This weekend at the movies, you can revisit Fast Times at Ridgemont High (which Sean Nelson described as "the greatest film of its kind"), watch Alejandro Jodorowsky's SIFF hit Endless Poetry, or catch blockbusters like genuinely affecting rom-com The Big Sick or sci-fi film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (perfect for those who loved The Fifth Element). Below, you'll find all of our film critics' picks—click on titles for movie times and trailers. You can also check out our compilation of outdoor movie screenings, our special events-filled film calendar, and our full movie times page.

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THURSDAY ONLY
Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
Abacus was the only US bank to face criminal charges for mortgage fraud after the 2008 financial crisis—and it wasn't a national behemoth but a small institution owned by the Sung family in New York. This documentary follows the course of the immigrant clan's legal fight over five years and has been praised by the New York Times as "a classic underdog tale."
SIFF Cinema Uptown

Brazil / Repo Man
SIFF is presenting a series of double features on Thursdays this summer. Celebrate nostalgia and escape to an air-conditioned movie theater while you revisit old favorites and cult classics. This week's double feature pairs the Orwell-on-angel-dust Terry Gilliam satire Brazil with the gritty yet eccentric LA sci-fi classic Repo Man.
SIFF Cinema Uptown

NT Live: Angels in America Part Two: Perestroika
Part One of Tony Kushner's beloved play Angels in America was described by Brendan Kiley as a "fever dream" that sets the stage for the staggering Part Two (a "kaleidoscopic seizure"). At this screening, see Part Two of London's National Theater production—starring Andrew Garfield, Denise Gough, Nathan Lane, James McArdle and Russell Tovey—broadcast live. (Part One will play on Sunday.)
Pacific Place & SIFF Cinema Uptown

The Room
Tommy Wiseau's (writer/director/producer/lead actor/distributor) PSA about sleeping with your best friend's girl. Best watched under the influence of something or other.
Central Cinema

FRIDAY-SUNDAY
Lady Macbeth
This British drama about an abusive marriage is based on Russian author Nikolai Leskov's 1865 novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, and stars Florence Pugh, Cosmo Jarvis, Paul Hilton, Naomi Ackie and Christopher Fairbank.
SIFF Cinema Uptown & AMC Seattle 10

Mali Blues
Lutz Gregor's Mali Blues examines that nation's musical spirit through the wrenching experiences of four musicians. This laggardly paced documentary may make you feel heat-dazed, but the stories of guitarist/vocalist Fatoumata Diawara, guitarist Ahmed Ag Kaedi of the Tuareg group Amanar, anti-Islam rapper Master Soumy, and griot Bassekou Kouyaté (the Jimi Hendrix of the ngoni) will touch you deeply. We learn that music is not merely frivolous diversion for these individuals; it is crucial to their survival, identity, and the country's cultural traditions—all of which have been threatened by the encroaching enforcement of Sharia law. DAVE SEGAL
SIFF Film Center

Point Break
In Kathryn Bigelow's iconic and highly entertaining 1991 film, Keanu Reeves is Johnny Utah, a rookie FBI agent tasked with investigating a string of unusual bank robberies.
Central Cinema

SUNDAY ONLY
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
Amy Heckerling's 1982 flick (35 years ago? Holy shit!), written by Cameron Crowe, is beyond question the greatest film of its kind, more than making up for the sorry tailspins both Crowe and Heckerling entered after making it. Jennifer Jason Leigh, Sean Penn, Phoebe Cates, and Judge Reinhold star; and look closely for a young Forest Whitaker, Eric Stoltz, and Nicolas Cage. SEAN NELSON
Pacific Place

NT Live: Angels in America Part One: Millenium Approaches
Part One of Tony Kushner's beloved play Angels in America was described by Brendan Kiley as a "fever dream" that sets the stage for the staggering Part Two (a "kaleidoscopic seizure"). See Part One of London's National Theater production—starring Andrew Garfield, Denise Gough, Nathan Lane, James McArdle and Russell Tovey—broadcast live. (Part Two plays on Friday.)
SIFF Film Center

ALL WEEKEND
Baby Driver
Once its tires grip pavement, Baby Driver becomes a full-throttle ballet of motion, color, and sound. The tunes are great, the getaway chases will leave you breathless, and the motley team of robbers—which includes Kevin Spacey, Eiza González, and an excellent Jamie Foxx—comes from the kind of screenplay you wish Tarantino still wrote. And a superbly villainous Jon Hamm shows there’s more to his post-Mad Men career than H&R Block ads. NED LANNAMAN
Pacific Place & AMC Seattle 10

The Beguiled
By taking the 1971 Clint Eastwood vehicle The Beguiled and touching it up with some Southern Gothic feminism, director Sofia Coppola has crafted an enchanting, dark, sometimes funny Civil War–era battle of the sexes that's one of the more smartly provocative movies of the summer. It's stunningly photographed by Philippe Le Sourd, and it conjures a humid, dreamlike mood that's memorably transporting. Whichever characters you end up thinking the title applies to, it's just as likely to refer to viewers of The Beguiled. MARC MOHAN
SIFF Cinema Uptown

The Big Sick
This film comes with a few red flags attached (rom-com set in the world of stand-up, etc.), but haters be damned. The true story of Kumail Nanjiani (Silicon Valley, Portlandia) and his real-life wife Emily Gordon’s tumultuous courtship is hilarious, warm, and genuinely affecting—a best-case scenario in every department. The cross-cultural differences at the center of the story are written and played with empathy and truth, and the performances (especially from Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan, Holly Hunter, and Adeel Akhtar) are deep, surprising, and bursting with multidimensional humanity. SEAN NELSON
Various locations

Dunkirk
From May 26 to June 4, 1940, the evacuation of Allied troops from the French port of Dunkirk and its surrounding beaches, known as Operation Dynamo, was a hugely important event in the history of World War II. After the war was over, the survivors of Dunkirk would almost all liken it to Hell. It was Hell on earth, a living Hell. The question is this: How do you present Hell on earth, Hell in the air, and Hell at sea on celluloid? For Christopher Nolan, much of the answer is do it in ultra-high-definition 70 mm IMAX film and show it in IMAX cinemas. Dunkirk is meant to be a nonstop 114 minutes of unalleviated spectacle, a massive collage of beautifully composed pictures, each one lasting for only a few seconds, of gunfire, flames, drowned corpses, exploding bombs, aerial dogfights with numerous plane crashes, and more, much more. Dunkirk shows a world full of terror, but Nolan goes to great lengths to ensure that his audience is never terrified. We sit in our seats munching popcorn and watch other people undergoing terrifying experiences. JONATHAN RABAN
Various locations

Endless Poetry
With this autobiographical film, Alejandro Jodorowsky, the surrealist genius behind El Topo and The Holy Mountain, has created the most accurate portrayal of a poet’s life in cinema history. When young Alejandro discovers a book of Federico García Lorca’s, he escapes his family’s house, becomes a poet, moves into a weird artist co-op, and physically ages only after having major life experiences. Every nonartist in Santiago de Chile, where the action takes place, is either a sleeping drone or a murderous pervert. Life in this world seems impossibly lonely until he meets a pink-haired woman warrior who kicks and spits at everyone she encounters. Equal parts goofy and gorgeous, violent and theatrical. Muy magnífico. Highly recommended. RICH SMITH
Grand Illusion

A Ghost Story
Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara play “C” and “M,” a young married couple living in a quaint country house that might be haunted. We don’t know much more about them, other than C (Affleck) is some kind of composer, that he and M seem to be having relationship trouble, and that the two never, ever smile. A Ghost Story seems to take itself ultra seriously, and Mara and Affleck gloom and glower for all they’re worth, even before a death fractures the narrative. But while A Ghost Story seems to be setting us up for a film that’s going to wallow wallow wallow in beautiful, tragic grief, it eventually goes full existential. It’s hard to say “visual tone poem” without it sounding hopelessly pretentious, but Lowery isn’t afraid of being vulnerable or seeming silly, and A Ghost Story is poetic in the best way—its ideas are little too big to reduce down to simple prose, and its abstraction reflects a grasping towards meaning, not a way to disguise a lack of it. VINCE MANCINI
SIFF Cinema Egyptian & AMC Seattle 10

Landline
Gillian Robespierre, writer-director of Obvious Child, reunites with Jenny Slate for this serio-comic take on secrets and lies in Giuliani-era Manhattan. Frustrated adman Alan (John Turturro) is keeping something from hypercritical wife Pat (Edie Falco), engaged daughter Dana (Slate) can't resist a man from her past, and teen sister Ali (Abby Quinn) is sneaking out to go clubbing. True, they're normal middle-class problems, but Robespierre has a knack for embarrassingly salty dialogue, and Slate and Quinn are perfectly cast as sisters straining against the yoke of expectations. These two elements come together to make a very satisfying movie experience. KATHY FENNESSY
SIFF Cinema Uptown

The Little Hours
Though nuns are often portrayed as beacons of purity, they’re anything but in The Little Hours, Jeff Baena’s film set at a convent in medieval Italy. These sisters unleash torrents of profanity, violently lash out at men, chug sacramental wine, and explore their sexuality with wild abandon. The film’s best moments come when we get to spy on them—wringing out the laundry, grooming the donkey, stealing turnips from the garden and later going to confession over the theft. The Little Hours finds comedy in mundanity; its jokes, thankfully, make up for its unoriginality. CIARA DOLAN
SIFF Cinema Uptown

Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan
Learn about super-famous dancer Wendy Whelan (formerly of the New York City Ballet) in this documentary about the pains of aging and Whelan’s desperate desire to dance. Brian Seibert of the New York Times writes that it “humanizes dance.”
Northwest Film Forum

Spider-Man: Homecoming
Spider-Man: Homecoming isn't just the best Spider-Man film ever made—it might just be the current reigning champion in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. Instead of being crammed with typical action set pieces and clunky character development, Homecoming is actually a good-natured teen comedy in the vein of John Hughes's best work, rather than the action-packed blockbuster behemoths we've grown accustomed to. It's the closest a Spider-Man film has come to capturing the insecurity and bubbly effervescence displayed in the Marvel comics of the 1960s, and Tom Holland's earnest, engaging style has a lot to do with it. WM. STEPHEN HUMPHREY
Various locations

Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
From its awe-inspiring opening montage, Luc Besson’s Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets immediately immerses its audience in a brilliant, idiosyncratic sci-fi universe—one that’s unlike anything we’ve seen for 20 years, since Besson’s last brilliant, idiosyncratic sci-fi universe, in The Fifth Element. Those of us who loved The Fifth Element will get exactly what we’ve been missing with Valerian. It’s a delight. SUZETTE SMITH
Various locations

War for the Planet of the Apes
The director of War for the Planet of the Apes and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Matt Reeves, has an incredible skill for creating the plausibly crumbling natural world Caesar and his tribe are about to inherit. He's also very good at balancing the necessary irony of Harrelson's performance with the even more necessary total conviction of Serkis's (and the other mo-cap ape actors). Even better: Though the film is full of violence, Reeves makes every death matter to someone on-screen. He's less good at noticing when his film overreaches with the whole "But who is the savage, now?" shtick. At one point, the Colonel forces a cadre of ape POWs to build a (wait for it) wall outside his commandeered fortress. "Why do they need a wall?" one of them asks, and only barely resists looking damply into the camera at Trump's America. But guess what: This is Trump's America, and Reeves makes an admirable effort to present it/us with a credible catastrophization of the moral and spiritual trajectory we can't even seem to fully acknowledge, much less avert. SEAN NELSON
Various locations

Wonder Woman
In Wonder Woman, innocence is Diana’s foil. She’s read at great length about the world, but has never lived in it. And as Diana deals with her naïveté and her foes, Wonder Woman is exciting and fun—even though it devolves into typical blockbuster spectacle near its end, I’d recommend it to anyone who loves action films, and there’s also just enough subtext to feed a philosophical mind. How much harm does Wonder Woman do when she strides boldly into war? Is this what power looks like? Is it cool just because she’s a woman? Hopefully these questions will be answered in future films. For now, Wonder Woman is a thrilling start. SUZETTE SMITH
Meridian 16 & AMC Seattle 10