It’s going to be another rainy weekend, the perfect excuse to hide out inside a movie theater and watch one of these films recommended by our critics. For even more movies, check out our movie times listings.
LIMITED RUNS
RiffTrax Live: Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny (Thursday Only)
A pig, a man in a gorilla suit, magic beans and more are featured in one of the strangest Christmas movies ever made.
Bikes vs. Cars
“We are destroying the world that made us, that evolved us, and we have no idea if we will have a home in the world that is now replacing it. The reason we are condemned to live in this different world is certain humans have the political power to maintain and increase the burning of fossil fuels. This is indeed the most important and sobering message in the rather melancholy documentary Bikes vs. Cars.” -Charles Mudede
Die Hard
A Christmas movie in which Bruce Willis plays Santa Claus and Alan Rickman plays a Satanic, communist, Christmas-denying terrorist. Or something.
The Princess Bride Quote-Along
Think you know all the words? Now’s your chance to prove it–although there will be subtitles for “all the best lines.” Plus, free inflatable swords and ROUS.
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in Smell-o-Vision
There will be free “Wonkariffic goodie bags” at SIFF’s “smell-o-vision” screenings to make this classic actually delicious.
Also out this week: Chi-Raq, but Ijeoma Oluo says, “Spike Lee’s ambitious new film tackling inner-city Chicago violence through the power of the pussy (I wish I were exaggerating) is bad. Everything about it is bad. Don’t see it.”
CONTINUING RUNS
Brooklyn
“It’s refreshing to see this largely internal, cerebral journey of an introverted young woman play out onscreen, and Nick Hornby’s screenplay, never afraid of sentimentality, keeps such a contained narrative from feeling too cold or distant. That’s right: Brooklyn is good because it’s so wholesome, so emotive, so free of irony, without qualifiers, and your grandma will probably like it a lot.” -Megan Burbank
Creed
“If you loved the original Rocky—and its heart, and the sometimes unbearable tension it provided—Creed is a fun and worthy film-going experience. And an exception to the rule that lightning never strikes in the same place twice.” -Wm. Steven Humphrey
The Good Dinosaur
“A boy-and-his-dog story where the boy is a talking dinosaur and the dog is a little grunting caveman, The Good Dinosaur is one of Pixar’s best.” -Erik Henriksen
Heart of a Dog
“If you’ve doubted Laurie Anderson’s Renaissance woman credentials, her great new autobiographical film Heart of a Dog will convince you otherwise. She directed, wrote, scored, coproduced, coshot, and did the voice-over for this elegiac tone poem about love, death, and dealing with loss.” -Dave Segal
The Martian
“I don’t know how high you’d have to be to not want to see a Ridley Scott film about Matt Damon getting stranded on Mars, based on Andy Weir’s startlingly sharp novel, and costarring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kristen Wiig, Donald Glover, and Jeff Daniels, among others.” -Sean Nelson
The Night Before
“The Night Before might be the only Christmas movie that offers both a whole lot of dick pics and the sad, lonely sense of desperation that defines the holidays. But then Seth Rogen throws up all over a midnight mass, and all is right with the world.” -Erik Henriksen
Sicario
“In short, Denis Villeneuve’s new drug thriller is phenomenal. Its story is both personal and political, a scathing portrait of the drug war, as well as an elemental allegory in which moral dilemmas are depicted by characters crashing violently into each other.” -Ned Lannamann
Spectre
“Spectre has all the evidence that director Sam Mendes is trying to make a movie that is simultaneously both a good movie and a good Bond movie, despite those things being mathematically and mutually exclusive phenomena.” -Sean Nelson
Spotlight
“It’s one thing for a reporter to break a story few people know about. It’s another thing entirely to tear the lid off a story everyone knows something about but whose true dimensions are too horrifying to imagine. Actor-turned-filmmaker Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight, which re-creates the Boston Globe’s 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning exposure of the Catholic Church’s sex-abuse scandal, looks at a case of the latter with riveting results.” -Kathy Fennessy
Taxi
“Iranian director Jafar Panahi made two masterpieces in the previous decade, The Circle (2000) and Offside (2006). His first masterpiece of this decade is certainly Taxi, a film he shot, directed, edited, and starred in despite being under house arrest and banned by the state of Iran from making films.” -Charles Mudede
Trumbo
“Award season must be around the corner, because movies like Trumbo come out only when they can be considered. This kind of movie tends to be set in some yesteryear and plays jazz, smokes heavily, and wears a long silk dress as it approaches. Not to suggest that Roach doesn’t do a quality job here—as biopics go, this representation of Dalton Trumbo, a golden age screenwriter, is up there with the best.” -Jacob Lichty
