Movies

“All of Us Strangers” is a lovely way to begin 2024, not because it’s especially seasonal – though one key scene takes place around Christmastime – but because it’s just so beautifully acted and tenderly observant. Writer-director Andrew Haigh’s drama made a lot of Top 10 lists for 2023. I always miss two or three such films around the holiday crunchtime. The upside, with “All of Us Strangers” in limited theatrical release, is the opportunity to start the year on a high note.

The title character we meet at the beginning of “Freud’s Last Session” – a talky, speculative drama that imagines a meeting between avowed atheist Sigmund Freud, who invented psychoanalysis, and the Christian apologist writer C.S. Lewis, author of “The Chronicles of Narnia” – is on his last legs. He is 83 years old, forgetful and in constant pain from the oral cancer he was diagnosed with 16 years earlier.

Watching a good movie is great. But writing - or reading - about a bad one can sometimes be even more fun. Here are 21 of the year's worst films: dreck that couldn't even get two stars from our critics. A few of them are still in theaters. (How is that even possible?) The rest can be streamed, if you dare.

Depending on your point of view, John Chau’s story is a sad one. Or it’s inspiring. Matters of religious faith are a personal exercise. Many of us either believe – or we don’t. The rest fall somewhere in between.

Ferrari starts with some ancient history: archival footage of Enzo Ferrari racing cars as a young man in the 1920s, just a few decades into the automobile age, long before he founded his eponymous automobile company. Watching him zoom around the track in grainy black and white is thrilling. But, wait a minute-how are we cutting into these closeups? Cameras were much too large in 1924 to strap to the side of a race car. And hold on-that's not Enzo. It's that most Italian of non-Italian movie stars, Adam Driver.

The year 2013 saw publication of Daniel James Brown’s nonfiction book bearing a long and involved title: “The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.”

Spokane's Sydney Sweeney waxes about her hometown and latest film, "Anyone But You,' which hits screens today as well as her work in "Euphoria" and "The White Lotus."

Early in “The Iron Claw,” a harrowing, fact-based drama inspired by the Von Erich family wrestling dynasty’s saga of triumph and tragedy, writer-director Sean Durkin uses B-movie bombast to telegraph the sorrows yet to come. Although much of this Texas-set tear-jerker unfolds against a backdrop of rivers and ranches, bathed in golden-hour light, the prologue – focused on domineering patriarch Fritz Von Erich’s career in the ring and his unhinged ambition – portrays pro wrestling’s colorful sensibility via black-and-white visuals and an unnerving score.

Like its central character, Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "The Color Purple" has had a long journey. Published in 1982, this lyrical story of a poor Black woman's eventual triumph over an abusive husband and a seemingly uncaring world became a movie directed by Steven Spielberg in 1985, and then a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical in 2005. And here it is, transformed again: a new movie, based on the stage musical but featuring some new songs, directed by filmmaker/musician Blitz Bazawule.

Since the 1950s, fueled by the furor of the Cold War, we’ve seen one cautionary tale hit movie theaters after the next. If the foe confronting society wasn’t some radioactive-reanimated dinosaur like Godzilla, it was an army of zombies.

“Wonka,” the new musical origin story of everyone’s favorite mischievous chocolatier, is a lot like the creative confections our protagonist conjures — we don’t need chocolate, but how can we resist such a tantalizing treat? It’s the same quandary with this movie: we never needed a musical origin story of Willy Wonka, but how can we resist this whimsical and wonderful tale crafted by ...

Former journalist and Emmy-winning TV writer Cord Jefferson’s directorial debut “American Fiction” is a social satire that wields a deceptively sharp shiv, not a cleaving broadsword, as it surgically slices through the many hypocrisies of the culture industry at large.

Star Wars miniature game night is held every Tuesday at Uncle's Games.

Author Steve Kozak will break down the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special during the Northwest Passages Event. Kozak will discuss his book, "A Disturbance in the Force: How and Why the Star Wars Holiday Special Happened" and his documentary, "A Disturbance in the Force."

The Bing Crosby Film Festival returns to the Bing with "White Christmas" and some rare footage of Crosby pushing Gonzaga and the Evergreen state.

“The world is a tragedy to those who feel,” the 18th-century author and politician Horace Walpole wrote, “but a comedy to those who think.”

In the middle of “Poor Things,” the new film from Oscar-nominated oddball auteur Yorgos Lanthimos, our heroine Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) toddles off on a solo adventure for the very first time. Wandering the streets of a pastel storybook Lisbon in silky shorts and a blouse with enormous puff sleeves, her long mane of raven hair swaying down back, Bella heads for a pastry stand, where she crams ...

If you’re a fan of “Saturday Night Live,” then you’re likely familiar with the trio of comic performers known collectively as Please Don’t Destroy.

When Bradley Cooper made yet another iteration of "A Star Is Born" in 2018, more than a few skeptics smelled a dilettante - a typical pretty-boy actor with clichéd, "ultimately I want to direct" aspirations. Cooper dispelled those reservations immediately in that movie, with an exciting, utterly authentic set piece at a rock concert, in which he not only believably played a burned-out star, but staged and sequenced the scene with urgency and grit.