It’s the final weekend of the highly anticipated, heavily celebrated, and gloriously busy Seattle International Film Festival, which offers screenings of 47 films this weekend (to make your decision a little easier, we’ve also highlighted the top 11 choices). But if those don’t tempt you, there are plenty more options to help you get your movie fix. We’ve compiled the best (non-SIFF) films playing in Seattle this weekend below, along with links to where and when you can see them. (We have conveniently omitted Warcraft, a “distinctly terrible” movie from director Duncan Jones, and Now You See Me 2, a follow-up to the “relatively contained dumpster fire about sexy magicians.”) For all the choices, make sure to check out our complete movie times listings.
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NEW RELEASES
1. The Conjuring 2
For horror fans accustomed to wandering through acres of dreck for a meager jolt, James Wan is the real deal. The Conjuring 2, the director’s return to the horror game after the amiably knuckle headed Furious 7, is a brilliantly staged, strangely exhausting work of a filmmaker in complete thrall to his chosen genre. This is a movie where virtually every scene is designed expressly for the purpose of causing the viewer’s colon to have an out-of-body experience. ANDREW WRIGHT
2. Maggie’s Plan
The screwball comedy Maggie’s Plan is filmmaker Rebecca Miller’s most satisfying film to date. Greta Gerwig plays Maggie, a college arts adviser, who has had lousy luck with men, but longs to have a baby. So she comes up with a plan—it involves underwear-model-turned-actor Travis Fimmel—but fate intervenes when she falls for Ethan Hawke’s unhappily married anthropology professor, John. Miller loves these characters, including Maya Rudolph and Bill Hader as Maggie’s unfiltered friends, too much to paint any of them as villains, and if Maggie’s plans—there are three altogether—are complicated by the vagaries of human desire, her happy ending feels fully earned. KATHY FENNESSY
LIMITED RUNS
3. The Last Unicorn
A delightfully dreary animated fantasy film with a Gothic style that’s the perfect antidote to today’s Pixar bubblegum, featuring the voices of Mia Farrow, Jeff Bridges, and Alan Arkin. When it was first released, The New York Times called it “unusually good.”
4. The Ones Below
A psychological thriller about two expecting mothers—but the couple who lives downstairs seems a little…off. Pregnancy offers plenty of in-built terror, and this film takes advantage of that creep-factor and runs with it. According to The New York Times, there is “much to admire” in this movie, and “the final shot is sublime in its perversity.”
5. Space Jam
Experience the trippiness of Space Jam, a bizarre sports/fantasy/comedy movie starring a bunch of animated Looney Tunes characters and live-action Michael Jordan.
6. Viktoria
Viktoria (Daria Vitkova) has everything she wants. Next to her bed is a direct line to the leader of the party. She is driven to school by a chauffeur, who, as she sits in the large backseat, hands her the best sandwiches that socialism has to offer. At school, she treats the teachers and students like shit. One could not imagine a more happy childhood. And it would have gone on like this forever had not the Berlin Wall collapsed and the party that spoiled her, the navel-less girl of the future, been overthrown by pro-democracy forces. The kind of depression that grips Viktoria can be understood only by Americans who are former child stars. CHARLES MUDEDE
CONTINUING RUNS
7. Captain America: Civil War
If you want to get super technical about it, Captain America: Civil War isn’t so much a Captain America movie as the third flick in the Avengers series. While Cap may be the heart and soul of this film, Marvel made sure to cram in as many of their products as humanly possible. But what should’ve been a 2.5-hour mess is another seemingly inconceivable Marvel miracle. Frenetic action set pieces are plopped in at regular intervals, and the uniformly terrific cast makes the long running time more than bearable. It’s way better than the marginally enjoyable Age of Ultron, and packs more fun than Winter Soldier, while still maintaining that film’s dark, paranoid edge. At this point, we know Marvel’s got an expansive, ongoing game plan, and this movie is just another piece in their puzzle. That’s why I’ve decided to trust and not start a war about it (civil or otherwise). WM. STEVEN HUMPHREY
8. The Lobster
Here’s the thing about The Lobster, the thing that’ll either make you want to see it or never see it: It captures what it feels like to be single. And not just that—it captures what it feels like to be single in a society obsessed with everyone having someone. That’s not a particularly fun thing to address, but it’s not particularly awful, either, so The Lobster splits the difference: surreal and heartfelt, it’s both laugh-out-loud funny and eerily melancholy. One minute, characters are wondering if they’ll ever find a partner; the next, they’re deciding which animal they’ll turn into if they end up single. ERIK HENRIKSEN
9. Love & Friendship
Who better than Whit Stillman, who has been flirting with Jane Austen since that brilliant exchange about Mansfield Park in his exquisite debut, Metropolitan, to adapt and extrapolate a story Austen wrote in her teens? SEAN NELSON
10. The Meddler
The Meddler‘s heroines aren’t flat, tertiary characters in someone else’s storyline. They’re weird, interesting, highly competent messes handling their own not-inconsiderable emotional baggage, and doing a realistically piss-poor job of it. They’re dysfunctional and unlikeable, and you can tell a man didn’t write them. Like UnREAL‘s Rachel or literally any of the women on The Good Wife (RIP), they’re complicated and make bad decisions and probably aren’t that cool to be around. But what makes them hard to watch is also what makes them real. MEGAN BURBANK
11. The Nice Guys
Sure, the mystery is fun, and yeah, it’s a goddamn delight to see Healy and March shoot and stumble their way though LA. But unlike just about every other modern American comedy, The Nice Guys is an honest-to-god actual big-screen comedy—with Black taking advantage of cuts, camera moves, sight gags, and framing to deliver both action thrills and unpredictable laughs. Most American comedies—which, with their static setups and half-improvised dialogue, might as well be performed as plays—can’t be bothered with any of the cinematic cleverness Black giddily employs here. ERIK HENRIKSEN
12. Weiner
As everyone knows, sexts brought Anthony Weiner’s brilliant political career to an end not once but twice. The first time, in 2011, was not fatal; the second time, in 2013, was. The first time cost him his seat in Congress (where he made fiery speeches and attacked the GOP like a bulldog)—the second, his chance of becoming the mayor of New York City. The documentary is about his second and final fall…But the real star of this very entertaining documentary is Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin. Her face, her body, her movements are a ship that crosses the crises of her marriage with admirable steadiness. Her husband has only a poor idea of her greatness. Hillary Clinton, however, knows the real value of this woman, which is why she is keeping Abedin close to her as she runs for president. In the documentary, we watch Abedin dump her husband’s political career for Hillary’s. CHARLES MUDEDE
