One of the great pleasures of the devoted movie-lover is stumbling upon a previously unheard-of film that instantly asserts itself as a new favorite. Such was the case with Pretty Poison, the 1968 thriller I first saw last summer and have been raving about since. An impossibly handsome Anthony Perkins stars as an ex-con with dark dreams, but it’s costar Tuesday Weld—as a high-school cheerleader with a mile-wide sociopathic streak—that puts the movie over. It’s a glorious mindfuck (with a prescient environmentalist edge). (Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Ave, seattleartmuseum.org, 7:30 pm, $15)

David Schmader—former weed columnist and Stranger associate editor—is the author of the solo plays Straight and Letter to Axl, which he’s performed in Seattle and across the US. His latest...