Michael Sarnowski’s grimy new historical-adjacent thriller dares to ask audiences to consider a deeply uncomfortable question. What if Robin Hood was not, in true fact, a sexy swashbuckling animated fox? Let alone one who stole from the rich to give to the poor? Or to unite with his band of affable outlaws who communed in the forest of Sherwood to thwart the avaricious overreaches of a swishy spoiled despot king? 

The answer, especially for those struggling day-to-day to make sense of the nonstop onslaught of insanity that mark The Way We Live Now: “damn, man, that sure would be a major bummer.” 

Having previously played very successfully in the milieu of miserabilia with Pig and A Quiet Place: Day One, I was optimistic about his take to scuff up the shiny legend of a folk hero. But where his previous film found glimmers of hopeful complexity, this one takes a more relentless approach. From the moment we meet his Robin Hood (Hugh Jackman, grizzled and grey-bearded) warming himself by a small fire at nightfall in the weather-ravaged hills of thirteenth century England, it’s immediately clear that he was neither Flynn nor Fox. A starving young woman (posing as a man) spouts the familiar tales of true love and virtue. Although he summarily tosses her a morsel of food (trigger warning: so many skinned animals), he delivers with it a truth bomb that Robin Hood was nothing but a murderous vandal who used stories of valor for cover to support more murderous vandalism. 

Lest you think this cantankerous mumbly man, time-worn skin covered by overgrown grey hair and protected from the elements by a collage of animal pelts, is using his denial of legend as simple cover, Sarnoski disabuses audience of any hope by the number of dogs and children’s heads who see the sharp end of his knives and trademark arrows.

The first third of the film reunites Robin with his old bestie Little John (a truly unrecognizable Bill Skarsgård). His onetime partner and crime has spent decades as the beneficiary of a violent identity theft, but the idyll of domesticity has been crushed by the realities of violent familial retribution. Jackman and Skarsgård’s scenes together echo the melancholy of late life, in which the truth has become indistinguishable from stories and memories, even among the men who lived or fabulized them. Robin joins John for one last battle with the odds stacked against them, less out of service to his friend than out of a fleeting hope that it will hasten his long overdue death.

From its opening frames, Cinematographer Pat Scola (who shot Sarnoski’s previous features) immediately conjures a grim and unforgiving medieval world, using celluloid film to capture desaturated vision of desolation. Far from the technicolor emerald greens of legend, this is a craggy and mossy world illuminated by overcast skies or the sparks of firelight against the menacing dark of night. Accompanying this desolate look, the film features some of the gnarliest kills, filthiest fights, and unforgivingly gory violence I’ve seen in quite some time. Every confrontation is tactile and brutal, combatants covered in dirt and ash, mortal wounds delivered unflinchingly. There’s little merriness to these men.

Despite the title, Robin’s death does not come quickly. The latter part of the film finds him recuperating on a seemingly enchanted island under the care of a mysterious Prioress (an excellent Jodie Comer). It’s here that some light enters the frame, in the form of seaside light that filters through windows and orchards where Robin’s rehab and physical therapy progress through gardening chores and trapping duties. We see him soften through conversations with a wise leper and warm in taking on surrogate fathering duties to a young girl who survived unspeakable trauma. Jackman and Comer share a magnetic rapport and in these sections, these two reticent characters bloom ever so slightly as the film wrestles with issues of legacy, duty, and the confounding balance of the universe. 

Although it’s a welcome counterpoint to the film’s grim opening act, the story never comes into full bloom. In part, because it’s still blanketed by an overwhelming sadness without much in the way of regret, but also because much of it feels so rote. One also ponders the choice to set the action against the folk story or Robin Hood at all. Jackman’s version of the character is a compelling storyteller, but even in the less sophisticated media environment of the time it makes little sense that the gilded legend would persist so widely if the man was such a monster whose villainy and blood feuds chased him into old age. Beyond those practicalities, Sarnoski’s script also seems to lose interest in the contradiction, pivoting instead to a vague flirtation with redemption. 

While some elements of the filmmaking and acting are superb, they’re often in service of a story that’s going through the motions. Be it found fatherhood, deathbed revelations, or tenuous friendships, Sarnoski is so committed to his anti-hero’s recalcitrance that the impact is diminished. It doesn’t help that we’ve also already seen a grizzled (yet still ripped) Hugh Jackman wrangling with the dark side of violent heroism in Logan, making this performance feel more like retread than re-invention. Despite some fascinating turns, I longed for it to connect — or at least have more to say — about the subversion of fairy tales. As the film’s intentions became clear, I found myself counting down the minutes until it paid off its title. While a few glimmers of insights penetrate the stony facade, a quiver full of opportunities to set loose an interrogation of myth never quite hit the target. 

The Death of Robin Hood arrives in theaters on June 19th
Image courtesy A24

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The metaphors run hot and heavy in this Down Under horror story about the trauma of gay awakenings. Still, small abandoned conservative towns, spooky religion, and the overwhelming potency of teenage lust remain creepily effective tools when deployed this stylishly. In his debut feature, director Adrian Chiarella makes a splash with one of the most assured debuts of the festival.

The stage is set with an effective setpiece in which a young woman is seemingly seduced and slaughtered by a sexy swimming pool shower ghost before she ever hits the water for her morning laps. Without explaining anything, leveraging the cavernous solitary setting, and deploying the gore strategically, we’re dropped into the action knowing that something awful is amiss without actually understanding anything but the lurking danger.

The action cuts to a pair of teenage boys — brave blonde Ryan (Stacy Clausen) and cautiously anxious newcomer Naim (Joe Bird) — testing the limits of a new friendship. Approaching a snake as it’s swallowing a poisonous frog (Australia, where everything can kill you, and each other!), breaking into an abandoned mill, throwing stuff in the abandoned mill, wrestling their way into a bit of clandestine smooching in the late afternoon sunbeams on the floor of an abandoned mill. Damn, abandoned mills ran really do it all. Walking their bikes home, there’s a nonchalance to this clandestine burgeoning romance.

Chiarella leaves the details of backstory to the imagination. Naim is newish to town, he and his mom (Mia Wasikowska having aged gracefully into “deeply out of touch mom” roles might be the scariest twist of all) attend the same school and seemingly new-age church as Ryan. It’s only later, when Ryan’s discovered to be carrying on with another boy in town that we discover the sinister regressive attitudes underlying the town in the form of a supernatural “conversion therapy” session that’s more possession than exorcism. It’s in the aftermath of this unsettling ceremony that we see the unsettling consequences of the ritual.

Without revealing too much, the “pray away the gay” ritual has the opposite effect. A seductive and violent presence stalks its victims, coming to them when they’re alone, a clever horror mechanic that twists and actualizes intrusive thoughts of queer awakenings and ensuing isolation. In a cruel twist, we (and the boys) learn that the presence takes the form of whatever one desire’s the most. It’s a clever concept but wouldn’t work without the potent acting of the two leads. Joe Bird is a phenomenal avatar for these feelings of both lust and confusion; Stacy Clausen excels in a tricky dual role requiring both vulnerability and menace. That we see the demonic presence from only one of their perspectives is a brilliant decision, enhancing the inherent terror in vulnerability and the potent pull of attraction despite the possibility of looming danger.

As much as it’s a queer allegory of homophobia, the themes and precisely engineered tensions should play universally. As the boys navigate their feelings for each other and struggle to unravel the horrible mystery of what’s tormenting them, Chiarella crafts a layered story, building genuine scares amid the context of a budding romance and chemistry between the leads. With their push and pull dynamic pitting the potency of attraction against mortal danger, the film builds to a thrillingly choreographed climax that reckons with the unsettling realization that “home” isn’t always a synonym for “safe”.

Smart, fun, sexy, and scary? One of the stronger features I’ve saw at Sundance whose power lingered long after the credits rolled, I suspect it’ll play well even before midnight.

An earlier version of this review ran when Leviticus played as an official selection of the Sundance 2026 Film Festival in the Midnights program. It was since acquired by NEON and opens theatrically this weekend.

Keep up with all of The SunBreak’s Sundance 2026 coverage on social media (@josh-c / @thesunbreak) throughout the festival.

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We are conditioned to treat immediate, breathless praise of a new blockbuster with a healthy dose of skepticism. And we should. But Disclosure Day deals in the kind of truth that is impossible to suppress, whether we’re talking about seventy years of government secrets or the reality of the film itself: Steven Spielberg has delivered another late-career masterpiece. It is a film so fiercely entertaining and intellectually stimulating that trying to temper my enthusiasm for it feels like an exercise in dishonesty. It genuinely belongs among his absolute best work.

At heart, Disclosure Day forces us to confront a deeply philosophical question: If handed incontrovertible proof that our accepted history is a multigenerational lie, what do we do with the truth?

The casting here is magnificent, largely because these actors don’t just occupy space—they form an intricate web of beautifully written, interlocking friction. At the center is Josh O’Connor as Daniel Kellner, a reformed felon turned cybersecurity expert who realizes the data he’s guarding is trapped on the wrong side of the corporate firewall. He is balanced by Emily Blunt’s Margaret Fairchild, a Kansas City meteorologist who one day develops the capacity to speak fluent Russian and the ability to read the exact intentions of everyone she meets. Orchestrating the paranoia from above is Colin Firth, playing the defense contractor boss Noah Scanlon, who puts the “deep” in deep state, while an always-brilliant Colman Domingo plays Hugo, the rogue employee determined to blow the whistle on the whole operation.

At the core of the resistance are Daniel and Margaret, bound together by a gravitational chemistry that makes their alliance inevitable. Surrounding them are their romantic partners, who represent different flavors of terrestrial skepticism. In a funny twist of cosmic symmetry, both skeptics are played by high-profile Hollywood nepo babies—though anyone launching a critique of inheritance here will have to contend with how good they both are. Eve Hewson (daughter of Bono) plays Daniel’s deeply Catholic girlfriend Jane, treating the alien revelation less like a political scandal and more like a crisis of the soul. On the flip side, Wyatt Russell (descendant of the Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn dynasty) plays Margaret’s musician husband, beautifully capturing the panic of a man who fears his wife’s sudden mind-reading abilities are just a horrific medical emergency.

There is one scene I cannot stop thinking about, less for its plot relevance or entertainment value than for its profound humanity. Caught in an existential crisis, Jane calls Sister Maura (Elizabeth Marvel) to ask if the world-changing secrets she’s harboring conflict with the tenets of her Catholic faith—specifically, the book of Genesis. As a non-believer who has spent a lot of time reading Genesis recently, I found their conversation deeply moving. Sister Maura’s answer offers a brilliant theological bridge, proving that ancient scripture and disruptive new truths can coexist, leaving the story of creation open to a much larger interpretation.

Ideas alone don’t propel blockbusters, though. Action does. Thankfully, Spielberg hasn’t lost his appetite for pure, relentless kinetic energy. Daniel spent years navigating digital firewalls, but now he is physically running for his life, trying to make his way to Hugo while Noah Scanlon and his corporate minions use every ounce of their firepower and technology to stay hot on his trail. Early on, after a botched apprehension, a bewildered Scanlon barks at the henchmen who let Daniel slip away, noting the absurdity that a guy who spends his entire life sitting behind a computer just completely outfoxed them. The resulting chases are brilliantly choreographed and, for my money, rank as exciting as anything in the early Indiana Jones movies.

When the final action sequence leads directly into the film’s ultimate payoff, I wasn’t prepared for how emotional I would find it. It is moments like this where Steven Spielberg proves why his entire cinematic footprint has generated enough value to rival the GDP of a small nation. He is a master technician, certainly, but at heart he remains an unmatched storyteller. At 79 years old, he is still operating at the absolute peak of his powers.

As for what those world-shaking truths in Disclosure Day actually reveal about the human condition?

I’m not saying it was aliens, but it was aliens.

___________________________________________

Disclosure Day opens in theaters everywhere on Friday, June 12.

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In the beginning, there were the action figures.

1982 saw the initial release of the Masters of the Universe toy line, and Mattel, the line’s manufacturers, shrewdly took advantage of the brand recognition by producing an animated TV series (He-Man and the Masters of the Universe) that ran for two seasons in the ‘80s. Animated spinoffs, a live-action 1987 movie, a couple of animated features, a series reboot, and a mountain of toys and collectibles followed.

The franchise has proven so persistent that Mattel and Amazon MGM greenlit an honest-to-God big budget theatrical reboot. The end result, Masters of the Universe, hits theaters tomorrow. So yes, blond and buff hero He-Man (and his equally buff gallery of allies and antagonists) are getting another shot at success on the big screen. And unlike the fascinatingly bad 1987 movie, this would-be blockbuster arrives with Amazon MGM’s deep pockets and promotional muscle on its side. 

Whether the monetary and PR oomph leads to mastery of the box-office universe remains to be seen. But if you’re looking for a fix of frothy big-screen summer entertainment, this new Masters of the Universe scratches that itch pretty capably.

Things roll into action right off the bat, as the mythical world of Eternia is brutally attacked by the forces of the evil Skeletor (voiced by Jared Leto). Eternia’s king and queen (James Purefoy and Charlotte Riley) are imprisoned in their massive home, Castle Grayskull, and their young son Adam is hurtled across dimensions into the decidedly mundane reality of Oklahoma City.

Years later, the adult Adam (Nicholas Galatzine) winds up working in HR at an Oklahoma corporation, awkwardly navigating grown-up reality while prattling on about Eternia, magic swords, and epic battles at every opportunity. His fervor on the topic results in crushingly uncomfortable and ultimately failed first dates, and jeopardizes his job.

Adam then recovers the magical sword he lost during his childhood dimension-hop. And before you can say, “By the power of Grayskull,” he’s back on Eternia, reuniting with his former mentor, ex-Man at Arms Duncan (Idris Elba), and Duncan’s daughter Teela (Camila Mendes).  One new set of abs and one familiar loincloth later, Adam’s become a literal He-Man, and he and his fellow fighters head into battle with Skeletor’s evil forces.

Director Travis Knight’s track record includes the fantastic Kubo and the Two Strings, and the strong Transformers theatrical offshoot Bumblebee. Both reveal a director with a knack for character building and interpreting established properties. Masters of the Universe, alas, can’t quite clear the very high bar set by those previous movies, largely due to a wobbly screenplay by Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, and Adam Nee. 

The script hits most of the notes required by Fantasy Blockbuster ordinance, but there’s a curious deficiency of forward motion to the plot, with the pacing lurching in odd fits and starts. The attempts at addressing gender roles satirically just don’t connect as sharply as they did in the previous Mattel toy-based hit, Barbie. And in the end, this big-screen He-Man opus lacks the Wow factor that makes the best tentpole fantasy-action movies stand out. 

But for all its myriad flaws and missteps, Masters of the Universe still serves up a solid, entertaining good time at the movies. The abundant action sequences look great on a big screen, the world-building and production design deftly straddle the line between slavish homage and shrewd imagination, and though they lack Barbie’s sharp wit and rapid-fire consistency, the sometimes crude blasts of humor still land frequently. 

Crucially in a movie like this, the cast clicks top to bottom. With his voice swaddled in a darkly flowery English accent and plenty of cavernous reverb, Leto makes the most of Skeletor’s blend of snowflake whininess and full-throttle menace. Elba knows how to invest humanity in even the most vaguely-sketched of stock characters, and Mendes’ Teela makes for an appealing foil/possible romantic interest/inveterate badass. 

Ultimately, this adaptation rests on the brawny shoulders of Galitzine, and he’s the movie’s ace in the hole. It takes genuine acting chops to pull off Adam’s particular combination of schleppy charm, vulnerability, resolve, and innate sweetness, while still coming off as a genuinely formidable fighter when push comes to shove, and Galitzine’s more than up to the task. Even when Masters of the Universe descends into formula fantasy territory, the charismatic and effortlessly watchable actor at the center of this cartoon universe does, in fact, prove decisively that he has the power. 

Masters of the Universe opens in theaters nationwide Friday June 5. Image courtesy Amazon MGM Films.

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Liminal horror, to be certain, is enjoying a moment. 

The last six or seven years have seen an influx of liminal horror movies hit theaters and streaming, exploiting the dread inherent in an empty space that turns out to be larger, darker, and more incomprehensible than first meets the eye.

Elements of liminal horror have frequently surfaced in horror and fantasy cinema over the decades, but the current iteration represents a distinctively 21st century sub-genre, one descended directly from Creepypasta and other online content. 

Most liminal horror films deliberately, often proudly, avoid traditional three-act structure, frequently delivering corridors to nowhere, abandoned buildings rife with foreboding shadows, physics-defying settings that’d give M.C. Escher a massive aneurysm, and ambiguous endings that generate more questions than answers. And with most of the sub-genre’s purveyors skewing young millennial and Gen-Z, liminal horror taps into the queasy disorientation inflicted on those demographics by the economic, societal, and environmental disintegration of the world around them. They’re less a scream-filled roller coaster ride, and more a slow, creepy, inexorable walk into the unknown.

The very fluid, decidedly internal nature of the sub-genre breeds wild inconsistency, with a fair amount of its entries generating more frustration than fear (one of many examples of the former, Undertone, released theatrically last March). Fortunately Backrooms, director Kane Parsons’ cinematic mutation of his popular liminal horror video series, represents one of the stronger movies to ride the crest of this cinematic wave. 

Down-on-his-luck divorcee Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor) owns and operates a struggling furniture store, spending his off-time largely drinking, wallowing in self-pity, and attempting to tame his deep-set anger via therapy sessions with his placidly patient shrink, Mary (Renate Reinsve). He’s living at such a low ebb that he sleeps in a display bed in the back of his store. 

One night, he’s awakened by a light emanating from an apparent seam in the wall of the showroom. He tries to pinpoint the source, and his exploration leads him to discover a portal into a large, labyrinthian network of backrooms cluttered with otherworldly detritus, swathed in deep shadows, and alive with strange growls and noises emanating from the space’s many dark corners. 

Clark soon recruits his two employees, Kat (Lukita Maxwell) and Bobby (Finn Bennett), to help him record and retrieve evidence of the backrooms’ existence. And eventually his therapist Mary’s drawn in. All the while, the space appears to be warping its occupants’ dreams and fears into something very tangible, and very, very threatening.

Then again, maybe it’s not. If you’re looking for a straightforward horror movie that follows standard tropes and neatly wraps itself up in a bow by the finale, look elsewhere. Once Backrooms establishes its characters and central conceit, it dives headfirst into an orgy of bizarre imagery, spasms of violence, and languid headiness with fever-dream fervor. And like most liminal horror, it’s much more of a haunting, haunted Rorschach test for a viewer than an assembly-line thrill ride.

How this goes down for the average viewer may vary. The sometimes patchy script by Parsons and Will Soodik sketches its characters adequately, but offers little by way of explanation, ground rules, or formula three-act momentum, and that’s bound to frustrate some.

Thankfully, Backrooms weaves a spell distinctive and arresting enough to ride out the rough spots. Parsons boasts some impressive skill in the director’s chair, successfully expanding the confining aesthetic of the original series into an immersive, genuinely chilling experience worth catching in a theater. He gets optimal mileage out of implying as much as he shows: the actual monster/s largely dwell in the shadows, just out of view, until things get nicely batshit near the end.

And while the script falls short on its characterizations, the work of the principals fills in the gaps surprisingly well. Clark is one messed-up piece of work, and Ejiofor gets inside the character’s barely contained aggression and despondence without alienating audience sympathy. Ejiofor’s performance, more than anything on the screenplay page, makes the places that Clark goes to (metaphorically and literally), all the more harrowing. The gradual assault on Mary’s unflappable, quiet exterior quickly escalates towards the end as the horrors of the backrooms reach their peak, and Reinsve’s acting captures Mary’s mounting fear and panic with far more depth than what’s in the script. 

Backrooms’ last few minutes recall H.P. Lovecraft, David Lynch, and Creepypasta all at once, with a strain of ironic humor punctuating the closing reel. And if its final shot fails to offer any resolution, Backrooms still packs a punch. You don’t have to understand an image on a Rorschach test to be deeply, wonderfully unnerved by it. 

Backrooms opens in theaters nationwide today, Friday May 29. Image courtesy A24.

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Amid festivals clogged with so many films with “prestige” ambitions, it’s a thrillingly welcome jolt when a really fun movie executes on a clever concept and is impeccably entertaining from top to bottom. And that was exactly the case when the good word of Tuner started rippling through queues at Telluride before putting on the full charm offensive in Toronto a week later. Making the transition from pulse-pounding documentary filmmaking to small-stakes crime romance, Daniel Roher does exactly that with a film that just moves from the jump and never lets up until the closing credits.

It helps that he has the infinite charms of Dustin Hoffman in his toolkit as Harry Horowitz, an easygoing owner of a venerable door-to-door piano tuning operation. Driving around the greater New York City area between opulent homes, ordinary apartments, and hallowed concert halls, he’s cheerfully upholding a decades-long profession for a dwindling audience of customers who need his services. Holding his own alongside the living legend is Leo Woodall as Niki White, hitting all the right notes as his pseudo-nephew and hardscrabble assistant whose hyperacute hearing and perfect pitch make him especially suited to the gig. Less superpower than curse, Woodall embodies a character who bears the psychological burden of having been prevented from fulfilling the promise of his incredible musical gifts. Instead, he makes his way through life behind a protective shell of constant ear protection and a world-weariness for connections.

The easygoing buddy comedy takes an eventful swerve when Niki’s hyperacute hearing gets his foot in the door of a far more lucrative side-gig of after-hours safecracking. With great power (and profitability), though, comes substantially greater risk. The criminal capering is fun while it lasts, but the film is situated in the real world of mounting debts, declining health, and runaway personal experiences. All push Niki deeper into an enterprise of criminal idiots while juggling a nascent relationship with a music composition student (Havana Rose Liu as Ruthie, admirably given plenty to do).

One of the most purely enjoyable movies I saw on last year’s festival circuit and as unlikely a follow-up to Oscar-winning Navalny as I could have imagined. While that doc hinged on one person’s stake in a massive geopolitical movement, there are some similarities in craftsmanship. Like that propulsive and keenly observed documentary about a Russian political figure crushed under the weight of an oppressive state, Tuner also has impeccable pacing and exceptional character work. Here, Roher balances the vibes of a great hang, introduces a sweet little romance, and develops the emotional stakes of found family while juggling an increasingly dangerous criminal enterprise.

I mostly know Woodall from television, but he gives a big screen performance here as Niki. Whether it’s the wisecracking yet sincere familial apprentice role to Hoffman (and Tovah Feldshuh as Harry’s wife Maria), a burgeoning relationship with Havana Rose Liu, or in heist sequences, he’s someone that quickly earns the audience’s affection and empathy. While the diverse settings in the life of a piano tuner turned accomplice look great through the lens of cinematographer Lowell A. Meyer, it’s more important that they sound great. It accomplishes this with an original score by Marius de Vries that situates us into the classical music environment and impressive sound design from Johnnie Burn (The Zone of Interest) that brings us inside Niki’s world. Working from a sparklingly crisp script he wrote with Robert Ramsey, Roher keeps the various threads in perfect harmony for a complete crowd-pleasing package that includes emotional resonance, rhythmic action and suspense, with plenty of heart and soul.

I couldn’t believe that it didn’t take home the audience award at TIFF, but as one of the most winningly charming movies I’ve seen in the last year, I’m certain it’ll crack the code on winning fans in wide release.

An earlier version of this review ran when Tuner had its Canadian Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It arrives in local theaters on May 29
Image courtesy Black Bear.

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A collection of loosely intertwined stories of isolation and connection, Silent Friend is on its surface a tale of academics at a German university whose stories are intertwined by theme and place. Separated by decades, their individual foibles play out in the general vicinity of a centuries-old gingko tree in a botanical garden near the guesthouse on a German college campus. 

Opening in the recent past and shot in crisp high definition, Tony Leung Chiu-wai gives a wonderfully soulful performance as Tony Wong, a visiting world-renowned neuroscientist. We see him arrive from Hong Kong to much fanfare, overzealous immersion in the campus food and drink scene, and entrancing a lecture hall full of students with an immersive introduction to his research into perception and consciousness (babies wearing crazy bonnets of brain scanners are remarkably cute). Soon enough, though, the Covid-19 lockdown finds him left almost entirely in isolation on the Marburg campus. Boredom, daily sanity-walks (familiar!), and deep dives into YouTube find his interest turning to the thoughts of plants, much to the major annoyance of a reticent security guard. It’s an even more appealing prospect when it comes with remote assistance from Léa Seydoux as another stranded academic with Zoom time on her hands. 

A story set decades earlier in the spring of 1972 finds Enzo Brumm as Hannes, a dreamy farm boy who rejected the fields for the halls of academia to study literature. When we meet him, he’s willing to read in the tall grass, but anything more than that is off the table. Wonderfully grainy, deeply saturated 16mm film depicts his gradual rediscovery of the joys of plants over a languid summer. His initial attraction is to a beautiful experimental botanist (Marlene Burow) flatmate, but his affections become even stronger for her “bourgeois” geranium that he agrees to plant-sit while she decamps with other more hedonistically inclined students for a long hiking vacation. She’s attached something like an electrocardiogram to the purple-flowered houseplant in her windowsill, but it quickly finds a place in Hannes’s (and our) heart. With apologies to the collection of greenery trying to survive in my apartment, I’ve never worried more about the fate of a decorative houseplant.

A third story, set in 1908, finds a brilliant young woman (Luna Wedler, as Grete) politely but firmly overcoming misogynistic stereotypes to find a place for herself in a Botany department overseen by deeply sexist turn-of-the-century professors. Evocatively contrasting 35mm black and white film follows her journey into the uncharted realms of the academy as the course of her studies becomes redirected and refocused through overcoming outdated social attitudes and embracing new technologies. Although she’s often met with rejection and misunderstanding, we also see her develop new ways of perceiving and gaining acceptance and allies while she perseveres.

As Enyedi and her editor Károly Szalai intercut among the triptych, humans in the audience might naturally gravitate to noticing the harmonic resonances between each of these protagonists. Even while surrendering to the symphonic arrangement of these stories, I couldn’t help but find myself puzzling over how (or whether) the three characters would formally intersect. Two characters consider the same text decades apart; one glimpses a photograph of another across the vast gulf of time. Their individual intricate stories might rhyme, but they don’t repeat. Instead, I’d have been wiser to recall Dr. Wong’s early lecture about the differences between the spotlight-focused adult awareness of exclusion versus the model by which infant brains perceive everything all at once. As the entrancing nature of the filmmaking casts a spell, the pleasures of viewing are many: the unexpected connections that each character forges, the way that lived experience reshapes interests, and how an openness to new lines of inquiry permutes identity. 

On a cosmic level, then, it is genuinely funny how Ildikó Enyedi made a nearly three-hour movie about a truly magnificent old tree that could not care less about anything resembling resolution of any of the mortal stories. With our limited lifespans and human adult brains, it is understandable that we might fixate on the fates of these humans even while the film’s actual protagonist is referenced directly in the title. We see it (her) in every storyline and in mesmerizing animations throughout the film. All of their stories — and so many more — played out in its vicinity but we come to understand its own form of isolation. In its disinterest in traditional resolution, the film’s greatest joke is also a deeply rewarding call to arms, entreating us to luxuriate in the grand sweep of time and experience. We can’t truly be the tree, but we still can take inspiration in taking the patience to try.

Silent Friend is now playing at SIFF Uptown through June 4th
Image via 1-2 Special

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Boots Riley’s I Love Boosters, the opening night film at this year’s Seattle International Film Festival, confirms him as one of the few American filmmakers capable of turning political rage into genuinely original spectacle. Riley has not spent the eight years since Sorry to Bother You (SIFF 2018) moderating either his politics or his imagination.

For a movie featuring a giant rolling ball of unpaid bills that stalks its protagonist Corvette (the always wonderful Keke Palmer), portals used to move stolen goods between the U.S. and China, and a pyramid scheme called “Friends Helping Friends,” something even stranger happened between its SXSW premiere in March and its SIFF screening on May 14: shoplifting went mainstream.

A booster, you may have surmised, is slang for a shoplifter who resells stolen merch. In late April, The New York Times attempted to launder shoplifting into something chic, rebranding it as “microlooting” in a now-infamous podcast featuring Maus’s nepo baby, the most fashionable writer at The New Yorker, and a millionaire Twitch streamer all agreeing that theft was socially acceptable.

Anybody who can sit through hours of Hasan Piker and come away thinking they’ve encountered a serious political thinker deserves whatever happens to him, so let’s get back to I Love Boosters.

Corvette is an ambitious fashion designer, professional booster, and resident of an abandoned chicken restaurant. Her schemes generally involve a white woman feigning illness while Corvette and her crew stuff themselves into what resemble sumo suits made of stolen clothing before bewildered sales associates can figure out what’s happening. Her partners include Sade (Naomi Ackie) and Mariah (Taylour Paige), though the operation evolves considerably once they encounter Jianhu (Poppy Liu), a young Chinese woman harboring a secret capable of emptying a department store in minutes.

Corvette eventually sets her sights on Christie Smith (Demi Moore), the world’s most recognizable designer and a woman incapable of speaking to another human being without dripping contempt. Appropriately, Smith operates out of a leaning tower whose floors tilt at absurd angles. Corvette wants both to destroy Smith and earn her approval, capturing the psychic contradiction at the heart of capitalism: even those who reject the system still crave validation from the people sitting atop it.

The film boasts a hilarious lineup of supporting performances, including Don Cheadle as Dr. John, the grinning head of the “Friends Helping Friends” MLM empire, and Lakeith Stanfield as a dangerously charming suitor hiding a monstrous secret. The funniest performance may belong to Will Poulter as Greyson, the techno-loving manager of a Metro clothing store who forces employees to pay for the outfits they are required to wear on the sales floor.

Metro, Christie Smith’s fashion brand, mandates that every outfit sold or worn in its stores remain strictly monochromatic. Greyson has no tolerance for last year’s monochrome appearing on this year’s sales floor, even when the colors are indistinguishable to the human eye.

Sometimes anti-capitalist messaging in movies can feel rote, even to those of us inclined to agree with it. Riley, however, earned his credentials years before socialism became a fashion accessory for podcast guests and people with Substacks. Long before “eat the rich” became an aesthetic, his hip-hop group The Coup had already recorded “5 Million Ways to Kill a CEO” and notoriously planned to release an album cover depicting the destruction of the World Trade Center in the fall of 2001.

Frustratingly, I Love Boosters often feels unfinished. Entire character tensions appear only to evaporate, particularly between Corvette and Sade. Naomi Ackie, the breakout star from last year in Bong Joon Ho’s Mickey 17, feels underused here. Riley also introduces brilliant ideas, like the unpaid-bills boulder, before abandoning them almost as quickly as he discovers them.

For all its flaws, I found it difficult to care. The movie runs only 105 minutes, and while Boots Riley may run out of time, he remains far from running out of ideas.

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I Love Boosters is now in wide-release.

SIFF Opening Night photos by Morgen Schuler. Movie still courtesy of Neon.

The post SIFF 2026 Notebook: <em>I Love Boosters</em> appeared first on The SunBreak.

Whether they’re trying or not, most horror movies reflect the times in which they’re made. 

Not surprisingly, the increased prominence of a certain toxic orange monster—and the Pandora’s Box of ignorance, cruelty, and racism said monster threw wide open about a decade ago—has inspired a lot of genre cinema that gives voice to the frustrations and fears of the disenfranchised. 

Mārama, a 2026 Seattle International Film Festival Jury Award winner starting its proper theatrical run today, taps into that zeitgeist brilliantly. It dresses some weighty themes in ornate period drag, only to tear that finery down with a ferocity that feels richly earned, masterfully suspenseful, and incredibly cathartic. 

It’s 1859, and Mary (Ariāna Osbourne), an orphaned young Māori woman, travels from New Zealand to England after receiving a letter from one Thomas Boyd. The correspondence promises revelations about the parents she never knew, but upon arriving in the UK, Mary discovers that Boyd died several months previous. Marooned in England with little hope of returning to her homeland, she accepts a job from wealthy whaling magnate Sir Nathaniel Cole (Toby Stephens) as governess to his young granddaughter Anne (Evelyn Towersley). 

Cole’s cultivated an obsession with Māori culture during his years whaling in the waters off New Zealand, filigreeing his estate with a massive collection of Māori artifacts and speaking the language fluently. Soon, it’s clear that his cultural appropriation skews to fetishization, that he’s likely hiding definitive (and potentially terrifying) answers to many of Mary’s most nagging questions. 

The setup portends a classic gothic melodrama (Stephens describes Mārama in interviews, not inaccurately, as “Jane Eyre on a bad acid trip”), and writer/director Taratoa Stappard uses that trope-worthy framework as a jumping-off point. Things feel elegant yet uneasy at first; then Mary gradually unpeels the layers of awfulness underneath, and things get more visceral, ugly, and sledgehammer-shocking. Along the way, Mary’s beset by vivid dreams and visions that hint at a deeper spiritual connection than she’s initially aware of. 

Stappard handles the buildup masterfully. The basic gist of the horror is divulged about halfway through, which makes Cole’s growing menace, the depth of the ethnic exploitation, and tattooed henchman Jack’s (Erroll Shand) loose-cannon monstrousness feel like horrific accidents in slow-motion.

By the time Mārama hits its final reel, things have hit a fever pitch, with the immaculately-appointed veneer of Cole’s massive estate giving way to blood, violence, and wholesale mayhem. It’s here that the movie well and truly kicks into horror high-gear, and the gusto with which it goes there can be understandably jarring (at least, that seems to be the one sticking point amidst the praise the movie’s received from critics). But Stappard’s script and direction sow the seeds of that descent into the nightmarish for much of the running time. 

Mary’s dawning awareness and embrace of her own heritage—and her anger over the horrors wrought on her and her people by colonialist exploitation—evolve as her (possibly supernatural) visions increase in intensity. You can’t ask for a better focal point or avatar for this than Osbourne, whose performance modulates brilliantly as things get heavier: When circumstances turn her into an Avenging Angel in a sumptuous red ballgown, Mary’s as visually iconic as she is ass-kickingly magnetic.  And if the movie wallows in righteous fury at the end, it does this while remaining true to Mary’s character and delivering some major catharsis for an audience.

Lest all of this sound like an over-intellectualized polemic, be assured that it doesn’t play that way. Taratoa Stappard takes on a lot of thorny issues in his debut feature film, but at its core, Mārama remains an incredibly well-engineered, gripping, and exhilarating piece of entertainment. Sometimes, a spoonful of sugar—or, in this case, a solid mix of succulent period detail, violence, shocks, and horror—really makes the medicine that is the message go down smoothly. 

Mārama opens today at the SIFF Cinema Uptown, AMC Alderwood 16, and Tasveer Film Center.
Images courtesy Watermelon Pictures/Dark Sky Films

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A long time ago, on a streaming service too not far away from your couch, Disney+ brought live-action episodic Star Wars content onto your television. The Mandalorian was initially a simple Space Western about a bounty hunter named Din Djarin roaming the galaxy taking prisoners for cash in the topsy-turvy aftermath of reconstruction that occurred after the Rebels blew up the Death Star (the second one), killed the Evil Emperor (the first time), and everyone waking up with a Yub Nub dance hangover to piece together a New Republic. A low-stakes weekly diversion, the motivating premise was that the title hero wore armor so cool-looking that no one could possibly care that Pedro Pascal’s face would almost never appear on screen. Soon enough, he flips from hunting a rascally Baby Yoda to rescuing him from nefarious Imperial fetishist creepers obsessed with his Force-sensitivity. Like the audience who adored the little creature (the magic of puppetry), he eventually adopts the little fellow as his foster son and they get up to all kinds of adventures together. Now, after several seasons of increasingly complicated lore involving cults, factions, conspiracies, and space swords, and the revelation that the kid’s name is Grogu, the pair have made the leap from streaming to the big screen, but unfortunately it’s hard to call the result a movie.

Instead, it’s like gathering in a theater to binge-watch a few episodes of a television show you’d kind of forgotten about in the intervening years since the last season aired. Not the worst idea in principle — watching fun stuff with other people who also like it is a thrill of cinema going — but the major problem with the Mandalorian and Grogu is that the episodes they chose to smash together to cash in on ticket sales aren’t particularly good ones, let alone very special episodes in terms of theme, development, or effects. As individual episodes of a TV show, these would be among the more forgettable. As a Star Wars movie, the collection of episodes squished together is easily at the bottom of the pile.

On the bright side, director Jon Favreau (who co-wrote the script with Dave Filoni & Noah Kloor) cast aside almost entirely the mythology of the recent seasons, making the film a neutral entry point for new fans, especially younger ones. Everything is vastly simplified, likely in the hopes that parents will take their kids, those kids will love seeing Grogu doing silly things, and will get hooked on Star Wars. It’s not a terrible gambit, but the extreme degree to which the plot and script are catering to the shortest attention span makes for a gratingly long two hours. 

Opening amid some stilted extortion among Imperial loyalists, the movie sets off with a twenty-minute action sequence. It’s kind of cool if nonsensical, but will thrill anyone who ever dreamed of seeing an AT-AT stretch the limits of “all terrain” by navigating a comically narrow and perilous mountain switchback. Soon, the titular bounty hunter returns to a seaside tropical airbase to claim his fees and draw another assignment. We learn that with his parenting responsibilities, he’s become more selective, choosing only to work on rooting out the villainous scum still holding on from the scattered Empire. This quest, for a commander whose face is unknown, will lead him, his little friend, and a CGI-animated Grape Ape pilot to navigate some slimy family dynamics in service of rescuing a wayward kid to extract some information. There are some vaguely interesting new planets and environments to visit, each building to a bigger and bigger CGI fight sequence mostly involving gross-looking creatures and/or robots. 

The execution of the story is sloppy in service of simplicity. Villainous characters state their villainy so plainly that a neon sign expressing their motivations would have been too subtle. Then they repeat it word for clunky word a few beats later. Flatly delivered dialogue is so direct and mind-numbing that the much-derided talk of trade routes from the prequels is Shakespearean in comparison. Throughout, characters repeat their nefarious motivations multiple times in nearly the same words over the span of minutes, as if the writers expect viewers to be distracted while scrolling on their phones. The stakes are utterly negligible, in large part, because the only thing stronger than the Beskar Steel worn by Mandolorians is the plot armor protecting our title duo from harm.

Basic plot details seem to shift minute-to-minute as if re-writes were happening between shots. At one point, a New Republic commander played by Sigourney Weaver (one of the film’s few human characters to show her face, albeit while giving a performance that leaves no impression) gives Mando a brand-new spaceship (a replica of the old one) as advance payment for a bounty hunting job. A few scenes later, she tells him she can’t pay him for the work he just completed. Later, some enemies speechify about how they’ll revel in watching a humbled foe live out his years in perpetual shame while they hold his prized possession as a trophy, then toss him and that item into a pit to die immediately. These aren’t not a huge things individually, but they stack up as symptomatic of a shoddily written script and cobbled-together continuity. 

Worse, one of the pleasures of a mission-of-the-week format should be watching the hero figure things out through some combination of wit and charm. There’s none of that here. The Mandalorian gets an assignment to find a faceless someone or other, and going on no information beyond a location, stumbles into them in a matter of minutes entirely by chance. At one point, he tries bribing a simian-like cheesesteak street cart vendor (Martin Scorsese in his Star Wars debut!) for information, only to have it pointed out that he is surrounded by dozens of posters with that subject’s face on them. Bounty hunting used to be an art, now any idiot can do it.

I might be way out of the mainstream, but the stunning miscalculation of the film is just how much it overestimates an audience’s interest in Hutts. Rather than bring back or introduce any human characters, the plot pushes all of its chips in on squabbling power dynamics of a crime family of big, slimy, green worms best known for their patriarch having briefly enslaved Princess Leia into a metal bikini-clad figure of sexual awakening for an entire generation. If you thought that one big gangster worm was gross as a side character, just wait until you see a planet full of them! If the CGI addition of one in motion freaked you out in Lucas’s tinkered re-release of the original trilogy, you cannot possibly be prepared for an entire movie about these creatures, let alone Jabba the Hutt’s rebellious son who’s looksmaxxed his way into being a jacked, over-muscled, arena fighter working off his debts. Voiced unrecognizably by Jeremy Allan White, one can only assume he’s leveraging the work he put into having played another tortured wrestler with a menacing father in The Iron Claw, a movie that fewer people saw during its entire run than will see this one on opening night.

The core issue with the film is less the beat-to-beat plotting than that neither of our heroes are movie stars. They barely have any character traits, let alone the potential for development or growth. You’d hope that a feature-length film would be ideally suited for drama or overcoming conflict, but both headliners have been reset to blank slates, barely informed by several seasons of television. Din Djarin is by nature a man of few words, which minimizes Pedro Pascal’s voice acting, and the helmet means that his face-time is limited to a few contractually required minutes. With the stunt actors sharing top billing, it’s unclear how much time anyone spent on set. Grogu fits this Marvel/Disney mandate that these movies hinge on a plucky, mostly clueless child in perpetual peril as the primary plot device. He’s indeed very cute, but that’s a crutch best deployed in smaller doses. As the minutes tick on, is it so wrong for an audience who’s been watching for years to imagine that he’d grow into more than a stuffed animal? The little dude is adorable and will continue to sell tons of toys, but both he and the movie mostly seem to forget that he’s more than a stuffed animal until the plot absolutely requires him to remember that he’s essentially a superhero. At least he’s still a puppet, having escaped the plague of ugly CGI that surrounds him.

The film is both mostly harmless and also easily the worst Star Wars movie ever released. I loathed the dreadful ending of Rise of Skywalker, but at least it had characters and ideas, several that I wish I could forget. With Mandalorian and Grogu, I’m already struggling to remember anything aside from that Ludwig Göransson got to write a soundtrack with a sick techno-influenced space song for a grimy Blade Runner-style planet. Maybe I’ve been spoiled by the splendors of Andor in terms of the dizzying heights that Star Wars episodic storytelling can achieve. As much as I understand that there should always be a place for kids at the Star Wars table, this is not the way.

Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu arrives in theaters on May 22 and will be on Disney+ before you know it
Images courtesy Lucasfilm.

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