A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
In actor/cinematographer/film critic Carson Lund’s directorial debut, it’s Sunday October 16 in mid-1990s1 suburban Massachusetts. It’s a sunny day, but the hint of a chill in the air already has residents minds turning to the long dark winter ahead. Between radio reports — voiced by master documentarian Frederick Wiseman — of a coyote terrorizing the area and the “New Hampshire Justice” that awaits the poor creature, we hear that a beloved park will soon be the site of a new elementary school.
Thunderbolts* opens with a shot of Florence Pugh on the ledge of the 2,227-foot-tall Merdeka Tower in Kuala Lumpur. From this harrowing start to the film’s last scene, the expression on her face perfectly tracks the feeling of watching a Marvel Cinematic Universe film in the year 2025. As the film opens, it’s one of absolute dejection and dutiful dread. Her character Yelena Belova has yet another job to do, but the thrill is long gone, and she’s questioning whether it’s still worth the paycheck.
The Legend of Ochi (2025 | USA | 96 minutes | Isaiah Saxon) The Legend of Ochi feels completely at home among Scandinavian …
I suppose it’s kinda cool that the Hollywood’s hottest young stars now establish their acting cred by the rite of passage of playing gay on the big screen. At least Jacob Elordi and Daisy Edgar Jones avoid tragic weepy stereotypes in Daniel Minahan’s handsome literary take (an adaptation Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 novel) on queer identities in the 1950s American West.
Superboys of Malegaon is a Hindi-language coming-of-age film that tells the true story of Nasir Shaikh, an amateur filmmaker from Malegaon, India. In the 90s, Nasir (Adarsh Gourav), the son of a movie parlor owner, grows tired of the Bollywood films he feels obliged to showcase at the theater and craves something new.
Starting today, tickets and passes are now available to the public for the 50th Seattle International Film Festival. While we’re digging through the schedule and plotting our own agendas, we thought we’d start by each highlighting a film (or two) from the program that we’re most excited to see or recommend.
Two couples, four best friends, Min (Han Gi-chan of kdrama Where Your Eyes Linger) and Chris (Bowen Yang of Crazy Rich Asians), Angela (Kelly Marie Tran, of several Star Wars films) and Lee (Lily Gladstone of Killers of the Flower Moon), live at the same address, share their lives and love each other. Nothing special or grandiose about their stories, there’s love, frustrations, insecurities, but these are things we all share as humans. While Chris is working through his issues with worthiness, aimlessness and fear of the future, Angela is trying to reconcile her frustrating and hurtful relationship with her mother while apprehensively preparing to become one herself with Lee’s second attempt at IVF looming.
Following his indie debut, Ryan Coogler was launched into a string of astronomically successful films built on longstanding intellectual property: Marvel’s Black Panther and the Rocky franchise’s Adonis Creed. That the up-and-coming Oakland-based director was able to play in these existing worlds and make films that were both commercially viable and artistically satisfying is a rare feat. With Sinners, it feels like he’s working with a blank check to tell a wholly original story. Here, he again teams-up with his perpetual leading man to answer a question the world’s long been pondering: are two Michael B. Jordans better than one?
Two formerly close friends, Rickey (Michael Angarano) and Glenn (Michael Cera) embark on a road trip after the former pops in for a visit to the latter. Rickey seems lost in grief after his father’s passing the year before and Glenn has gone off the deep end, swallowed up by fear of his impending role as a father. Rickey manages to get Glenn to head to Sacramento to supposedly carry out his late father’s last wishes, but has more than just scattering remains in mind. Along the way, they find their friendship again but also seem to create a sort of co-dependence that exacerbates their self-centered midlife crises.
After embedding audiences with fictional photojournalists covering a Civil War yet to come, director Alex Garland has teamed up with that film’s battle coordinator (himself a Navy SEAL veteran) Ray Mendoza to bring viewers into the heart of a 2006 surveillance mission gone sideways in Ramadi, Iraq. Constructed from the memories of the soldiers themselves, it’s an inarguably impressive feat of technical filmmaking, immersively told, and unfolding in nerve-rattlingly real-time.
