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They don't call SIFF America's biggest film festival just for kicks. Besides corralling 273 films (plus multiple shorts packages) from all over the globe, the 2013 Seattle International Film Festival is three and a half weeks long, which means you have almost an entire month to dive into SIFF, get sick of it and ignore it for a while, then dive back in all over again.

As ever, there's a ton of stuff worth seeing, from glorious art films to splashy documentaries to craptastic cult fare. The opening-night gala brings Joss Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing, which has been sold out since it was announced and will likely involve a hilarious mingling of speech-giving civic dignitaries and screaming Whedonistas. The centerpiece gala brings the much-buzzed-about documentary on backup singers Twenty Feet from Stardom. And the closing-night gala brings The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola's ripped-from-the-headlines drama on Hollywood thieves. (The fact that it has a plot means it's already 10,000 times better than 2010's Somewhere.)

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE. Among the non-gala film events that have The Stranger excited: Fateful Findings, a fledgling classic of brilliantly terrible cinema in the manner of The Room; The Punk Singer, Sini Anderson's revelatory documentary about Kathleen Hanna; Furever, a squirmy documentary about the pet-memorial business; and An Evening with Kyle MacLachlan, during which the Northwest native and beloved Hollywood star will submit himself to an onstage Q&A (complete with clip show!), then hang out and watch the classic pilot of Twin Peaks on the big screen.

Here is The Stranger's guide to every single film in SIFF 2013, featuring eyewitness reviews of more than 130 films and a half-dozen jokes in poor taste.