Does the onslaught of this “juicy” Pineapple Express weather make you feel like weeping into a Snuggie? Get yourself to a movie theater and relax in stimulating comfort instead. Your options include the “strangely peaceful” (Charles Mudede) documentary Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival, the entertaining new Buster Keaton doc The Great Buster, and the perennial favorite playful horror Gremlins. Follow the links below to see complete showtimes, tickets, and trailers for all of our critics’ picks.
Note: Movies play Thursday–Sunday unless otherwise specified.
Bohemian Rhapsody
I heart Queen. The song this film is named for was on the soundtrack of my youth. But early reactions to the film biopic (that’s more about Freddie Mercury than the British rock band he led) have been mixed to bad. The New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan tweeted that Bohemian Rhapsody “is a glorified Wikipedia entry but Rami Malek plays Freddie Mercury (and wears his wonderful costumes) with incredible gusto.” Our own Chase Burns was not a fan at all. (“The 15-minute long shit I took during the middle of the movie was more nuanced than the straight-washed hagiography peddled in that movie theater.”) In sum, enter at your own risk. LEILANI POLK
Various locations
Border
Ali Abbasi’s film is Sweden’s 2019 submission to the Oscars, and it certainly looks like a bizarre Nordic treat. A border agent with the power to smell human emotions lives an isolated life until she meets a man who shares her ability. But she still has much to discover about herself. Some critics are hailing this movie, based on a story by the writer of Let the Right One In, as an uncategorizable masterpiece.
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
Friday–Sunday
Boy Erased
This film features the most prolific twinks of our time: Troye Sivan, Lucas Hedges, and Nicole Kidman. These three gays will dazzle the screen in this year’s most star-studded gay flick—oh wait, Troye Sivan is the only gay among them. Lucas Hedges has said he’s “not totally straight, but also not gay and not necessarily bisexual,” and Nicole Kidman, despite being the world’s most famous twink, is surprisingly a 51-year-old Australian woman. While think pieces on Hedges’s sexuality will probably dominate the conversation around Boy Erased, it looks like a cute holiday movie about gay conversion therapy. Go see it! CHASE BURNS
Various locations
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
In Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Melissa McCarthy stars as real-life best-selling biographer Lee Israel. But this isn’t a life of literary glitz and glamour that you’re imagining after such a juicy introductory sentence! After falling on hard biographer times, Israel turned to a life of writerly crimes, forging letters from long-dead authors to make just enough cash to pay her rent, take her cat to the vet, and aggressively drink. This all sounds sad, I know, but there’s warmth underneath, thanks to Israel’s friendship with the charming, equally self-destructive Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant). McCarthy, who’s made a career of portraying loud women, is a different kind of jerk here—a real person who lashes out not for laughs, but because life is hard and she knows she’s making bad choices. ELINOR JONES
SIFF Cinema Uptown & AMC Seattle 10
Creed II
Creed II is a Rocky sequel. A good Rocky sequel, even. But the one thing it doesn’t really feel like is a sequel to Creed. MGM decided they weren’t gonna wait for Ryan Coogler to write or direct a follow-up to his 2015 miracle. So Stallone took back the reins for Creed II, building a story around what appears to be the very first idea he had: What if it was just another misshapen, lunkheaded Rocky movie that ignores why these characters work? Thankfully, Creed II rises above Stallone’s desire for standardization due to the strengths of its characters. All the good-to-great things that Jordan, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad, and yes, even Dolph Lundgren (!) are doing feel like they’re happening in spite of the story Stallone’s foisted upon director Stephen Caple Jr., and it’s easy to believe Caple spent most of his time trying to rehabilitate Stallone’s fundamentally busted concept. BOBBY ROBERTS
Various locations
Donna Haraway: Storytelling for Earthly Survival
The historically specific mode of wealth generation that has dominated human life since its emergence in 17th-century Europe is, it turns out, totally alien from its very own planet. The wealth generation is infinite; the planet is rudely limited. The rift between the two is not only growing but closing down an old and roughly 12,000-year-old global system of life—and evidently opening a new, pretty much unknown one. In the weirdly peaceful documentary Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival, the philosopher Donna Haraway sees the current crisis (some call it the Anthropocene, others the Capitalocene; I prefer the former) not as the end of life on earth but as the transformation (or rearrangement) of “ways of living and dying.” In short, life can and will continue after the extinction of humans (a young species). But if humans want to address the problem or hope to reverse the ongoing climate crisis, they must change their ways of living and dying on a cultural level. And it’s important that humans distinguish what is natural from what is cultural. Though one (culture) is embedded in the other (nature), its rate of evolution is much, much faster. This fact is lost when nature (slow) is confused with culture (fast). CHARLES MUDEDE
Northwest Film Forum
Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
DO NOT SEE THIS MOVIE if you are not a Harry Potter nerd. If you aren’t going to immediately go home to discuss and consider various possible plot developments while your movie date reads you random opinions from the deep internet, do not go and see this movie. The thing is 134 minutes long, and the plot is thick and almost excruciatingly detailed. It might be difficult to follow if you’re not super fresh on your Harry Potter knowledge. I recommend seeing it at a theater with extremely comfortable seating, and not skimping on snacks. Luckily, some truly remarkable cinematography and delightful cast of magical folk and beasts make the ride an enjoyable one, even when you’re feeling overwhelmed with new information. JENNI MOORE
Various locations
Free Solo
This highly praised, dizzying documentary reveals the heart-stopping journey of Alex Honnold as he conquered Yosemite’s El Capitan wall without ropes or safety gear. You don’t need to be a climber to be thrilled at this glimpse into human accomplishment.
Ark Lodge Cinemas & AMC Seattle 10
The Great Buster
One of the most beloved funny people in American history, Buster Keaton has had an almost universal influence on global cinema. Peter Bogdanovich’s documentary takes excerpts from restored films and interviews with such filmmakers, stunt performers, and actors as Mel Brooks, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, Dick van Dyke, and Johnny Knoxville.
Grand Illusion
Friday–Sunday
Green Book
Green Book tells the supposedly true story of a Black jazz pianist, Dr. Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali), and his white driver, Tony Lip (Viggo Mortensen), as they go on a concert tour through the segregated South in 1962. Although they’re both from New York, they’re from entirely different worlds: Shirley moves through the rarified air of highbrow culture. Tony, on the other hand, is an Italian American stereotype made sentient, a “whattsamattayou” tough guy with a tenderly soft underbelly. Green Book’s biggest red flag is that it’s essentially another Driving Miss Daisy story about how to solve racism in three convenient acts. But the movie’s really nice, and it’s hard to get too mad at it. Ali and Mortensen are both awfully good, and the script, for all its familiarity, is kind of comforting in its shtick-y predictability. NED LANNAMANN
Various locations
Gremlins
Gremlins still holds up, 34 years after its original release. The very retro-ness of this comedy-horror-holiday flick adds to its charm. The mix of humor and scares still stands up, the mogwai is still too cute for its own good, the gremlins birthed from it still disgustingly funny and frightening, and the implausible story still draws you in. A man brings home the ultimate Christmas gift for his teenage son, an exotic pet he found in Chinatown that comes with very specific (and vital) care instructions that must be followed (don’t get him wet, don’t feed him after midnight, don’t expose him to light). Of course, it wouldn’t be a movie if he cared for the furry little creature properly. LEILANI POLK
Central Cinema
Friday–Sunday
Holidays on Ice
This series will be dedicated to movies about sports on the ice. Whether you want something heroic, dramatic, or downright silly, you can find something to suit your mood. This weekend’s options include The Cutting Edge, Slap Shot, The Mighty Ducks, and Ice Castles.
SIFF Film Center
Friday–Sunday
Memoir of War
The writer Marguerite Duras (played by Mélanie Thierry) provides a focal point for this unusual film about World War II, based on the cultural icon’s autobiographical novel La Douleur. The film recounts Duras’s desperate attempts in Vichy France to save her Resistant husband Robert Antelme from Nazi imprisonment. This film is France’s submission to the 2019 Academy Awards.
Northwest Film Forum
Friday–Sunday
Meow Wolf
The adorably named Santa Fe artist collective Meow Wolf caught the fancy of George R.R. Martin, who helped them take over a disused bowling alley for an epic art exhibition. But success comes with its own struggles. Enter their world and find delirious, DIY inspiration.
Thornton Place
Thursday only
Mirai
By many reports, a great new anime may have joined the canon this year: Mirai by Mamoru Hosuda (Summer Wars, Wolf Children) was shown at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight and was described as “the work of a true auteur (in what feels like his most personal film yet) presented as innocuous family entertainment” by Variety. It’s about a young boy who initially resents the arrival of his baby sister—until a mysterious time slip allows him to meet his ancestors, his dog as a human, and his sister as a teenager. It sounds charmingly surreal and deeply felt, and you should seize your opportunity to see it.
Regal Meridian 16 & Thornton Place
Museo
During Christmas Eve, while guards were drunk, thieves took advantage of the National Museum of Anthropology and History’s faulty alarm system and got away with around 125 Mayan, Aztec, Miztec and Zapotec artifacts. Three and a half years later, federal officials retrieved nearly all of the stolen artifacts and arrested two men who were behind the theft. The men were two ordinary guys who “visited the museum more than 50 times, made sketches and plans, then jumped the fence, crawled through an air-conditioning duct and looted seven display cases before dawn on Christmas Day, 1985,” according to the New York Times. Filmmaker Alonso Ruizpalacios’s new film Museo (Museum) reimagines this famous heist, renaming the characters Juan and Wilson, and casting Gael García Bernal (Mozart in the Jungle, Y Tu Mamá También) and Leonardo Ortizgris (Güeros), respectively. It’s a remarkably beautiful film that borders on the surreal, with scenes so hypnotic that I literally fell asleep the first three times I watched Museo’s screener for this review—which says more about my ability to watch a movie past midnight than the pace of the film. That said, for a heist film, it’s not in a hurry to get anywhere. Which is fine, because Ruizpalacios and cinematographer Damián García create lush, sometimes experimental scenes that linger like daydreams. CHASE BURNS
Northwest Film Forum
Thursday only
Overlord
While carrying out a vital pre-D-Day mission, a ragtag bunch of American Dogfaces stumble across a small French village that’s just packed to the rafters with secret Gestapo experiments. (Note: In what may be a controversial move in this day and age, the Nazis are unequivocally depicted as the Bad Guys.) Genre mashups are often content to rest on their high-concept laurels, but this J.J. Abrams production is very willing to do the grunt work, solidly establishing its war movie bonafides—an early paratrooper sequence is genuinely alarming—before transitioning into full-tilt body horror. (This is an extremely moist movie.) If this sounds even remotely like your sort of thing, Overlord’s combination of heavy artillery and horrid creatures should prove to be pretty irresistible. When it comes to B-Movies, nasty, brutish, and short all count as positive traits. ANDREW WRIGHT
Meridian 16 & Thornton Place
Ralph Breaks the Internet
The sequel to Wreck-It Ralph is Disney’s strangely savvy and grown-up (but still fun-for-kids) take on the viruses, ads, social media networks, videos, and snake pits of idiocy on the web. Charles Pulliam-Moore of i09 wrote, “In its accurate depiction of the highs and lows the internet has to offer, Ralph Breaks the Internet also casually, and perhaps unavoidably, draws attention to something else about the ever-flattening global culture we’re all swimming in—and how Disney owns the rights to way, way too much of it.”
Various locations
Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World
Catherine Bainbridge’s important documentary traces the impact that Native American musicians have made on blues, rock, jazz, hiphop, and heavy metal. Using Link Wray’s menacing 1958 instrumental “Rumble” as its anchor (akin to Do the Right Thing’s use of Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power”), Bainbridge relates stories of several influential, distinctive performers, including the Band’s Robbie Robertson, activist folkie Buffy Sainte-Marie, Mildred Bailey, Charley Patton, and a cat named Jimi Hendrix. Rumble asserts the primacy and resiliency of Native culture despite the government’s concerted efforts to suppress and erase it. DAVE SEGAL
Central Library
Saturday only
Searching for Ingmar Bergman
There are brilliant filmmakers, smart filmmakers, and intellectual filmmakers. My definition of an intellectual movie is a work that comes closest to reaching the depth of literature—the highest form of intellectual art. Searching for Ingmar Bergman is a documentary by Margarethe von Trotta, an intellectual filmmaker. Her last documentary was about the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt. Her new film explores the life and deep mind of Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish director who made high art out of cinema.
Grand Illusion
CHARLES MUDEDE
Suspiria
Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino’s reinterpretation of Argento’s film Suspiria is a precisely choreographed mindfuck, and progressing through the film’s six acts feels like peeling off layers of an onion until you reach the reeking core. It’s swift, brutal, and breathtaking, but it’s also frequently bogged down by overcomplicated subplots and distracting details. The original premise remains the same—ancient ballerina witches trying to live forever by sacrificing students—but this time around, the Markos Dance Academy is located right next to the Berlin Wall in post-World War II Germany, and Susie Bannion (a very meh Dakota Johnson) is a runaway Mennonite from Ohio. Whatever parallels Guadagnino hoped to draw between the traumatic aftermath of the Holocaust and the bloody chaos going on inside the coven ends up feeling more confusing than profound. CIARA DOLAN
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Symphony for a Massacre
Jacques Deray’s 1963 crime thriller concerns five men whose drug deal goes terribly wrong when one of them steals from the others. Those who like their noir à la française should check it out.
Scarecrow Video
Friday only
Widows
Widows is an overflowing plateful of entertainment, piled high with juicy plot, buttery performances, and plenty of sweet genre pie. It’s a mash-up of pulp and prestige that shouldn’t work well on paper but plays out tremendously well on-screen. Director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Shame) cowrote the twisty script with novelist Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl, Sharp Objects), and while the interconnected webs of Chicago’s crime underworld and its racially charged local politics contain more than enough intrigue, the performances are what’ll grab you. I mean, just look at this cast: Harry (Liam Neeson) leads a crew of career criminals (including Jon Bernthal and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) in a heist that goes disastrously wrong, leaving their widows Veronica (Viola Davis), Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) with a serious problem when crime boss Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry) and his enforcer brother Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya) demand they return the stolen money. The real fun is watching McQueen, Flynn, and this ridiculously large talent pool of actors lay the groundwork for a slick, rich, tantalizing thriller, and then connecting all the dots. NED LANNAMANN
Various locations
Also Playing:
Our critics don’t recommend these movies, but you might like to know about them anyway.
The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
