It's time to revisit festive and wintry favorites—though Seattle theaters often approach the holidays from an unorthodox angle. Our critics have chosen the best of the weekend for you here. You can choose between bona fide Christmas fare like It's a Wonderful Life or decidedly more secular options like Die Hard, and if you're sick of all things seasonal, we've got plenty of new releases and classics, like the mysterious Irma Vep and the exquisite Lady Bird, listed below. Follow the links for complete showtimes and trailers, or, if you're looking for even more options, check out our complete movie times listings, and our film events calendar.
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THURSDAY ONLY
Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the BombStanley Kubrick's farce on a thermonuclear war is bleak, funny, timely, and totally full of Peter Sellers. If your grandparents could laugh at the annihilation of the human species, you can too, right?
Living Computers Museum
Food Justice Film Festival
Food justice is for real. It involves a community mastering and localizing food production. The veggies and fruits and eggs from urban farms are healthier because they are fresh and do not contain the high levels of class struggle and stress found in mass-produced foods in supermarkets. Also, locally grown food requires much less energy to transport, and it changes a community’s relationship with what they eat. Meaning, things like leafy vegetables, tomatoes, and carrots are no longer alienated but an active part of your city. Lastly, urban gardens look cool. Solid Ground, a local social-service agency dedicated to ending urban poverty, is presenting a film festival at Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute devoted to food justice. There will be short films about sustainable food and farming gathered and curated by the Chicago-based Real Food Films. This event will be good food for your soul. CHARLES MUDEDE
Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute
Free Lunch Society
Even the most pointed documentaries occasionally need to show exactly what they’re jabbing at. The intriguingly wonky Free Lunch Society takes a distinctly favorable look at the concept of an Universal Basic Income, drawing copiously from the past—as well as a few ominous glimpses down the road—to make its case. The lack of any real opposing viewpoints, though, make it tough to dispel the aura of propaganda. Framed as a report from the distant future (complete with a vaguely Siri-sounding narrator), director Christian Tod’s film explores the idea of citizens receiving a living wage from the government, referencing examples such as the ongoing oil payments to Alaskan residents, economic experiments conducted in Namibia and Switzerland, and the White House’s scuttled attempt at redefining welfare in the 70’s. Fascinating as all the number-crunching is, however, it becomes apparent as Free Lunch Society progresses at how just firmly it stacks its chosen deck, with the voices against limited to a couple of quickly dismissed sound bites. That said, when viewed against the current backdrop of growing economic inequality and ever-more-apocalyptic tax plans, the information compiled here still makes for a pretty compelling argument, no matter how one-sided the delivery may be. ANDREW WRIGHT
Grand Illusion
Here Comes the Night: 40th Film Noir Series
As Charles Mudede says, “If you love cinema, then you must love film noir”—a category he describes as full of “spiderlike women, lots of long knives, lots of rooms with dark curtains, lots of faces of the fallen, and lots of existential twists and turns.” The last installment in this series is Roman Polanski's nihilistic Chinatown.
Seattle Art Museum
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Yorgos Lanthimos's morality play uses the myth of Iphigenia—who was sacrificed by her father to appease the gods—as a springboard, but it's the mythology of cinema that Lanthimos is intent on exploding as he uses sterile, slow, almost Kubrickian imagery to interrogate the story. What's happening onscreen isn't important. What's going on beneath the surface is. The lives of husband-and-wife doctors Steven (Colin Farrell) and Anna (Nicole Kidman) are all surfaces. Other than some doctor-patient sex play in the bedroom, the only thing that suggests anything other than tranquil domesticity is Steven’s unconventional relationship with a teenage boy, the nature of which is deliberately ambiguous at the film’s start but becomes painfully defined as it unfolds. Sacred Deer is, in the moment, an unpleasant experience. But as the director is careful to announce early on, this is not a film about what you see—it’s about what you realize hours, maybe days, after you’ve left the theater. Lanthimos gets under your skin and stays there. NED LANNAMANN
Meridian 16
The Nightmare (Der Nachtmahr)
German visual artist Akiz's The Nightmare (Der Nachtmahr) is a psychological horror film in the guise of a techno party (Atari Teenage Riot's Alec Empire composed the score). Opening inter-titles warn of extreme strobing, isochronic tones, and binaural frequencies before concluding, "Anyway...this film should be played loudly." All the better to lose yourself in the jackhammer beats blasting from clubs and cars as 17-year-old Tina (Caroline Genzkow, very good) turns to face the strange. It starts when a party pal makes a video in which she appears to morph into a freaky fetus from a science lab. Soon, Tina is hearing odd sounds and imagining disturbing scenarios. Then, the Tinabeast from the video materializes as a house guest that only she can see. Her parents call in a home security team, but they don't find anything. Her therapist recommends she talk to it, and she does, but it won't leave her alone. As the tiny monster becomes more visible, though, it also becomes more sympathetic. KATHY FENNESSY
Grand Illusion
FRIDAY
The Florida Project
The real reason The Florida Project is a breakout success, and the reason everyone should see the film, is the rowdy, previously unknown seven-year-old actor Brooklynn Prince. Moonee, played by Prince, is a mischievous tyrant who spends her days terrorizing the Orlando hotel she calls home. Like director Sean Baker’s Tangerine, the characters in The Florida Project don’t want anyone’s pity. Prostitution, drugs, arson, assault—it all goes down in the Magic Castle, the purple hotel (or project) where Moonee lives. Prince—with considerable help from her costars, Baker, and screenwriter Chris Bergoch—resonates beyond the twee and cute. At the film’s climax, Prince delivers a performance that would make even the surliest curmudgeon cry. CHASE BURNS
AMC Seattle 10
FRIDAY-SUNDAY
Die Hard / Scrooged
There was once a time when Bill Murray was the biggest star in the world and then didn’t make any movies for four years. Scrooged was his comeback, and knowing what we know now about his indie inclinations, you can see how conflicted he is about ennobling what is essentially a lavish corporate entertainment that pretends to be critical of the commercialization of Christmas while actually literally commercializing Christmas. Still, Murray is magnificent in the film, the effects are better than you’d expect, and the 1988 version of Hollywood excess is almost quaint by comparison with the CGI purgatory we live in today. Die Hard, meanwhile, is almost definitely the best, most satisfying example of purely corporate cinema that ever was, or ever will be made again. It came out the same year as Scrooged, and no one within a thousand miles of it was conflicted about a goddamn thing.
Central Cinema
It's a Wonderful Life
Shortly after It's a Wonderful Life's 1946 release, James Agee, one of the few American film critics of that era still worth reading , noted the film's grueling aspect. "Often," he wrote, "in its pile-driving emotional exuberance, it outrages, insults, or at least accosts without introduction, the cooler and more responsible parts of the mind." These aesthetic cautions are followed, however, by a telling addendum: "It is nevertheless recommended," Agee allowed, "and will be reviewed at length as soon as the paralyzing joys of the season permit." Paralyzing joys are the very heart of George Bailey's dilemma; they are, to borrow words from George's father, "deep in the race." The sacrifices George makes for being "the richest man in town" resonate bitterly even as they lead to the finale's effusive payoff. Those sacrifices are what make It's a Wonderful Life, in all its "Capraesque" glory, endure. SEAN NELSON
Grand Illusion
Snowpiercer
And so, we learn the truth. The poor people on this post-apocalypse train that’s circling a world frozen by anthropogenic climate change learn that the rich people in the first class cars eat things like sushi while they eat… cockroaches. When a leader of the rebellion against the rich sees this fact with his own eyes, sees cockroaches in a huge pot being turned into “tasty” protein bars, he almost throws up. This is just too much. This must end. This is my least favorite scene in an otherwise incredible movie by the great South Korean director Joon-ho Bong. We will eat and enjoy insects in the future. Believe that. CHARLES MUDEDE
SIFF Film Center
SATURDAY ONLY
Flesh and Blood
Since about the middle of this year, I have been looking for a film that I could pin to the age of Donald Trump with great certainty. Flesh and Blood, a low-budget indie film directed by Mark Webber has the look and feel of an America that has been devastated by Trump’s policies and mentally damaged by his idiotic Tweets. It is set in bombed-out Philadelphia neighborhood. Everyone is suffering and broke. By design or not, this film is filled with the mood of our moment. The story begins with a man leaving prison. He is white. He returns to his family (a mother and half-brother). The half-brother, Guillermo Santos, is half-brown and brainy. But the film, which is raw and gritty, is essentially about the ex-con rebuilding his life in multi-cultural neighborhood. In an Obama film, racial and cultural mixing might represent cosmopolitanism; in Flesh and Blood, it looks the place where all of the people who took the knee during the national anthem, who came from banned Muslim countries, whose birth certificates can not be verified, who lost everything Puerto Rico, who had their pussy grabbed have been dumped. CHARLES MUDEDE
West of Lenin
SATURDAY-SUNDAY
Le Gai SavoirJean-Luc Godard's experimental 1969 film interrogates language and learning through the conversation of two revolutionary activists. You will either find it earth-shaking or utterly insufferable.
Northwest Film Forum
Irma Vep
One of the leading themes of the films by the French director Olivier Assayas is celebrity: being close to it, living with it, seeing it in ordinary situations. His last film, Personal Shopper, has a real Hollywood star (Kristen Stewart) playing a personal shopper for a European movie star. Assayas’ second-to-last film, The Clouds of Sils Maria, has the same Stewart playing a personal assistant to Juliette Binoche (a real European movie star playing a European movie star). In Irma Vep, which was made just over 20 years ago, a real Hong Kong movie star, Maggie Cheung, plays a Hong Kong movie star who is hired by a French director to play the lead role in a remake of the French silent-era classic Les Vampires. Assayas never gets deep into to the magic of celebrity, but he knows that the masses are more interested in being near to its power than understanding it. CHARLES MUDEDE
Northwest Film Forum
SUNDAY ONLY
SHRIEK! Let the Right One InSHRIEK!, the film class focused on women and minorities in horror, will get bloody and chilly with a showing of the great Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In, about an age-old vampire in the body of a little girl and the adolescent boy who falls in love with her. Enjoy happy hour prices and discuss the movie.
Naked City Brewery
ALL WEEKEND
Blade Runner 2049
Director Denis Villeneuve has his work cut out for him. 2049 not only has to stay true to Ridley Scott’s circa-1982 concept of the future, but also has to deliver a future that feels plausible in 2017. The result—in large part thanks to cinematographer Roger Deakins’ jaw-dropping talent—doesn’t disappoint: 2049’s future feels safer and cleaner, lacking Blade Runner’s sensuous grime (there’s not a single cloud of cigarette smoke), but its imagery is no less striking, particularly when Villeneuve and Deakins go wide with hypnotic vistas of a decaying Earth. Even if this future is less believable and tactile than Scott’s, it gets the feel right. The worst parts of 2049 are those that lean hardest on Blade Runner, but thankfully, Villeneuve & Co. are mostly content to build and expand rather than revisit and rehash. There are moments of strange and genuine creepiness; there are jarring sights that, without a single word, evoke hundreds of years of history; there’s a desolate ache that makes the future seem both beautiful and horrible. At its best, 2049 finds LAPD officer K (Ryan Gosling) moving through a dreamlike, half-familiar dystopia—asking a few old-school Blade Runner questions about the nature of identity, and adding many more of his own. ERIK HENRIKSEN
AMC Seattle 10 & Meridian 16
The “Coco” in question is the oldest living relative of the film’s young protagonist, Miguel, but the story is driven by Miguel’s passion for becoming a musician—and the conflicted relationship he has with his family, who label music as “bad” for reasons he has yet to learn. But Miguel is tenacious when it comes to performing and after his abuelita smashes his guitar, Miguel steals the guitar of a famous ancestor. Since taking from the dead is a big no-no, Miguel crosses over into the Land of the Dead. Coco ends up being an exceedingly tender kids’ film with deep themes about mortality, ancestry, and memories—and any adult with a soul will be moved, too. JENNI MOORE
Various locations
The Disaster Artist
Even if you have never seen The Room, Tommy Wiseau’s infamous masterpiece of shocking artistic poverty, there’s plenty to recommend James Franco’s re-creation of its conception and creation. Much like Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, this film makes the case that a complete lack of talent and vision are not necessarily bars to entry for a life in show business, as long as you have an unlikely friend, and the strangest accent since Martin Short in Father of the Bride. Littered with hilarious cameos from the likes of Seth Rogen, Megan Mullally, and Bryan Cranston, The Disaster Artist is funny, sweet, and strange, with a central performance by Franco that rises to the level of either high camp or high art. SEAN NELSON
SIFF Cinema Egyptian & Meridian 16
Jane
Based on recovered footage of iconic primatologist Jane Goodall during her groundbreaking chimpanzee research in 1960s Tanzania, Jane unfolds in a traditional National Geographic documentary format: beautiful nature footage paired with reserved British voiceover (provided by Goodall herself). Anyone with a passing interest in Goodall’s writings about the social relationships of chimpanzees will be delighted by the dramatic film clips of chimps stealing bananas from her camp set to an energetic score by Philip Glass. Mixed-in moments of Goodall’s perfectly-lit beauty seem out of place with her professional reflections until the film reveals this recovered footage was shot by Hugo van Lawick, a gifted wildlife photographer and, in time, Goodall’s first husband. The authentic relatability to both these love stories—van Lawick falling for Goodall and Goodall discovering her life’s work—pushes Jane beyond the confines of a nature film into the territory of being a pretty ideal date movie. SUZETTE SMITH
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Lady Bird
Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan, never better) is a teenage girl striving to find a self she can live in while stranded in moribund, lower-middle-class Sacramento, "the Midwest of California." Her efforts begin with that name, which she bestowed upon herself—Christine was too normal—and loudly demands that everyone call her at all times. The crusade also manifests in the form of hair dye, petty crime, habitual lying, sexual experimentation with unworthy boys, and musical theater. Though Lady Bird will perform for anyone, the only audience she truly wants is her exasperated, judgmental, sharp-tongued mother, Marion (Laurie Metcalf, almost certainly the greatest living actress). It's an exquisitely observed portrait of a mother and daughter so intractably at war that they can't see how close they are until it's too late. SEAN NELSON
Various locations
Loving Vincent
We’ve already had a few fine cinematic attempts to tell the story of the brilliant yet tortured Vincent van Gogh. The one element missing was the beautiful, slightly unsettling look of Van Gogh’s groundbreaking artwork. Loving Vincent, the latest from animators Hugh Welchman and Dorota Kobiela, is the first of these biopics to get it right. That’s because the entire film is composed of actual paintings: The international production employed more than 100 artists to paint each frame of the film on canvas, copying the thick brushstrokes and brash colors of Van Gogh’s most celebrated works. The rest of Loving Vincent doesn’t hit the same heights. Kobiela and Welchman’s script is a leaden, Citizen Kane-style attempt to investigate Van Gogh’s final days in France through the efforts of Armand (Douglas Booth), a young postman’s son attempting to deliver the artist’s final letter. It’s a well-meaning way to let us cross paths with many of the villagers whom Van Gogh painted, but it’s hampered by conspiracy theories and a lumbering pace. ROBERT HAM
Meridian 16 & AMC Seattle 10
The Square
The Swedish director Ruben Ă–stlund is a rising star in European cinema. And judging from the buzz about his latest film, The Square, it is only a matter of time before he conquers the United States. At the center of the film is Christian (Claes Bang), the head curator of X-Royal, a huge and powerful modern art museum in Stockholm. One day, three con artists on a city street lure Christian into a clever trap and mug him. He loses his wallet and slick smartphone. Back at the office, and still in a state of shock from what happened to him in broad daylight, he locates his smartphone on the web. It is in a place that we in the US would call the projects. Encouraged by a friend, he decides to take matters into his own hands and does something that changes his life. Before the act, the art was just about names, money, and academic concepts concerning the human condition in a world that has no alternative to neoliberal capitalism. After the act, the art is directly about his life, clothes, car, job, relationships, and city. The art asks: Why is there so much poverty in a rich city? Why is it so easy to ignore beggars? Why is wealth so unfairly distributed? And if it were fairly distributed, would crime vanish? What kind of animal is the human? CHARLES MUDEDE
Varsity Theatre
Thelma
Much like Jordan Peele folded acidic commentary and comedy into the shocks and dread of Get Out, Joachim Trier’s fourth feature, Thelma, is a lot more than it appears: as a thriller about a young woman with kinetic abilities.Our introduction to Thelma is as a lonely university student, who, when not fielding weirdly invasive phone calls from her parents, shuffles quietly between classes and the library. As she studies one afternoon, she finds herself gazing longingly at a female classmate, Anja (Kaya Wilkins), then suffering a seizure that sends her falling to the floor and sends crows thumping into a nearby window.As the friendship and attraction between the two women deepens, Thelma reels with fantasies and increasingly dangerous seizures, not to mention an existential crisis, as she begs God to remove this desire from her heart. There’s much more to Thelma, but I hesitate to unpack it and risk ruining the film’s slow-build tension. It keeps you waiting for the dam to burst—and makes the eventual deluge all the more satisfying.
AMC Seattle 10
Thor: Ragnarok
Thor: Ragnarok is, finally, a legitimately great Thor movie—one that proves goofy comedy, goofier mythology, 1980s-tinged sci-fi and fantasy, and Led Zeppelin aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, all that stuff goes together like... whatever Norse gods eat instead of delicious sundaes! And the cherry on top is the Incredible Hulk! And a giant wolf! And Jeff Goldblum! Jeff Goldblum in space! Wow. This sundae analogy fell apart fast. I’m not great at sundae analogies, and to be fair, Ragnarok isn’t great at... ah... narrative cohesion. Some might quibble that Ragnarok is disjointed; I’d counter that its tone—exciting and quippy and sweet—is always dead on. For that, and for Ragnarok’s constant hilarity, we can thank Taika Waititi, the New Zealand director who, until now, has made slightly more low-key fare: Flight of the Conchords, What We Do in the Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Like those projects, Ragnarok is as good-hearted as it is clever; as much as its characters might smash each other across garbage planets, and as godlike and monstrous as they might be, Waititi treats them like real people. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Various locations
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
One way you know a film is written by a playwright is when everything everyone says in it is clever and wise and perfect. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, written and directed by Martin McDonagh, never fails on this score. The dialogue, particularly when given life by actors Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell, is hilarious and provocative. But the biggest indicator that you're watching the work of a playwright is the sense that there's no way the story is what the film is really about. The three billboards in Three Billboards are signifiers and catalysts, but they're also red herrings (literally red, in fact). The billboards are taken out by Mildred (McDormand) as a way to publicly shame Ebbing's police chief (Woody Harrelson) for having failed to catch the man who raped and murdered her daughter. They also keep her grief alive and present tense. McDonagh depicts graphic violence and hateful language flippantly, in a style people like to call Tarantinoesque. But McDonagh is not a shock artist, not satisfied milking the disjunction of liking the bad cop or the mean lady. He's making the case that humans are complex, that "sympathetic" is relative, and that whatever horrible things people are capable of doing to each other (and they are indeed horrible), we still have to live together when we're done. SEAN NELSON
Ark Lodge & SIFF Cinema Uptown
Wonder
When a movie comes along that is good—legitimately, sincerely good, like flowers or soup or dogs—I find myself grasping at a way to describe it. Wonder is that good movie. It’s about a little boy, Auggie (Room's Jacob Tremblay), and his mom (Julia Roberts), his dad (Owen Wilson), and his older sister (Izabela Vidovic). Auggie was born with a condition that makes him look different, so that's what Wonder focuses on—but it’s not really what this movie is. This is a portrait of a group of humans—grown-ups and kids, but mostly kids—who are whole, complicated people, who have opportunities to be selfish and opportunities to be kind. Wonder defaults to kindness in a manner that feels both totally inspiring and completely organic. ELINOR JONES
Meridian 16
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