It's another great weekend to break from whatever you're binging to make room for newly streaming films and shows, like Hans Petter's dreamy Out Stealing Horses or A Thousand Cuts, Ramona S. Diaz’s documentary about the violent administration of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. Read on for all of our top picks for this weekend streaming through local theaters and national platforms. Longing for the big(ger) screen? Check out our guide to drive-in movie theaters in the Seattle area, or check out our guide to streamable shows that received Emmy nominations.


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

New & Noteworthy: Supporting Seattle Businesses

Aren't You Happy? (Das melancholische MĂ€dchen)
Is the pressure to be happy yet another product of capitalism? As she wanders the streets of a German city, a sad lady experiences 15 encounters that reveal truths about self-marketing, serial monogamy, spirituality, disillusionment, and the compulsion to appear a certain way. This limited screening is part of Goethe Pop Up, Three Dollar Bill Cinema, Gay City, and NWFF's Queer as German Folk series.
Available via Northwest Film Forum
Friday-Sunday

Carmilla
The residents of a vast country estate (a teenage girl, her father, and a strict governess) become the unexpected caretakers of a mysterious girl (spoiler: she is a vampire) after she gets in a gnarly carriage accident. Inspired by Joseph Sheridan's 1872 gothic vampire novel Le Fanu, Emily Harris's film looks spooky. And hot!
Available via Grand Illusion
Opening Friday

Out Stealing Horses
In this scenic, flashback-filled film based on the novel by Per Petterson, an aging man reflects on his childhood summers when he discovers that his neighbor in his new countryside town—where he moves after the death of his wife—is a man he's met before. These SIFF screenings include a post-film discussion between director Hans Petter Moland and Stellan SkarsgĂ„rd.
Available via Northwest Film Forum and SIFF
Opening Friday

Qween Fest
Originally slated for the Skyway branch of the King County Library, this virtual film festival geared toward queer teens will feature screenings of Alyssa Lener's "Bubble," Kase Peña's "Full Beat," and other shorts. Be sure to stick around after each screening for discussions with the directors. 
Available via King County Libraries
Friday only

Song Without a Name
The newborn baby of Georgina, an Indigenous Andean woman, is stolen from the clinic at which it was born and is never returned. When she's met with indifference by the Peruvian legal system, Georgina goes to a journalist, who uncovers an epidemic of fake clinics and abductions in 1980s Peru. Melina Leon's thriller is based on true events.
Available via Northwest Film Forum and SIFF
Opening Friday

Sunless Shadows
Like its 2016 predecessor Starless Dreams, Mehrdad Oskouei's new film follows the lives of teenage girls in an Iranian juvenile detention center. This time, however, the characters are serving time for the same thing: the murder of a male family member. "In this film we see murder through the eyes of murderers, both mothers and daughters. I wanted to scrutinize their act of killing from various perspectives, understand their reasons and find out whether the act itself was a difficult task," writes the director.
Available via Northwest Film Forum
Opening Friday

A Thousand Cuts
"Just because you’re a journalist, you are not exempted from assassination," stated Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte in 2016. In Ramona S. Diaz’s documentary, Maria Ressa, the executive editor of the news website Rappler, literally puts her life on the line to investigate the administration's various anti-democratic injustices—most notably its violent anti-drug campaign—and to combat the misinformation that floods the news cycles.
Available via Northwest Film Forum and SIFF

Virtual Moving History XX – Analog Animals
As you'll see in this week's compilation of short films from the Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound, cute animal videos were definitely a thing pre-YouTube. One of them, "The House That Cats Built," is a cat video from 1938 (!!), filmed in Seattle.
Available via Northwest Film Forum
Sunday only

The Wild
Documentary filmmaker Mark Titus (The Breach) returns to the Alaskan wilderness, where the people of Bristol Bay and the world's largest wild salmon runs are in danger of environmental devastation from Pebble Mine, a massive copper mine slated for construction.
Available via SIFF
Opening Friday

You Never Had It. (An Evening with Charles Bukowski.)
No one can resist the intrigue of restored tapes that have been newly snatched from the lost and found, and they're all the more exciting when they feature a household name. This documentary is based on a video of the iconic writer talking about sex, books, childhood, and life over clinking glasses of booze in his California home in 1981. 
Available via Scarecrow Video

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 Netflix

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, 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 Google Play

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 PBS

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

New & Noteworthy: Nationwide

An American Pickle
The first HBO Max original is a sweet-yet-salty pseudo-sci-fi riff on Rip Van Winkle, about a Jewish man who falls into a pickle brine and wakes up a century later, perfectly preserved, and struggling to understand the ways of 2020 New York City with the help of his computer-programmer grandson. Both men are played by Seth Rogen, so I hope you enjoy that man's scratchy giggle because there's almost zero chance you're not going to hear it with two of him in the same movie.
Available via HBO Max

The Burnt Orange Heresy
Why do peaceful Italian villas make the best settings for thrillers (and family dramas, for that matter)? Continue your personal investigation of the subject with Giuseppe Capotondi’s new film about a down-on-his-luck art critic (Claes Bang) who scoops up a mysterious American (Elizabeth Debicki) as he's headed to the estate of a wealthy collector (Mick Jagger). Trust issues and gorgeous scenery abound. 
Available via Sony Pictures
Premiering Friday

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Of the multiple miracles of modern filmmaking that occur throughout the runtime of Eternal Sunshine—including such feats as “Jim Carrey underplays things,” “Kirsten Dunst isn’t annoying,” and “Michel Gondry doesn’t twee his movie to death”—the most notable? This sci-fi tragedy about a broken relationship is maybe the most poignantly romantic film of the last 25 years.
Available via Netflix

Hellraiser
The man with pins in his face is the leader of an extradimensional S&M club, essentially. There are several other details about the film, but that's the pivot point. Stephen King famously called its director, Clive Barker, "the future of horror."
Available via Hulu

Howard
Howard Ashman, the man who wrote the lyrics to songs from classic Disney movies like The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Beauty and the Beast, died of HIV/AIDS when he was just 40. Don Hahn's documentary is a celebration of the artist's life and lasting work. 
Available via Disney+

The Jurassic Park Trilogy
Before you can even get that "But you forgot abou—" off your fingertips and into a comment box somewhere: There are only three Jurassic Park movies. And those three movies are now available for you to binge back-to-back-to-back, at which point you might realize the conventional wisdom about the third one is pretty broken, and it's in fact the second-best movie in the series because it's nothing more than a quick, clean, and efficient monster movie. It knows exactly what it wants to do, and then it goes out and does it. The same can't be said for The Lost World, which is a mostly-dour, confused mash of crowd-pleasing intent and annoying, unsatisfying execution. The first is a goddamned classic, of course, and being able to call up the T-Rex scene at will is one of the blessings of the modern age.
Available via Netflix

Made in Italy
Liam Neeson and his son play (you guessed it) a father-son duo who travel to Italy to renovate and sell their countryside villa after a death in the family. The parallel real-life experiences of the actors (being related and having lost a close relative, Neeson's late wife Natasha Richardson, in 2009) should balance out the film's standard storyline. 
Available via VOD
Premiering Friday

Nailed It!
Netflix is getting scary good at the whole reality show thing, and that's probably not a good thing overall, considering how the apex of the previous reality show era led to (waves frustratedly at current White House occupant), but the good news is that Netflix's best original reality show is still Nailed It!, a charming, fizzy, lighthearted cooking competition hosted by Nicole Byer and focused on baking tragedies perpetrated by well-meaning amateur cooks. Season two of their excursion into Mexico premieres this weekend.
Available via Netflix
Premiering Friday

The Peanuts Movie
Many people didn't really give this film a shot when it came out for a couple reasons: Firstly, Peanuts is considered pretty boring and trite now (despite the fact the comics themselves are frequently kinda dark and packed with neurotic ennui), and secondly, nobody thought the squiggly, simple art-style of Charles Schulz could translate to 3D. But now that it's on Disney+, more people might discover that not only is it very faithful to those comics, it's somehow also faithful to that lo-fi, folksy feel so many people remember from those old Charlie Brown cartoons. There are a couple odd intrusions of modern-day pop-culture elbowing in, but those blips of annoyingness aside, this is probably one of the best animated Peanuts adventures ever made.
Available via Disney+
Starting Friday

The Peanut Butter Falcon
With a cast like Dakota Johnson, John Hawkes, and LaBeouf himself, you might think The Peanut Butter Falcon is another gritty indie drama. But instead, it's a family-focused adventure film about a young man with Down syndrome who runs away from his nursing home to learn at the feet of the Salt Water Redneck (Thomas Haden Church) and become a famous professional wrestler. It may not have all the guns and tats of that other Shia flick above, but it's definitely going to be a lot more heartwarming.
Available via Hulu and Amazon Prime Video

The Secret Garden
Yet another live-action crack at the classic children's fantasy tale by Frances Hodgson Burnett. It's probably not going to be bad, because considering Burnett's source material, you'd have to be Uwe Boll to screw up the story. But it is being adapted by Jack Thorne, a guy whose biggest claim to fame is writing the fascinating-and-often-baffling Harry Potter and the Cursed Child stage play. If he took Harry Potter and turned it into that, the curiosity level for what he might do to The Secret Garden is pretty high up there.
Available via VOD
Premiering Friday

The Tax Collector
People think "auteur theory" is for fancy-schmancy serious artistes like Stanley Kubrick or Francois Truffaut, but the theory applies just as strongly to people like Michael Bay and David Ayer. And Ayer's latest, The Tax Collector, just solidifies the man's "auteurship." You got yourself the requisite heavily tattooed, angry men with shaved heads, deep into some serious criminal activity, and toting large guns with loud, fiery barrels to go along with dialog that seems to be made of nothing more than profanity, nails, and childhood trauma. Oh yeah, and one of those angry men? Shia LaBeouf. It's auteurs all over this thing, baby!
Available via VOD

Time Bandits
Probably the most subversive kids' film ever made, sending the following messages simultaneously: Stealing is awesome, adults are stupid, your parents are useless, God is a musty dipshit, and there's no adventure like the kind you get into with a band of marauding, time-traveling steampunk dwarfs. If you couldn't suss it out by the description alone, this is definitely a Terry Gilliam joint.
Available via HBO Max

Waiting for the Barbarians
Director Ciro Guerra's latest film is a pretty straightforward, on-the-nose condemnation of colonization and the generational cruelty it never fails to breed, but it's the way the condemnation is made that's notable. It's essentially a stage play, albeit one set in an amazing desert set, and starring a fairly heavy-duty cast, including Oscar-winner Mark Rylance, future-Batman Robert Pattinson, and 21 Jump Street alumnus Johnny Depp.
Available via VOD
Premiering Friday

Work It
Alicia Keys produced this throwback to the early 2000s (Christ, that's about 20 years ago, ugh) when dance flicks had a minor resurgence and had a whole bunch of people who couldn't reliably count to four trying to "serve" folks in their high school cafeteria. Work It has a paper-thin story about a girl who really wants to get into college and needs to perform well at a dance competition, but paper-thin is all the story you need when everything about your movie lives and dies on a) personality and b) choreography. Tune in to see if this can join the pantheon of classics like Save the Last Dance and Step Up.
Available via Netflix

Last Chance to Stream: Films Ending This Week

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
Thursday only

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
Thursday only

Ongoing: Supporting Seattle Businesses

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

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

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

The Fight
Five civil rights attorneys fight for justice on behalf of a migrant mother separated from her child, a transgender soldier at risk of losing his career, and basic reproductive and voting rights that face threats from the Trump administration. This Kerry Washington-produced documentary will absolutely give you a new sense of appreciation for the ACLU.
Available via Northwest Film Forum and SIFF

A Girl Missing
When the nephew of a home-care nurse is arrested for kidnapping the daughter of the family she has long worked for, the woman's relationship with her employers is (understandably) threatened. 
Available via SIFF

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

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

Rebuilding Paradise
The November 2018 firestorm that devastated Paradise, California, killed 85 people, displaced 50,000 residents, and destroyed 95% of local structures, making it the worst fire in California history. Academy Award-winning director Ron Howard shows the community members who worked to rebuild the city in the aftermath. 
Available via Grand Illusion

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 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 2020 festival 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

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

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