A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
For a few years in the ‘90s, The Seattle-born Jim Rose Circus Sideshow was everywhere. How this band of sideshow misfits scraped, lifted, regurgitated, and self-mutilated their way to international notoriety (for awhile, at least) is told with a veteran carnival barker’s rumpled, robust zing in Chickory Wees’ great documentary.
Reviews of three films playing at the Seattle International Film Festival; all will stream on SIFF.tv next week.
The Bonebat Comedy of Horrors Film Festival is a local April tradition that may not be quite as inevitable as death or taxes, but it’s getting there. And it’s a helluva lot more fun.
Scream 6 (2023 | USA | 123 minutes | Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett ) The original 1996 meta-horror classic Scream earned …
As per usual with years past, all my SunBreak co-conspirators saw a lot more new movies than I did this year, but …
Since seeing Halloween Ends, purportedly the final chapter in director David Gordon Green’s reboot of the iconic slasher franchise, I’ve oscillated between dismissing it as entertainingly lousy, and viewing it as a work of operatically-pitched satiric genius. Truth be told, it kinda feels like both at once, and therein lies much of its cockeyed charm. Whether you succumb to that charm, however, is another story.
Pearl, the prequel to writer/director Ti West’s well-received shocker X, takes a character’s origin story—the kind usually dispensed as an afterthought in a couple of sentences of exposition or two minutes of black-and-white flashback footage—and turns it into an audacious, grandly operatic standalone experience.
Several days late but not several dollars short, please see below for a machine-gun rundown of everything else I saw at SIFF …
When I finished watching Rick Charnoski’s narrative feature debut, I was so bowled over I had to see it a second time in as many days on a festival screen—just to determine if my immense love for it was the cinematic equivalent of an immediate, all-consuming crush that evaporates in the harsh light of day. Upon second viewing, I realized my movie-crush was no fluke.
When asked how he sees the movie of his life, Russian opposition presidential candidate Alexei Navalny bristles at the suggestion that his real-life story be depicted as a dry historic drama. It’s a thriller, Navalny asserts. And with that proclamation by its subject, filmmaker Daniel Roher literally opens the curtain on what turns out to be one hell of a thriller—and much more.
