A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
Part of the routine when attending preview screenings as a press member requires us to give a brief opinion after the movie to one of the PR representatives. The answer I gave after Argylle was “dumb but harmless.” A couple of days later, I still can’t think of anything better.
Cord Jefferson’s wildly entertaining, and biting, satire American Fiction will probably make any white person who has ever taken a selfie with a Toni Morrison or bell hooks book at least a little squeamish. This movie deals with race, identity, agency, who has control over their own stories. It’s an absorbing movie that never feels heavy handed and has one of the most memorable lead characters I’ve seen in quite a while.
When Seattle indie filmmaker Rose Kreider asked me to check out her 2022 debut film The Woman, I was thoroughly impressed. It …
In 2022 it felt like moviegoing came (almost) all the way back (for the seemingly dwindling number of people who were willing to go into the theaters). As the year winds to a close, we’re sharing lists of our favorite films we’ve seen (so far).
The life and times of Napoleon should give plenty of fodder for a biopic. He rose from humble beginnings on his way to becoming one of the most powerful people in the world’s history. The tagline on posters says “He came from nothing; he conquered everything.” It’s quite the story! Sure, several million people died along the way, but who’s counting?
The Osage Nation, after being expelled and moved across the country a few times already, without choice, became the richest people per capita in the world when oil was found on their land. And it leads to one of the oldest and most American of stories: the white man’s coveting of anything of value that belongs to people they see as lesser.
The time is nigh for SIFF to kick off its third(!) DocFest, a festival of many of the most interesting documentaries around the world. It all goes down starting tonight and running through next Wednesday at the Uptown. I’m most interested in catching two documentaries about two very different writers: John LeCarre and Tom Wolfe. But there’s a lot more to catch the attention of us documentary lovers.
It’s probably not a coincidence that A Haunting in Venice is my favorite of Kenneth Branagh’s three Agatha Christie/Hercule Poirot movies when it was the only one whose book I hadn’t read prior to seeing the film.
As long as I’ve been writing about the arts (somewhere near twenty years now), I’ve tried to keep any effusiveness in check, lest I feel like one of those critics whose names appear on movie posters declaring some Hollywood dreck like a Transformers movie life-changing. So when I left the theater after watching Oppenheimer, my emotions were almost foreign. I felt wonder and astonishment and like I had seen one of the best films I’ve seen in my life.
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.
