If you’re looking to step up your smalltalk game by heading to the movies this weekend, our critics have picked the best films for you to do just that. See all of your options below, from successful remakes like Ghostbusters and Star Trek Beyond to limited runs like the films at the Noir City festival or Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Or, if you missed weird, conversation-provoking films like The Lobster (striking fear in the hearts of single people everywhere), farting corpse movie Swiss Army Man, or the bizarre and chilling documentary Tickled, we have good news: they’re all still playing. For even more choices, check out our complete movie times listings.
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NEW RELEASES
1. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie picks up where the series left off: Edina and Patsy have not matured one iota, and when the pair suddenly find themselves bankrupt (and charged with killing model Kate Moss) they dash off to the French Riviera to evade the law, find rich husbands, and ingest more drugs and bubbly. The film achieves the same high-pitched, broad humor of the series—even though at a scant 90 minutes, Ab Fab: The Movie is straining at the seams. While you may wonder, “Why was this made?” the hilarious presence of Joanna Lumley is reason enough. Her character Patsy is a stroke of comedic genius, and the world is always in dire need of that. WM. STEVEN HUMPHREY
Wide Release
2. Star Trek Beyond
Despite the 21st century having surpassed many of Roddenberry’s wildest technological dreams, those of us living in 2016 find ourselves struggling with some of the same social and political issues as those who were alive in the 1960s. That can make Star Trek‘s interstellar utopia seem goofy and preposterous—like it’s merely one more fantasy world for us to gaze into as we retreat from reality. But every once in a while, the future of Star Trek can feel like something more—like a melding of entertainment and ideology, of adventure and potential. Every once in a while, Star Trek feels like an actual glimpse into a future. A future where, if we wanted, we could scrape the blood off our faces and do better. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Wide Release
LIMITED RUNS
Thursday
3. Actress
Actress is intimate and personal, and it is also a performance. When I say “Brandy Burre never stops performing in Actress“—which tracks Burre’s fledgling efforts to restart her career and reengage with her old creative community—I do not mean it as a mock-diagnosis of any sort of pathology. What Actress does is capture Burre in an array of moments that illuminate the performances we all give as we move through our days—the face-saving phrasings, the harmony-sustaining obfuscations, the laboriously casual name-drops. Burre’s openness before Greene’s camera is brave, by which I mean “Other people would be scared to do this.” DAVID SCHMADER
Northwest Film Forum
4. Decoder
Based on the writings of William S. Burroughs, this legendary German cult film from early ’80s Berlin examines the science of Muzak as a musical tranquilizer used to calm the masses, and corporations who enlist an agent to stop the anti-Muzak movement.
Northwest Film Forum
5. White Star
This German film directed by Roland Klick follows the exploits of a Hollywood agent (Dennis Hopper) as he uses usual—and somewhat more unusual—means to promote an aspiring keyboardist (Terrance Robay).
Northwest Film Forum
6. Zero Days
“This was obviously the first, biggest, and most sophisticated example of a state or two states using a cyber weapon for offensive purposes,” says New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger in Zero Days. He’s talking about Stuxnet—an elegant, dense, and massive piece of malware. First discovered via an “epidemic of computer shutdowns” in 2010, eventually it was recognized as something far greater: a powerful, covert American and Israeli cyber attack on an Iranian nuclear facility. Alex Gibney’s documentary Zero Days delves into how Stuxnet happened—a tale that’s part 007-style spy caper, part computer nerds waxing rhapsodic about code—and what it means that the Obama administration refuses to acknowledge its role in the attack. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Sundance Cinemas
Starting Friday
7. The Neverending Story
A guileless wimp stumbles into Fantasia and finds himself head to head with the most existentially profound antagonist in all of children’s literature, nothingness itself.
Central Cinema
8. Tickled
The title suggests a film about a harmless fetish, but this chilling documentary uncovers more emotional pain than physical pleasure. In the prologue, a television reporter describes David Farrier as “New Zealand’s favorite pop culture reporter.” One day, he comes across a call for a competitive endurance tickling contest that involves flights to Los Angeles and four-day hotel stays. On the evidence of the video clips, the scene is rather wholesomely homoerotic (the male participants remain fully clothed during sessions). KATHY FENNESSY
Seven Gables
9. Wet Hot American Summer
The original Wet Hot American Summer was created by comedians David Wain and Michael Showalter (from the sketch group The State), and it is a spot-on parody of those 1980s teen sex comedies. It stars such now well-known luminaries as Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, Elizabeth Banks, Michael Ian Black, Janeane Garofalo, David Hyde Pierce, and more, and it revolves around the oversexed counselors at a kids’ summer camp. The jokes in Wet Hot American Summer are hilarious, filthy, and bizarre—and it absolutely BOMBED at the box office. Despite its original poor opening, Wet Hot American Summer eventually found its audience on DVD and cable where it became one of the most beloved camp classics of our time. WM. STEVEN HUMPHREY
Central Cinema
Saturday
10. Alice in the Cities
This film about a German writer’s unexpected friendship with a young girl is the first in the “Road Movie” trilogy by German filmmaker and European Film Academy President Wim Wenders.
Saturday-Sunday
11. The Colossus of Destiny: A Melvins Tale
This documentary follows rock/metal/punk band The Melvins (founded in Montesano, Washington, and named after a supervisor at a local Thriftway) and is described as “an up-to-date visual documentation and celebration of the band.”
Grand Illusion
All Weekend
12. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Sure, Hunt for the Wilderpeople’s scope is small, but it gives you everything you could want from a movie: It’s smart, emotional, and even a bit action-packed once Ricky and Hec embark on an unplanned adventure in the forest. But most of all, it’s funny. So, so funny. Wilderpeople is a hugely loveable movie that’s suitable for date night or the whole family, and I know that sounds like a hacky movie poster blurb. But when a movie’s this good, it’s tough to avoid clichés, so I’ll leave you with another: Don’t miss it. NED LANNAMANN
SIFF Cinema Egyptian & Sundance Cinemas
13. 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
Sundance Cinemas
14. Noir City Film Festival
If you love cinema, then you must love film noir. And if you love film noir, then you must love the Noir City festival, which comes to Seattle this week and will feature a number of known and less known movies in this genre that has lots of spiderlike women, lots of long knives, lots of rooms with dark curtains, lots of faces of the fallen, and lots of existential twists and turns. CHARLES MUDEDE
CONTINUING RUNS
15. The BFG
The BFG is an oddly paced but eventually rewarding film, with one or two flat-out magnificent stretches. You probably remember Dahl’s book as being bubbly and bright, but the English author’s humor and fluidity with language disguised a dark tale of Dickensian sorrow and Greek-god violence. Sophie is an orphan, a completely isolated (and tiny) figure in a decidedly inhospitable world. When she, in the dead of night, spies the 24-foot-tall BFG—which stands for Big Friendly Giant, although she doesn’t know about the “Friendly” part just yet—outside her orphanage window, he abducts her and squirrels her away in his secret cave in Giant Country. NED LANNAMANN
16. Captain Fantastic
In Captain Fantastic, this alternative family has to leave their little compound to attend a funeral, and in the outside world, we get to observe their smug disconnection from society alongside their admirably thoughtful, sustainable, and creative approach to life. Any audience would have a hard time not laughing out loud at the quick, complex jokes—but liberal, thoughtful Seattleites will get an extra kick when they recognize themselves in the characters. The mood shifts constantly, so that at any given moment the family’s lifestyle seems either ideal or like a mild form of child abuse. JULIA RABAN
17. 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
18. 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
19. Ghostbusters
Because I’m so enthralled by all four lead actors, and even more enthralled by watching the world of bitter, obstructionist dorks implode with rage over their casting, I was almost ecstatic to see how well the whole thing turned out. It’s not just that it works and is hilarious and has great special effects and all the candy—It’s also a perfect commentary on gender inequality in movies. Leading by example. SEAN NELSON
20. Independence Day: Resurgence
Twentieth Century Fox did not screen Independence Day: Resurgence for critics, probably because the film is so good it would annihilate critics’ ranking systems. For how does one give a film “five stars” when it deserves all the stars in the universe? How does one offer “two thumbs up” when a more accurate assessment would be to have each person on Earth join together to raise all of our thumbs to the heavens? And how does one rate “10 out of 10” when one knows ∞ is the only numerical concept that could come close to representing Independence Day: Resurgence? ERIK HENRIKSEN
21. 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
22. The Secret Life of Pets
Watch pets personified in The Secret Life of Pets: a take on what Fido and Fluffy are up to behind our backs, with voice actors including Louis C.K., Kevin Hart, and Jenny Slate.
23. Swiss Army Man
If you want your dreams to be weird for the rest of your life, see Swiss Army Man, directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, and starring Daniel Radcliffe and Paul Dano. Radcliffe, working hard to quash your beloved associations of Harry Potter, portrays a farting corpse—a farting corpse that serves as a companion, prop, and man Friday to Dano’s very sad young bearded man, Hank. Hank is just like most sad young bearded men, except he’s also a castaway on an island, where his creepy new pal washes ashore. MEGAN BURBANK
