Steal a few precious hours away from your relatives for quality movie time. Follow the moving journey of an Afghan girl under the Taliban regime in The Breadwinner, mock bad contemporary art in The Square, or take your pick from our other critics' picks from now until Sunday. Follow the links below for complete showtimes and trailers, or, if you're looking for even more options, check out our complete movie times listings, and our film events calendar.
Get all this and more on the free Stranger Things To Do mobile app—available now on the App Store and Google Play.
Jump to: Saturday Only | All Weekend
SATURDAY ONLY
Brimstone & Glory
Almost a year ago, a huge fireworks market in the Mexican city of Tultepec exploded for reasons that are not known. Fireworks exploded within fireworks and above and below fireworks to form a massive fiery monster, a mind-boggling spectacle that no amount of computer-power in Hollywood could reproduce for a big-budget film. For many Americans, this terrible and sublime (in the Kantian sense) accident (it killed 42 people people and injured around 80) was the first time they learned of Tultepec, a city whose economy and culture is centered on the production and distribution of fireworks. The gorgeous documentary Brimstone & Glory by Viktor Jakovleski is about this city and its obsession with fireworks. Though the film does not mention the accident of 2016, it does capture the life of Tultepec's huge fireworks economy—its dealers, its buyers, its tourists, its competitions, its madmen, and so on. We also see the dangers of this kind of business. We also see arms missing hands and spark-scarred skin. CHARLES MUDEDE
Northwest Film Forum
ALL WEEKEND
Alien
Sci-fi classic Alien is really two movies. The first is a drama about work, labor issues, contracts, company rules, and so on; the second is just a horror film. In fact, one can see the unresolved management/labor problems in the first part of the film as being transmogrified into a monster that destroys the mining spaceship (the Nostromo) in the second part. From a wider historical perspective, the 1970s marked the end of an economic order that began at the end of the 1940s and witnessed the rise of unionized labor in the United States (this, in the film, is exemplified by the working-class characters on the spaceship factory—the late Harry Dean Stanton and the still kicking it Yaphet Kotto). The 1980s, on the other hand, marked the beginning of an economic order that transferred a massive amount of power to supermanagers. We have not left the 1980s to this day, which is why this film is still relevant. CHARLES MUDEDE
Central Cinema
Blade of the Immortal
Takashi Miike has pinballed from genre to genre during his singular career. Blade of the Immortal, Miike’s 100th film (nope, not a typo), finds the director in something approaching traditionalist mode, using his penchant for splattery weirdness to bolster the story, rather than careen entirely off the rails. While the swordplay here isn’t as crisp as in his previous Thirteen Assassins, it more than compensates with sheer riotous excess. Critically speaking, this thing’s a hoot. Compressing Hiroaki Samura’s long-running manga series, the story follows a grumpily honorable swordsman (Takuya Kimura) rendered unkillable after being infected with sacred bloodworms. After half a century of wandering, he finds himself entrusted with helping a young girl avenge her family. Heads soon roll, along with pretty much every other conceivable body part. Blade of the Immortal’s best element proves to be its main character, whose deadpan, long-suffering demeanor gives the film its final touch of welcome absurdity. Whether fighting a woman armed with a lethal musical instrument, or facing off against what may literally be a zillion goons during the hallucinatorily gooshy finale, for him it’s still somehow just one damned thing after another. ANDREW WRIGHT
Grand Illusion
Blade Runner 2049
Director Denis Villeneuve has his work cut out for him. 2049 not only has to stay true to Ridley Scott’s circa-1982 concept of the future, but also has to deliver a future that feels plausible in 2017. The result—in large part thanks to cinematographer Roger Deakins’ jaw-dropping talent—doesn’t disappoint: 2049’s future feels safer and cleaner, lacking Blade Runner’s sensuous grime (there’s not a single cloud of cigarette smoke), but its imagery is no less striking, particularly when Villeneuve and Deakins go wide with hypnotic vistas of a decaying Earth. Even if this future is less believable and tactile than Scott’s, it gets the feel right. The worst parts of 2049 are those that lean hardest on Blade Runner, but thankfully, Villeneuve & Co. are mostly content to build and expand rather than revisit and rehash. There are moments of strange and genuine creepiness; there are jarring sights that, without a single word, evoke hundreds of years of history; there’s a desolate ache that makes the future seem both beautiful and horrible. At its best, 2049 finds LAPD officer K (Ryan Gosling) moving through a dreamlike, half-familiar dystopia—asking a few old-school Blade Runner questions about the nature of identity, and adding many more of his own. ERIK HENRIKSEN
AMC Seattle 10
The Breadwinner
It’s hard not to flash on “Boys Keep Swinging” when one boy-disguised character in Nora Twomey’s animated feature says to the other, “When you’re a boy…” As David Bowie’s song would have it, “nothing stands in your way.” When you’re a girl in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan in 2001, however, everything is an obstacle. Eleven-year-old Parvana (Saara Chaudry), the heroine of Twomey’s feature, is a headstrong girl who helps her father, Nurullah, sell used goods at the market. A former teacher who lost his leg in the war, Nurullah shares his knowledge of history with her. When the Taliban gets wind of this subversion, they haul him off to jail and beat Parvana’s mother when she tries to bring him his walking stick, so Parvana makes like Mulan and cuts her hair to pass as a boy. Since Nurullah used to tell her stories, she does the same to comfort her little brother. In the process of providing for her family, she befriends another girl disguised as a boy who helps her come up with a plan to free Nurullah. KATHY FENNESSY
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Coco
The “Coco” in question is the oldest living relative of the film’s young protagonist, Miguel, but the story is driven by Miguel’s passion for becoming a musician—and the conflicted relationship he has with his family, who label music as “bad” for reasons he has yet to learn. But Miguel is tenacious when it comes to performing and after his abuelita smashes his guitar, Miguel steals the guitar of a famous ancestor. Since taking from the dead is a big no-no, Miguel crosses over into the Land of the Dead. Coco ends up being an exceedingly tender kids’ film with deep themes about mortality, ancestry, and memories—and any adult with a soul will be moved, too. JENNI MOORE
Various locations
Escapes
Escapes is the extraordinary story of Hampton Fancher, flamenco dancer, screenwriter of Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049, and obscure B-movie actor. Thrill to his tales of debauchery, love, and friendship in this film that combines oral history with clips of Fancher's many forgotten screen roles in movies and TV shows with titles like The Brain Eaters, Law of the Plainsman, and The Incredible Sex Revolution.
Northwest Film Forum
The Florida Project
The real reason The Florida Project is a breakout success, and the reason everyone should see the film, is the rowdy, previously unknown seven-year-old actor Brooklynn Prince. Moonee, played by Prince, is a mischievous tyrant who spends her days terrorizing the Orlando hotel she calls home. Like director Sean Baker’s Tangerine, the characters in The Florida Project don’t want anyone’s pity. Prostitution, drugs, arson, assault—it all goes down in the Magic Castle, the purple hotel (or project) where Moonee lives. Prince—with considerable help from her costars, Baker, and screenwriter Chris Bergoch—resonates beyond the twee and cute. At the film’s climax, Prince delivers a performance that would make even the surliest curmudgeon cry. CHASE BURNS
SIFF Cinema Uptown & AMC Seattle 10
Yorgos Lanthimos's morality play uses the myth of Iphigenia—who was sacrificed by her father to appease the gods—as a springboard, but it's the mythology of cinema that Lanthimos is intent on exploding as he uses sterile, slow, almost Kubrickian imagery to interrogate the story. What's happening onscreen isn't important. What's going on beneath the surface is. The lives of husband-and-wife doctors Steven (Colin Farrell) and Anna (Nicole Kidman) are all surfaces. Other than some doctor-patient sex play in the bedroom, the only thing that suggests anything other than tranquil domesticity is Steven’s unconventional relationship with a teenage boy, the nature of which is deliberately ambiguous at the film’s start but becomes painfully defined as it unfolds. Sacred Deer is, in the moment, an unpleasant experience. But as the director is careful to announce early on, this is not a film about what you see—it’s about what you realize hours, maybe days, after you’ve left the theater. Lanthimos gets under your skin and stays there. NED LANNAMANN
Meridian 16
Loving Vincent
We’ve already had a few fine cinematic attempts to tell the story of the brilliant yet tortured Vincent van Gogh. The one element missing was the beautiful, slightly unsettling look of Van Gogh’s groundbreaking artwork. Loving Vincent, the latest from animators Hugh Welchman and Dorota Kobiela, is the first of these biopics to get it right. That’s because the entire film is composed of actual paintings: The international production employed more than 100 artists to paint each frame of the film on canvas, copying the thick brushstrokes and brash colors of Van Gogh’s most celebrated works. The rest of Loving Vincent doesn’t hit the same heights. Kobiela and Welchman’s script is a leaden, Citizen Kane-style attempt to investigate Van Gogh’s final days in France through the efforts of Armand (Douglas Booth), a young postman’s son attempting to deliver the artist’s final letter. It’s a well-meaning way to let us cross paths with many of the villagers whom Van Gogh painted, but it’s hampered by conspiracy theories and a lumbering pace ROBERT HAM
SIFF Cinema Uptown & Meridian 16
Lady Bird
Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan, never better) is a teenage girl striving to find a self she can live in while stranded in moribund, lower-middle-class Sacramento, "the Midwest of California." Her efforts begin with that name, which she bestowed upon herself—Christine was too normal—and loudly demands that everyone call her at all times. The crusade also manifests in the form of hair dye, petty crime, habitual lying, sexual experimentation with unworthy boys, and musical theater. Though Lady Bird will perform for anyone, the only audience she truly wants is her exasperated, judgmental, sharp-tongued mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf, almost certainly the greatest living actress). It's an exquisitely observed portrait of a mother and daughter so intractably at war that they can't see how close they are until it's too late. SEAN NELSON
AMC Seattle 10 & SIFF Cinema Egyptian
The Light of the Moon
The Light of the Moon, a movie written and directed by Jessica M. Thompson, is set in a Brooklyn neighborhood that is now thoroughly gentrified. It concerns a young Hispanic woman, Bonnie (Stephanie Beatriz), and her young white boyfriend, Matt (Michael Stahl-David). Something really bad strikes their perfect millennial world with the force and suddenness of a thunderbolt. It happens not long after a tipsy Bonnie bids farewell to friends and coworkers at a Brooklyn bar. One moment, she is walking down an empty street; the next, a stranger is threatening to kill her if she screams for help. He rapes her. Later that evening, Bonnie's boyfriend takes her to a hospital, where she gets a morning-after pill and a shot of a drug that will hopefully protect her from HIV. Eventually the cops call her about a suspect, but Bonnie is reluctant to go to the police station. It's very clear that what she wants is not justice but her life back. But this is wishful thinking on her part. The film, which is expertly paced and patiently scripted, presents Bonnie with only one direction—forward—but she resists it again and again. CHARLES MUDEDE
Grand illusion
The Philadelphia Story
Katharine Hepburn found her "box office poison" antidote in 1940 with this sparkling (if overlong) comedy of remarriage, directed by George Cukor. Hepburn plays a headstrong blue-blood divorcée who's about to marry the wrong man—he's boring and pompous, despite his working-class roots, and he's played by a mustachioed nobody. Luckily, her ex (Cary Grant) is still hanging around, dragging along trouble in the form of two tabloid reporters (Jimmy Stewart and Ruth Hussey) who enter the household as spies, get chewed up like playthings, and exit with honor intact. The movie doesn't seem stagebound (it started as a play with Hepburn in the same role), but it is cluttered with overly cute secondary characters like a lecherous uncle and a thee-and-thou-spouting Quaker librarian who pops up midway through for local color. Still, The Philadelphia Story remains the best introduction to Hepburn's patented untouchable-yet-yielding allure. ANNIE WAGNER
Central Cinema
Roman J. Israel, Esq.
Let's begin by recalling Jake Gyllenhaal’s bulging eyes in Dan Gilroy’s excellent thriller Nightcrawler. They are the eyes of a man who almost entirely lives in his head. With those eyes in mind, let's turn to the star of a new film that's also directed Gilroy, Roman J. Israel, Esq. Denzel Washington—a black American actor who has handled his Hollywood career far more prudently and effectively than, say, Will Smith—plays Mr. Israel, a man who, like Gyllenhaal's character in Nightcrawler, lives deep inside of his head. But we see his extreme inwardness not in his eyes but manner of walk. Roman J. Israel is a lawyer who has a monstrous memory. He can recall with no effort all of the details of dead and forgotten cases; he also lives in his vivid dreams of a better and more just American society. He walks like his mind has no idea that it has a body. Each step Israel takes is as stupid and graceless as the one before it and the one to come. The film is not Washington’s best, but it, and that mindless/lumbering walk, will not disappoint Washington’s fans.
CHARLES MUDEDE
Pacific Place & AMC Seattle 10
The Square
The Swedish director Ruben Ă–stlund is a rising star in European cinema. And judging from the buzz about his latest film, The Square, it is only a matter of time before he conquers the United States. At the center of the film is Christian (Claes Bang), the head curator of X-Royal, a huge and powerful modern art museum in Stockholm. One day, three con artists on a city street lure Christian into a clever trap and mug him. He loses his wallet and slick smartphone. Back at the office, and still in a state of shock from what happened to him in broad daylight, he locates his smartphone on the web. It is in a place that we in the US would call the projects. Encouraged by a friend, he decides to take matters into his own hands and does something that changes his life. Before the act, the art was just about names, money, and academic concepts concerning the human condition in a world that has no alternative to neoliberal capitalism. After the act, the art is directly about his life, clothes, car, job, relationships, and city. The art asks: Why is there so much poverty in a rich city? Why is it so easy to ignore beggars? Why is wealth so unfairly distributed? And if it were fairly distributed, would crime vanish? What kind of animal is the human? CHARLES MUDEDE
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Thor: Ragnarok
Thor: Ragnarok is, finally, a legitimately great Thor movie—one that proves goofy comedy, goofier mythology, 1980s-tinged sci-fi and fantasy, and Led Zeppelin aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, all that stuff goes together like... whatever Norse gods eat instead of delicious sundaes! And the cherry on top is the Incredible Hulk! And a giant wolf! And Jeff Goldblum! Jeff Goldblum in space! Wow. This sundae analogy fell apart fast. I’m not great at sundae analogies, and to be fair, Ragnarok isn’t great at... ah... narrative cohesion. Some might quibble that Ragnarok is disjointed; I’d counter that its tone—exciting and quippy and sweet—is always dead on. For that, and for Ragnarok’s constant hilarity, we can thank Taika Waititi, the New Zealand director who, until now, has made slightly more low-key fare: Flight of the Conchords, What We Do in the Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Like those projects, Ragnarok is as good-hearted as it is clever; as much as its characters might smash each other across garbage planets, and as godlike and monstrous as they might be, Waititi treats them like real people. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Various locations
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
One way you know a film is written by a playwright is when everything everyone says in it is clever and wise and perfect. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, written and directed by Martin McDonagh, never fails on this score. The dialogue, particularly when given life by actors Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell, is hilarious and provocative. But the biggest indicator that you're watching the work of a playwright is the sense that there's no way the story is what the film is really about. The three billboards in Three Billboards are signifiers and catalysts, but they're also red herrings (literally red, in fact). The billboards are taken out by Mildred (McDormand) as a way to publicly shame Ebbing's police chief (Woody Harrelson) for having failed to catch the man who raped and murdered her daughter. They also keep her grief alive and present tense. McDonagh depicts graphic violence and hateful language flippantly, in a style people like to call Tarantinoesque. But McDonagh is not a shock artist, not satisfied milking the disjunction of liking the bad cop or the mean lady. He's making the case that humans are complex, that "sympathetic" is relative, and that whatever horrible things people are capable of doing to each other (and they are indeed horrible), we still have to live together when we're done.SEAN NELSON
Various locations
We the Workers
It may not be a bad idea to watch Alien (a sci-fi feature film made in 1979) before watching We the Workers (a documentary shot in Southern China from 2009 to 2015). What both films share is this truth: The motor at the core of capitalist history is indeed class struggle. This is why much of the world around us can be explained in purely economic and class terms. Many people (on the left and the right) believe there is more to capitalism than what John Maynard Keynes, the greatest economist of the 20th century, called “the economic problem.” But there really isn’t. In the documentary, workers and activists struggle with the owners of the money and the means of production. The struggle is this simple: The capitalists want cheap labor-power, and the workers want a fair deal, more benefits, and job security (all of which make labor dear). Yes, this formulation of capitalist society is vulgar, but that’s precisely because the motor of history is vulgar. Nevertheless, the images in We the Workers, the images of factories and brand-new cities, are amazing. CHARLES MUDEDE
Northwest Film Forum
Wonder
When a movie comes along that is good—legitimately, sincerely good, like flowers or soup or dogs—I find myself grasping at a way to describe it. Wonder is that good movie. It’s about a little boy, Auggie (Room's Jacob Tremblay), and his mom (Julia Roberts), his dad (Owen Wilson), and his older sister (Izabela Vidovic). Auggie was born with a condition that makes him look different, so that's what Wonder focuses on—but it’s not really what this movie is. This is a portrait of a group of humans—grown-ups and kids, but mostly kids—who are whole, complicated people, who have opportunities to be selfish and opportunities to be kind. Wonder defaults to kindness in a manner that feels both totally inspiring and completely organic. ELINOR JONES
Meridian 16
Get all this and more on the free Stranger Things To Do mobile app—available now on the App Store and Google Play.
