Surprise: it’s going to rain this weekend. Hide from the monocloud while you’re inside a movie theater, watching one of these films recommended by our critics. Plus, find complete listings for movie times on our Things To Do calendar.
1. East Side Sushi
“Ostensibly, East Side Sushi is about a journey from being a skilled home cook to an assistant cook at a Japanese restaurant. The main character wants to become a sushi chef, but because she is the ‘wrong’ race and gender, she meets with resistance…. Director Anthony Lucero shows us exactly what it means to be poor in America.” –Angela Garbes
2. Fantasia 75th Anniversary
“Fantasia? The stoner’s delight. Take some drugs, flop in your seat, look up at the screen, and see those magical horses flying around the clouds and palace. Very trippy. And it’s kind of cool for stoners to appropriate a kids’ flick, a film for the innocent, a family values film.” –Charles Mudede
3. Goodnight Mommy
“Goodnight Mommy is definitely, without one doubt, my FAVORITE horror movie of the year. It’s not a ride for the faint of heart—especially those who are parents or ‘mommies’ themselves.” –Kelly O
4. Ikiru
“For many, Kurosawa was a great director due to the effortless sweep and grandeur of his epics. But for those of us who treasure him for his pained, sincere humanism—his ability to see how every side in an argument has its own wounds to hide—Ikiru will stand as his supreme achievement. Ikiru is one of the very greatest of films.” –Bruce Reid
5. The Martian
“I don’t know how high you’d have to be to not want to see a Ridley Scott film about Matt Damon getting stranded on Mars, based on Andy Weir’s startlingly sharp novel, and costarring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, Donald Glover, and Jeff Daniels, among others, but I am not now, nor have I ever been, quite as high as that.” –Sean Nelson
6. Miss You Already
“The first film to ever make me cry (not counting wildlife documentaries) was Beaches. The latest from director Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Twilight) manages a close approximation of that weepy masterpiece with Miss You Already.” –Marjorie Skinner
7. Room
“Room rewards a close viewing as well as a casual one—watch it as a sensitive and insightful character study, or watch it for “Daring Escape from Rape Shed!”—the action sequences are about as tense and nail-bitey as it gets. Either way, it works.” –Alison Hallett
8. Sicario
“What’s the opposite of evaporate? Whatever it is, that’s what Sicario does. When so many movies and TV shows disappear from memory as soon as you’re finished watching, Sicario lingers. It clots. In short, Denis Villeneuve’s new drug thriller is phenomenal.” –Ned Lannamann
9. Spectre
“Spectre has all the evidence that director Sam Mendes is trying to make a movie that is simultaneously both a good movie and a good Bond movie, despite those things being mathematically and mutually exclusive phenomena.” –Sean Nelson
10. Spotlight
“It’s one thing for a reporter to break a story few people know about. It’s another thing entirely for a reporter—or a team of reporters—to tear the lid off a story everyone knows something about but whose true dimensions are too horrifying to imagine. Actor-turned-filmmaker Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight, which re-creates the Boston Globe’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning exposure of the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal, looks at a case of the latter with riveting results.” –Kathy Fennessy
11. Taxi
“Iranian director Jafar Panahi made two masterpieces in the previous decade. In 2009, Panahi made his support of the Green Movement known, and this eventually landed him in prison. Though he is now free to move about Iran, he can’t leave the country. In his latest movie, Taxi, Panahi drives a cab around Tehran. This work provides a great opportunity to see the state of the director and his big city.” –Charles Mudede
Need more advice for surviving the monocloud? Check out our complete guide to getting through the cold, dark, horrible next few months in Seattle.
