Movies

Shorts, feature, docs: The best of SpIFF 24

Oscar hopeful 'Argentina, 1985' probes justice

Coming in May to Netflix: a few favorite films

In 2022, Macedonian Australian filmmaker Goran Stolevski established himself as a talent to watch with his daring directorial debut, the folk horror film “You Won’t Be Alone,” about a witch body-jumping through a Macedonian village, experiencing the vast spectrum of love and cruelty life has to offer. His sophomore feature, “Of an Age,” is quite different — a high school coming of age story set in 1999 and 2010, about a Serbian immigrant teenager, Kol (Elias Anton) growing up in Melbourne, coming to terms with his sexuality and experiencing first love. Despite the genre contrast, there’s a commonality between the two films in the the way that Stolevski captures the aching beauty snatched in life’s darker moments — the heart of the matter remains the same, the bittersweet tone just as poignant.

“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” launches Phase 5 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and these phases are starting to feel like variants in a pandemic.

In one of the first scenes of “Return to Seoul,” the striking second film by French Cambodian filmmaker Davy Chou, and Cambodia’s 2022 Oscar entry, Freddie (Ji-min Park), a French woman who has just landed in Seoul, gets to know her new Korean friends over shots of soju. As she boldly pours her own drink (frowned upon in Korean etiquette) she casually tells them about her approach to life, which she describes as “sight reading,” as in music — learning the signs, how to read them and then plunging into the unknown. Little does she know how much sight reading she will do over the course of an eight-year personal odyssey of self-discovery, on a restless search for identity.

The marketing team behind Elizabeth Banks' "Cocaine Bear" on Tuesday released a bonkers video game inspired by the forthcoming film. And the internet is eating it up.

What’s new for home viewing on Video on Demand and Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services.

Drifting snow and gale force winds continued to tie up almost all train traffic both east and west of Spokane.

Friday's openings: Time for some Marvel action

Lantern to screen Oscar-nominated short films

Like him, hate him, Shyamalan churns them out

What’s new for home viewing on Video on Demand and Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and other streaming services.

Call it a “cultural reset” or a “vibe shift,” but there’s no denying that there is before “Magic Mike” and there’s after “Magic Mike.” One can even point to a specific inflection point in Steven Soderbergh’s 2012 male stripper drama that was lightly culled from star Channing Tatum’s own experiences in an “all-male revue”: the scene in which Tatum, as the aforementioned Mike, performs a solo number to Ginuwine’s “Pony” as Cody Horn’s Brooke looks on from the crowd. It’s not just the hypnotic fluidity of Tatum’s hips and torso, but the way that Soderbergh cuts back to Brooke, our gaze becoming her gaze, her frown offering dramatic irony to the visual splendor that is Tatum’s body in motion.

Most of the promotional material for “Consecration,” the religious gothic horror film directed by Christopher Smith, features an indelible image of star Jena Malone wearing an all-white nun’s habit, soaked in crimson gore from neck to fingers. It’s a striking, curiosity-sparking visual, and a great hook for a film of this genre. But after watching “Consecration,” one can’t shake the feeling that Smith and co-writer Laurie Cook started with the image and worked backward, filling it in with a thin — and yet overly busy — story of terrifying nuns, lost relics, broken families, fallen angels and a young woman who sees too much for her own good.