August means big block-busting fun, and Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw delivers. For more intellectual fare, revisit the John Cassavetes masterpieces Opening Night and Love Streams, or discover a dark time in Argentinean history with Rojo. 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 (which are now location-aware!), and don't forget to see where outdoor movies are playing.
Note: Movies play Thursday–Sunday unless otherwise noted
42nd Street
Broadway director Julian Marsh needs just one more hit so he can retire and recover his health. It looks like he may just pull it off until his temperamental star Dorothy breaks her ankle on the eve of the show's premiere and has to be replaced by understudy Peggy. This 1933 musical starring Ruby Keeler boasts the still-impressive kitsch choreography of Busby Berkeley, who makes enormous moving sculptures out of grinning, leggy girls.
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Saturday only
Part of Dressed to the Nines
Apollo 11
Todd Miller's superbly edited new documentary on the Apollo 11 mission, which put Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong on the moon (and sent Michael Collins around its dark side), adds no narration or talking heads, other than contemporaneous sources. Although you know how things turned out, you're plunged into the suspense of the moment, when even the slightest miscalculation could have doomed the astronauts to a lonely or fiery death. Listen to that amazing sound design! JOULE ZELMAN
Pacific Science Center
A Bigger Splash
This 1974 film stars the British painter David Hockney as himself! It was shot by Jack Hazan over three of Hockney's most creatively successful years, and the result is, in the words of filmmaker Martin Schwartz, a "document of glamor, love, sex, and creativity in early-1970s London and New York."
Northwest Film Forum
Thursday only
The Biggest Little Farm
Skeptics might wonder whether a 90-minute documentary on farming is better used as insomnia remedy than a night out at the movies, but John Chester's gorgeous film has been snatching up audience choice and best film awards all over the place. He and his wife, Molly, spent eight years striving to create a farm in California that was perfectly in accord with nature—despite drought, poor soil, and wildfires. Ultimately, they have to accept that they're not in control of nature and life. Come for the lovely footage of wildlife and farm animals, stay for the inspiration to fight for sustainability.
Crest
Booksmart
Booksmart is about Molly and Amy (Beanie Feldstein and Kaitlyn Dever), two accomplished girls who are currently enjoying their final day of high school—and realizing that they've alienated all of their peers by focusing only on school and each other. When Molly decides the pair needs a party experience before graduation, it kicks off an epic night of social awkwardness, attempted hook-ups, accidental drug use, and inescapable theatre kids. The love-you-to-death friendship between Molly and Amy is the heart of director Olivia Wilde's movie, and major credit is due to Dever and Feldstein for crushing that chemistry. They’re lifted up by a brilliant supporting cast of fellow teen misfits (including Billie Lourd, who steals every scene she barreled through) and fuckup grownups (Jason Sudeikis, Jessica Williams, and Mike O’Brien) who round out a laugh-inducing, cry-inducing, and utterly relatable high-school universe that I wanted to inhabit and also gave me PTSD. ELINOR JONES
Various locations
California on Fire
Artist and filmmaker Jeff Frost has recorded astounding footage amidst the terrifying "mega-fires" destroying California. According to the Forum's description, "Each of the film’s five chapters are based on the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance." Stay on after the screening for a Q&A with Frost.
Northwest Film Forum
Saturday only
Collide-O-Scope Surprise Party!
Enjoy a night of video weirdness and wonderment—plus free prize drawings and snacks—at this special edition of Collide-O-Scope that coincides with host Michael Anderson's birthday.
Re-bar
Thursday only
Comedy Gold from the American Cinema
This summer, let the silver screen wash over you and enjoy old-school cool with comedic classics like The Awful Truth, in which Cary Grant and Irene Dunne play secretly-in-love divorcing spouses who keep sabotaging each other's attempts at new relationships. Sounds like Dan Savage would advise them both to DTMFA, but this was classic Hollywood so all ends in kisses.
Seattle Art Museum
Thursday only
Crawl
Soooo...is this movie about gigantic bloodthirsty alligators wreaking havoc on hurricane-flooded Florida...good? According to reviews, no. But it's a lot of fun, like any dumb B-movie ought to be, says critic Jake Wilson (The Age): "It lives up to its schlock promise — delivering jokey shocks with a degree of expertise while retaining enough seeming naivety to let viewers have fun mocking its shortcomings." Aaron Yap of Flicks.co.nz is blunter: "You want big alligators attacking people? You’ll definitely get big alligators attacking the shit out of people."
Various locations
The Farewell
If you had a fatal disease, would you want to know? This question lies at the heart of a 2016 This American Life segment called “What You Don’t Know” by Lulu Wang. Her 80-year-old grandmother, known as Nai Nai, had been diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer and given three months to live. Her family decided not to tell her she was sick at all. Now Wang has written and directed a film, The Farewell, based on her family’s experience. It features Awkwafina, the wonderful rapper and actor, in her first starring role. GILLIAN ANDERSON
Various locations
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
The first of the Fast & Furious spinoff films, the ampersand-fueled Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw is exactly as goofy and fun as it should be. Free of the core saga’s melodrama, the buddy cop comedy finds Dwayne Johnson’s tough guy Hobbs and Jason Statham’s tough guy Shaw flex-bickering and secretly loving each other as they work with Shaw’s super-spy sister (Vanessa Kirby, AKA the sister on The Crown) to fight Brixton Lore (Idris Elba), who, notably, has a robot motorcycle. (In the first five minutes, somebody asks Lore who he is, and he says, “Bad Guy,” which is almost as good of a name as “Brixton Lore.”) If you thought F&F couldn’t get any sillier, Hobbs & Shaw is happy to prove you wrong (the Rock fights a helicopter), and if you thought F&F couldn’t get more emo, Hobbs & Shaw is also happy to prove you wrong (once again, we learn that families, both those we inherit and those we create as we flip dune buggies through the air, are Very Important). In conclusion, vote Hobbs and Shaw in 2020. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Various locations
Jawline
A teenage boy in rural Tennessee tries to build an online following in this oddly affecting portrait of the new youth internet dystopia. Co-presented by Reel Grrls, TeenTix, and NFFTY.
Northwest Film Forum
Thursday–Saturday
The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Inspired by a true story, The Last Black Man in San Francisco is about the city’s rapid gentrification and those crazy looks white folks give Black and brown people for daring to feel at home in their own neighborhoods. It centers on carpenter Jimmie Fails, who becomes obsessed with his massive childhood home in the city and sets out on a mission to buy it. These days, it’s going for a cool $4 million. Fails plays a fictionalized version of himself in the film, which he cowrote with his best friend, director Joe Talbot. Almost right off, there are hints the film was directed by a white person. In this San Francisco, white neighbors don’t call the cops, but rather use the threat of calling the cops as a weapon in order to get Black people to scram. A breath of fresh air: There’s no romantic subplot or “classic” nuclear family. Instead, the film’s emotions stem from Jimmie’s fixation on his childhood home, his friendship with the autistic aspiring playwright Montgomery, and his complicated relationship with his city. But after finishing the film, I was left with questions about these characters’ lives: How does Jimmie find time to make money? Where do these Black San Franciscans get their food? It adds another level of too-smooth glaze to the film to never see its main characters working or doing any other life stuff. JENNI MOORE
Various locations
Love Streams
In their final cinematic collaboration, director John Cassavetes and his wife Gena Rowlands play a pair of somewhat unhinged siblings that find themselves relying on one another as the rest of their lives unravel. According to the theater's write-up, the dreamlike climax plays like "Powell and Pressburger guest directing a scene from Inland Empire." If you're enough of a movie buff to get those references and haven't yet seen this film, go!
The Beacon
Saturday–Sunday
Luz
This German horror film has, according to critics, redefined the low-budget shocker with its narrative tricks, out-of-left-field frights, and intriguing soundscapes. Plot summaries have been bare-bones, but the film follows the police investigation of a young Chilean cab driver who bursts into their station with a strange confession. Bonus: It was shot on actual film (16mm)!
Grand Illusion
Friday–Sunday
Midsommar
When we meet college student Dani (Florence Pugh), she's isolated, enduring a nerve-shredding family crisis behind a mask of feminine selflessness and apparently afraid to reveal her emotions to her distant and manipulative boyfriend, Christian. But once an affection-starved Dani, along with Christian and his bros, follow their friend Pelle to his cultish village in rural Sweden for a mysterious pagan festival, Midsommar blossoms into a flower of a different color. The Americans respond to their surroundings in varying ways: Christian and fellow PhD student Josh try to probe the village's secrets for academic glory, while douchey Mark ogles long-tressed local girls. Dani, meanwhile, wavers between unease with the cult's weird rituals and attraction to its sense of unshakable fellowship. Soon, they're all swept up in rites involving dancing, feasting, and tripping out, unaware that far more transgressive acts are being prepared. The ensuing narrative is expansive, a bit funny, full of elaborate invented culture, and overall less exhausting (and exhilarating) than director Ari Aster's Hereditary. Where Hereditary is about losing a family, Midsommar is about gaining one, a process that's a lot less wholesome than it sounds. JOULE ZELMAN
Wide release
Once Upon a Time in... Hollywood
Once Upon a Time doesn't have the self-conscious, This Is a Quentin Tarantino Film™ feel of the filmmaker's past few movies. Make no mistake: Nobody besides Tarantino could have made Once Upon a Time—like all of Tarantino's movies, it's a singular thing, uniquely dialed in to his obsessions and quirks. But like Tarantino's best movies, it feels neither reliant nor focused on those obsessions and quirks. We spend the bulk of our time with three people: Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), an earnest, anxious, B-list actor whose career is right about to curdle; Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), Rick's toughed-up, chilled-out former stuntman and current BFF; and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), a bubbly, captivating actress who's just starting to enjoy her first taste of success in show business. Two of these people—the ones who're beginning to realize the world is no longer all that interested in what they have to offer—are fictional. The third is not, and how much you know about the real-life events that occurred in and around Los Angeles in 1969 will profoundly color your experience watching the film. How Tarantino plays with history in Once Upon a Time is one of the more intense and surprising elements of the film—and, thankfully, it's also one of the best. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Various locations
Opening Night
Another of the awe-inspiring duo of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands's famous collaborations, Opening Night is about a frustrated stage actor (Rowlands) who takes it upon herself to fix the boring play she's about to perform in. But the men she's working with don't take her seriously, she's getting a little drunk, and she's been thrown into turmoil by the death of a young fan. Don't miss this masterpiece of American indie filmmaking.
The Beacon
Saturday–Sunday
Puget Soundtrack: Postcard from the Badlands presents Naer Vaer
Atmospheric music ensemble Postcard from the Badlands will perform music composed for archival footage curated by the Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound (MIPoPS) and editing by visual projectionist Torin Kovach and MIPoPS archivist Libby Hopfauf that explores themes of "creation, community, conquest, migration, labor, and play."
Northwest Film Forum
Sunday only
River's Edge
This relentlessly bleak look at apathetic youth—about a boy who murders his girlfriend and the ambivalence of his friends toward the crime—stars Keanu Reeves, Crispin Glover, Ione Skye, and Dennis Hopper.
The Beacon
Sunday only
Rojo
People simply vanished during Argentina’s Dirty War, which lasted from 1974 to 1983. With the implementation of a US-backed military dictatorship, death squads were deployed around the country to “disappear” anyone who was thought to be a political dissident or leftist. It was an extremely dark time in Argentine history. Benjamín Naishtat’s Rojo (2018) is set just after the beginning of this war. In a small Argentine town in 1975, pompous but well-regarded lawyer Claudio (Darío Grandinetti) gets in an altercation with an unstable man in a restaurant, eventually leading to that man’s death when he is disappeared by our protagonist. The last two acts of the film draw out the complacency of Argentine society towards this new political reality and also Claudio’s desperation to hide what he has done. While much of the greater historical and political context might be missed by foreign audiences, Rojo serves up pitch-black humor (and drama) with an eye for the cinema of the era it’s depicting. JASMYNE KEIMIG
SIFF Film Center
Friday–Sunday
Spider-Man: Far from Home
For those who have been salivating for a sequel to 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming—and more Spider-Man than we got in the last two Avengers movies—you can relax. Spider-Man: Far from Home is pretty freaking good! It has almost everything you loved from Homecoming, plus better action sequences. That said, while Homecoming crackled with originality, Far from Home is far from what made its predecessor so great. Sure, it’s got snappy jokes, terrific characters, top-notch action, and loads of delicious teenage awkwardness. But it lacks the one thing Homecoming had in abundance: a laser-sharp focus on the emotional horror of being a teen. And yet? I still loved it. It’s better and more emotionally resonant than the vast majority of superhero flicks, and Far from Home is an excellent sequel that will occasionally illicit ear-to-ear grins. WM STEVEN HUMPHREY
Various locations
Streetwise
A quintessential exemplar of Seattle filmmaking is returning to the theater in a new restoration. This collaboration by Martin Bell, Mary Ellen Mark, and Cheryl McCall peered into the lives of street youth in the 1980s and stands now as a testament to a community forgotten and rejected by the rest of the world.
The Beacon
Friday only
Sword of Trust
The charm of America's favorite deadbeat uncle, Marc Maron, is a fine line. It’s either offensive or sexy. Where you fall on that line depends on your drunkenness and/or daddy issues. What secrets does his pornstache hold? How many regrets are hidden in those hairs? I was thinking about this ’stache throughout Sword of Trust, directed by Seattle’s own Lynn Shelton. This is the first time Shelton has shot a film outside of Washington State, in Alabama, but you wouldn’t know it, as it’s set almost exclusively in a pawnshop owned by Maron’s character, Mel. There are other excellent actors in the film, and there is a loose plot about a questionable Confederate relic and the conspiracy theorists who want to buy it. But the story is so clumsy that it doesn't really matter. Go for Maron’s wry ’stache. CHASE BURNS
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Friday–Sunday
Toy Story 4
How can Pixar continue a peerless run, without turning on autopilot or trumpeting the same themes in movie after movie? The Toy Story franchise is the best example of how Pixar has avoided those pitfalls. Each is about the adventures of a gaggle of charming kids’ playthings, but as the franchise has carried on, the ideas underpinning those high jinks have gotten richer and darker. By Toy Story 3, the first Toy Story's simple message of tolerance became, in part, an exploration of accepting death. The fourth installment eases up a bit, with a much simpler theme of not being afraid to grow up. That’s the challenge facing Bonnie, the little girl who was gifted all of these toys. But with a little help from Woody, she makes a new friend: Forky, a spork with glued-on googly eyes, popsicle sticks for feet, and a pipe cleaner for arms. This strange crafts project becomes Bonnie’s new favorite plaything—which means Woody must protect and mentor this bundle of nervous energy, which only wants to return to the trash from whence it came. ROBERT HAM
Wide release
Welcome to Wakaliwood
The genius of Wakaliwood films, which are made in the slums of Kampala (the capital of the English-speaking African country Uganda), is that they cannot be improved. The way they look like they were made is exactly how they were made: with almost no money. The raw action scenes and stunts, the super-cheap CGI special effects (the kind you find on an iPhone), the poor quality of sound, the disorderly editing, the crazy mesh of English and Swahili, and the improbable plots are precisely what make these films so enjoyable. Because the poverty of the production is so proud of itself, so brazen, so lacking in shame, it directly mocks first-world production values. If, say, the special effects were upgraded, then these films would lose much of their political and comic power. Another aspect of Wakaliwood films is their benshi (a performer who provides narration) bringing the whole mess together. If the benshi does not make you laugh until it hurts, then he has not done his job. This special double-feature presentation will include Who Killed Captain Alex? and Bad Black—a masterpiece of 21st-century cinema. CHARLES MUDEDE
The Beacon
Friday–Saturday
A Woman Under the Influence
If you have not seen this film, you have not seen one of the triumphs of independent filmmaking in the history of American cinema. Released in 1974 with no support or distribution from Hollywood, the movie, directed by John Cassavetes, examines the gradual mental collapse of an ordinary American housewife, played by the divine Gena Rowlands (her husband is played by the equally divine Peter Falk). In Under the Influence, we are in the home, the heart of an American humanism (an American sensitivity) that is rarely expressed on the big screen. CHARLES MUDEDE
The Beacon
Thursday only
Yesterday
The latest from director Danny Boyle (Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire), Yesterday is about a musician, Jack, who, after a freak bus accident during a mysterious global blackout, wakes up to a world where the Beatles never existed (but Ed Sheeran—who plays himself—does?). Jack remembers the Fab Four, however, and finds rocketing fame and fortune (and a sense of dwindling creative self-worth) performing their songs as if they were his own. LEILANI POLK
Various locations
Also Playing:
Our critics don't recommend these films, but you might be interested in them anyway.
The Fall of the American Empire
