A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
On opening night, last Friday, everyone I spoke to before the show told me about how much fun they expected or how excited they were for the Fifth Avenue Theatre’s new production of Bye Bye Birdie. That included the gentleman who scanned my ticket, a bartender, and the elderly couple seated next to me. It was the first “fun” play to hit the stage this year, they all told me. They were all correct, it was a blast.
Five strangers find them selves tangled up in each others lives after each receives organ donations from a mysterious donor. The young Wan Seo (Lee Je In) a Taekwondo champion with a failing heart and over-protective father, Gi Dong (Yoo Ah In) lost his site as a child, Ji Song (Ahn Jae Hong) got a new set of lungs, Seon Nyeo (Ra Mi Ran) was fitted for kidneys after attempting to take her life, and the overly kind and intensely devout Yak Seon (Kim Hee Won) gained a new liver. Very quickly after their operations, they were up and about, but even more surprising was their newly manifested super powers and a strange tattoo that appeared along with them.
Spoiler alert (not): 28 Years Later, the second sequel to director Danny Boyle’s influential 2002 shocker 28 Days Later, could hardly be better. And unlike 28 Weeks Later, the rather meh second film of the franchise, this new entry serves up something deeply emotional, stunningly ambitious, seriously creepy, decidedly distinctive from its predecessor(s), and exhilaratingly suspenseful.
Told in three acts in reverse, Mike Flanagan has made a lovely little Stephen King adaptation about how Tom Hiddleston came to be an exceptional dancer who contains multitudes.
Fresh off the enormous success of Past Lives, Celine Song returns to the world of divided affections in Manhattan. Her first semi-autobiographical film concerned yearning across decades and missed connections across continents. It was among my favorite movies of 2023 , an Oscar nominee, and Seattle Film Critics Society’s Best Picture of the Year. Materialists, which finds her returning as both writer and director, is also loosely inspired by her own past life, bringing a more cynical eye to the complexity of beautiful people seeking soulmates from the comfortable side of the precipitous economic divide.
Wes Anderson movies are a genre unto themselves, often misunderstood as shallow, whimsical dioramas. That some fail to see the immense emotion beneath the ornately hand-crafted surfaces and trademark camera positioning and movement remains a matter of great mystery to those of us who eagerly watch and rewatch each film and revisit the old ones to find new depths. His latest, The Phoenician Scheme, is unlikely to change that perception, but to me it’s another unqualified success.
Jane Austen has dominated the cinematic sphere for decades, inspiring everything from faithful period adaptations to quirky modern retellings—and even films that make Austen herself the object of obsession. Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is the latest installment in the seemingly endless Austen Boom, loosely riffing on Pride & Prejudice while fostering an easy kinship with its Austen-devoted protagonist.
An ongoing annotated list of all of the SunBreak’s coverage of the 51th Seattle International Film Festival, which runs from May 15-25 in person and May 26-June 1 online.
This year at SIFF I was struck by two films seemingly about the same thing (dictatorships disguised as Communism), but from completely different perspectives (and in different countries). While the story, the people and the outcomes varied, the toll on the peoples of both countries were felt just as palpably. I didn’t expect to be so intrigued and taken in by these stories but here we are. Below I give you the low down on each and why I think, if you can manage it, you should seek them out at a SIFF venue if they run them again outside of the festival.
One SIFFter’s coverage of most of his SIFF 2025 views.
