A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
Luca Guadagnino has long explored the way our sexy human bodies drive us to madness, whether it’s a steamy countryside romance, the horror of an elite ballet academy, or the insatiable hunger for human flesh that motivates a cross-country road trip. With Challengers, he transports us into the inner psychological warfare of the most dangerous game of all: men’s profession tennis.
Bertrand Bonello’s century-spanning tryptic is nothing if not inventive, but it’s sometimes hard to find the emotion in the high aesthetics. But if you give yourself over to it, you come to realize that maybe the chilly gulf is exactly the point of this stylish filmmaking exercise that melds science fiction and humane mysticism. Whether it’s in any given moment or spanning across time, its interlocking stories confront the impossibility of making deep simultaneous connections.
An annotated list of all of the SunBreak’s coverage of the 50th Seattle International Film Festival, which runs from May 9-19 in person and May 20-27 online.
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.
Even though the film has a confusingly long name and almost zero promotion outside of BTS’ fanbase, it has become the second highest-grossing movie at the US Box Office in 2024. Suga | August D along with director Jun-Soo Park creates an experience that’s larger than life. Starting with some simple words from Suga to build am intimate world for viewers to escape to with him, the bulk of the movie is a concert, a replaying of each and every song he performed on the very short run D-Day tour.
Sol (Naíma Sentíes), a young girl of 7, is quiet and polite as she arrives at her grandfather’s home with her mother who’s dropping her off in anticipation of her father, Tonatiuh’s (Mateo Garcia), birthday party that night. Unsure of herself and her place in the house she floats from one family member to the next, aunts, uncles and cousins, treated sweetly but aloof as they prep themselves for the night’s festivities. An air of anxiety and impending loss threatens to suffocate all those in the house.
We start up where Part One left us as Paul (Timothée Chalamet) and Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) Atreides have found the mistrusting Fremen that they must win over not only to survive but to thrive as both Paul and Jessica have foreseen. Each has their own path in what will become the fight for the freedom of these people and themselves. The latter must manipulate the religious fervor for the coming messiah while the former must lead the people, even if it’s not what he wants for himself.
I love a movie that lets us watch an artist at work (see also, Showing Up) especially when it’s a craftsman of a job I’ve never considered.
Benoît Magimel is the Napoleon of French cuisine. Juliette Binoche is his cook, apprentice, and lover. Over twenty-plus years together, they’ve built an astonishing culinary and emotional partnership together at a stunning country estate. It’s the late 1800s in France, the Age of Escoffier is dawning, and the preparation, appreciation, and invention of food is serious business.
An NYPD EMT, Cassie Web (Dakota Johnson), has a lonesome existence, but she’s more than happy with the way things are while her partner Ben forces her out of her shell and into socializing. A life and death experience brings out a new power laying dormant within her brought on by her mother’s time in the Peruvian Amazon. As her mother lay dying during child birth, locals save Cassie’s life with the help of a rare spider that supposedly offers supernatural powers. Double crossed by her supposed protection Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), she clung to life just long enough for the birth of her daughter.
