A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
Ryan Coogler’s first Black Panther film was the first (and only) Marvel to crack the Oscar ceiling for a best picture nomination. The much-anticipated return to Wakanda reconciles with the sad reality of the real world: the 2020 death of Chadwick Boseman and Wakanda’s loss of its beloved king and protector.
A pervasive sadness lingers around the corners of Aftersun, Charlotte Wells’s deeply accomplished recollection of a father-daughter summer holiday in Turkey.
Martin McDonagh revisits 1920s Ireland with a stirring dark comedy of an abruptly severed friendship on a tiny island of sad boring men.
Saturday brought another tribute, this time to the legendary Cate Blanchett to coincide with the US premiere of Todd Field’s TÁR. We spend two hours and forty masterfully controlled minutes with the prodigious, highly-lauded, multiply-degreed conductor Lydia Tár.
The follies of the wealthy are on full display in two comedy premieres in Toronto. Rian Johnson returns to the Knives Out saga with Glass Onion’s debut and Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness made landfall on North American shores during TIFF 2022.
Oh boy. David O’ Russell’s zany star-packed Amsterdam is a movie with so much going for it that nevertheless makes itself incredibly challenging to recommend. I sympathize with those who will find it simultaneously too much and not enough, or recoil from the ambitious sentimentality that animates its many excesses. I also groaned as it’s machinery sputtered and strained to draw meaning from madness. Yet! From its chaotic energy — a hallmark of a director who’s a monster on set yet consistently attracts the industry’s highest levels of talent — spring no shortage of genuinely laugh-out-loud bits and gonzo performances. Like most of his work, it’s a big-hearted mess that many will hate, but some might be able to forgive in spite of itself.
We were thrilled to see that the Orcas Island Film Festival was planning a big return for 2022 after a slightly-subdued 2021. Since then, they’ve released their full lineup — a jaw-dropping collection of some of the top prize-winners and most buzzworthy titles from many of the year’s most prestigious festivals. Along with potentially Oscar-bound international films and heart-stirring documentaries, the re-expanded program will pose scheduling conundrums for attendees trying to decide how to best plan a weekend of seeing some of the year’s best films well in advance of their neighbors. For lovers of first-look films, it’s among the best kinds of problem to have!
Nothing wrong with a little kindness. Melancholy humor of a severed friendship from Martin McDonagh, an itinerant donkey in EO, and a true story given the Farrelly treatment.
The follies of the wealthy are on full display in two comedy premieres in Toronto. Rian Johnson returns to the Knives Out saga with Glass Onion’s debut and Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness made landfall on North American shores during TIFF 2022.
Laura Poitras’s All the Beauty and the Bloodshed links the life and art of photographer Nan Goldin to her present-day activism surrounding the opioid epidemic; Brett Morgen contemplates David Bowie as philosopher king in IMAX proportions with Moonage Daydream.
