the best smile in all of Korean entertainment
Marco (Kang Tae-Ju), A young Filipino-Korean man, is fighting underground muay thai bouts and taking less than wise snatch and grab jobs just so he can scrounge up enough funds to pay for his ailing mother’s surgery. His father was in the wind the moment he was born and despite a tireless search to find him, all paths led to dead ends… until now.
Portrait of the Explorer as an Old Fart
It’s been fifteen years since Harrison Ford donned his famous fedora atop Indiana Jones’s head. But! The iconic archaeologist is back for what is likely a final exploration.
In Asteroid City a play’s the thing.
Asteroid City is Wes Anderson operating at the peak of his abilities and making a potent argument for his use of intricate artifice as a vessel for conveying deep sincerity.
Pixar’s Elemental is sweet, but relies on tired tropes and shallow storylines
As a young immigrant family the Lumens moved to the big city of Elemental. They were awed by this new place where fire, water, land and air all live together harmoniously… or so they thought. They quickly found it less than welcoming for fire elementals with the city seemingly built to accommodate water more than others, so they found a little neighborhood with other fires and settled there to open a local shop. Time flew by as their daughter Ember grew and it was a given, both in their actions and words, that she’d take over the family business when it came time. One day, an unexpected visitor brought along with him a crisis that threatened to shut down their mom and pop store, so Ember was hellbent on fixing it. In the process she found an unexpected friend in Wade, a water elemental, and discovered the big city was much more than it seemed.
Past Lives is a timeless romance that yearns across decades and oceans
The Past Lives hype that immediately saturated Sundance Twitter following its premiere in Park City was not fucking around. Since then it wowed SIFF audiences as the opening night feature and is now opening around the country, including here in Seattle.