The holidays are always a crowded time at the multiplex. This year brings a slate of movies begging for your attention, including three biopics of great men vying for your attentions.
Author: Josh
All of Us Strangers heals and haunts with a modern ghost story
It’s by no means A Christmas Carol, but in the grand tradition of holiday movies featuring spiritual visitations, Andrew Haigh works through familiar queer traumas in All of Us Strangers, his gorgeously realized vibey ghost story that arrives in wide release just in time for the holidays.
The Boys in the Boat paddles into theaters to assuredly please local crowds
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.
On screens for the holidays: secret musicals Wonka and The Color Purple
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.
Seattle Film Critics name Top Ten Films of 2023 and honor Lily Gladstone with Hartl PNW Spotlight
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.
Poor Things rapturously reinvigorates the Frankenstein myth
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 gets you the best seat in the house with Menus-Plaisirs—Les Troisgros
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 swoops into theaters this weekend.
The Boy and the Heron (2023 | Japan | 124 minutes | Hayao Miyazaki) In what might be his final film, master Japanese …
Everyone’s invited to Saltburn for the holidays
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.
May December has notes on a scandal
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.