What a time for Nineties Kids to be alive with access to massive studio filmmaking budgets! In what’s been a pretty great summer of adult filmmakers playing with (and recontextualizing) their childhood toys on the big screen, comes another strong nostalgia play in the form of TMNT: Mutant Mayhem. Spearheaded by “permanent teenager” Seth Rogen, we get a satisfying reboot of the teen turtles who cowabunga’ed their way into pop culture ubiquity when they made the jump from comics into morning cartoons, film, video games, and action figure adaptations in the late 1980s. 

We meet twentysomething friends Leon and Felix, just as their working holiday home gets off to a rough start. Getting away from city life to focus on creative pursuits, their Benz stops firing correctly, breaking down a rustic lane, out of cell service, in the middle of a forest. Felix optimistically runs ahead to find a path, leaving Leon alone in the woods to stew over this inconvenience. It’s a portentous beginning, and a pattern that will repeat itself often in their time by the coast in German director Christian Petzold’s take at a “summer film”.

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.

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.

The main question you have to ask yourself when deciding if you’re going see this movie is “Does seeing Michael Keaton put on the ol’ Batsuit and once again speak aloud an ad-libbed catchphrase justify spending more than two hours with multiple versions of Ezra Miller and some pretty substandard CGI?” 

Hasbro’s robots in disguise get a competent reboot in the latest iteration.