What a time for Nineties Kids to be alive with access to massive studio filmmaking budgets! In what’s been a pretty great summer of adult filmmakers playing with (and recontextualizing) their childhood toys on the big screen, comes another strong nostalgia play in the form of TMNT: Mutant Mayhem. Spearheaded by “permanent teenager” Seth Rogen, we get a satisfying reboot of the teen turtles who cowabunga’ed their way into pop culture ubiquity when they made the jump from comics into morning cartoons, film, video games, and action figure adaptations in the late 1980s.
Afire is a slow-burning seaside chamber piece until it isn’t
We meet twentysomething friends Leon and Felix, just as their working holiday home gets off to a rough start. Getting away from city life to focus on creative pursuits, their Benz stops firing correctly, breaking down a rustic lane, out of cell service, in the middle of a forest. Felix optimistically runs ahead to find a path, leaving Leon alone in the woods to stew over this inconvenience. It’s a portentous beginning, and a pattern that will repeat itself often in their time by the coast in German director Christian Petzold’s take at a “summer film”.
Oppenheimer is a masterclass in filmmaking
As long as I’ve been writing about the arts (somewhere near twenty years now), I’ve tried to keep any effusiveness in check, lest I feel like one of those critics whose names appear on movie posters declaring some Hollywood dreck like a Transformers movie life-changing. So when I left the theater after watching Oppenheimer, my emotions were almost foreign. I felt wonder and astonishment and like I had seen one of the best films I’ve seen in my life.
Roundtable: We Are Become Barbenheimer
Given the monumental event in summer blockbuster history, Chris and Josh collected ourselves and convened a quick roundtable to chat about our experiences with Christopher Nolan’s atomic age biopic and Greta Gerwig’s big budget fantasia about the original American Icon.
It’s time to embrace that this is now Barbie‘s world, we’re just living in it
Every time I saw a TV commercial or product tie-in for the new Barbie movie – and there were a lot – I had the same thought: “this movie better be good.” It gives me immense pleasure to report that, for the most part, it is an extremely well-made and enjoyable, often (literally) otherworldly, movie that will delight its audience.
Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning is the first great blockbuster of the summer, should you choose to accept it
Is there a long-running blockbuster movie franchise that is more dependably good than the Mission Impossible films with Tom Cruise? I don’t think there is.
It’s time to take a Joy Ride, the summer road-trip movie you won’t want to miss
Audrey (Ashley Park), is headed to China to make the deal of her young career. With her best friend Lolo (Sherry Cola), unpredictable but loyal as can be, in tow acting as translator and Lolo’s odd cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) tagging along for the ride, Audrey is already on edge. For a little moral support they meet up with her college roommate and Chinese soap star Kat (Stephanie Hsu) when they arrive. Audrey is drowning in the unfamiliar culture and to save her job and this deal she has to dig into the past she’s avoided for so long.
Roundtable: Our Favorite Movies of 2023 (So Far)
We’re just past the halfway point of 2023; so to commemorate the occasion a few of you friendly neighborhood SunBreakers took stock of the films we’ve seen so far.
The Childe is a wild ride filled with assassins, double crossing sociopaths, and the best smile in all of Korean entertainment
Marco (Kang Tae-Ju), A young Filipino-Korean man, is fighting underground muay thai bouts and taking less than wise snatch and grab jobs just so he can scrounge up enough funds to pay for his ailing mother’s surgery. His father was in the wind the moment he was born and despite a tireless search to find him, all paths led to dead ends… until now.
Portrait of the Explorer as an Old Fart
It’s been fifteen years since Harrison Ford donned his famous fedora atop Indiana Jones’s head. But! The iconic archaeologist is back for what is likely a final exploration.