NATHAN WEINBENDER:
I just spent a few days at the Seattle International Film Festival, which rang in its 50th anniversary with a program of more than 250 features and shorts from around the world. When I first started attending SIFF on an annual basis, I would jam-pack my schedule, seeing upwards of 20 movies in only a few days. I’m now a lot more selective, which usually means I have a higher hit ratio—and it means my brain isn’t totally fried at the end of each day. I can’t cover everything I saw, but here are a few highlights.
Thelma, which kicked off the fest, stars June Squibb as a grandmother on a mission to get back some money that was scammed from her. The opening night crowd ate this up more than I did, but it’s charming and occasionally quite funny, with a great supporting cast that includes Parker Posey, Malcolm McDowell and the late Richard Roundtree. Thelma is set to be released by Magnolia Pictures next month.
I always try and catch some documentaries, and both of the ones I saw are movie-related. The first is Scala!!!—that title comes with three exclamation points—an entertaining history of a London cinema that became a haven for transgressive film and punk artists in the ’70s and ’80s. The other doc is called Hitchcock’s Pro-Nazi Film, an academic study of the controversies surrounding Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 thriller Lifeboat, which some contemporary critics interpreted as anti-American in the midst of WWII.
I had a lot of affection for the quiet drama Janet Planet, the debut film of Pulitzer-winning playwright Annie Baker. Set in the early ’90s, it’s about a single mother (played by Julianne Nicholson), her young and observant daughter, and the strange people who keep coming into their lives. Another mother-daughter story is Queen of My Dreams, a feature-length expansion of director Fawzia Mirza’s short. Jumping back and forth in time from the ’60s to the ’90s, it looks at the overlapping, sometimes contradictory coming-of-age experiences of a Pakistani mother and her daughter being raised in Canada.
I also had a chance to see Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow, which opens in Spokane this weekend. It’s like a teen movie made by David Lynch or David Cronenberg, in which a supernatural soap opera has a profound effect on a couple of high school outcasts. It’s a visually alluring nightmare of suburban alienation and a potent allegory for gender dysphoria.
Perhaps my most anticipated film of the fest was Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning Drive My Car. Evil Does Not Exist is set in the snowy woods of rural Japan, where a company specializing in luxury camping experiences wants to build a site, much to the chagrin of the locals. What develops is a slow-moving meditation on nature and capitalism, sometimes hypnotic and sometimes stagnant. I’m still not sure how I feel about the ending, which seems to put too fine a point on things, but it sure has stuck with me. Evil Does Not Exist is set to open at the Magic Lantern next week.
The in-person Seattle International Film Festival continues through Sunday, May 9th [19th], and select festival titles will be available to stream from May 20th to 27th at SIFF.net.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Nathan Weinbender.
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Nathan Weinbender is a film critic and one of the regular co-hosts for Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, heard Friday evenings at 6:30 PM here on KPBX.
