If anything can get you through Seattle's winters, it's Seattle's movie scene. Whether seeking out Oscar picks like Lady Bird, foreign art flicks like Vazante, Russian dashcam movies like The Road Movie (actually there's just one of those), classic cinema like North by Northwest, or children's movies at the annual festival, you can count on our critics for comprehensive recommendations. Follow the links for complete showtimes, tickets, and trailers for all of their favorites, or, if you're looking for even more options, check out our complete movie times listings or our film events calendar.

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THURSDAY ONLY

The Birds
Once you slog through an hour of dull, poorly imagined romance, you get to some pretty gruesome apocalyptic bird attacks in Hitchcock's dated but still intriguing horror classic.
Ark Lodge Cinemas

Dunkirk
From May 26 to June 4, 1940, the evacuation of Allied troops from the French port of Dunkirk and its surrounding beaches, known as Operation Dynamo, was a hugely important event in the history of World War II. After the war was over, the survivors of Dunkirk would almost all liken it to Hell. It was Hell on earth, a living Hell. The question is this: How do you present Hell on earth, Hell in the air, and Hell at sea on celluloid? For Christopher Nolan, much of the answer is do it in ultra-high-definition 70 mm IMAX film and show it in IMAX cinemas. Dunkirk is meant to be a nonstop 114 minutes of unalleviated spectacle, a massive collage of beautifully composed pictures, each one lasting for only a few seconds, of gunfire, flames, drowned corpses, exploding bombs, aerial dogfights with numerous plane crashes, and more, much more. Dunkirk shows a world full of terror, but Nolan goes to great lengths to ensure that his audience is never terrified. We sit in our seats munching popcorn and watch other people undergoing terrifying experiences. JONATHAN RABAN
AMC Seattle 10

The Fits
The Fits introduces two startling talents: filmmaker Anna Rose Holmer, who has a preternaturally steady touch, and actress Royalty Hightower, who has a Sphinx-like gaze—until she smiles and her joy illuminates the screen. Hightower plays Toni, a Cincinnati 11-year-old who likes to box. At the local recreation center, she wears utilitarian workout wear and maintains a serious expression while taping her wrists and sparring with her older brother. But she’s intrigued by the loud, sparkly-dressed girls of the Lincoln Lionesses drill team. She watches them as if they had just stepped out of a spaceship. The minimalist jazz score, pitched between Eric Dolphy and Gil Mellé’s Andromeda Strain soundtrack, underscores her fascination. So she joins the team and exhibits more strength than grace, but she makes a friend in pom-pom-haired Beezy, the only girl smaller than her. Then the older dancers, with their lip gloss and dip-dyed hair, start to have inexplicable fits. The spirit of Steadicam-era Stanley Kubrick haunts this coming-of-age tale as horror-movie musical. KATHY FENNESSY

The Lodger
This early, silent Hitchcock from 1927 is set around a string of murders committed by a Jack the Ripper-type killer who targets young blonde women. Hitchcock dedicated most of his career to terrorizing young blonde women on screen. Still, it's great early cinema.
Ark Lodge Cinemas

Winter Light: The Films of Ingmar Bergman
Charles Mudede says, "You can almost live forever on a diet of just films of the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman." This week's film is the unspeakably beautiful Wild Strawberries, about an elderly professor facing mortality and pondering the fleeting pleasures and miseries of life and love. It stars the great film director Victor Sjöström as well as Bergman faithfuls Ingrid Thulin and Bibi Andersson.
Seattle Art Museum

FRIDAY-SUNDAY

A Ciambra
In Jonas Carpignano (Mediterranea)'s drama, a 14 year-old boy named Pio Amato lives by the example of his rebellious older brother, Cosimo, in their small Roma community in Calabria. But when Cosimo disappears, Pio is forced to make an unexpected adult decision that tests how ready he is to grow up. This film, like some of the greatest in the Italian tradition, uses nonprofessional actors in a story about the hardship and drama of ordinary life.
SIFF Film Center

The Grand Budapest Hotel
In The Grand Budapest Hotel, doom and death are all but unavoidable: The film is set largely in Eastern Europe in the 1930s, and just outside the hotel's doors lies the barbaric slaughterhouse we know as humanity. It's a big cast and a big story, and as an adventure and a caper, Grand Budapest is so tremendously, ridiculously fun that it would exuberantly fly off its rails if it weren't for Wes Anderson's confident touch and Ralph Fiennes's remarkable performance. If anyone tells you Grand Budapest isn't hilarious, they're dead inside, but so is anyone who thinks it's merely a screwy comedy: The darkness that peeked from the corners in Anderson's earlier films is starting to crawl out. Even with all its fantastical affectations, the film has an ominous weight. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Central Cinema

North by Northwest
Here are my top five movies ever: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Charles Burnett’s To Sleep with Anger, Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Hyènes, and Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. The last film is in my blood and dreams. The opening sequence, the UN building, the train, those sunglasses, the black workers on the train. The bus, the cornfield, the crop-dusting pilot trying to kill a New York advertising exec. Perfection. Cinema. CHARLES MUDEDE
Ark Lodge Cinemas

Vazante
In Vazante, a pre-teen in Brazil is taken in marriage by a slave trader, her dead aunt's widower. Isolated but free-spirited, Beatriz is drawn to the house slaves, especially young Virgílio, who may be the slave trader's illegitimate child. But these tenuous connections may be doomed from the start. Manohla Dargis of the New York Times praised director Daniela Thomas for the "bracing lack of vanity in how she conveys this long-lost world and not an iota of misplaced nostalgia."
Grand Illusion

SATURDAY ONLY

Antonio Sanchez: Birdman Live
Regardless of one’s opinion on Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 2014 film Birdman, it was unusually inventive for a best picture Oscar winner. Much was made of how it was filmed in a single continuous shot, but Antonio Sanchez’s score is just as essential. A jazz drummer, Sanchez improvised to the film, and then edited and layered the recordings. The brusque, clattering score is untraditional, but the way Sanchez’s drums punctuate and play off of the action makes it hard to imagine anything else working as well. Here, he’ll play the music to a screening of the film. ANDREW GOSPE
Neptune Theatre

Saturday Secret Matinees
Grand Illusion and the Sprocket Society will continue their tradition of pairing an adventure serial with a different secret matinee movie every week. This year, the serial is Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe, and the theme of the feature film will change every fortnight (maybe they stole the idea from the Stranger's new printing schedule. Though probably not). The remaining themes include "Very Bad Deals "(this week), "Twisted Intrigues," "Atomic Monsters," and "Widescreen Thrills." The coolest part, from a film buff point of view? Everything will be presented on 16mm.
Grand Illusion

ALL WEEKEND

And the Winner Is...
Watch the nine Best Motion Picture Oscar nominees on the big, big, big, big screen.
Cinerama

Call Me By Your Name
As I sat watching the story of unexpected passion between a teenage boy and a slightly older male grad student staying with his family at their palatial Northern Italian villa during the languid, dappled, decadent summer of 1983, I thought three things: (1) James Ivory (Maurice, The Remains of the Day, Howards End), who wrote the screenplay based on André Aciman's novel, is the laureate of agonizingly slow-burning love shared by inexpressive people in stately houses, (2) Guadagnino seems able to make the air around this family actually swoon with intellectual fecundity and erotic possibility, and (3) honestly, what is Armie Hammer doing there? Hammer plays Oliver, the American grad student who captivates the imagination and emotions of young Elio, a musical prodigy poised at the frustrating age when you're supposed to start choosing a path but you can't seem to take a step in any direction. Timothée Chalamet (recently seen as the pretentious indie-rock rich kid boyfriend in Lady Bird) is perfect as Elio. He's coltish one minute, graceful the next, and always one step ahead of everyone. Intelligence streams out of him as convincingly as lust and longing. The question then becomes: Is Oliver, as embodied by Hammer, worthy of Elio's adoration? I just can't see it. This leaves a hole at the center of what would otherwise be—and still, semi-miraculously, is—a very involving, melancholy film. SEAN NELSON
Various locations

Children's Film Festival Seattle
The Children's Film Festival is founded on two premises: 1) Children are not stupid and 2) they deserve beautiful world cinema just like us grown-ups with underused film degrees. The organizers at Northwest Film Forum believe that art can do heavy lifting for "racial equity and diversity, inclusivity, social justice, [and] global awareness" through brilliant storytelling and lovely sound and imagery. For this year's theme, "Dream the Future," the festival reaches across the globe (Bamse and the Witch's Daughter from Sweden, 5 Rupees from India, Hero Steps from Colombia) and revives masterpieces of the past (Hayao Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky, Karel Zeman's Invention for Destruction), in a splendid mix of live action and animation. There are also shorts programs, film workshops for your baby Bergmans, and even a pancake breakfast. Don't have a tadpole to bring to the movies? Go anyway. The films are age-appropriate, but they don't talk down to kids and they won't talk down to you. JOULE ZELMAN
Various locations

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

The Commuter
One of the most productive and entertaining collaborations in Hollywood today is that between Spanish director Jaume Collet-Serra and the Irish actor Liam Neeson. They have made three excellent action thrillers. They are about to release a fourth, The Commuter, which in tone and setting is much like the duo’s masterpiece—their second collaboration, Non-Stop. This film also stars the underappreciated actress Vera Farmiga. She plays a baddie. She brings bad news to Liam, who is 65 and not getting younger. Liam must get out of yet another tough situation. He is on a commuter train, the love his life (his wife) seems to have been kidnapped, he must do something he doesn’t want to do or lose everything. This is what we call a movie, my man. A bloody fucking movie. CHARLES MUDEDE
Meridian 16

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
Ark Lodge Cinemas

I, Tonya
Tonya Harding was considered a freak, even though she was arguably the most technically skilled skater of her time. In the wake of the infamous 1994 attack on Nancy Kerrigan (which she may or may not have had a hand in), Harding was further ostracized, transformed by the nascent 24-hour news cycle into a white-trash demoness—so it’s important that any fictional depiction of her life acknowledge that she was also a real person who suffered. I, Tonya, is a solid attempt, largely thanks to Margot Robbie’s portrayal of a very human, very sympathetic Tonya. Without sugarcoating Harding’s personality (which could be caustic) or her tragic life (which was full of abuse and abandonment), I, Tonya tells a familiar story of a woman whose life was ruined by hapless, cruel men and sexist gatekeeping. It has been criticized for its stylized, darkly comic depiction of abuse, but it’s also one of the only portrayals I’ve seen that presents Harding as a person, and that acknowledges she was abused. It’s hard not to root for her in the film—she's a talented weirdo surrounded by bad men, whose raw determination can’t be blunted by an equally abusive and narcissistic mother (an excellent, unnerving Allison Janney) who teaches her to conflate being loved with being hit. It’s impossible not to empathize with Harding, and to imagine what her career and life might have looked like had she been able to make a clean break from her abusive family. MEGAN BURBANK
Various locations

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
Various locations

Maze Runner: The Death Cure
There isn’t really that much to the Maze Runner movies other than (1) “Waaaah, everyone is so mean to us boys for no reason!” and (2) Go go go go go! That said, the series has grown on me over the years. The first Maze Runner did so well at the box office that subsequent installments saw their budgets ratchet up, and all that money—coupled with the retention of director Wes Ball for all three films, which is unheard of in the dystopian teen genre—has produced some slick, over-the-top, sci-fi fun. For sure, Death Cure reaches further than its grasp in a vain attempt to close the story on a meaningful note—the last 45 minutes resemble the “Dear Sister” Saturday Night Live skit where everyone keeps shooting each other and melodramatically dying—but who can really blame this gaggle of murder-teens for trying to pretend like all the murdering they did meant something? SUZETTE SMITH
Various locations

Molly's Game
It does not matter that this film is based on a real story. Reality sucks if it is not fucked with, which will certainly be the case in this crime drama about a woman (Jessica Chastain) who was a world-class ice skater and also happened to run a world-class underground poker joint. The Russians were in on the action just like the 2016 election. The FBI bust her shit up. What did she do wrong? Girls just want to have fun. The over-acclaimed screenwriter Aaron Sorkin decided that this would be the first film he directed. Expect to enjoy parts this film that are devoted to crime, and expect to be bored by the parts devoted to redemption. CHARLES MUDEDE
AMC Seattle 10 & Meridian 16

Phantom Thread
The alleged news that this will be Daniel Day-Lewis’s final outing as an actor would only be reason enough to see this film if you actually believe he truly won’t ever act again once he’s finished cobbling or whatever he’s doing this time. But really, all you need to know is that he’s in it. Boom, it’s a don’t miss. But then you see the trailer, in which obsessive jealousy burns slowly, causing terrible damage as it mounts, and you see the makings of a Paul Thomas Anderson gem, and another brilliant performance by Day-Lewis, one of the finest actors who ever drew breath. SEAN NELSON
Various locations

Pitch Perfect 3
The Pitch Perfect universe feels like a 1989-era Taylor Swift Instagram experience, before she deleted all her 'grams to get all self-serious and boring. It’s a shiny, flawless, and highly-edited world of pretty girls having curated fun, and if I could live in it, you bet your ass I would, because it is a delightful land to inhabit for a fast-paced, totally ridiculous 90 minutes. Pitch Perfect 3 trusts that its audience has seen the first two movies and banks on the characters’ established charm. It also crams in as much singing and silly choreography as it can, and leaves scant time for dialogue (who cares!) or character development (whatever!) or any male characters aside from a couple of minor romantic interests and some disappointing father figures (who needs 'em?! ). But the film makes up for what it lacks in normal human interaction with sequins, yachts, and an excellent application of Britney Spears’s "Toxic." Oh, and John Lithgow! All that stuff is way more fun than regular people having any sort of plausible life anyway. ELINOR JONES
Meridian 16

The Post
The Post is Spielberg’s clear and passionate ode to the adversarial press, and not only is it a refreshing departure from his past work, it also turns out to be a good fit for his slick storytelling style. Spielberg is, at his core, a populist—a guy who wants to make crowd-pleasers so badly that his name has become synonymous with them. With The Post, Spielberg’s skills are put to a purpose. Tom Hanks plays Ben Bradlee, the chain-smoking, gray-suited editor of the Washington Post. Hanks is the perfect choice for a character who’s juuust enough of a salty old sumbitch to keep things from turning into mushy hagiography. In one of the first scenes, Bradlee tells Katharine “Kay” Graham—the owner of the newspaper, played by grand dame of cinema Meryl Streep—to “keep your finger out of my eye.” t’s 1971, and the drama of the day concerns the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret history of the United States’ disastrous involvement in Vietnam and the lies the government told the American people along the way. Daniel Ellsberg (The Americans’ Matthew Rhys, who has a great cloak-and-dagger face) has started leaking the report to the New York Times, which gets slapped with an injunction. With the New York Times silenced, The Post follows the Washington Post’s journey to (1) acquire the Pentagon Papers and (2) decide whether to publish, risking lawsuits and jail time. The story has obvious contemporary parallels, with the press risking it all to check the president’s power—and Spielberg, surprisingly, rises to the challenge. In a lot of ways, The Post is the movie Oliver Stone wanted Snowden to be. VINCE MANCINI
Various locations

The Road Movie
If you are as addicted to the YouTube genre of Russian dashcam videos as I am, you will not want to miss The Road Movie. It has everything you want to see and much more: a person popping out of a truck, a cow flying through the air, a car plunging into a river, a man falling from the sky with a parachute, an asteroid exploding in the sky. The drug many of these clips provide is the rip between the normal and the nuts. One moment, the world has its shit together; the next moment, it does not. The first world, you know where things are going (the happy Russian pop music, the conversation about mundane things); the next world, you do not know where the driver will end up. (In the bushes on the side of the road? Under a truck? In the grave?) In one scene, the wind suddenly and dramatically tears off the roof of a building. In another scene, a madman jumps on the boot of a car and freaks out its driver, a Russian woman. She drives; he clings to her boot. This is a powerful drug. CHARLES MUDEDE
Northwest Film Forum

The Shape of Water
The Shape of Water is strange, sweet, and wonderful, and easily the greatest film ever made about a mute cleaning lady who falls in love with an amphibious fish man. A fairy tale set in 1962, it finds Elisa (Sally Hawkins) working the graveyard shift at the Occam Aerospace Research Center—a cold institution that marks a time, del Toro says, “where America is looking forward. Everything [is] about the future... and here comes a creature from the most ancient past.” That creature—wide-eyed, gilled, and played with strength and inquisitiveness by Doug Jones—is imprisoned at Occam. Locked in a tank and chained in a pool, he’s prodded by a reverent scientist (Michael Stuhlbarg) and tortured by a dominating military man (Michael Shannon). When Elisa finds him, she recognizes a kindred spirit—and feels an attraction that’s met with varying degrees of enthusiasm from her dubious coworker Zelda (Octavia Spencer) and her artist neighbor, Giles (Richard Jenkins). Whether they’re human or... whatever the hell the creature is, The Shape of Water’s characters are played by some of the best actors working today—all of whom give whole-hearted, nuanced performances, anchoring a story that can feel bigger (and weirder) than life. The characters’ depth is reinforced by del Toro: his stories are marked by an earnest affinity for outcasts—which, in the falsely idealized America of the 1960s, includes the mute Elisa, the closeted Giles, and the Black Zelda. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Various locations

Star Wars: The Last Jedi
The spectacles in Star Wars: The Last Jedi are some of the most powerful and believable in the franchise—Luke Skywalker's dark island, the interiors of the First Order’s battleships, the space battles. The audience is completely immersed in this distant galaxy with its operatic narrative. But what do we find once we get there? A scene that's recognizably pro-vegetarianism; a sophisticated critique of the destructive, elitist principles of the Jedi religion; a feminist rejection of male impulsiveness and a celebration of rational, thoughtful female leadership; and a political economy that springs from the idea that many of the problems of this galaxy might be related to its laissez-faire market. All of this is in the new Star Wars film, which may disappoint Trump supporters but will certainly be enjoyed by every other human in this galaxy. CHARLES MUDEDE
Meridian 16 & Pacific Place

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

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