📽️BLACK PHONE 2 rings true...some of the time -- Tony lets you know whether to pick up when a horror sequel calls. In theaters this weekend. thesunbreak.com/2025/10/16/b...

Luca Guadagnino wades into the mess of campus cancel culture and tenure mania with 📽️ AFTER THE HUNT. Starring Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield, and Ayo Edebiri, the film opens tonight at SIFF with wider release Friday. thesunbreak.com/2025/10/15/a...

📽️ In GOOD FORTUNE Keanu Reeves tries to save Aziz Ansari’s soul -- Marina has a review of the comedian's directorial debut, featuring body-swapping guardian angels. Opens this weekend in theaters. thesunbreak.com/2025/10/15/g...

The sad truth of 📽️ ROOFMAN is what it reveals about the world we live in -- Morgen reviews the story of a veteran hiding out in a Toys R Us starring Canning Tatum, Kirsten Dunst, and Peter Dinklage. thesunbreak.com/2025/10/11/t...

📽️ IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU -- with an unbelievable Rose Byrne at its chaotic center, Mary Bronstein's intense take on the horrors of motherhood wowed Sundance. It's now in theaters just in time for spooky season. thesunbreak.com/2025/01/30/s...

📽️KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN brings razzle and dazzle to a dingy, Argentinian prison - Chris reviews Bill Condon's musical adaptation with Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna, and a star-making performance from Tonatiuh. Now in theaters. thesunbreak.com/2025/10/10/k...

"Nostalgia and 3D printed soldiers doesn't exactly save TRON: ARES from disintegrating" - Morgen goes on a rocky thrillride with Jared Leto and Greta Lee in the latest installation which finds the classic video game breaking into the real world 📽️ thesunbreak.com/2025/10/09/n...

Announcing the nominees for the Seattle Film Critics Society's 2025 Best Pacific Northwest Film award with a screening series at @siffnews.bsky.social

📽️ Family drama brings Daniel Day-Lewis back to the screen in ANEMONE -- the three-time Oscar winner is out of retirement and back in theaters this weekend. thesunbreak.com/2025/10/04/a...

📽️In ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER the struggle is real and worthy -- Paul Thomas Anderson's latest -- starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, and Chase Infiniti is an absolute banger for our times. In theaters now. thesunbreak.com/2025/09/26/o...

📽️ Is it Worth it to Pay Attention to HIM? - Tony dives into Justin Tipping's assault on professional sports and toxic masculinity, a dark stylized fable set in the world of American football. thesunbreak.com/2025/09/24/h...

At this point, we'd be flabbergasted if the Orcas Island Film Festival lineup was anything other than astonishingly good. Today they revealed the full list and it's a dizzying array of the best movies of the year, and probably more than a few Oscar winners. thesunbreak.com/2025/09/23/o...

Josh Duhamel is an unlikely babysitter in 📽️ LONDON CALLING -- Marina reviews an uneven assassination buddy-comedy, now playing in theaters. thesunbreak.com/2025/09/19/l...

📽️ A BIG BOLD BEAUTIFUL JOURNEY overpromises, underdelivers -- Marina goes on a magical GPS journey with Collin Farrell and Margot Robbie and lives to tell the tale. thesunbreak.com/2025/09/17/a...

Stephen King's 📽️THE LONG WALK stirs up mixed emotions - Morgen reviews Francis Lawrence's new post apocalyptic adaptation starring Cooper Hoffman, David Jonsson, Tut Nyout, and Ben Wang on a march to the end. thesunbreak.com/2025/09/12/s...

A last dispatch from 📽️ TIFF 2025 includes quick reviews of Wake Up Dead Man, No Other Choice, Orwell 2+2 = 5, Blue Heron, Poetic License, and Fuze. thesunbreak.com/2025/09/10/t...

POETIC LICENSE. A mom with no boundaries befriends two buddies with attachment issues. Almost nothing makes sense in Maude Apatow's collegiate comedy of terrible choices except that Cooper Hoffman and Andrew Barth Feldman have a lifetime of buddy comedies in their future. #TIFF

NO OTHER CHOICE. Expected this downsizing comedy to go much differently, but Park Chan-wook digs deeper and deeper into daffy darkness. Not entirely my cup of tea, but have to appreciate the commitment to the bit. #TIFF

NOUVELLE VAGUE. But of course Richard Linklater made a movie about the making of BREATHLESS a rangy hangout pic populated by a comically absurd array of bold-faced names. Zoey Deutch is suitably perplexed as Seberg; Sunglasses/ Marbeck are convincingly iconoclastic as Godard. Appealing vibe. #TIFF

BLUE HERON. A filmmaker interrogates events of a tumultuous summer from her childhood on Vancouver Island. Using tools of her trade, she constructs layers of artifice to attempt to find truths she was too young to understand, conveying to the audience a small sense of empathetic confusion. #TIFF

ORWELL 2+2=5. Drawing on writings from the last year of Orwell's life, Raoul Peck crafts a tapestry of outrageous prescience from film clips, quotations, and present-day imagery. A call to collective action before forcefully prophetic warnings become elegies as we grow deaf to their accuracy. #TIFF

WAKE UP DEAD MAN. My god, Josh O'Connor is good at this! My fraying wits could be a culprit, but Rian Johnson's hilariously plotted, elegantly structured mystery's warm embrace in a world of wolves is the most moved I've felt at #TIFF. Keep making these as long as Daniel Craig will do them!

A few more #TIFF 2025 Dispatches: 📽️ Tuner, Nuestra Tierra, Sound of Falling thesunbreak.com/2025/09/08/t...

TUNER. Amid so many "prestige" ambitions, a welcome jolt when a fun movie executes on a clever concept and is impeccably entertaining from top to bottom. Dustin Hoffman charms, and Leo Woodall hits all the right notes as a hardscrabble piano tech whose acute ears get him into safecracking. #TIFF

NUESTRA TIERRA. Questions spiral from a case adjudicating a murder captured on film. Testimony within the courtroom gives way to personal narratives of surviving family, personal histories, a legacy of colonialism, and a discovery of indigenous identitIes buried in centuries of paperwork. #TIFF

#TIFF 2025 Dispatches: Some instant reactions to three world premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival: 📽️ Rental Family, Dead Man's Wire, and The Christophers thesunbreak.com/2025/09/08/t...

THE CHRISTOPHERS. Felt more sputtering and searching than I expect from Soderbergh, but Michaela Cole and Ian McKellen make magnificent sparring partners. As far as people talking in rooms go, can't ask for better than these two talking about art and trying to pull one over on his idiot kids. #TIFF

RENTAL FAMILY. Wait. Is this really a Japanese remake of a Werner Herzog movie starring Brendan Fraser as an American actor abroad who gets into the surrogate relative business? HIKARI takes it far more sentimental and comedic; Fraser's big soft vulnerability demands sweet and tidy endings. #TIFF

DEAD MAN'S WIRE. Aggrieved borrower bound to a slippery lender by loaded shotgun might be too on the nose a metaphor if it hadn't really happened. With Bill Skarsgård as self-righteous captor, Gus Van Sant makes wry hay of the 1977 Indianapolis hostage situation that minted a minor folk hero. #TIFF

A few more reactions to films playing at the Toronto International Film Festival: 📽️The Testament of Ann Lee, Miroirs No. 3, and The Lost Bus. thesunbreak.com/2025/09/07/t...

THE LOST BUS. Impossible to capture the enormity of the Paradise wildfire, but Greengrass does what he can with a limited budget. Filming the flames like a monster, he puts us inside the dark belly of the beast alongside McConaughey. Ample bravery abounds, but no heroics can rescue this one. #tiff

MIROIRS NO. 3. With something always just out of reach, Christian Petzold's films have a certain rigor of academic riddles populated by characters brimming with curiosity and nursing quiet tragedies. The great pleasure is in the final piece falling into place to reveal a richer, fuller whole. #TIFF

The shift from the box canyon of Telluride to the glass canyon of downtown Toronto is slightly jarring, but we're here catching all sorts of TIFF premieres. First batch of reactions includes It Was Just An Accident, The Wizard of the Kremlin, Christy, Franz, & Sirât. thesunbreak.com/2025/09/06/t...

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE. Amanda Seyfried's luminous eyes are watching god in Mona Fastvold's maximalist epic of the original Dance Church. Song and ecstatic movement displace carnal pleasures in a sweeping account of a colonial messiah with an enduring legacy of austere craftsmanship. #TIFF

SIRÂT. Amid a throbbing soundscape and stunning vistas, a father's search for a missing daughter encapsulates the stupid fragility of life and reinforces a universal truth. No matter how caring and resourceful, never ever follow a band of aging ravers to a second desert raving location. #tiff

FRANZ. Agnieszka Holland so actively resists biopic convention in attempting to capture the childhood, inspiration, family, life, and legacy of a man perpetually out of time and place that it leaves the audience to find their own form of Kafka-esque coherence in the striking moments on screen. #tiff

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT. Righteous kidnappings have never been funnier (apologies to BUGONIA). A snowballing comedy of errors and archetypes is even more impressive for having been filmed in secret. Panahi's real gift, a catharsis that challenges us to see humanity in ever-lurking oppression. #tiff

THE WIZARD OF THE KREMLIN. A deeply dull recounting by a vaguely british Paul Dano featuring an oddly inert Jude Law. Assayas usually makes fleeting effervescent moments of life monumental; here, decades of consequential world politics are rendered as somnambulant foregone conclusions. #tiff

SENTIMENTAL VALUE. Joachim Trier constructs his drama about the hard business of family to unfurl with such intricate precision that you barely notice what it's up to until it swoons to full bloom. Renate Reinsve and Stellan Skarsgård are exquisite; Inga Ibsdotter a shimmering discovery. #telluride

📽️ COVER-UP Poitras's latest celebrates the physical and personal elements of Hersh's decades of persistent revelatory investigative journalism. At the periphery, a sinking realization that while the pace of atrocities hasn't slowed, resources to report them continue to dwindle. #telluride

FRANKENSTEIN: Bending the ultimate myth of broken monsters and men as only he could, Guillermo del Toro threads seemingly limitless resources into an indulgent tapestry: a gilded intricate culmination threaded from his purest impulses, both generous and grisly. The spark of life, elusive. #telluride

JAY KELLY Noah Baumbach's alternatingly introspective & cartoonish Euro caper makes an oddly compelling argument that the greatest role of George Clooney's storied career is the public persona George Clooney. Sneakily sentimental work from Adam Sandler steals the show. #telluride

THE MASTERMIND. Sir, Josh O'Connor is stealing art again. Kelly Reichardt taps into a jazzy 70s aesthetic in a heist pic about a suburban dad with a snatch-and-grab scheme but not much vision beyond. With more questions than answers, its aesthetic captures an egocentric country in flux. #telluride

Telluride 2025: 📽️ Bugonia; Hamnet; Pillion -- notes from yesterday at the Show thesunbreak.com/2025/08/30/t...

PILLION. Who'd have guessed the squirmiest elements of watching a meek Dudley Dursley stumble his way into a submissive arrangement with superhero biker Alexander Skarsgård would be the amount of holiday barbershop quartet? This sweet-natured BDSM coming-of-age isn't your mom's Babygirl. #telluride

HAMNET. We've become too careless with the word "shattering" but there is no other word for Jessie Buckley's wail of despair or Paul Mescal's transmutation of unceasing waves of grief. With extraordinary dexterity Chloe Zhao divines the alchemical power of art to span an unknowable gulf. #telluride

BUGONIA: There's no arguing with crazy, but Emma Stone's kidnapped CEO uses every technique of corporate communication when faced with tremendous fanaticism of Jesse Plemmons as her captor. Together they reveal the deeply damaged nature of an absurd response to our insane reality. #telluride

Notes on the first day of #Telluride 2025 including world premieres of 📽️ Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere; Ballad of a Small Player; and La Grazia thesunbreak.com/2025/08/29/t...

BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER: with an assaultive soundtrack and gorgeously-garish photography, Edward Berger casts Macau as a hellscape for a gambler's hallucinatory descent. No one plays insatiable desperation quite as sweatily as Colin Farrell who anchors this fable with jittery aplomb. #telluride

SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE it's nearly impossible to make the creation of a great work of art seem anything less than inevitable but Jeremy Allen White ascends beyond tropes and sweaty mimicry to find some glimmers of deep truth about making an album as a cry for help. #telluride