A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
One of the best entries in last year’s SIFF Northwest Connections program is situated 800 miles south on I-5 and a half century in the past: the biography of Sarah Jane Moore, one of two women who independently attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford while he campaigned for election in California. Eschewing typical documentary conventions, the story of the would-be assassin is told by the subject herself, having been released from prison 32 years into her life sentence.
Who could have possibly guessed that the squirmiest elements of watching a meek all-grown-up Dudley Dursley (Harry Melling) inadvertently stumble his way into a submissive arrangement with a godlike motorcycle dom played by Alexander Skarsgård would be the amount of holiday barbershop quartet singing?
John Patton Ford taps Glen Powell to star in his loose re-imagining of a 1949 black comedy in which an outcast needs to eliminate everyone on the family tree ahead of him in the line of succession to inherit a fortune. For once, his charisma isn’t enough to make it work.
Kahlil Joseph’s multi-sensory film takes inspiration for W.E.B. Du Bois’s dream — unfinished at the time of his death, but realized decades later by a group of scholars led by Henry Louis Gates — of creating an Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience. Acting more as chief curator or executive producer than a typical film director, he assembles a richly textured visual album for the screen that includes a long list of talented filmmakers, collaborators, and guest stars.
Bart Layton’s newest crime thriller, Crime 101, has nearly everything going for it. A stacked cast led by Chris Hemsworth, beautiful cinematography from Erik Wilson, an intriguing story adapted from Don Winslow’s novella,, and so much more.
Gore Verbinski’s latest movie turns out to be an imaginative, funny, and surprisingly affecting sci-fi adventure.
Wuthering Heights is both the title of Emily Brontë’s only novel, published in 1847, and a new film by Emerald Fennell, out this week, which I will refer to as “Wuthering Heights.” One bears some resemblance to the other, but not too much, hence the quotation marks. It is like when there was once a Seattle rock band called “The Rolling Stones.”
Through this weekend, the Monty Python stage musical SPAMALOT can be seen at the 5th Avenue Theatre. It was uproariously funny. It is probably the funniest play I have ever seen, which includes The Book of Mormon and The Producers (my favorite musical that is not Chicago).
In which the only rational response to sudden intense fame is to fictionalize a version even more absurd to find some glancing approximation of the honest truth.
Sundance 2026 is in full-swing in Park City, Salt Lake City, and — beginning on January 29 — online
