While you're slathering aloe vera on your limbs this weekend (it's gonna be a hot one by Seattle standards), unwind with movies newly streaming online, from the new Regina Hall comedy Tijuana Jackson to the 2020 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour. We've rounded up those and more top picks from local theaters and national platforms below, along with some ongoing on-demand options and movies leaving the streams this week. Longing for the big(ger) screen? Check out our guide to drive-in movie theaters in the Seattle area.


Jump to: New & Noteworthy: Supporting Seattle Businesses | BIPOC-Focused Films | New & Noteworthy: Nationwide | Ongoing: Supporting Seattle Businesses | Last Chance to Stream: Films Ending This Week

New & Noteworthy: Supporting Seattle Businesses

Amulet
Seeking refuge in London from an ambiguous foreign conflict, an ex-soldier (played by Alec Secăreanu of God’s Own Country) finds room and board as a repairman in the decrepit estate of a mysterious young woman and her dying mother, who stays locked in a room in the attic and may or may not be possessed by an evil spirit. Romola Garai (Atonement) classifies her directorial debut as "feminist horror."
Available via Northwest Film Forum and Grand Illusion
Opening Friday

Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
There are only 18 hours left until the Roaring '20s, a dive bar off the Vegas Strip, closes for good—and its regulars hold out until the bitter end. "It's less a portrait of a long goodbye to a drinking establishment than it is an exploration of the community that calls such places home and their fellow barflies family—and what happens when you take away that collective space after the very last call," reads a Rolling Stone review. If you're not already pining to reclaim your spot at your favorite watering hole, this'll change that.
Available via SIFF
Opening Friday

Dance with No Dominion
Local all-stars David Rue, Randy Ford, Marco Farroni, and Christopher D’Ariano respond to HIV/AIDS through dance in director and dancer Chris Mason Johnson's Test, which is set in San Francisco in 1985. Also on the docket for this AMP Virtual Arts Series screening is Ian Horvath's No Dominion, the artist's final dance film before he died of the virus in 1990.
Available via Northwest Film Forum

Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful
A quick flip through a retrospective of Helmut Newton's work will reveal the legendary photographer's core subject: subversive and provocative portrayals of mostly-naked ladies, many of whom (Catherine Deneuve, Grace Jones, Charlotte Rampling, Isabella Rossellini) are famous. Gero von Boehm's documentary examines the artist's influences and features some of his home movies.
Available via SIFF
Opening Friday

HUMP! Greatest Hits - Volume 1
The HUMP! team is bringing back some fan-favorite amateur porn shorts from years past in the first of several volumes of streamable compilations.
Available via The Stranger
Saturday only

2020 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour
See six short films selected from this year's Sundance Film Festival, including Malaysian director Diffan Sina Norman's "Benevolent Ba," about a devout woman's path to sacrificial slaughter, and Ashley Williams's "Meats," about a pregnant vegan's newfangled craving for meat.
Available via Northwest Film Forum
Opening Friday

Tijuana Jackson
Regina Hall stans, unite! Romany Malco's debut feature features the Support the Girls star as the love interest of Tijuana Jackson (aka TJ, played by Malco), a man determined to move beyond his checkered past and live out his dream of becoming a world-renowned motivational speaker.
Available via Grand Illusion
Opening Friday

The Tobacconist
A man named Franz walks into a Vienna tobacco shop frequented by Sigmund Freud et voila: a historically inspired fictional friendship is born. When Franz falls for music-hall dancer Anezka, he seeks advice from the renowned psychoanalyst, who admits that he, too, is baffled by the opposite sex. This film, which is being wide-released online, is based off of Robert Seethaler's bestselling novel.
Available via Scarecrow Video

Virtual Moving History XVIII – Black Washington: Local Government & Community Activism
This installment of MiPoPs' archival video series will continue to highlight the history of Black communities in Seattle with clips from Angela Davis's 1973 lecture at UW, interviews on the establishment of SPD's East Precinct, and more.
Available via Northwest Film Forum
Sunday only

BIPOC-Focused Films

I Am Not Your Negro
Sixteen years after Lumumba, Raoul Peck, who is Haitian, has directed I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary about one of the greatest writers of 20th-century America, James Baldwin. Now, it's easy to make a great film about Baldwin, because, like Muhammad Ali, there's tons of cool footage of his public and private moments, and, also like Ali, he had a fascinating face: the odd shape of his head, the triangle of hair that defined his forehead, and his froggy eyes. Just show him doing his thing and your film will do just fine. But Peck blended footage of Baldwin with dusky and dreamy images of contemporary America. These images say: Ain't a damn thing changed from the days of Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement. But they say this with a very deep insight about the nature of time. CHARLES MUDEDE
Available via Grand Illusion and Ark Lodge

Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things
From her 1934 performance at the Apollo Theatre when she was just 15 years old to her late career, Leslie Woodhead's documentary celebrates the life of the iconic jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald through rare interviews and images.
Available via SIFF

John Lewis: Good Trouble
The late civil rights activist and Georgia congressman John Lewis fought for voting rights, gun control, healthcare reform, and immigration over the course of his long career. Using archival footage and interviews from his late years, Dawn Porter's documentary Good Trouble explores Lewis's childhood, his 1957 meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., and his lasting legacy on social justice movements of the present.
Available via Ark Lodge, Northwest Film Forum, SIFF, and elsewhere

Keepers of the Dream: Seattle Women Black Panthers
Following its Oakland progenitors, Seattle was one of the first cities to form a branch of the Black Panther Party. Scored by SassyBlack, this series of five short documentaries, produced by Patricia Boiko and Tajuan LaBee, serves as an introduction to the courageous actions of women Black Panther activists, from Frances Dixon to Phyllis Noble Mobley.
Available via Seattle Channel

Miss Juneteenth
Channing Godfrey Peoples's debut feature centers around the fictional Miss Juneteenth pageant, an annual competition that awards the winner a scholarship to a historically black college or university of her choice. In a twist on the standard rivalries that drive the pageant genre (think Miss Congeniality and Drop Dead Gorgeous), the longtime winner in this case, Turquoise Jones, sees who she deems a more worthy winner in her daughter, Kai. "Instead of just depicting the myriad ways black women carry their communities, the movie goes further to explore how these women and black girls support each other in a world that often fails them," wrote Lovia Gyarkye for the New York Times.
Available via Northwest Film Forum

Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am
The rise of the prolific Nobel-winning author Toni Morrison dishes on her life busting up the white male literary hegemony in Timothy Greenfield-Sanders's documentary, with appearances by Hilton Als, Oprah Winfrey, Russell Banks, and Angela Davis, among others. BOBBY ROBERTS
Available via Ark Lodge and PBS

Whose Streets?
Most of us remember scrolling through news about the Ferguson protests on Twitter in 2014, but Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis’ directorial debut Whose Streets? fills in the blanks of the story, offering a humanizing, much-needed portrait of those involved. Dedicated to Michael Brown, the film captures the aftermath of the shooting of the unarmed 18-year-old—by a white police officer, while the Black young man had his hands in the air—using unflinching interviews with the still-grieving Ferguson residents who’ve seen their community unify against police brutality. JENNI MOORE
Available via Northwest Film Forum and Ark Lodge

See also: Our resistance roundup for more anti-racism resources.

New & Noteworthy: Nationwide

The Assistant
Kitty Green's The Assistant works quietly in its condemnation of abusive men in power. There's no passionate monologue about how a system enables a predator like Harvey Weinstein to comfortably exploit women, nor any cathartic scenes of abusers getting their comeuppance. Rather, the film focuses on the minutiae of office operations and existence, centering the person least in power—a female assistant—as a means of exploring exactly how abusers are enabled by everyone around them. While The Assistant is pretty self-contained, it’s perhaps one of the first films in this #MeToo-era to grapple with the people (men and women alike) and corporate structures that allow for abusers to flourish. They didn't arrive into their respective scenes that way, rather, a misogynistic culture that mandated we "look the other way" helped to normalize their behavior. Green did well to focus on the small actions of an assistant like Jane—the devil is in the details, after all. JASMYNE KEIMIG
Available via Hulu

The Dog House
Billing itself as a "dating show" for dogs and their owners, this show matches people with their ideal pup from a rescue shelter and follows them as they hang out in a grassy play area. It's also set in the UK, so you've got the charming British accent factor, too. What more do you need to know? 
Available via HBO Max

Harriet
Aside from the assistance that the formerly enslaved Harriet Tubman got from the Underground Railroad­, it’s hard to imagine exactly how she pulled off all her heroics. With Harriet, audiences are given a live-action reimagining of Harriet Tubman’s journey to self-liberation: changing her name, hiding in bales of hay, being chased by dogs, and getting cornered by armed men on a bridge before jumping into the river. Harriet shows how Tubman (Cynthia Erivo) got help from a secret network of safe houses and trusted free Blacks (Leslie Odom Jr. and Janelle Monáe) who stuck their necks out to help her cause. Harriet doesn’t subject the sensitive viewer to excessive gore or violence (though there is one particularly unsettling scene), because for once, this is a story in the “slave movie” genre about tremendous triumph, leadership, and Tubman’s unwavering faith, both in God and herself. JENNI MOORE
Available via HBO Max

The Ip Man Quadrilogy
Another binge-watch option for appreciators of pure athleticism is Donnie Yen's increasingly-ridiculous Ip Man series, which started as a respectful and stirring action-drama about the life of the man who trained Bruce Lee, and very quickly became a whirling hurricane of pain and propaganda on a scale that makes Looney Tunes seem subtle. But who needs subtle when you've got about 10 hours of Donnie Yen just dealing unfathomable amounts of human carnage out like a Vegas dealer with a shoe full of blackjacks? With the addition of Ip Man 4 earlier this month, the series is now complete on Netflix.
Available via Netflix

The Last Dance
The 10-part documentary/hagiography of Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls during their two-part reign over the 1990s was instrumental in many people maintaining some semblance of sanity in the early days of the Coronavirus pandemic. And now the whole thing is available on Netflix in one big bingeable gulp, so if you didn't see it (or steal it) then, you can finally catch up now. Maybe it'll play a little differently all in one go, without the Greek chorus of social media literally meme-ing every aspect of it as it aired. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Either way, it's a great opportunity to get some of the best basketball ever played back on a screen in 2020.
Available via Netflix

Radioactive
Taking inspiration from the graphic novel by Lauren Redniss, Marjane Satrapi examines the life of the renowned, two-time Nobel Prize-winning French-Polish physicist Marie Curie (played by Rosamund Pike) through her radioactive journals, which are stored in lead-lined boxes in the BibliothÚque Nationale de France. 
Available via Amazon Prime

The Rental
Dave Franco (the better Franco) makes his directorial debut with this new-to-VOD horror flick, co-written with Joe Swanberg, about a pair of couples vacationing at an AirBNB on the Oregon Coast. The couples are not modeling the healthiest of relationships, and whatever fractures there were are going to be forced wide open once the film's resident homicidal stalker gets thrown into the mix.
Available via VOD

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: Table Read
Ten years ago, Edgar Wright adapted a graphic novel by Bryan Lee O'Malley called Scott Pilgrim, about a 20-something dickhead who gains a teensy-bit of self-awareness through a series of video-game-inspired fights with the evil exes of (one of his) current girlfriend (s). It flopped. Which is weird, because the film is frankly amazing, is still ahead of its time even 10 years later, and that cast? Imagine getting Chris Evans, Brie Larson, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Aubrey Plaza, Alison Pill, Jason Schwartzman, Anna Kendrick, Brandon Routh, Ellen Wong, (and those other two, Egg and the weird kid from Arrested Development) for the song Universal paid to get this movie made. Speaking of that cast: Now you can watch (most of) them reunite over Zoom, along with Edgar Wright, for a table read of the script to benefit the Water for People organization.
Available via YouTube

Spotlight
Michael Keaton, Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, and Brian d'Arcy James play the Boston Globe's "spotlight" team of investigative journalists who were tasked with looking into child molestation charges leveled at Boston's beloved Catholic Archdiocese. Translating a highly detailed true story to film could sound like a staged reading of a Wikipedia page, or worse, trivialize the victims' experiences—and Spotlight walks dangerously close to this precipice. However, other than a few hammy moments, this film somehow manages to pull it off.
Available via Netflix

Yes, God, Yes
Forgoing the cartoonish (albeit entertaining) tropes of teen sex comedies in place of a more believable narrative, Karen Maine's feature-length directorial debut (she also directed the short film Obvious Child, which inspired the 2014 Jenny Slate feature) follows a Midwestern Catholic teen (Stranger Things' Natalia Dyer) as she grapples with her newfound sexuality.
Available via VOD
Premiering Friday

100 Years of Olympic Films: 1912–2012
In acknowledgment of the 2020 Olympics, which would have kicked off in Tokyo this week, the Criterion Collection is streaming its monumental collection 100 Years of Olympic Films on their streaming platform, the Criterion Channel. The collection includes 53 films and covers 41 editions of the Olympic Games, from Stockholm in 1912 to London in 2012. Need help deciding what to watch? Every week, The Stranger's Chase Burns writes about key films and moments from the collection. 
Available via Criterion Channel

Ongoing: Supporting Seattle Businesses

Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly
Chinese contemporary artist Ai Weiwei, who's known for his bold public criticisms of the Chinese government's stance on democracy and human rights, was a force behind the portrait exhibition @Large, which depicted images of prisoners from all over the world—from Nelson Mandela to Chelsea Manning—on the exterior of Alcatraz Island, and also featured an inmate letter-writing project. This documentary explores the exhibition's process from start to finish.
Available via Northwest Film Forum

All I Can Say
Blind Melon frontman Shannon Hoon recorded himself on his Hi8 video camera for the better half of the '90s, all the way up to the hours preceding his death at the age of 28. The hundreds of hours of footage show everything from his creative process to the birth of his daughter to his struggles with addiction to the rising power of the internet. This film, released in 2019, compiles key moments of that footage into a video diary.
Available via Scarecrow Video and Northwest Film Forum

Americana Kamikaze
NYC's interdisciplinary performance group Temporary Distortion blends theater, film, and installation to freakily contort Japanese ghost stories and horror (aka J-Horror) through an American musical tradition. In a 2009 New York Times review of the play, Jon Weiss wrote, "Hard-core horror fans should take notice, because with Hollywood’s rarely risking something truly upsetting anymore, preferring funny zombies and by-the-numbers remakes, you might have to go to the theater to see death performed live to really test your limits."
Available via On the Boards

CĂ©sar and Rosalie
In Claude Sautet's classic romantic drama César et Rosalie, two men (the wealthy César and David, an old flame) battle for the affections of a beautiful, recently divorced lady (played by Isabelle Huppert in her first film role). 
Available via Ark Lodge

Fantastic Fungi
At its worst, Fantastic Fungi gets too woo-woo wacky for its own good (when the film’s discussion turns to magic mushrooms, the visuals turn into what is, as far as I can tell, a psychedelic screensaver from Windows 95), but at its best, the doc pairs fantastic time-lapse imagery with a good dose of actual, mind-blowing science. Affable, passionate mushroom researcher Paul Stamets is joined by talking heads Michael Pollan, Andrew Weil, and narrator Brie Larson to examine everything from massive fungal networks that carry signals between disparate, distant plants to the psychological benefits of psilocybin. It’s an uneven trip, but a good one. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Available via Ark Lodge

Guest of Honor
A father (David Thewlis) and daughter (Laysla De Oliveira) unravel their intertwined secrets in this 2019 time-weaving thriller from director Atom Egoyan (The Sweet Hereafter). Luke Wilson plays a priest who kind of solves everything for everyone. Way to go, Luke!
Available via Grand Illusion

Her Effortless Brilliance: A Celebration of Lynn Shelton Through Film and Music
Acclaimed Seattle director Lynn Shelton died too soon, and the grief felt by her fans, collaborators, and loved ones comes through in this documentary by Shelton's longtime friend Megan Griffiths. It's free to watch on YouTube and features a star-studded lineup of appearances, including Emily Blunt, Kaitlyn Dever, Rosemarie DeWitt, Mark and Jay Duplass, Jeff Garlin, Joshua Leonard, Sean Nelson, Michaela Watkins, and Reese Witherspoon, as well as live music from her partner Marc Maron, Andrew Bird, Ben Gibbard, Laura Veirs, and Tomo Nakayama.
Available via YouTube

The Infiltrators
In this docu-thriller, two young immigrants purposely get themselves thrown into a shady for-profit detention center to dismantle the corrupt organization from the inside. Their detainers don't know that they're members of the National Immigrant Youth Alliance, a group of radical DREAMers who are on a mission to stop unjust deportations.
Available via Northwest Film Forum

My Darling Vivian
Johnny Cash's first wife, Vivian Liberto (for whom the country singer wrote his famous song I Walk the Line), has long been obscured in stories of Cash's life (see: 2005's Walk the Line, in which she's played briefly by Ginnifer Goodwin). Matt Riddlehoover's documentary, featuring interviews with Cash's children and archival footage of Liberto, reframes her narrative. 
Available via Scarecrow Video

Now I'm Fine
Sean Nelson wrote, "Ahamefule J. Oluo, of Stranger Genius Award winning band Industrial Revelation, remounts his autobiographical odyssey, a harrowing, hilarious personal story punctuated by astoundingly strong songs, brilliantly arranged and performed by several of the most talented musicians in Seattle." Originally staged at On the Boards, Now I'm Fine received rave reviews during its recent New York run, and will now be screened online. 
Available via On the Boards

Police Beat
Police Beat, a fictional film I made with the director Robinson Devor (we also made Zoo), is also a documentary about a Seattle that's recovering from the dot-com crash of 2000 (a crash that sent Amazon's shares falling from nearly $100 apiece to $6—they're now around $2,400), and entering its first construction boom of the 21st century (between 2005 and 2008). The hero of my film, the police officer Z (played by the beautiful but sadly late Pape Sidy Niang), could actually afford a little Seattle house on his salary (around $45,000). The median price of houses in 2003 was a lot (about $300,000) but not out of reach for a middle-class immigrant with a stable job. Lastly, the film is a documentary about Seattle's beautiful and virid parks. How I love them all and wanted to film them all: Volunteer Park, Freeway Park, the Washington Park, Madison Park, the parks on either side of the Montlake Cut. So green, so urban, so natural. CHARLES MUDEDE
Available via The Stranger

Runner
When he was just eight years old, Guor Mading Maker (later known as Guor Marial) fled war-torn Sudan to seek safety in the US, where he went from running track in high school to qualifying for the 2012 Olympics. As a means of taking ownership over his new life and condemning the acts of violence in his birth country, he refused to represent Sudan and instead ran independently. This documentary depicts the athlete's journey, including a reunion with his parents after a 20-year separation.
Available via SIFF

Skate Kitchen
If Crystal Moselle's new HBO series Betty has you hungry for more scenes of womxn landing tricks on their skateboards and displaying acts of friendship in its purest form, you should watch its 2018 feature-length predecessor Skate Kitchen, which has all the same actors playing the same characters. It centers on Camille (Rachelle Vinberg), an introverted skater from Long Island who falls for the mysterious Devon (Jaden Smith) just as she's falling out with her mom and making friends with a new group of gals rightly hellbent on reclaiming kickflips from the boys who overcrowd the NYC skate scene.
Available via Northwest Film Forum

SPLIFF 2019 & 2020
A new vibe of stoner entertainment is emerging—witness the rise of Broad City, High Maintenance, and basically every TV show created on Viceland. And, most importantly, The Stranger presents SPLIFF, your new favorite film festival created by the stoned for the stoned. Because we can no longer congregate in person, we're rescreening the 2019 and 2020 festivals (the latter of which is hosted by Betty Wetter and Cookie Couture) online! Got some weed on hand? Check it out from the comfort of your home. All contributions received will be shared with the filmmakers.
Available via The Stranger

Tangerine
Good movies can sometimes give off a hum—a feeling that the energy and chemistry on screen can't be constrained by the edges of the frame. Tangerine fits this description and then some, creating a kinetic rush with enough spillover juice to light up LA for a year. While chock-full of innovations both welcome (a story about transgender characters, played by transgender performers) and potentially eye-strainingly worrisome (the movie was shot entirely on tricked-out, stabilized iPhones), the main takeaway is just how alive it seems. ANDREW WRIGHT
Available via Northwest Film Forum

Widow of Silence
Deep within the powder keg of Kashmir, a beleaguered Muslim “half-widow” repeatedly makes the hazardous trek to the nearest government center to try to claim the death certificate of her long-missing husband. Her attempts to move on, however, are stymied by a society where, to quote one of the wormier bureaucrats, it’s the “responsibility of the people to keep their government happy.” Writer/director Praveen Morchhale’s film isn’t exactly subtle about its message, beginning with the image of an elderly woman literally tied to a chair. Thankfully, though, much of the thematic heavy-handedness is leavened by an expert use of framing, Shilpi Marwaha’s clear-eyed lead performance, and a final moment of irony that’s keen enough to shave with. ANDREW WRIGHT
Available via SIFF

Last Chance to Stream: Films Ending This Week

The Audition
Nina Hoss plays a tightly wound high school violin teacher on the verge of a nervous breakdown in this 2019 feature from German director Ina Weisse. 
Available via SIFF
Thursday only

And the Birds Rained Down
In Louise Archambault's melancholy film, which won the Dragon Award at the 2020 Göteborg Film Festival, three hermits living in remote cabins in the Quebec countryside have their way of life upended by forest fires.
Available via SIFF
Thursday only

Ex Machina
This is the near future. A sleek black helicopter flies toward a place that looks like the Arctic. Miles upon miles of hills and fields are covered in ice and snow. There is only one passenger in the helicopter; he is a young employee, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson, who in this film looks like a young Bill Gates, and with good reason), of a huge internet corporation that's very much like Facebook. It is, in fact, called Bluebook (a name based on a book of lectures delivered by the early-20th-century philosopher and logician Ludwig Wittgenstein). In a competition, Caleb has won the honor of meeting his boss, Nathan (rising star Oscar Isaac), a man who has amassed the kind of fortune that can buy the whole Arctic and who has plans for his employee. Caleb soon learns that his boss is developing a robot, Ava (Alicia Vikander), with the power of self-awareness. But the trillionaire wants to be certain about his creation (which is top secret and the next big thing that will change human history and make him yet another trillion bucks). He wants proof that it is as self-aware as a human. It is Caleb's job to determine the extent, depth, and realness of the robot's self-awareness. He begins performing tests on the beautiful Ava, which unlike the beautiful Rachael in Blade Runner is aware that it is a robot, created by a human. I very much doubt that the year will produce a better sci-fi film than Ex Machina. It has a solid plot with a pace that is not slow but not at all fast. Every word matters in this film: Not a look, movement, or sequence is wasted by first-time director Alex Garland. And it all leads to an impressive conclusion that's not so much about the future but about what it really takes to stage a revolt against your masters. The break (or, to use the language of Foucault, the rupture) has to be brutal and total. For the effective beginning of a new world, nothing of the past must be preserved. CHARLES MUDEDE
Available via Netflix
Thursday-Saturday

Her
Theodore Twombly (a mustachioed Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with his AI, "Samantha" (Scarlett Johansson), in this Spike Jonze hit, which won an Oscar for best original screenplay in 2013. 
Available via Netflix
Thursday-Tuesday

House of Hummingbird
Fourteen-year-old Eunhee has little comfort in life, whether at middle school (actual teacher quote: “We die every day”), with her tense family, or among fickle friends and crushes. She finds unexpected solace when she gets a new Chinese tutor: Youngji, a gentle, independent woman who recognizes Eunhee’s acute loneliness and confusion. Bora Kim’s debut film, set in the outskirts of 1990s Seoul, explores the teenager’s relationships rather than following a single narrative. Though we focus on Eunhee, played by an incredibly natural Ji-hu Park, every character seems to be hiding an inner universe, and we’re soon invested in the friendships, loves, and heartbreaks of this parochial world. JOULE ZELMAN
Available via SIFF
Thursday only

One Day in the Life of Noah Piugattuk
Zacharias Kunuk (The Fast Runner, Searchers) directs this comedy of errors about Inuit settler Noah Piugattuk and his band of nomadic hunters, who are pressured to abandon their traditional way of life in place of settlement housing by a white government emissary they meet on the sea ice.
Available via SIFF
Thursday only

Tito
There's something so singular about the pacing and acting style of Canadian actor Grace Glowick's directorial debut Tito. The protagonist is like a more paranoid Edward Scissorhands without scissors for hands. He makes friends with a cheery dude who doesn't mind that Tito is scared to leave the house for fear of being hunted by elusive predators that he claims prowl the streets. We can't tell if it's a heartwarming friendship movie or a reflection on the terror of moving through the world, but you should see it either way.
Available via Grand Illusion and Scarecrow Video
Thursday only

We Are Little Zombies
Described by Vulture's Emily Yoshida as a "rainbow-colored, RPG-inspired scream into the abyss," Makoto Nagahisa's We Are Little Zombies follows four teenage orphans who, after watching their parents' bodies turn to dust ("like fine Parmesan atop a plate of spaghetti Bolognese," as Grand Illusion aptly put it), decide they must start a cyber-punk band and conquer the world.
Available via Grand Illusion
Thursday only