If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed by the number of options for Pride Weekend and need to take an escapist break at a movie theater, our critics have picked the best options for you to do just that. Fans of director and screenwriter Brian De Palma are in for a treat: not only can you catch an engrossing documentary about the man himself, De Palma, but you can also brush up on two of his greatest, creepiest hits: Blow Out and Carrie. If you’re looking for lighter fare, we’ve got that too (with options like Finding Dory and The Nice Guys), but, in general, fans of psychological thrillers will have the most to choose from this weekend. If the options below aren’t enough for you, you can find even more choices via our complete movie times listings.
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NEW RELEASES
1. Free State of Jones
An action-drama inspired by the life of Newton Knight, who founded the Knight Company, a rebellious group of Confederate deserters who attempted to form a haven safe from civil unrest: the “Free State of Jones.”
Wide Release
2. Independence Day: Resurgence
A sequel to 1996 science fiction thriller Independence Day, this new edition of “massive alien attack” features stars including Jeff Goldblum and Bill Pullman reprising their original roles, as well as new faces from Liam Hemsworth to Maika Monroe.
Wide Release
LIMITED RUNS
3. Alien
My unrepentant Darwinism is the reason that the one horror film I really, really love and watch over and over is Alien. The economic realism of Alien (the workers worried about contracts, better pay, bonuses, and so on) is matched by the biological realism of the alien (the perfect organism). In fact, the first part of the movie is essentially Marx in space, and the second part of the movie is Darwin in space. CHARLES MUDEDE (All weekend)
Central Cinema
4. Belladonna of Sadness
In 1973, the United States wasn’t quite ready for Belladonna of Sadness, Eiichi Yamamoto’s erotic animated adaptation of French historian Jules Michelet’s 1862 tome La Sorcière. Though there’s movement, which builds to a stroboscopic crescendo toward the end, Yamamoto relies largely on static, richly-hued watercolors and oil paintings to tell the story of Jeanne (voiced by Aiko Nagayama), a beautiful weaver in a feudal village where poverty and marriage don’t mix (at times, the art recalls Mœbius’s storyboards for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unmade Dune adaptation). Making its US debut, this beautifully restored version combines the sexually-charged atmosphere of 1974’s soft-core fantasia Emmanuelle with the anything-goes spirit of 1977’s horror whatsit House. KATHY FENNESSY (All weekend)
Grand Illusion
5. De Palma
The filmmakers, who are also filmmakers, don’t really press their subject very hard, and it’s easy to see why. Contrary to his devilish behind-the-camera reputation, De Palma on-screen comes across as a gregarious, often hilarious narrator of his own career. His laugh is warm and infectious, and his gift for showbiz anecdotes is world-class. Hearing him trash-talk Cliff Robertson, or describe how Al Pacino bailed on an overlong shoot, or the little ways Sean Penn psyched out Michael J. Fox honestly made me wish the doc was five hours long. SEAN NELSON (All weekend)
SIFF Cinema Uptown
6. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial
A disease-ridden alien briefly befriends a young boy before being brutally exterminated in a heroic joint effort by NASA and the CDC. (All weekend)
Central Cinema
7. Kaili Blues
A slow, meditative, and poetic film about family guilt that centers around a small medical clinic in China’s Guizhou province. (All weekend)
Northwest Film Forum
8. Touki Bouki
The last act of this film will blow your mind. It reaches the condition of a music video. It has two tunes: One is Afro-funk, and the other is an orchestral blend of jazz horns, electro, funk, and Afro-pop. The second tune steals the show. It swells and soars as the lovers (or whatever they are) rush to the seaport to catch the next ship to France. They sit in the back of a convertible, passing small and big businesses, modernist office buildings, government and military officers. There’s an indication of the genius of Mambéty—successor to the only other African director to achieve world-class status, Ousmane Sembène—but it won’t reach full flower until Hyenas. The last act of Touki Bouki is impressive, but it’s still too messy, too experimental, too impatient. CHARLES MUDEDE (All weekend)
Northwest Film Forum
9. Imitation of Life
At the end of what has to be the most curious film Hollywood ever made about the race problem, Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959), the gospel legend Mahalia Jackson appears and sings “Trouble in the World.” This is during a super-fancy funeral that’s been paid for by the poor person heading to the grave. And then the most amazingly cheesy thing happens. It’s so cheesy that it’s amazing. It’s so cheesy that it just might make you cry. “Soon, we will be done, trouble in the world…” CHARLES MUDEDE (Thursday only)
Northwest Film Forum
10. Blow Out
Brian De Palma’s celebrated thriller Blow Out stars John Travolta and Nancy Allen, and opens with a scene where Travolta is recording sound effects for a horror movie—then something truly sinister happens. (Friday only)
SIFF Film Center
11. Carrie
Based on Stephen King’s first novel, this Brian De Palma classic follows a religiously indoctrinated girl with telekinetic powers; the film opens with a very strange shower scene, and you’ll certainly recognize the bucket of pig’s blood at prom. (Friday only)
SIFF Film Center
12. Looper
Looper is a spectacular genre thriller. Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as Joe, a man employed by criminals from the future to do their janitorial work. He stands in a field, holding a beautiful, junky gun—the movie’s design is exquisite—until a bound, gagged prisoner from the future appears. Joe immediately blows the prisoner away and destroys the body. One day, the prisoner is Joe as an old man (Bruce Willis), and all hell promptly breaks loose. If you’ve ever complained about Hollywood’s lack of originality, you owe it to your past self to go see Looper once or, preferably, twice. PAUL CONSTANT (Friday only)
Scarecrow Video
WIDE RELEASES
13. 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
14. 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
15. Finding Dory
I never thought a movie about animated fish would make me cry so much. But then again, not all fish are Dory, the charming protagonist of Finding Dory, Pixar’s sequel to 2003’s Finding Nemo. Although the movie is intended to be a follow-up, Finding Dory holds its own 13 years after its predecessor debuted and anchored itself in the hearts of then-10-year-olds like me. As an adult, I discovered a new appreciation for the characters of my favorite Pixar film. ANA SOFIA KNAUF
16. 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
17. 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
18. 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
19. 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
20. 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
