A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
The holiday film with the most local relevance is almost certainly The Boys in the Boat. It tells the inspirational true story of the UW eight man crew team that improbably dominated better funded collegiate competition, made it to the 1936 Olympics, and showed Hitler the power of good old fashioned American determination.
The holidays are always a crowded time at the multiplex. This year brings a slate of movies begging for your attention, two of which are musicals even though their trailers try to keep that fact under wraps. Brief reviews of The Color Purple and Wonka below.
This afternoon, the Seattle Film Critics Society (SFCS) announced the creation of a new award to specifically honor the outstanding work of a person with local ties to the Pacific Northwest. Named for the late John Hartl, the Seattle Times film critic whose wrote film criticism and features for the paper for decades, the Pacific Northwest Spotlight award will be presented annually by the SFCS board to acknowledge an exceptional body of work, rather than a single film or performance, that represents the region.
In a relentlessly inventive take on the Frankenstein myth, a sexually-insatiable experiment stumbles out from a Goldbergian laboratory into a vibrant Ozlike world. Based on Alasdair Gray’s illustrated novel, Yorgos Lanthimos tells a coming-of-age story unlike any other, set amid some of the richest and most dazzling production design captured on film this year. With tremendous and daring performances across the stellar cast, Poor Things earns a must-see spot for holiday season moviegoers and well-deserved recognition on year-end lists and award nominations.
Frederick Wiseman’s newest documentary runs for exactly four hours, probably about the amount of time you’d spend enjoying a dinner service at Le Bois sans Feuilles, the three Michelin starred restaurant run by the Troisgros family at their inn in the French countryside in Ouches. While the price of admission for the film is substantially less than even the a la carte menu at the celebrated restaurant, the intricately observed documentary is nevertheless a sumptuous immersion in the highest levels of new French cuisine.
The Boy and the Heron (2023 | Japan | 124 minutes | Hayao Miyazaki) In what might be his final film, master Japanese …
The best thing Emerald Fennell does with her sharp satiric follow-up to A Promising Young Woman is giving the always-sublime weirdo Barry Keoghan a whole goddamned movie to finally let his freak flag fly. She brings a distinctly female gaze to a twisty class comedy about an Oxford scholarship nerd falling in (and in love with) with the college’s landed party people elite through the transformative power of doing a fortuitous favor for a fellow student.
The names Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau are nowhere to be found in the press materials for Todd Haynes’s new film May December, but anyone alive in 1997 will instantly recognize their story as the launching point for Samy Burch’s screenplay and Julianne Moore’s uncanny performance.
David Fincher’s latest film is about an incredibly meticulous craftsman doing dirty work for hire for incredibly wealthy clients in exactly the way he knows how to do them best.
New theorem: if a Marvel movie it has a Spider-Man or a super pet, it’s going to be good. The Marvels has orange tabby cat Goose; thus the Marvels is pretty good. Q.E.D.
