It's a great weekend for indie, world, and popular movies, and we've compiled the best ones below. Seattle International Film Festival is over, but you've got a second chance to see some of the greatest hits and award-winners at Best of SIFF, which lasts until next week. You can also check out the new Incredibles 2, Nick Offerman in Hearts Beat Loud, or the archival and musical Queerama. Follow the links to see complete showtimes, tickets, and trailers, and, if you're looking for even more options, check out our complete movie times listings or our film events calendar.
Note: Movies play from Thursday to Sunday unless otherwise noted.
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2001: A Space Odyssey
Stanley Kubrick's megalith of a film questions the nature of intelligence and consciousness through the story of an astronaut pitted against the malevolent computer on his spaceship. If you haven't it seen it yet, you're lucky: Your first experience can be with a 70mm restoration.
AMC Pacific Place
Friday–Sunday
Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
A glamorous Sydney-based drag trio, including the world-weary trans woman Bernadette (Terence Stamp), catty queen Adam/Felicia (Guy Pearce), and chic Tick/Mitzi (Hugo Weaving), take their show to the middle of the Australian outback. They hop aboard an old bus (nicknamed "Priscilla") searching for love and friendship. Come for the cobbled-together drag finery, stay for the triumph over grief and homo-/transphobia.
Central Cinema
Friday–Sunday
American Animals
Based on a true story about a plot to relieve the library at Kentucky’s Transylvania University of its most valuable tomes (including a drool-worthy Havell edition of Audubon’s Birds of America), director Bart Layton’s first foray into scripted filmmaking is an odd mash-up of his usual documentary style and narrative storytelling. Most of the time, the mixture works. The scripted, acted parts of the movie—which make up its bulk—are fully engrossing, and although Layton’s stylistic decisions are colored by familiar Scorsese and Kubrick influences, more often than not, the result is zippy and fun. Layton is also well aware of the countless heist movies that have preceded this one, and the film’s riffs on the genre add levels of unexpected complexity and sadness. These four young thieves were raised on Hollywood-glorified visions of crime, and American Animals exposes the aimlessness and emptiness at the heart of their caper. NED LANNAMANN
AMC Pacific Place
Avengers: Infinity War
Avengers: Infinity War, Marvel’s attempt to put an exploding bow on 10 years of corporate synergy, is a lurching, ungainly colossus of a blockbuster, with far too many characters and storylines stretching across a series of planets that resemble 1970s prog-rock album covers. The thing is, though, while you’re watching it? None of these elements feel like debits. Sometimes, excess hits the spot. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo deserve a huge amount of credit for simply making sure all of Infinity War’s 5,000 performers hit their marks—but they also find room for most of these characters to get an honest-to-god character moment or two. The Russos aren’t exactly stylists, however, and there’s a flatness to the establishing scenes here that feels similar to Marvel’s first wave of films. A little bit of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther panache would’ve gone a long way. But once the action kicks in, the ridiculous scope of this thing takes over and sweeps away any quibbles. ANDREW WRIGHT
Various locations
Best of SIFF 2018
Missed Seattle International Film Festival audience favorites? They’ll be screened again, along with the award winners. Don't miss your second chance to see Prospect, My Name Is Myeisha, The Last Suit, and more.
Various locations
Friday–Sunday
Deadpool 2
Everything you could possibly want from a sequel to Deadpool is in place: the relentless breaking-down of the fourth wall; Deadpool’s twisted, self-flagellating humor and his snipes at pop culture, the X-Men franchise, characters in the franchise, the death of characters in the franchise. There are perfectly choreographed, partially slow-motion, and hilariously absurd CGI-augmented (and in some cases fully initiated) fight sequences; gratuitous and non-too-serious violence and carnage...Basically, Deadpool spends a lot of time wallowing in his own self-pity, the boundaries of his mutant-ness are tested, and once he figures out what he’s supposed to be doing—keeping a soldier from the future, Cable (Josh Brolin), from killing 14-year-old Russell Collins—the action re-starts in earnest. LEILANI POLK
Various locations
First Reformed
Don’t make the mistake I made at the Telluride Film Festival when I skipped this unexpected magnum opus from the writer of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. Paul Schrader’s latest film is a return to form. Infused with elements from his Calvinist upbringing and 1950s art-house cinema (check out his newly reissued book Transcendental Style in Film on Bresson, Ozu, and Dreyer), First Reformed revolves around the Reverend Ernst Toller (portrayed with devastating restraint by Ethan Hawke). He is a former military chaplain ministering to a tiny congregation in upstate New York, and he can’t get past the deep grief and spiritual isolation caused by the ill-fated death of his enlisted son. When congregant Mary (Amanda Seyfried) asks him to counsel her troubled (and radical environmentalist) husband, Toller discovers his church’s distinguished financial savior is an amoral corporate polluter, and he becomes obsessed with saving a world he believes is destroying itself. The film also stars Cedric the Entertainer as a mega-church pastor and Toller’s overseer. CARL SPENCE
Meridian 16 & AMC Pacific Place
Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf
What you actually find behind the gardens by Oudolf is Oudolf, the designer. He has done a trick that the eye and camera of Andrei Tarkovsky also mastered. Though having squeezed out the accidental from his works, Oudolf reproduces it by understanding the nature of wildness. The best way I can explain this effect is if you think of a musician who can compose tunes out of wind chimes without ever losing the impression that the instruments, the suspended metal rods, are set into motion by a wind that has come from you know not where and is going to lord knows where. There is a moment in Five Seasons: The Gardens of Piet Oudolf—which is short (75 minutes) and is beautiful because Oudolf's gardens are beautiful (he designed garden on Manhattan's High Line park)—when Oudolf makes comments about climate change. He does not believe his work can make a difference at that scale. His gardens may not save the world, but they saved him. But he is wrong here. CHARLES MUDEDE
Northwest Film Forum
Friday–Sunday
Hearts Beat Loud
An amiable film starring Nick Offerman as an aging widower and record store owner who pushes his talented daughter (Kiersey Clemons) to form a band with him. Variety calls it "as pleasant and fleeting as sorbet on a hot day"—but that the real draw is Clemons, an extremely talented singer and marvelous screen presence.
SIFF Cinema Uptown & AMC Seattle 10
Friday–Sunday
Hereditary
If you’re not comfortable with the very real possibility that you’ll be drenched in sweat and cowering in the fetal position by the end of Hereditary, perhaps this is one cinematic experience you should skip. But you’d be missing out—writer/director Ari Aster’s feature debut might be one of the most beautiful and nauseating horror movies ever made. Hereditary centers on miniaturist artist Annie Graham (an Oscar-worthy Toni Collette), whose family is rattled by mysterious events following the death of her reclusive mother. Her daughter, tween outcast Charlie (Milly Shapiro), is apparently grieving the hardest of them all—she spends her free time making dolls out of dead pigeons and always looks like she’s got a category five hurricane brewing inside her head. Hereditary is brilliant—the whole thing hums with cold electricity that’s guaranteed to unsettle your soul. Aster gracefully illustrates humanity’s ancient fear of predestined fate in a setting, and with a family unit, that feels deeply rooted in reality. It’s also a powerful reminder of the horror genre’s underutilized potential as a source for empathy—proof that it’s possible to uncover great truths about the human condition, so long as we’re willing to kneel down in the dirt and pick apart the rotting carcasses of our worst fears. Like Hereditary, it’s gross, but it’s worth it. CIARA DOLAN
AMC Pacific Place & AMC Seattle 10
Hotel Artemis
Most genre films have an oddball character or two thrown in for color. "I'd like to see a movie that's just about THEM," one occasionally thinks. Hotel Artemis is that movie, and it's just as good as it sounds. The ensemble of eccentrics on offer are the clientele and staff of the titular hotel—an exquisitely dilapidated art-deco section of an otherwise abandoned building in the middle of a cyberpunk-y, riot-filled, near-future Los Angeles. The staff consists of a fast-talking shut-in mob doctor, the Nurse (Jodie Foster), and her enormous orderly, Everest (Dave Bautista, enormous). The guests, of which there can be only four, include a conflicted bank robber in a beautiful suit, Waikiki (Sterling K. Brown); a glamorous French assassin, Nice (Sofia Boutella, as required by law); and a shitbird arms dealer, Acapulco (Charlie Day). The ostensible plot hooks here are (1) who will fill the Artemis's last bed as the riot approaches, and (2) the imminent arrival of the hotel's ruthless mob boss owner, the Wolf King of Malibu. But Hotel Artemis is more of a loose game of pool than a tightly wound clock, content to bounce its characters off of one another and see what happens. Artemis justifies spending time in a weird, fun world—a world that's usually only briefly visited by conventional protagonists. BEN COLEMAN
AMC Pacific Place
In Case of Emergency
A control freak running a famous Manhattan publishing house and keeping up appearances of a perfect life is laid out by a car accident. Suddenly, she can't stop her employees from finding out that her happiness is a lie, and she sets out to help a new, sexually frustrated friend overcome a bad case of "dick drought." A raunchy, over-the-top, yet rather sweet farce about female friendship. Director/star Stefanie Sparks will attend tonight.
Northwest Film Forum
Thursday only
Incredibles 2
Incredibles 2 simply isn’t as tightly tied together as the first. Its villain, the Screenslaver, isn’t as key to defining Elastigirl’s character as Syndrome was to Mr. Incredible’s in the first film—so when everything climactically comes together in the third act, Incredibles 2 ultimately packs a weaker thematic punch. This isn’t really a knock, though. What Incredibles 2 (slightly) sacrifices in cohesion and heart it makes up for with action and comedy. He opens Incredibles 2 with back-to-back set pieces that quickly put the previous film’s finale in the rearview; he closes the film with a team-based triumph that any three X-Men flicks combined couldn’t compete with; and when he goes for the gag (which is often), it feels like Chuck Jones-era Looney Tunes via classic-era Simpsons (which Bird himself helped make classic). Incredibles 2 isn’t as good or affecting as the first, but it is prettier, louder, faster, and funnier—and if you have to make a trade, that’s not a bad one. BOBBY ROBERTS
Various locations
Logan: Noir Version
17 years after X-Men kick-started the superhero genre, we get something like Logan. Something that isn't just a great superhero movie, but a great movie. No disclaimers, no curve: Logan is fantastic. Make no mistake: Logan is such a superhero movie—such an X-Men movie—that at one point Logan (Hugh Jackman) flips through an X-Men comic featuring his spandexed alter ego, Wolverine. He's not impressed. "Maybe a quarter of it happened," he grumbles, "and not like this." Despite his crankiness, Logan is full of the same stuff as the yellowed pages of X-Men and Wolverine: superpowered mutants. Nefarious evildoers. A rock-solid belief that violence fixes everything. But for all Logan's nods to genre—and it's as much a western as a superhero movie—it's about bigger things, too. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Ark Lodge Cinemas
Thursday only
Mary Shelley
Like The Young Karl Marx, Mary Shelley is a film about a central figure of European culture that’s directed by a nonwhite person. In the case of The Young Karl Marx it was Haitian Raoul Peck. With Mary Shelley, which is about the author of the Western classic Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, it’s Haifaa Al-Mansour (one of Saudi Arabia’s first female film directors). In the way no European director could really make a film like The Young Karl Marx, no European could make a film like Mary Shelley. It is a very peculiar and even weirdly restrained adaptation (starring Elle Fanning). Furthermore, the director is now working on a film with a black American cast, Nappily Ever After. Now that’s what I call globalization. CHARLES MUDEDE
Grand Illusion
Friday–Sunday
Mountain
If you crave spectacular natural footage and beautiful music combined, this documentary about mountains and those who climb them, scored by Australian Chamber Orchestra and narrated by Willem Dafoe, should give you exactly what you want.
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
Ocean's 8
If there were ever a time for an all-female cast of big name Hollywood women to pick up where a cast of big name Hollywood men left off, it’s now. The premise is pretty straightforward: Sandra Bullock stars as Debbie Ocean, the estranged sister of Danny Ocean (the character played by George Clooney). She’s in the robbing industry, too, though her fresh parole implies she might not be as savvy as her bro. Nonetheless, she leaves prison with a plan to pull a heist at the Met Gala in NYC, and she must put together a crack group of professionals to execute it. Steven Soderbergh isn’t at the helm, but he did co-produce, and apparently he, Clooney and Jerry Weintraub were all involved in Ocean 8’s conception, so you can expect it to have a similar pace and the slick quality of the other films of the franchise. Plus, the women cast is stellar and diverse—Cate Blanchett, Mindy Kaling, Sarah Paulson, Rihanna, Helena Bonham Carter, Awkwafina and Anne Hathaway included. LEILANI POLK
Various locations
On Chesil Beach
On Chesil Beach takes us back to 1962 England, before the internet taught virgins how sex worked, and when a young woman saying “no” was just a stuck-up prude who probably doesn’t have any emotional baggage so why bother asking her what’s wrong or how to help. Based on the novel by Ian McEwan, the movie follows Florence (Saoirse Ronan) and Edward (Billy Howle) as they fall in sweet, lightly star-crossed love, and then when it all goes south. She’s a wealthy city girl, and he’s a country boy with... less money, I guess? But the tensions really arise when they get married and get naked and get super duper awkward. On Chesil Beach is its own type of doomed romance, with twists and intrigue and a quick pace that manages to still leave room for humanity. There were highs, lows, and parts I sincerely hated—just like any real, human, non-rom-com relationship. ELINOR JONES
AMC Seattle 10
Queerama
“Contrary to popular opinion, most homosexuals don’t look any different from anyone else.” Thus begins this hour-long montage of queer news, cinema, and culture over the past 100 years. Beginning with 1919’s Different from the Others and moving through newsreels about underground gay communities, queer liberation, the AIDS crisis, the fight for marriage equality, trans rights, and more, the archival footage spans the evolution of queerness as a perversion—something secret, taboo, criminal—to something as ordinary as Seattle rain. Set to music by John Grant and Hercules & Love Affair, the film isn’t narrated so much as it is sung. Catch it if you like extended music videos—if not, skip it and head to the gay bar instead. KATIE HERZOG
Northwest Film Forum
RBG
All hail Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Better known as “RBG” to her fans (and “Bubby” to her grandkids), at 85 years old, the US Supreme Court justice still has a fierce intellect, a duty to the law, and an immense inner and physical strength. Over the long course of her career, RBG repeatedly defended the rights of everyone to live free from bias, but, as Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg says, Ginsburg “quite literally changed life for women.” And she’s still doing it. With intimate interviews with family and friends, as well as RBG herself, the film captures the life of a woman with a heart none of us wants to stop ticking. KATIE HERZOG
Various locations
Sollers Point
In what Variety called "an honest song of self-defeat and squandered promise and finding yourself at the end of your youth with nothing to show but a rap sheet and a dog who really belongs to your ex," Matthew Porterfield's low-key drama follows an ex-prisoner returning to his hometown to try to pick up the threads of his life. Despite the influence of family and friends, the protagonist, played by McCaul Lombardi, has run-ins with a vaguely white-powery gang. The film has been criticized for its aimlessness, but it also boasts beautifully observed and acted scenes, particularly with Jim Belushi as the protagonist's father and Zazie Beetz as his ex.
Grand Illusion
Thursday only
Solo: A Star Wars Story
Much like its plot, Solo shouldn’t work. It doesn’t work. It wins anyway. Boy and Girl try to con their way out of their shitty lives. Boy gets away, and vows to return for Girl. Instead, he gets caught up in a freewheeling life of crime with a giant dog, a cranky thief, a well-dressed gambler, and a robot-rights activist droid. That last bit sounds sorta heavy for Star Wars, right? It is. Solo has the tonal consistency of a detuned piano, and it’s constantly throwing around interesting-but-unexamined ideas and characters, which pop up every few minutes and then are never seen again. But for those seeking weightless escapism with enough gags, winks, and in-jokes to fill the Millenium Falcon’s cargo hold, not to mention laboriously Marvel-esque, overly connected worldbuilding? You’re gonna have fun.
BOBBY ROBERTS
Various locations
Upgrade
Upgrade is a sort of schlock action sci-fi thriller that’s heavy on the viscera and light on the introspection. Written and directed by Australian Leigh Whannell, who helped write the original Saw short with James Wan, it stars Prometheus’s Logan Marshall-Green as “Grey Trace,” a beardy mechanic who makes a living restoring classic muscle cars even though it’s the future. He doesn’t understand these kids with their bleeping and blorping, their sexting and their self-driving AI cars, and that suits him just fine. Until the day he becomes the victim of a seemingly random act of brutality at the hands of cackling thugs straight out of The Crow. That’s when Eron, a boy genius who’s on the spectrum, makes Grey an offer he can’t refuse: to cure Grey’s disability with a microchip implanted in his spine. A chip that will not only restore him, but just might give him special powers. Upgrade becomes a sort of poor man’s RoboCop meets a basic cable Black Mirror. Whannell doesn’t have Paul Verhoeven’s gift for satire, but he does have a horror director’s facility for visceral gore and suspenseful compositions. VINCE MANCINI
AMC Pacific Place
Thursday only
VOYEUR Presents: Bigger Than Life
The VOYEUR outré cinema club presents a great film by the director of Rebel Without a Cause, Nicholas Ray, about a man (James Mason!) with a terminal illness whose experimental drug treatment turns him into a danger to his wife and child. VOYEUR says: "Initially panned upon its release in 1956, Nicholas Ray’s ominous expressionist melodrama [...] later garnered high praise from the critics of the Cahiers du Cinema, solidifying Nicholas Ray’s place among the great American auteurs."
Scarecrow Video
Sunday only
Won't You Be My Neighbor?
The question isn't how much you will cry. The question, which only emerges days into the aftermath of seeing this extraordinary new documentary about the life and work of Fred Rogers, is this: What exactly are you crying about? Possibility number one: good old-fashioned nostalgia. A huge chunk of the film consists of clips from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, the public TV show for children Rogers created, wrote, and performed multiple roles in for 33 years. Seeing the way he spoke directly to his viewers, making sure we knew we were valued, cared for, seen, and known is a powerful reminder of the early validation the show provided. And learning that this style of address arose from radical education theory, developed by Rogers himself (in conjunction with learned colleagues like Spock, Braselton, and Erikson), about the benefits of being candid with children, only deepens the admiration. But this footage also stirs up the memory of inarticulate childhood sorrow his attention helped to alleviate, taking you back to the time before you were capable of constructing the armor required for this nightmare of a world. Possibility number two: the impossibility of such a human existing again, either on television or, indeed, on earth. He represented a strain of religious conviction that seems inconceivable now. Through his show, he demonstrated the precepts of his faith—kindness, empathy, dignity, peaceful coexistence, safety, love—without ever once mentioning, or even gesturing toward, a deity. SEAN NELSON
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Friday–Sunday
Also Released This Weekend:
Our critics don't recommend these movies, but you might like to know about them anyway.
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