Late in Roy Andresson’s About Endlessness a man in a cafe watches in awe as snow falls gently outside a cafe window. A soft choral rendition of “Silent Night” accompanies the snowflakes, but no one seems to notice. He interrupts his fellow patrons’ quiet indifference to ask “Isn’t it fantastic?” To their quizzical responses he clarifies, “Everything”. Its as close a thesis statement as you’re going to get from this poetic contemplation of the mundane and profound that unfolds in dozens of short vignettes over seventy-four minutes.
Finding You delivers gorgeous Irish landscapes and a by-the-numbers romance
A middling late-teen rom-com with some really lovely landscape photography.
The Woman in the Window brings a literary sensation to the screen
A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window was a literary hit in 2018, one of those page-turners in the mold of the Girl on the Train and Gone Girl with unreliable narration and suspenseful twists. I never read it, but got the sense that a decent share of its sales were hate-readers who threw their copies of the book at the wall in frustration when certain plot points were revealed. After a long time in pandemic release purgatory, Joe Wright’s film adaptation finally drops this weekend. The main selling point is that you can find out what the love/hate for the novel was all about in the span of less than two hours instead of 448 pages.
A half-hearted attempt to reinvent the wheel, Spiral is the final nail in the coffin of the Saw series
Over the course of the last several weeks, I’ve been going back through all the previous Saw stories. Across eight films, the series told of everyday people who found themselves caught in tortuous games of life and death that were all orchestrated by the infamous Jigsaw killer. Only a few are worth watching as the series steadily declined into being more and more unnecessarily convoluted to keep the story running past where it should have ended. It is a shame as the first, even with its flaws, remains a standout that left a mark on the horror genre as a well-constructed and inventive film.
The fourth wall gets mowed down in the new action/comedy In Action
How hard can it really be to write the script for a big budget action movie? The dialogue doesn’t have to be good and the real magic happens when shit blows up or there’s fighting. It might not be something any idiot could do, but if you got two idiots together, you just might have something.
The Paper Tigers is even more than the sum of its parts
The best local Seattle film production of 2021 has arrived.
Jason Statham kicks ass and takes names in Wrath of Man. I hope you weren’t looking for anything more.
Jason Statham’s character in Guy Ritchie’s new movie Wrath of Man gets the nickname ‘H,’ presumably because anything longer would be a waste of the man-of-few-words’s time.
In Limbo, a Syrian refugee tries to make a home in Scotland
Ben Sharrock’s delicate and sensitive sophomore effort looks for beauty under tough circumstances.
Phoebe’s Father was a hidden gem in 2015, and it’s being re-released now. You should see it immediately.
Released previously in 2015, Seattle filmmaker John Helde is bringing his film Phoebe’s Father back to the Northwest Film Forum to play in its virtual cinema and then become available on streaming formats. This is all good news because Phoebe’s Father is a hidden gem of a movie that affected me deeply.
Without Remorse expands Amazon’s Clancyverse
Having previously transformed Jim from The Office into a globe-trotting action hero, Amazon Studios has now turned their attention to a much easier lift: expanding their Clancyverse to include Michael B. Jordan as a score-settling former Navy SEAL John Clark.