A Seattle moviegoing lifestyle magazine
Ryan Coogler’s first Black Panther film was the first (and only) Marvel to crack the Oscar ceiling for a best picture nomination. The much-anticipated return to Wakanda reconciles with the sad reality of the real world: the 2020 death of Chadwick Boseman and Wakanda’s loss of its beloved king and protector.
A pervasive sadness lingers around the corners of Aftersun, Charlotte Wells’s deeply accomplished recollection of a father-daughter summer holiday in Turkey.
Martin McDonagh revisits 1920s Ireland with a stirring dark comedy of an abruptly severed friendship on a tiny island of sad boring men.
Saturday brought another tribute, this time to the legendary Cate Blanchett to coincide with the US premiere of Todd Field’s TÁR. We spend two hours and forty masterfully controlled minutes with the prodigious, highly-lauded, multiply-degreed conductor Lydia Tár.
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.
The follies of the wealthy are on full display in two comedy premieres in Toronto. Rian Johnson returns to the Knives Out saga with Glass Onion’s debut and Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness made landfall on North American shores during TIFF 2022.
Oh boy. David O’ Russell’s zany star-packed Amsterdam is a movie with so much going for it that nevertheless makes itself incredibly challenging to recommend. I sympathize with those who will find it simultaneously too much and not enough, or recoil from the ambitious sentimentality that animates its many excesses. I also groaned as it’s machinery sputtered and strained to draw meaning from madness. Yet! From its chaotic energy — a hallmark of a director who’s a monster on set yet consistently attracts the industry’s highest levels of talent — spring no shortage of genuinely laugh-out-loud bits and gonzo performances. Like most of his work, it’s a big-hearted mess that many will hate, but some might be able to forgive in spite of itself.
Twins with such a tight relationship from birth they spoke their own language… that is, when they spoke at all. After making a pact at around age 6, June (Letitia Wright) and Jennifer (Tamara Lawrence) Gibbons remained silent for years. Much later they admitted it was meant as a fun prank in the beginning but after a while, it just became a part of life. They forgot how to socialize with anyone outside of each other so in their silence they created an entire world where the two of them could experience reality on their own terms.
Nothing wrong with a little kindness. Melancholy humor of a severed friendship from Martin McDonagh, an itinerant donkey in EO, and a true story given the Farrelly treatment.
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.
