Film
The Day He Arrives: Hitting the Bottle in South Korea
The prolific Hong Sang-soo’s 12th film begins with Sungjoon (Yu Jun-sang), a former film director now retired to…
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Oslo, August 31st: A Junkie’s Long Day of Regret
As an actor, Anders Danielsen Lie has a frail, almost birdlike quality. He’s like some creature plucked too…
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Peace, Love & Misunderstanding: Jane Fonda and Catherine Keener Are Ill-Used
How much longer must we wait for a vehicle worthy of Jane Fonda, whose past few roles are…
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Ultrasonic: Are Conspiracy Theories Contagious?
If you’re going to save yourself from self- indulgence as the writer/director/star/ composer of a shoestring indie, you’d…
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High School: Making Pot No Fun at All
Its opening shots replete with heavily fetishized close-ups of kids taking hits off joints and its dialogue peppered…
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The Manzanar Fishing Club: Japanese-Americans Remember Their Shameful Detention
This documentary opens with a photomontage of Japanese-Americans in the late ’30s and early ’40s, just before the…
Film
SIFF: Week 3 Picks & Pans
WEDNESDAY, MAY 30 Rent-a-Cat/3:30 p.m., Harvard Exit Wait, you mean this isn’t the plot for Zooey Deschanel’s TV…
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Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance: Great Footage, Little Depth
A deeply archived and circumspect history of the Joffrey dance company, this doc does a perfect white swan…
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First Position: The Ardors of Dance
The nonfiction formula pioneered by Spellbound leads to frustrating superficiality in this glossy documentary about a multicultural collection…
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Headhunters: Art Theft and Murder in Norway
Arguably the strangest of the many recent Scandinavian movies to rifle through modern American-indie tropes and then cash…
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Post Mortem: A Harrowing Drama of Pinochet-Era Chile
“Nobody can escape the wheel of history,” a physician says in Pablo Larraín’s devastating follow-up to Tony Manero…
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SIFF Week 2: 20 New Picks & Pans
WEDNESDAY, MAY 23 Unforgivable/6:30 p.m., Harvard Exit Unforgivable? Interminable is more like it. Veteran writer/director André Téchiné (The…
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Bernie: Jack Black in a True-Life Texas Crime Story
The script for Bernie was in part dictated from the stand: In a 1997 murder trial in Carthage,…
Film
SIFF: Innocence and Experience
You’ll find two main varieties of SIFFgoers at the Seattle International Film Festival, now in its 38th year.…
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The Dictator: Sacha Baron Cohen Attempts Scripted Comedy
Admiral General Aladeen (Sacha Baron Cohen), dictator of the fictional North African nation Wadiya, travels to New York…
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What to Expect When You’re Expecting: Cameron Diaz (and Others) Get Knocked Up
Heidi Murkoff’s mega-bestselling mommy manual actually makes perfect sense as a vehicle for a contemporary Hollywood ensemble comedy.…
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SIFF: Week 1 Picks & Pans
THURSDAY, MAY 17 [PICK] Your Sister’s Sister/7 p.m., McCaw Hall For decades, it seems, Seattle’s tiny film community…
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Mansome: Morgan Spurlock’s Shallow Grooming Doc
“I think that men are having an identity crisis, but they don’t really know it.” So says “biological…
Film
SIFF: A Q&A With Lynn Shelton
It’s quite the honor to be selected as SIFF’s opening-night feature, particularly when Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister…
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SIFF: Rick Stevenson’s 10-Year Documentary
If the documentary The 5,000 Days Project: Two Brothers, which follows its subjects over the span of 10…