This week's round-up of all the best movies playing in town includes an appearance by Val Kilmer, who will show a film version of his one-man play Citizen Twain, a documentary about David Lynch, the Guardians of the Galaxy movie, the 40th anniversary screening of Saturday Night Fever, and the opening of the Translations Film Festival, the 12th annual event highlighting transgender experiences on film. 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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THURSDAY ONLY
Citizen Twain with Val KilmerYou probably never pictured Mr. Batman Forever as one of the greatest writers in American history, but here we are! A film version of Val Kilmer's new one-man play Citizen Twain shows the actor embodying Twain/Samuel Clemens to riff on politics, writing, and spirituality, adapting the man's mercilessly witty screeds for a stage performance. That Kilmer's show will highlight Twain's "faith and God" is especially intriguing, given the Presbyterian Twain's notorious irreverence toward organized religion and his feud with Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy. (Kilmer himself is reportedly a Christian Scientist.) In any case, this seems like a chance for Kilmer to show the great author's many fascinating contradictions, and the actor will be there in person to introduce the screening.
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Free Fire
Thereâs a whole lot of fun and a whole lot of action crammed into Free Fireâand the fact it delivers as much as it does, in such a short time, and with such a simple premise, isnât only a testament to Wheatley and Jumpâs intelligence and skill. Itâs alsoâin a media age bloated with drawn-out franchises and over-serialized televisionâremarkably welcome. Fuck the small talk: In Free Fire, bullets and one-liners and shreds of emotion zip byâsnatching you up, wringing you out, and letting you go, exhausted and exhilarated. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Meridian 16 & Sundance Cinemas
Good Morning
"The films in SAM's tribute to one of the three masters of Japan's Golden Age of film, Yasujiro Ozu, are all beautiful and have at their core the quiet spirit of their times and placesâmid-century, post-war Japan," wrote Charles Mudede. Continuing in the weekly series, this Thursday's film is Good Morning, a lighthearted comedy that shows off Ozu's sillier side.
Seattle Art Museum
Inland Empire
Inland Empireânamed after the California region not because it's set there, but because Lynch simply liked the sound of itârecalls Bergman's Persona and Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits in its allusive structure and suggestions of a fracturing female psyche. But there's no trace of homage, or even traditional psychology. Laura Dern plays, in the film's clearest thread, a Hollywood-mansion-inhabiting actress with a homicidally jealous husband (Peter J. Lucas) and a new job: a role in a Southern melodrama that roughly parallels the romantic triangle that eventually forms with her co-star (Justin Theroux). But Lynch twists the diegesis like a mile of taffy, until there's no there there, just dreams within dreams within movies within nightmares. MICHAEL ATKINSON
SIFF Film Center
My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
I saw Dash Shawâs animated feature film My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea at last yearâs film festival, where I was pleased to see the personable humor and torsion of reality that I always expect from his work. Shaw is a well-respected indie comics artist whose graphic novels, like Bottomless Belly Button and Cosplayers, mix entertaining, well-written stories with cool ideas that threaten to conceptually blow the doors off the whole biz. My Entire High Schoolâwhich features voice work from the likes of Reggie Watts, Lena Dunham, Susan Sarandon, and Maya Rudolphâfinds teenagers facing a couple of different disasters. SUZETTE SMITH
SIFF Cinema Uptown
FRIDAYâSUNDAY
Citizen Jane: Battle for the CityThis film is about the postwar struggle between two giants of urban planning: Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs. Moses represented the modernist movement, and Jacobs represents the urbanist movement, which really didn't get started until the last decade of the 20th century. Moses's approach: top-down; Jacobs's: bottom-up. But what the documentary doesn't mention is that Moses's vision was supported by the capitalists of his social democratic times. Why? Because his plans destroyed stored and stagnating capital and made room for the reaccumulation of capital. Jacob's urbanist vision did not do this at all. CHARLES MUDEDE
Northwest Film Forum
David Lynch: The Art Life
Learn about how David Lynch became the filmmaking icon he is today by watching this 2016 documentary that explores his artistic development and personal life. Ben Kenigsberg at The New York Times describes the film as "a fond portrait of how one man nurtured his artistic temperament and risked being misunderstood â sometimes by his own family."
SIFF Film Center
Harold and Maude
The perfect date movie, about a death-obsessed young man who falls in love with an old woman's impending corpse.
Central Cinema
SUNDAY ONLY
Saturday Night Fever: 40th AnniversaryThe thing about Saturday Night Fever is that itâs a very realistic film. The New York accents, the cars, the clothes, the restaurants, the life on the streets are carefully matched with the actual world of that movieâs times, the second half of the 1970s. The music and dancing in the nightclub are not what make SNF an important work, but its mundane details and attention to class differences. The star of the film, John Travolta, is working-class, and the woman he desires, Karen Lynn Gorney, is lower-middle-classâthough Gorneyâs character behaves as if she is from a much higher station in society than Travoltaâs. Also, there are few scenes from that period that are more brilliant and funny than the SNF diner scene. I will never get enough of Travolta talking with a mouth full of hamburger. CHARLES MUDEDE
Thornton Place, Bella Bottega, and AMC Southcenter 16
ALL WEEKEND
ColossalA romantic comedy about a woman, Gloria (Anne Hathaway), who flees from New York City back to her rustic hometown, where she bumps into a guy (Jason Sudeikis) she used to know. It's also a movie about a giant monster wreaking havoc on downtown Seoul. It's two great tastes that go great togetherâespecially once we learn that Gloria has an unexplained connection to the kaiju in question, able to somehow control its movements from half a world away. The director Nacho Vigalondo, speaking to Marc Mohan, explains: "When the synopsis went public, some people thought I was making a spoof of monster movies. It is nothing but a love letter to monster movies. What I am making a comment on is romantic comedies."
SIFF Cinema Uptown & Guild 45th
The Fate of the Furious
"I choose to make my own fate,â Vin Diesel growls at the start of The Fate of the Furious, the eighth chapter in the greatest family saga since William Faulknerâs The Sound and the Fury. This is after Vinâonce again playing the lumpily majestic Dominic Toretto, criminal street racer turned special-forces operativeâhas raced through the streets of Havana, in reverse, in a car that is on fire. If youâre one of those joyless fucks who still thinks theyâre too good for the Fast and Furious movies, you are only hurting yourself. For the rest of us: The Fate of the Furious is here. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Meridian 16, Pacific Place, & Sundance Cinemas
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 Peeleâs directorial debut is both a clever, consistently funny racial satire and a horror film, one that mocks white liberal cluelessness and finds humor inâbut doesnât dismissâBlack peopleâs fears. ERIC D. SNIDER
Various locations
Gifted
Gifted is about a little girl, Mary, whoâs being raised by her uncle, Frank, after her brilliant motherâs suicide. Bonnie is a teacher who gets a little too involved after learning that Mary is brilliant, too. Or, like, beyond brilliant. Mary rules at math. Despite the fact that Chris Evans, Jenny Slate, McKenna Grace, and her one-eyed cat are all so charming and watchable that you almost forget how much math is on-screen, Gifted is the kind of movie most people will never hear about. But some people will accidentally watch it on an airplane, or when their parents are visiting, and theyâll be pleasantly entertained for two hours. ELINOR JONES
Various locations
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
The music is uniformly great, the jokes are whip-smart and delightful, the action scenes are exciting CG works of art, the characters are identifiable and lovable, and BABY GROOT IS (as mentioned earlier) GODDAMN ADORABLE. While the characters of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 may be mired in their feelings, at least they have themâand aren't afraid to show them. WM. STEVEN HUMPHREY
Various locations
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
Ark Lodge Cinema & Majestic Bay
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 movieâsuch an X-Men movieâthat 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 genreâand it's as much a western as a superhero movieâit's about bigger things, too. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Meridian 16
The Lost City of Z
Itâs easy to see, with just a few tweaks, how The Lost City of Z could have been a by-the-numbers historical biopic, and its costumes and sets are perfectly on point. But the film offers something more complicated, and as Percy and his team travel deeper into unmapped terrain, writer/director James Gray takes us into uncharted territory within Percyâs psyche. Werner Herzogâs twin documents of white manâs obsession with the jungleÂâAguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldoâare easy touchstones here, but Grayâs outlook is far more humane, and he permits his story to exist as a rip-rousing adventure for long stretches, even as it delivers much more than that. NED LANNAMANN
Various locations
T2 Trainspotting
The native visual wit of Danny Boyle's direction has only grown more delightful with ageâhe revels in mischievous references to the original film. And there's something undeniably satisfying in seeing the four actors from the original reunited, and looking weathered. (It's also nice to hear Ewan McGregor speaking with a Scots accent again.) The original film was like a bone-marrow biopsy of the zeitgeist of its period. By contrast, the sequel revels in pricking its characters' articulate, self-aware out-of-timeness. It confines them to a Scotland that is simultaneously collapsing upon itself (high mountains of garbage loom everywhere) and exploding outward into an indistinguishable Europeanness, and it surrounds them with reminders of the selves they never managed to become. SEAN NELSON
Meridian 16
Translations Film Festival
Three Dollar Bill Cinema presents their 12th annual festival highlighting more than 70 films and artists from around the world that explore transgender experiences. This year, opening night promises a screening of Free Cece!, a documentary featuring Laverne Cox and Cece McDonald that explores Cece McDonald's incarceration in a men's prisonâas well as systemic injustices and violence that transgender women of color face. (McDonald and director Jacqueline Gares will attend the opening night party at the Egyptian.) MATT BAUME
SIFF Egyptian & Northwest Film Forum
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