Tacos!, Cardiel, and Big Trughk @ Chop Suey
Holy hard shells with extra cheese—there are so many bands with the word “TACO” in their name! There’s Brain Tacos, Bumpin Tacos, Free Tacos, Tacocat, Smogs & Tacos, Dr. Taco, Taco Land, Kid Taco, El T’aco, Tacotek, Taco Neck, Star Taco, TacoWild, 2am Taco, Barf Taco—even a band named Shit Taco. With so many tacos, it may be hard to keep track. I can tell you this, though: Seattle two-piece Tacos! (with exclamation point!) are one of the heaviest of the bunch. They play experimental heavy metal, and it’s FRICKIN’ LOUD! Fans of Big Business, the Melvins, or any of the excellent bands on the Good to Die roster should listen up, and then eat it up. (YUM!) KELLY O
The Dina Martina Christmas Show @ Re-Bar
Over the years, The Stranger has called Dina Martina many things, including “a one-woman Circus of the Stars,” a “ walrus prostitute,” “a cut-rate Elizabeth Taylor impersonator who went skydiving but her parachute failed and she crash-landed into a Shoney’s buffet,” and a Genius. (Dina creator Grady West won the Stranger Genius Award for performance in 2012.) For the uninitiated: Dina Martina is a singer who cannot sing, a dancer who cannot dance, and a storyteller who seems to have situational brain damage. And her shows are the weirdest, funniest, most oddly heartwarming stage extravaganzas you’ll ever see. DAVID SCHMADER
All the Way is about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Robert Schenkkan’s script is undeniably a modern masterpiece. It helps that President Lyndon Johnson had an outsize personality, but Schenkkan also transforms the political convolutions of the time into something even poli-sci neophytes can understand. Strom Thurmond’s defection from Dixiecrat to full-blown Republican, for example, is presented as the betrayal of a minor general on the evening of an empire-endangering battle. J. Edgar Hoover is the king’s duplicitous counsel. Martin Luther King Jr. is an allied monarch with his own kingdom to attend to. Schenkkan’s script renders one of the most tumultuous times in modern American history as something timeless. PAUL CONSTANT
National Gallery @ Northwest Film Forum
In National Gallery, the great Frederick Wiseman points his camera at scenes in a major London museum. As with his other documentaries, Wiseman humanizes the institutional process. We feel, in the details of the gallery, the life of humans—their eyes, their art, their movements, their sitting, their listening, their silent thoughts. There is no explanation for this documentary, no obvious goals, nor a narrator to guide us. We just watch and listen. Also, National Gallery is Wiseman’s most beautiful documentary since La Danse, which is about the Ballet de l’Opéra National de Paris. CHARLES MUDEDE
The Babadook @ SIFF Film Center
Australian writer/director Jennifer Kent’s intelligent, impeccably designed creepfest about a single mom, her adorable nutbar son, and a sinister picture book draws on organically frightening elements—darkness, silence, old black-and-white cartoons, and silent films—to create an unsettling trespass into the unspeakable emotional conflict between parents and children, and the different kinds of violence it can unlock. An instant classic in the tradition of post-Hammer British horror with a kinky, Tim Burton–esque visual sensibility, The Babadook isn’t the kind of horror film that makes you scared to look under the bed. It’s the kind that makes you scared to look in the mirror. SEAN NELSON