The Seattle International Film Festival is coming up next week, so start planning! In the meanwhile, there's plenty to watch. Our critic was mildly disappointed with Pokémon Detective Pikachu—Morgan Troper writes, "There are a slew of incoherent plot twists, few of which resolve satisfyingly"—but it'll probably please Poké-fans. And you can thrill to Zhang Yimou's new epic Shadow, or the very different classics Alien and Kiki's Delivery Service, or any number of indies. Plus, take your mama to a special screening of La La Land or a sing-along version of Mamma Mia. Follow the links below to see complete showtimes, tickets, and trailers for all of our critics' picks. If you're looking for even more options, check out our film events calendar and complete movie times listings.
Note: Movies play Thursday–Sunday unless otherwise noted
Alien 40th Anniversary
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
Friday–Sunday
Amazing Grace
The double-platinum album Amazing Grace was recorded live, at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles, in 1972. The singer was 29-year-old Aretha Franklin, returning to her gospel roots for two nights, and the shows she put on were electrifying. That album was the soundtrack to a documentary by Sidney Lumet that never got released for various reasons, some more understandable than others. After Ms. Franklin’s recent passing, Lumet’s film is finally available, and 2019 audiences can effectively pull up a pew and bear witness to how she put in work across those two days in the January of 1972. If you are not already familiar with the term “transcendent,” you should practice its usage—you’ll need it if you’re hoping to speak on what got captured in this film. BOBBY ROBERTS
Various locations
Arcadia
Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Will Gregory (Goldfrapp) score this hypnotic journey into weird British rurality and its denizens, using archival footage from the past 100 years of UK cinema. It sketches a meta-narrative of the persistent ties between people and land, the threats to these bonds from Thatcherism, mass agriculture, and suburbanization, and the possibility of returning to joyous and mysterious ritual. Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw hailed it as an "absorbing odyssey through bucolic calm, bizarre eccentricity, and what appears to be real-life horror paganism."
Northwest Film Forum
Thursday only
Ask Dr. Ruth
On a recent episode of The View, 90-year-old sex therapist and media personality Dr. Ruth warned the roundtable of women that threesomes are "very bad" for a marriage. "Do not engage in a threesome," she said, "because that third person might be a better lover." This is bad advice. Have threesomes. But this documentary isn't about Dr. Ruth's advice, it's about Dr. Ruth. And damn, her story is long overdue for a good documentary. She is a pioneer—and a very funny one. CHASE BURNS
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
Avengers: Endgame
In Avengers: Endgame, what happens to the world after the destruction of 50 percent of all large-scale life on Earth and other planets? People live in huts, gather food, eat less meat, spend more time with their families, and billionaires must learn to compost. This is what the Green New Deal will apparently look like. The horror. It is the mission of the Avengers to restore the American way of life. What is deeply missed on an earth globalized by American consumerism is the background of abundance: farm houses with gas-guzzling pickups, hot dogs that come with condiment choices (mustard, ketchup, or what have you). Avengers want you to believe that they are more than just about fast food and overstocked supermarkets. They are about families that feel deeply connected when eating hot dogs and hamburgers at a picnic table set on a piece land carpeted by the US's main crop, turf grass. CHARLES MUDEDE
Wide release
Black Radical Imagination
See experimental short films that highlight contemporary stories within the African diaspora community.
Frye Art Museum
Saturday only
British Comedy Classics: I'm All Right Jack
The finest British comedies of the 1940s and ’50s—Green for Danger, The Man in the White Suit—have aged marvelously well, thanks to understated, funny scripts and endlessly watchable professionals. In this week's I'm All Right Jack, a young man from an aristocratic family is caught up in a struggle between his profiteering uncle and a trade union.
Seattle Art Museum
Thursday only
Captain Marvel
What you need to know is that Captain Marvel is a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie, and MCU movies are generally good-to-excellent, and Captain Marvel is no different. It’s smart, funny, and deliriously self-aware, and there’s a bunch of cool explosions. There’s also a young Agent Coulson, an explanation of how Nick Fury lost his eye, and a goddamn kitty-cat named Goose. It is an all-around successful comic book movie, like the 5,000 MCU movies that came before it. “But wait,” you say. “It is different. Aren’t you going to mention… [points at boobs, from one to the other, back and forth, maintaining eye contact, making things weird]?” Ugh, FINE. I'll say it. Yes, Carol is a woman, and this is the first Marvel movie centered on a woman. I’ve really enjoyed my Bruce Bannerses and Steve Rogerses, but I liked my Carol Danvers even more. It was great to see someone who looked like me straight-up destroy alien bad guys. ELINOR JONES
Various locations
Carmine Street Guitars
Jim Jarmusch, Bill Frisell, Patti Smith's guitarist, and other musicians rely on this Greenwich Village historic guitar shop to buy and repair their instruments, which owner Rick Kelly and his apprentice Cindy Hulej create from reclaimed wood. Critics have praised this documentary's "gentle, homespun magic” (Owen Gleiberman, Variety), saying it is "mostly as sweet as it is informative" (Glenn Kenny, New York Times).
Northwest Film Forum
Friday & Sunday
Dammed to Extinction
This film address the orca population crisis and what can be done—namely, removing dams, which disrupt the beautiful cetaceans' access to their food supply of chinook salmon. Stay on afterward for a conversation moderated by KING 5 reporter Alison Morrow.
SIFF
Thursday only
Digital Disconnect
This Meaningful Movies screening will explore how fake news and social media affect our democracy, tracing the evolution of the internet as a publicly funded project in the late 1960s to the behemoth it is today.
Our Lady of the Lake
Friday only
Dogman
Marcello (Marcello Fonte) has a nearly perfect life. He happily runs a dog-grooming shop in a rundown seaside village, and spends his days off scuba diving with his daughter. But this small, kind dog-lover has a big, mean problem: Simone (Edoardo Pesce), an enormous and enormously violent bully who forces Marcello into an accomplice role in his many crimes. Gomorrah director Matteo Garrone imbues this fable with dread and violence, taking the story into unpredictable and intensely suspenseful places, and Marcello’s tragic plight—he’s so good-natured that he can’t see this hulking brute as anything but his friend—is riveting and heart-rending. Plus, dogs! NED LANNAMANN
Grand Illusion
Thursday only
Georgetown Super 8 Film Festival
See films about the Duwamish Valley made on Super 8 film by denizens of Seattle.
Oxbow
Saturday only
Hail Satan?
“Sorry about the mess,” Lucien Greaves, the cofounder of the Satanic Temple, says to the crew of Hail Satan? as he welcomes them into the organization’s headquarters in Salem, Massachusetts. Like the Satanic Temple, director Penny Lane’s Hail Satan? isn’t quite what it seems: Yes, Lane’s affectionate and funny documentary does feature some pig heads getting slammed onto spikes, and yes, there are some naked writhing people. But Hail Satan? is more interested in the organization’s vision of “contemporary satanism”—one that doesn’t include worshipping the devil but does include progressive activism and providing a “sociopolitical counter-myth” in a country that’s too often characterized as a “Christian nation.” [Greaves:] "We are a secular nation. We are supposed to be a democratic, pluralist nation.” That’s a fact that seems ominously and increasingly forgotten in Trump’s America, so forget about the question mark. Hail Satan. ERIK HENRIKSEN
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
Her Smell
In the new film from Alex Ross Perry (Queen of Earth, Golden Exits), the indefatigable Elisabeth Moss (whose four front teeth I could probably write a love letter to) plays Becky Something, leader of the riot grrrl band Something. Over the course of five acts, Becky slowly descends into complete self-destruction: using drugs, fighting with her bandmates, spurning her family, bringing in a hack shaman to cleanse her of her problems. The New York Times calls this flick “relentless,” while Consequence of Sound says Moss “throws her entire being into the role.” My bet is that this film is a portrait of rock and roll we haven’t quite seen before. JASMYNE KEIMIG
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Hesburgh
This documentary examines the life of Theodore Hesburgh, priest, presidential advisor, and president of the University of Notre Dame, a complicated figure who took part in the civil rights protest movement (but whose anti-racism record at the university is rather equivocal). Patrick Creadon's film sounds rather hagiographic, but does seem to be an interesting introduction to a major figure of the 20th century.
Varsity Theater
Thursday only
High Life
Claire Denis’s High Life is the French art-house director’s first science-fiction film and her first English script. It depicts outer space in a way we’re not used to seeing on-screen: through the utter absence of visual information. The spaceship is a clunky rectangular box, its interiors are shabby and grimy, and the cosmos is represented by a few sprinkles of light on a black background. Denis’s story is abstract and nonlinear, and her characters function like allegorical symbols rather than humans. Some will be impressed by the weightiness of Denis’s jag into zero gravity, but for me, High Life was a frustrating experience, a collection of half-developed ideas being sucked into an unfocused void. The nature of Denis’s provocations is clear: With High Life, she’s drawing a parallel between the desperate boredom of life and its ceaseless ability to perpetuate itself, even amid the most dire of circumstances. NED LANNAMANN
SIFF Cinema Uptown
If the Dancer Dances
This documentary by former Merce Cunningham Dance Company member Lise Friedman and Maia Wechsler ponders how to prevent the loss of dance masterpieces—which, if they're not performed, can't be said to exist anymore. The film focuses on the resurrection of Cunningham's RainForest (1968) by Stephen Petronio's dance company.
Northwest Film Forum
Friday–Sunday
Kiki's Delivery Service
In an unnamed European country, ambitious young witch Kiki hops on her broomstick and sets up a freelance delivery business in the city, but must grapple with the tribulations of finicky magical powers, working, and growing up. A sincere and gentle parable about overcoming self-doubt and depression with the help of your friends, featuring the cute talking kitty Jiji and one of the subtlest, most bittersweet endings you'll ever see in animation.
Central Cinema
Friday–Sunday
'La La Land' Special Mother's Day Screening
Enjoy the contemporary Hollywood musical by Damien Chazelle, starring Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, in the company of Mama. Keep your ticket stub to get a $5 bellini or mimosa or a $6 bloody mary.
Big Picture
Sunday only
Long Shot
Thankfully, Long Shot isn't another addition to the mid-2000s family of comedies where dude-bros are nagged to death into loving beautiful women. It’s maybe... 10 percent that. The other 90 percent is a reverse Pretty Woman, including lots of making out, amazing outfits, and yes, Roxette. Rogen is fully competent as a funny schlub, and Theron destroys as a secretary of state and presidential hopeful, and the two of them together are—I know, this is weird—charming as hell, and their relationship totally works. While the film’s final act gets a bit schmaltzy (it's way more rom than com), the overall experience is wonderful. I’ll never question a neckbeard’s value ever again. ELINOR JONES
Various locations
MoPOP Matinee: Clueless
"My buns don't feel nothin' like steel," "I am totally butt crazy in love," and "Oh my god, I am totally buggin'" are a mere few of the top-notch one-liners of Clueless, the classic '90s adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma. Enjoy access to A Queen Within: Adorned Archetypes at this MoPOP screening.
MoPOP
Sunday only
Mother's Day 'Mamma Mia' ABBA along
There are a lot of mothers in Mamma Mia, which makes it the perfect musical to sing along to with your favorite moms. This screening will include closed captions so you can get all those ABBA lyrics right.
Central Cinema
Sunday only
Moving History
Moving History is the Moving Image Preservation of the Puget Sound's quarterly ciné-collage of rare and archival footage of Seattle and environs, including "feature films, historic Seattle footage, oral histories, dance performances by PNW artists," and much more.
Northwest Film Forum
Sunday only
Pokémon Detective Pikachu
Detective Pikachu wears multiple hats over the course of its 104-minute runtime. Sometimes the film is a wholesome, Spielbergian coming-of-age adventure. At other points, it’s a buddy comedy teeming with self-referential, mic drop-y in-jokes, many of which are bound to fly straight over the heads of its target demographic. Or maybe you want your Pokémon movie to be science fiction with vague sociopolitical subtext? Hey, it can do that, too! More than anything, Detective Pikachu feels like Turner & Hooch on a combination of mescaline and speed. MORGAN TROPER
Various locations
Scarecrow Academy 1959: The Greatest Year in Film History
The video rental library's new series contends that 1959 was the best year in film history ever. It saw "a high point of Hollywood studio filmmaking, the rise of new independent cinema, the great flowering of international movies, and the beginning of the French New Wave." Film critic Robert Horton will delve into the highlights of this landmark year. This week (the final one), watch the classic horror comedy A Bucket of Blood, about a struggling artist who starts making suspiciously...realistic...sculptures, paired with the Jack Kerouac-written short film Pull My Daisy.
Scarecrow Video
Shadow
There’s still nothing like watching a big, boisterous epic in a movie theater. And if you need another reminder, here’s Shadow, director Zhang Yimou’s visually stunning return to the wuxia genre of martial arts epics set in ancient China. Having seen it both in a theater and on a reasonably decent television, all I can say is: Get to the theater for this one. There’s no comparison. The fantasy setting is basic—a massive gorge, a flowing river, and little else—and the story’s not much either, with warring kingdoms attempting to broker peace, while the commander of one army trains a doppelganger to take his place. But once you get through the table-setting of Shadow’s first hour, the action kicks in, and the movie becomes every bit the equal of Zhang’s past triumphs Hero and House of Flying Daggers. Shadow’s breathtaking centerpiece—a rain-soaked, one-on-one duel, coupled with a stealth attack on a city—is nothing short of extraordinary. NED LANNAMANN
Grand Illusion
Friday–Sunday
Shazam!
You like your nephew! He’s nine years old, absolutely adorable, and as boring as a bar of Ivory soap. And that’s pretty much the vibe of Shazam!, which, like Aquaman, is practically begging to be known as “the fun one” in DC’s line of grumpy, mostly unenjoyable superhero flicks. Based on the old-timey Captain Marvel comics, Shazam! tells the story of orphaned Billy Batson who stumbles into a wizard’s cave and is given god-like powers (and a buff adult’s body) to become the world’s super-charged champion against the seven deadly sins. Billy yells the name “Shazam,” lightning pops out of the sky, and bam—the transformation is complete. If you’re 9 years old, you’ll think it’s pretty good. There’s not a lot here to appreciate if you’re an adult. WM. STEVEN HUMPHREY
Various locations
Shelf Life
Paul Bartels's black comedy is about three warped adults raised in a bomb shelter, where their parents hid with them after the Kennedy assassination. After the screening, beloved Art Zone host Nancy Guppy will facilitate a Q&A with co-writers O-Lan Jones, Andrea Stein, and Jim Turner.
Northwest Film Forum
Saturday only
Transit
A man is on the run from a fascist army that's occupying France. He jumps onto a train heading to Marseille and toward his very last chance to get away: a Mexico-bound cruise ship that's leaving the Mediterranean port city soon. The man is Georg (Franz Rogowski), a Jewish German radio technician. His bag contains the manuscript of a dead but famous Communist author. Also in the bag: the dead man's papers for Mexico. Georg is assuming the writer's identity. The film, by the great German director Christian Petzold, is based on a 1942 novel of the same name about a Communist rebel who escapes from a Nazi concentration camp in Paris, heads down to Marseille, and ends up waiting, and waiting, and waiting for a transit letter. Petzold, however, sets this World War II story in present-day Europe, though it is a strange intersection between the past, present, and future—the Jews who fled Nazi Germany in the late 1930s and early 1940s meet and interact with Muslims fleeing a new fascist regime. The Jews in the movie are ghosts from the past, and the Muslims are ghosts from the future. These are the specters haunting Europe today. CHARLES MUDEDE
Varsity
Thursday only
Videoasis
Videoasis, the biannual showcase of Pacific Northwest-made music videos curated by Bobby McHugh and Sharlese Metcalf, will return to the big screen.
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
Friday only
Also playing:
Our critics don't recommend these films, but you might want to know about them anyway.
