ental

pays tribute to his parents’ sacrifices and the hard work they put into the Korean grocery store they opened in the Bronx, Sohn’s Fruits & Vegetables.

“My parents had come here from a foreign place to make a better life for [my siblings and I],” Sohn says. “They had gone through a war. They came to the country without knowing any English. There were a lot of obstacles for them.”

The unlikely romance between Ember and Wade is inspired by Sohn’s personal life, too, with the cultural clashes between the characters and their families reflecting his and his Italian-American wife’s experiences. “The toughest thing for me was that my parents and grandparents always said, ‘You have to marry a Korean,’”

Oppenheimer

ETA: JULY 21

Christopher Nolan’s latest stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” and focuses on his work as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. Shot in IMAX, it’s got an impressive cast including Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Emily Blunt, Rami Malek, Gary Oldman, and more. With a $100 million budget, expect an epic. — RF project was in a more hopeful place thanks to the support of his coworkers at Pixar, who reminded him that his original vision for the film didn’t come from a place of anger. “I started to find balance in the story to honor [my father’s] experience without the story being about that. I wanted the story to be about inclusion and love.”

The residents of Element City are composed of either fire, water, earth, or air. There’s societal friction between the fire and water folk, and with the city largely running on H2O, Ember’s parents bristle at the fact that the metropolis isn’t as welcoming to their kind. Xenophobia—and all that it encompasses—is directly addressed within the greater metaphor.

But as Sohn says, there’s much more to the story than that. Ember dreams of taking over the family convenience store, which serves as a cultural hub for the city’s fire community, and Sohn

Sohn recalls. “With this film, we’re trying to find specificity in cultures not mixing right away or when empathy hasn’t been opened just yet.”

On its surface, Elemental appears to be another family drama with cute characters and vibrant colors. But the film’s subject matter couldn’t be more grounded. In fact, Sohn had a difficult time being vulnerable enough to share some of the more personal aspects of his family’s story, but he says it was an absolute necessity. “The hunt to try to find something real in the work that we’re doing, it demands vulnerability,” he explains. “It’s very scary. But that’s just a part of making art.”

Asteroid City

ETA: JUNE 23

Master of whimsy Wes Anderson is back with this romantic comedy sci-fi set in 1955. It follows parents and their kids attending an annual Junior Stargazer’s convention, where worldchanging events are about to occur. The cast is huge, star-studded, and features a lot of Anderson regulars, including Tilda Swinton and Jason Schwartzman, along with Tom Hanks, Scarlett Johansson, Margot Robbie, Steve Carell, and many, many more. — RF