This weekend at the movies, skip Beauty and the Beast (it's "difficult to see past the film's disturbing elements," Ciara Dolan says) and instead watch one of our critics' picks, including new releases like the supernatural Personal Shopper and memory-based drama The Sense of an Ending, SIFF hit and Southern gothic documentary Uncertain, sci-fi classic Aliens (Charles Mudede calls it "the perfect movie for our times"), dance film/Ohad Naharin biopic Mr. Gaga, and Singaporean drama Apprentice. It's also not too late to catch films like Moonlight, I Am Not Your Negro, and La La Land before they leave theaters. See all of our critics' picks below, and click through the links to see specific movie times and trailers. For more options, check out our complete movie times calendar (as well as our list of special film events).

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Jump to: Thurs Only | Fri—Sun | All Weekend

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THURSDAY ONLY

1. Apprentice
Boo Junfeng's Apprentice is set in contemporary Singapore and concerns a young man who becomes a prison guard with the goal of meeting and (it seems) confronting the man who hanged his father in the 1990s. This is a human story, in the sense that no one is really wrong or the "bad guy." The prison's hangman is not just doing a job but is deeply concerned about those he has to kill by law. And the hero's motives are not at all pure. That is the film at the level of the story; but there is also lots of interesting things happening at the level of the film's language, which is primarily a mix of English and Malay. CHARLES MUDEDE
Grand Illusion

2. Manchester by the Sea
In Manchester, Lee Chandler (Affleck) seems content to shovel walkways and unclog toilets for a living in Boston, until word comes that his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler, seen in flashbacks) has died of a heart attack. Joe’s will stipulates that he wants Lee to move back to his titular hometown and become Patrick’s guardian. Lee, however, is haunted by past events and resists, with a toddler’s tenacity, every effort by the people around him to help him come to terms. I feel for the guy, and you will too, but after two hours, I wanted to grab him by the collar and tell him to buck up. After all, he’s at least going to get an Oscar nomination out of it. MARC MOHAN
Sundance Cinemas

3. Night of the Shooting Stars
At Seattle Art Museum's Viva Italia! film festival, revisit the greatest works of mid-century Italian cinema with works by Monicelli, Rossellini, Fellini, and other masters of postwar Neorealism and the more stylized movements that followed. This screening—the last in the series—will feature Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's 1982 fantasy war drama Night of the Shooting Stars.
Seattle Art Museum

4. Toni Erdmann
Toni Erdmann, the character, is a death clown, a life coach, and a big, hairy Bulgarian monster. Toni Erdmann, the Oscar-nominated film from German filmmaker Maren Ade, is a farce, a tearjerker, and a bonkers take on globalization and its discontents. It begins with a shaggy German music teacher, Winfried (Austrian theater vet Peter Simonischek, soulful and impish), who likes to play practical jokes no one appreciates. When his daughter, Ines (the wondrous Sandra Hüller), drops by for a short visit, she spends most of the time making work calls. Later, Winfried decides to visit Ines in Bucharest where his attempts to make her laugh—involving a set of false teeth and a cheese grater—fall flat, so he reemerges as Toni Erdmann, a goofy gent who pops up at the most inopportune times. If the 162-minute film threatens to wear out its welcome, director Ade brings everything home with a humanist's light, loving touch. KATHY FENNESSY
Varsity Theatre

FRIDAY—SUNDAY

5. Aliens
James Cameron’s second film (his first is The Terminator) is the second film in the Alien series, Aliens. Like the first film Alien, Aliens presents a critique of capitalism. The former concerns the old struggle between capital and labor; the latter concerns the ruthlessness of corporate power and an industrial military complex that serves not the public but corporate interests. We live in the era when White House has become a business. Aliens is the perfect movie for our times. CHARLES MUDEDE
Central Cinema

6. Paterson
Paterson is beautiful throughout—visually, in how Jim Jarmusch and cinematographer Frederick Elmes capture the wondrousness of an urban morning, and aurally, with Paterson's poems (written by Ron Padgett) becoming as much a part of the film as Laura's bulletproof optimism or the rumble of the 23. But there's something else beautiful about Paterson: Jarmusch's clearheaded, straightforward reminder that the most worthwhile art is made by those who scrounge, who have day jobs, who are the same as us: the people who drive and ride the bus, or who try to take up guitar and wonder if they can sell their cupcakes, or who hone their rhymes while waiting for the washing machine. The people who get through each day, finding and sharing bits of hope and truth as the world crumbles around them. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Grand Illusion

7. The Sense of an Ending
Ritesh Batra's The Sense of an Ending is based on the novel by Julian Barnes. The film explores a lie that the protagonist (played by Jim Broadbent) has been telling himself for years. The plot is full of sex, betrayal, and death, and the acting is lovely. Emily Mortimer is on-screen for only a few brief moments, and she makes impeccable use of every second; each twitch and motion is fascinatingly full of character. And even though the central themes are regret and nostalgia, Broadbent's performance never settles for boring angst—it's all about disbelief and incredulity. JULIA RABAN
Pacific Place and Guild 45th

8. Uncertain
Uncertain is a village on the edge of a sublime lake in Texas. "Uncertain is not on the way to anywhere. You've got to either know where you're goin' or be lost to find it," explains the sheriff of the county. He also says that many of the people who live in Uncertain had to leave society behind and rebuild their lives. In another scene, we are told there are not many women in that part of the world. The men here are mighty lonely. Uncertain, which has a church called Uncertain Church, contains all the elements of a Southern gothic: the mysterious lake, the secrets deep in the souls of the inhabitants like the secrets at the bottom of the lake, the sheriff, the crime, the confessions, the city slicker trying to solve it all. CHARLES MUDEDE
Northwest Film Forum

ALL WEEKEND

9. Before I Fall
Before I Fall is an all around well-made film that concerns a conventionally beautiful teenager who is trying to get out of the maze of the last day of her life. One of the movie's many excellent scenes has two teens running through the twilight of a green-dark forest. This is, indeed, green gothic at its best. Seattle-based visual artist Matthew Offenbacher was the first to theorize this kind of gothic aesthetic. He described it as a feeling, a mood (stimmung in the German expressionist sense) that captures the region’s monstrous aspect. The dusky quality of its sharply slanted light, its dusk-green trees, its urban wilderness blending with the wilderness of the woods. All of this is in Before I Fall, which was filmed in and around Vancouver B.C., the capital—the Transylvania—of green gothic. CHARLES MUDEDE
Pacific Place

10. Fences
Recently, while leaving a screening of the solid and engaging film adaptation of August Wilson's play Fences, which was directed by Washington himself, a man walking behind me said to the woman walking next to him that this is not the kind of Denzel Washington film he likes. It's too act-y, it's all about the Academy Awards. Clearly, he wanted Washington to shoot more and talk less. But Fences has no guns and a whole lot of talking about life—it deals with failed dreams, race relations in mid-century America, marital problems, parenting problems, working-class problems, drinking problems, problems with debts, mental health, and, ultimately, death. What might kill the character Washington plays in Fences, Troy Maxson, is not a car chase or a shoot-out, but blocked arteries to the heart. He is a normal guy with a very standard suite of personal and social issues. CHARLES MUDEDE
Varsity Theatre

11. Get Out
Get Out is a feature-length version of the not-quite-joking sentiment among African Americans that the suburbs, with their overwhelming whiteness and cultural homogeneity, are eerie twilight zones for Black people. Far from being a one-joke movie, however, Jordan Peele’s directorial debut is both a clever, consistently funny racial satire and a horror film, one that mocks white liberal cluelessness and finds humor in—but doesn’t dismiss—Black people’s fears. ERIC D. SNIDER
Various locations

12. Hidden Figures
The function of white ideology is to place the blame of black poverty on black people themselves. They are not smart enough, they are lazy, they are like children—therefore they live in the projects, they are on welfare, they perform poorly academically. But the golden bowl of this logic gets a crack whenever a person or an event makes the truth visible: Blacks are as stupid or as smart as any other group of people. This is why a movie like Hidden Figures is so important—a film about a black mathematician, Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji P. Henson), who worked for NASA and participated in its key projects in the 1960s. The mathematician was also a woman, and so she challenged not only white ideology but also male ideology. She had to be hidden twice. The movie also stars Janelle Monáe, who made her mark in the best movie of 2016, Moonlight. CHARLES MUDEDE
Pacific Place and Sundance Cinemas

13. I Am Not Your Negro
Sixteen years after Lumumba, Raoul Peck, who is Haitian, has directed I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary about one of the greatest writers of 20th-century America, James Baldwin. Now, it's easy to make a great film about Baldwin, because, like Muhammad Ali, there's tons of cool footage of his public and private moments, and, also like Ali, he had a fascinating face: the odd shape of his head, the triangle of hair that defined his forehead, and his froggy eyes. Just show him doing his thing and your film will do just fine. But Peck blended footage of Baldwin with dusky and dreamy images of contemporary America. These images say: Ain't a damn thing changed from the days of Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement. But they say this with a very deep insight about the nature of time. CHARLES MUDEDE
Sundance Cinemas

14. John Wick Chapter 2
As with the first John Wick, each action sequence—and there are a lot of them—aims to entertain, surprise, and deliver the sort of thrill that can only come from a hyper-stylized, perfectly orchestrated shoot-out. Or car chase. Or fistfight. Even if it doesn’t have the freshness of the original, Chapter 2 offers plenty: It never stops being Looney Tunes funny, but it’s also baroque, dark, and weird, moving at a burning-rubber pace. John Wick: Chapter 2 does not disappoint, and it’s a welcome reminder of how fun and exciting a well-crafted action movie can be. If Buster Keaton were alive today and saw John Wick in action... well, he’d probably be disgusted and horrified at how violent movies are now. But once he got over that, he'd probably clap pretty hard. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Pacific Place

15. Kedi
The enchanting Turkish documentary Kedi works triple time as a nature documentary, a travelogue, and a meditation on the human-animal bond. Director Ceyda Torun makes a case for Istanbul as the new Rome for stray cats. When she isn't soliciting the thoughts of caretakers and observers, her cinematographer, Charlie Wuppermann, shoots the furry subjects from ground level such that they fill the screen while humans fade into the background. These street-smart cats congregate around teahouses and markets for treats and back rubs. Torun follows several around town, like the orange tabby that steals food for her kittens, the gray tabby that sleeps in an auto shop, and the black-and-white cat that chases mice from a restaurant. She exalts these hardy creatures while portraying Istanbul as a city of compassionate citizens. It's a side of Turkey we don't see often enough. KATHY FENNESSY
SIFF Cinema Uptown and Guild 45th

16. Kong: Skull Island
In an interview with Suzette Smith, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts said: "Kong represents the vulnerability in all of us. He represents an unknown, mythic quality in the world. A big part of this film is also just about becoming okay with not having all the answers. There are things we cannot understand and the sooner we understand that the better off we are." SUZETTE SMITH
Various locations

17. La La Land
You guys, I LOVED La La Land, and you will too. Don’t be afraid of it just because it’s a musical about a struggling actress (Emma Stone) and a pretentious jazz musician (Ryan Gosling) who meet and fall in love and sing and dance in a romanticized, cartoony LA. Yeah, it’s splashy and grandiose and full of hazy violet Southern California sunsets, but its emotional core is genuine. Take it from shriveled-hearted me, the Unearned Sentiment Police: La La Land is a grand, over-the-top, razzly-dazzly love story that won’t make you puke one bit. It might even help you forget the horrors of reality, however momentarily—and after the year we’ve had, that practically makes La La Land a public service. MEGAN BURBANK
Pacific Place

18. The LEGO Batman Movie
Let's start with the good: There’s finally a Batman movie you can take the kids to! The Lego Batman Movie follows up 2014’s surprisingly wonderful The Lego Movie by focusing on that cinematic universe’s version of Batman, a growling, too-cool-for-school badass voiced by Will Arnett. With a blend of computer animation and actual Lego bricks, the dizzying Lego Batman bursts at the edges of the screen. Now for the bad: The Lego Batman Movie may be geared a little too much toward kids. Sure, there are plenty of wisecracks and throwaway gags for eagle-eyed grownups and Batman nuts, but the movie grinds to a halt several times so Batman can learn A Very Important Life Lesson. For a movie that contains this much pure silliness, it’s too bad it thinks it needs to talk down to kids. NED LANNAMANN
Meridian 16

19. Lion
Based on Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home, the film, an inspiring drama that earns tears without jerking them, begins with five-year-old Saroo (played by a bouncing ball of energy named Sunny Pawar) becoming separated from his mother and brother and ending up a thousand miles away in Calcutta. Saroo’s path may be unclear, but Lion’s isn’t: Like the train that took him away in the first place, the film moves steadily toward its tearful destination, propelled by sincere performances and Volker Bertelmann and Dustin O’Halloran’s gently urgent musical score. Kidman shows great tenderness as the adoptive mother, underscoring the theme of “family” not being limited by biology, and Patel is serious-minded and haunted. But it’s little dynamo Sunny Pawar that you’ll remember best, his infectious cheery optimism encapsulating the film’s hopeful tone. ERIC D. SNIDER
Meridian 16, Sundance Cinemas, and Admiral

20. Logan
17 years after X-Men kick-started the superhero genre, we get something like Logan. Something that isn't just a great superhero movie, but a great movie. No disclaimers, no curve: Logan is fantastic. Make no mistake: Logan is such a superhero movie—such an X-Men movie—that at one point Logan (Hugh Jackman) flips through an X-Men comic featuring his spandexed alter ego, Wolverine. He's not impressed. "Maybe a quarter of it happened," he grumbles, "and not like this." Despite his crankiness, Logan is full of the same stuff as the yellowed pages of X-Men and Wolverine: superpowered mutants. Nefarious evildoers. A rock-solid belief that violence fixes everything. But for all Logan's nods to genre—and it's as much a western as a superhero movie—it's about bigger things, too. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Various locations

21. Moonlight
Moonlight is a film that has all of the major film critics in the country singing the loudest praises, and is already breaking box-office records, and happens to be a coming-of-age tale of a black American male. But I want to make this clear: The director of Moonlight, Barry Jenkins, did not come out of nowhere. He also directed and wrote one of the best films of the previous decade, Medicine for Melancholy (2008). The wonder is that it took him so long to make his second feature, which will most likely make a big splash at the next Oscars. Expect Jenkins to be one of the few black Americans to win the award for best director. CHARLES MUDEDE
Sundance Cinemas

22. Mr. Gaga
The most remarkable thing about choreographer Ohad Naharin is that he didn't start his professional training until he was 22, after his mandatory enlistment in the Israeli Army. Naharin studied simultaneously at both Juilliard and the School of American Ballet, and has been running Tel Aviv’s Batsheva Dance Company since 1990. Although the film doesn't truly define Naharin’s Gaga style of dance, it's still a fascinating look inside the life and mind of the reigning godfather of modern dance (while fulfilling every stereotype we've already seen of a dance company’s pompous artistic director). This Gaga has nothing to do with the other, more famous, Gaga. RACHEL GABRIELLE
Northwest Film Forum

23. Personal Shopper
It took French filmmaker Olivier Assayas to make me appreciate the subtleties Kristen Stewart can convey. In 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria, she held her own with the great Juliette Binoche. Now, in Personal Shopper, her latest collaboration with Assayas, she again manages to be enigmatic but not vapid. The movie is a cinematic Frankenstein monster, stitched together from different genres into something that transcends its sources: Stewart plays a young American in Paris working as an assistant for a globe-trotting supermodel, buying high-end clothes but never getting to try them on. (It’s a metaphor.) She’s also trying to make psychic contact with a twin brother who died from a heart defect—a disease she also has. MARC MOHAN
SIFF Cinema Uptown and Sundance Cinemas

24. A United Kingdom
What made Botswana a success and its next-door neighbor Zimbabwe a complete disaster? A part of the answer can be found in the new and excellent movie A United Kingdom, directed by one of the few working black female directors in the world, Amma Asante. The film is about the founder of modern Botswana, Seretse Khama, played by David Oyelowo (Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma). Though Kingdom's plot is centered on how Khama, a black African aristocrat, met, romanced, and married a middle-class British white woman, Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike), it also shows how their interracial relationship was a diplomatic mess for the UK government, which still had close economic and political ties with a country, South Africa, that made racial separation (apartheid) official around the time the Khama/Williams romance began (the late 1940s). CHARLES MUDEDE
Guild 45th and Seven Gables

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