If you're heading to a movie theater this weekend, Wes Anderson's beautifully detailed stop-motion fantasy Isle of Dogs, the devastating new Tunisian drama Beauty and the Dogs, and a Buster Keaton mini-fest are just some of the worthy alternatives to the disappointing Ready Player One. Find all of our film critics' picks for this weekend below, follow the links to see complete showtimes, tickets, and trailers, and, if you're looking for even more options, check out our complete movie times listings or our film events calendar.

Note: Movies play from Thursday to Sunday unless otherwise noted.

Stay in the know! Get all this and more on the free Stranger Things To Do mobile app (available for iOS and Android), or delivered to your inbox.

After Louie
Director Vincent Gagliostro draws from his past as an ACT UP activist for this occasionally didactic, if consistently engaging debut about one man's survivor's guilt over emerging unscathed from the AIDS crisis. Sam (Alan Cumming) is a middle-aged man who is all about the work. In this case, he's a visual artist toiling away on a film about a friend felled by AIDS, which entails replaying 20-year-old home videos, waxing nostalgic for the heady days of ACT UP, and failing to engage with the present. That starts to change when he meets Braeden (Zachary Booth from Keep the Lights On), a pretty twentysomething in an open relationship. Sam assumes he's a sex worker and treats him accordingly. Braeden could use the money, so he takes it, but he's genuinely interested in Sam. He also challenges biases and prejudices around heteronormativity and feminization that Sam has never fully acknowledged. As an actor, Booth can't quite keep up with Cumming, but Braeden is likable in ways that the cynical Sam is not, so it evens out in the end. If Sam can be exasperating, he stands for every embittered activist who irritates everyone around them, but who really and truly helped to make the world a better place. KATHY FENNESSY
Northwest Film Forum
Thursday only

Alfred Hitchcock's Britain: The Man Who Knew Too Much
Sure, with the exception of the modestly budgeted, black-and-white Psycho, Hitchcock is known for his lavishly Freudian Technicolor thrillers from the ‘50s and ‘60s. But the films he made in his native Britain are just as worthy of note—taut, intricate, their perversity more elaborately disguised. This week is the surprisingly grim spy drama Sabotage with the great Sylvia Sidney.
Seattle Art Museum
Thursday only

Annihilation
Annihilation could squeeze into just about any label you give it: a horror film; a science-fiction flick that toys with the possibility of extraterrestrial life; a wilderness adventure; a romantically yearning character study; a chilling, painfully suspenseful mystery; a “message” film about either the environment or male toxicity, depending on where you feel like directing your anger; an abstract, allegorical art piece with long stretches of dialogue-free visuals. The most accurate label is probably just to call it an Alex Garland film. After his stunning 2015 directorial debut (Ex Machina) and now the gorgeous, terrifying, and spellbinding Annihilation, we’re starting to get a sense of what that is. These are films that use the tools of genre—science fiction and horror, predominantly—to explore the liminal space between what is human and what isn’t. Annihilation is the best kind of cinematic experience, one that floods the senses without battering them into submission, and one that moves the mind and heart without manipulating them. It’s a staggering thing to witness. NED LANNAMANN
Various locations

Back to Burgundy
The French import Back to Burgundy is a big, rather shameless slice of Oscar bait that also sports some interesting ideas about depicting sense memories. The story follows an Australian-based winemaker (Pio Marmaï) who returns to the family vineyard in France after a decade of estrangement. Faced with a whopping inheritance tax, he and his siblings (Ana Girardot and François Civil) must decide whether to sell off the most valuable plots or fully commit to the day-to-day operations. Watching people work can be an underrated virtue in the movies, and director Cédric Klapisch brings an absorbing, tactile feel—grape stomping has rarely looked this ravishing—to the various nuts and bolts of the profession. Unfortunately, the increasing moments of downtime prove to be rather less engaging, trafficking in well-worn plot devices. Still, what ultimately lifts Back to Burgundy out of the genial crowd-pleasing doldrums is in how it handles its flashbacks, drifting between present day triggers and past events in novel, disarmingly fluid ways, sometimes within the very same shot. ANDREW WRIGHT
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Thursday only

Beauty and the Dogs
This is the first outstanding film I have seen in 2018. It's set in Tunisia, has nine chapters (each composed of one take), happens over one night, and concerns the rape of a young woman, a university student named Mariam (Mariam Al Ferjani). Actually, the film is not so much about the rape as it is about Mariam's dogged effort to report it and make it official. Everything is against her. She first goes to a hospital to obtain evidence of the rape. But to do this, to examine her, the doctor needs a report from the police. But her ability to obtain such a report is complicated by the fact that the rapists are police officers. The men and women who work at the police station do everything they can to discourage her from reporting the crime. Mariam is not ostensibly a rebel or a feminist. She is often frightened, is in a state of shock, and is sometimes wanting to give up and submit to the powers that be. But if she does submit, then the crime, the rape, is isolated. She will have to deal with it on her own. CHARLES MUDEDE
SIFF Film Center
Friday–Sunday

Black Panther
Because I do not want to spoil the experience of this movie, I will not describe the path of the film's plot to its core problem, which concerns the unification of black Africa with black America. Out of a comic book, director Ryan Coogler crafted an important concept about how, from the unification, a post-pan-Africanist global Africanism can emerge. It comes down to this: black Africans and black Americans have to admit their respective failings. (My feeling is that Coogler is much harder on black Americans than black Africans.) As a whole, Black Panther is lots of fun and will excite a lot of discussion and strong opinions. But the most revolutionary thing about Black Panther is its city. The capital of Wakanda has skyscrapers, a monorail, sidewalks of grass, green buildings, farmers markets, and no cars. The whole idea of private transportation is foreign to this fictional society. If this black African capital has anything to share with the world, it's its city planning. CHARLES MUDEDE
Various locations

Buster Keaton: Four Features
Sean Nelson: "Yeah, yeah… Buster Keaton, classic silent cinema, blah blah blah. But guess what! Buster Keaton's work holds up better than ANY of the so-called classic screen comedians—Chaplin, Lloyd, the Marx Brothers (all of whom I'd take a bullet for)." If you'll be seeing his movies for the first time, count yourself lucky that your maiden experience will be on Grand Illusion's big screen (and in Grand Illusion's plush chairs). The movies are The General, often regarded as one of the best films ever, about a plucky but unfortunate Southern railroad engineer in the Civil War; Steamboat Bill, Jr., in which Keaton plays a Boston college boy forced to return to Mississippi to take over the family paddleboat business; The Three Ages, a parody of the grandiloquence of D.W. Griffith's Intolerance; and College, a satire on the freshman life and college athletics.
Grand Illusion
Friday–Sunday

Call Me by Your Name
Recently, The Stranger published a review of this film by noted heterosexual Sean Nelson, who couldn’t seem to shake his impression that Armie Hammer had never been near another man’s penis in his life. That may be, but focusing on that fact is beside the point, because the film holds out the possibility that these two characters (whom we also see having sex with women) are simply, inexplicably attracted to each other, “identity” be damned. Maybe they’re even straight, and it was just a charge in the air, a tension that had to be resolved, a mystery. This movie is a masterpiece and you should see it before Timothée Chalamet wins his Oscar. CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE
Varsity Theatre & Meridian 16
Thursday only

Campout Cinema: Dark City
Alex Proyas has a reputation for making really great bad films. He directed the marvelously awful The Crow (the film that killed Bruce Lee’s son, Brandon Lee), the polished but nonsensical sci-fi thriller I, Robot, and the magnificently messy Dark City, a 1998 film that will never get old. Bad rarely gets better than Dark City, which is also a sophisticated work of urban theory. The city in the movie is weirdly alive and constantly changing. The hero keeps waking up in new surroundings. Bad, bald, pale men rule this very strange world. CHARLES MUDEDE
MoPOP
Friday only

The Death of Stalin
From Armando Iannucci, the creator of Veep, and more importantly, the vastly superior British politics TV series The Thick of It (and the film it inspired, In the Loop) comes a film, The Death of Stalin, that recognizes that farce, not tragedy, is the operative mode of true fascism. At least in retrospect. This is one of the grimmest, most harrowing films to ever make you double over with laughter. The heavyweight cast includes Steve Buscemi (as Khruschev), Michael Palin (as Molotov), and Jeffrey Tambor (as Malenkov), all of whom prostrate themselves to appear devoted to the regime while frantically tap dancing for their own survival—and eventual seizing of power. They are abetted in their machinations by UK eminences like Andrea Riseborough, Paddy Considine, Simon Russell Beale, and Roger Ashton-Griffiths. There’s no missing the present day resonances in the depictions of a regime that is both totally corrupt and plainly mediocre, but Iannucci is keen to remind you that the distance between even a toad like Trump and Stalin—who ordered the actual murder of approximately 60 million of his own comrade countrymen—is important to remember. But if the best thing you can say about a leader is that he isn’t exactly Josef Stalin, well… This film’s grave, absurd, brilliant, and brutal historical context has a way of making the future look, if not hopeful, then at least familiar. SEAN NELSON
SIFF Cinema Egyptian & AMC Seattle 10

Ernest et Celestine
Celestine and Ernest live in a wispily painted watercolor world that manages to be squealingly adorable but sharp. Underground, the sophisticated mouse society where Celestine lives is founded on two principles: that gnawing has been their greatest survival skill, so being a dentist is their highest calling, and that bears are big and bad and will kill you. Celestine is an artist who doesn't think bears can possibly be that bad. Ernest & Celestine is a French animated animal allegory about mob injustice, about being on trial for who someone thinks you are rather than what you've done. It's sort of about a mouse, a bear, and Trayvon Martin. JEN GRAVES
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Saturday only

Flower
Flower announces its outrageousness in its very first scene, which finds rebellious teen Erica (Zoey Deutch) giving a cop a blowjob at a scenic overlook of the San Fernando Valley. When he refuses to pay her in full, Erica’s best friends (Maya Eshet and Dylan Gelula) storm his cruiser, filming the compromising situation with their phones while Erica explains, “We’re not taking you to court—we’re just taking your money." The girls consider themselves rebels with a cause, delivering vigilante justice and profiting off the unsuspecting creeps in their suburban hamlet—at least when they’re not chugging Slurpees, playing arcade games, and ogling “hot old guy” Will (Adam Scott) at the local bowling alley. Director Max Winkler (spawn of the Fonz!) co-wrote Flower’s script with Alex McAulay and Matt Spicer, the man behind last year’s Ingrid Goes West. For Flower, it seems like the trio sourced inspiration from the whip-smart dialogue of Juno, the maximalist dude-bro humor of Superbad, and feminist rhetoric they clearly do not understand. Still, I’ll admit I laughed myself hoarse and even shed some tears. That’s all thanks to Deutch—she’s like a rainbow, and without her, I doubt director Winkler could’ve pulled off the film’s chameleonic transformation from dark comedy to neo-noir to road movie to millennial romance. CIARA DOLAN
Meridian 16 & AMC Seattle 10

Game Night
On the upside: Sharon Horgan has a small part in a halfway decent, big-budget Hollywood comedy! And so does Lamorne Morris! And hey, there’s Kylie Bunbury! They’re part of an overachieving supporting cast that makes the perfunctory Game Night a much better movie than it should have been. The comedy-movie genre is probably in its worst shape ever, so when Game Night achieves the bare minimum—making you laugh—it’s downright refreshing. The plot, not that it matters, involves Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams and a group of friends trying to solve a puzzle mystery that may or may not include Bulgarian gangsters, Fabergé eggs, and the kidnapping of Bateman’s brother (Kyle Chandler). Is it all a game? Is any of it real? I 100 percent guaran-fucking-tee you will not care. Look—Game Night isn’t worth a lot of deep thought, and it’s not going to provoke any type of cultural conversation. But it’s got some laughs, and that feels like a lot right now. NED LANNAMANN
Various locations

Howl's Moving Castle
My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke—when it comes to animation gods, there’s Hayao Miyazaki, and then there’s everybody else. Although reportedly considering retirement after completing the Oscar-winning Spirited Away, Miyazaki was apparently intrigued enough by the prospect of adapting a novel by children’s author Diana Wynne Jones to return to the drawing board. ANDREW WRIGHT
Central Cinema
Friday–Sunday

Isle of Dogs
Wes Anderson’s second foray into stop-motion animation—following 2009’s unassailably wonderful Fantastic Mr. Fox—is full of delectable visual treats. This time, the director’s grade-school diorama aesthetic floods your ocular circuits with a retro-futuristic version of Japan, where all the dogs of Megasaki City have been exiled to Trash Island following an outbreak of snout fever. Isle of Dogs is leaps and bounds more advanced than Fantastic Mr. Fox—the deliberate herky-jerkiness of that film has vanished, replaced by a refined style of stop-motion that’s breathtaking in its elegance, even as it depicts Trash Island’s mountains of maggoty, flea-ridden refuse. But Anderson’s depiction of Japanese humans in Isle of Dogs leaves something to be desired. In what initially seems like a clever tactic, the dogs all speak English while humans communicate in un-translated Japanese. While this pulls us inside the dogs’ world, it flattens the depiction of the Japanese characters. Anderson—and the audience—remain Western outsiders looking in. But all in all, Isle of Dogs is worth recommending. NED LANNAMANN
SIFF Cinema Uptown

Leaning Into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy
Leaning into the Wind is the second documentary film—following River and Tide—about artist and environmentalist Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy is famously known for his temporal and site-specific installations made from natural materials. I will admit that a documentary is a hard sell; but a documentary about art? That’s even harder. But Goldsworthy’s work belongs on film the same way Planet Earth belongs in an IMAX theatre. Everything about this, from the opening credits to the final 10 minutes, is captivating. The scenery and sculptures are beautifully shot and every inch is scored with killer audio. LEAH ST. LAWRENCE
Northwest Film Forum
Thursday–Friday

The Leisure Seeker
The Leisure Seeker was always going to be a hard sell. Italian director Paolo Virzì’s movie isn’t overly precious about the realities of aging, so there’s a lot of gross old people stuff that I can’t imagine anyone is overly fond of. And both of its lead characters—Ella (Helen Mirren), a preening, slightly dotty Southern belle, and John (Donald Sutherland), a Hemingway-obsessed English teacher in the late stages of Alzheimer’s—initially come across as grating. To be fair, that’s how old people often are, but Virzì’s tin ear for naturalistic American dialogue certainly doesn’t help. But stick with The Leisure Seeker and you’ll be rewarded with something special, as Mirren and Sutherland begin filling in the pieces of their characters’ lives—obliquely at first, then in foggy but affectionate reminiscences and teary revelations. We begin to see the complex course of their lives—as lovers, as parents, as friends, as spouses—through the dimming window of their failing memories and bodies. BEN COLEMAN
AMC Seattle 10 & Meridian 16

Love, Simon
If you're one of those people who only reads the first sentences of movie reviews, here you go: Love, Simon is FANTASTIC, and you should see it IMMEDIATELY. The best thing about it is Simon himself: A clever, kind kid with a loving family and good friends, he's having a hell of a time figuring out how—or if—he should come out. Not many YA protagonists feel as real as Simon, regardless of whether he's going through great stuff or drama. Simon's great stuff includes: a secret e-mail relationship with Blue, another closeted kid at his school. Simon doesn't know who Blue really is, and Blue doesn't know who Simon really is, but through hesitantly typed e-mails, the two find the beginnings of a relationship that's inspiring and complicated. Simon's drama includes: his dipshit classmate Martin, who stumbles onto his e-mails with Blue–and threatens to share them with everyone if Simon doesn't do what he says. Love, Simon thrums with heightened emotions, but it never feels false or silly; Greg Berlanti's smart enough to treat these kids like real, complicated people, and the result is a movie that feels both truthful and ridiculously engaging. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Various locations

November
Follow Estonian director Rainer Sarnet's vision across a hallucinatory black-and-white landscape of forests, mud, ancient churches, and huts in a sinister, alluring story of a wild peasant girl, Liina, who's determined to marry her fellow villager Hans. But Hans becomes fascinated with a visiting German baroness, and Liina resorts to witchcraft and other tricks to win him back. The love triangle is well played out and tragicomically poignant, but the film's real magnetism is in the bizarre side stories: the dead returning on All Hallow's Eve for some roasted chicken and sauna time; the ensouled puppets made of junk that the villagers use to pilfer from each other; the veneer of Christianity over stubborn pagan practices.
Grand Illusion
Thursday only

Raising Arizona
The Coen brothers’ sublimely goofy love story between a criminal (Nicolas Cage) and a cop (Holly Hunter) who decide to steal a baby has some of the weirdest, funniest scenes in their whole oeuvre. In what other movie would a man being robbed by Nicolas Cage solemnly intone, “Son, you got a panty on your head”?
Central Cinema
Friday–Sunday

Ramen Heads
It's not a perfect documentary—the music's a little overdone—but it's nevertheless an entertaining and interesting peep into the life and methods of Osamu Tomita, Japan's "reigning king" of the obsession-spawning noodle soup.
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Friday–Sunday

The Road Movie
If you are as addicted to the YouTube genre of Russian dashcam videos as I am, you will not want to miss The Road Movie. It has everything you want to see and much more: a person popping out of a truck, a cow flying through the air, a car plunging into a river, a man falling from the sky with a parachute, an asteroid exploding in the sky. The drug many of these clips provide is the rip between the normal and the nuts. One moment, the world has its shit together; the next moment, it does not. The first world, you know where things are going (the happy Russian pop music, the conversation about mundane things); the next world, you do not know where the driver will end up. (In the bushes on the side of the road? Under a truck? In the grave?) In one scene, the wind suddenly and dramatically tears off the roof of a building. In another scene, a madman jumps on the boot of a car and freaks out its driver, a Russian woman. She drives; he clings to her boot. This is a powerful drug. CHARLES MUDEDE
Ark Lodge Cinemas
Thursday only

Tehran Taboo
In this richly colored rotoscope animation by Ali Soozandeh, an Iranian expatriate in Germany, a cross-section of men and women in Tehran navigate draconian, hypocritically applied Islamic law in their search for sex, freedom, and excitement. A judge solicits sex from a prostitute he's meant to sentence; the wife of a drug addict is prevented from getting a divorce; a young woman seeks an operation to disguise her lack of virginity.
Grand Illusion
Thursday only

Unsane
The news that Steven Soderbergh filmed Unsane in secret, on an iPhone, feels almost inevitable. The 55-year-old filmmaker has a history of experimenting with technology and messing with viewers’ expectations, and it only takes a few minutes of Unsane to understand why he chose to use the tiny lens of a smartphone to create this taut new thriller. Soderbergh uses voyeuristic closeups to tell the tale of Sawyer, a lonely, driven young woman with an acidic streak played by The Crown’s Claire Foy. Every detail—Sawyer’s expressive eyes, her freckled skin, the strings of saliva that emerge between her lips in her most emotionally fraught moments—becomes unavoidable and unsettling this close. The victim of a stalker in her former hometown, Sawyer still sees the face of the man who pursued her. Wisely seeking counseling, she inadvertently commits herself to a cruelly understaffed mental health institution that takes advantage of insurance loopholes to hold her for seven days. Foy does a remarkable job keeping us focused on her plight, even as she remains an almost entirely unreliable and unlikable protagonist. While that element of Unsane rubs rough against the film’s subtext of a woman’s voice and story being ignored or doubted, it doesn’t take away from the film’s creeping, fascinating dread. ROBERT HAM
AMC Seattle 10 & AMC Pacific Place

A Wrinkle In Time
A Wrinkle in Time is an engrossing fantasy about a teenage girl, Meg, who—despite her anxieties and faults, and with the help of some friends and three extra-dimensional beings named Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which—embarks on a cross-dimensional adventure to save her missing father from a terrifying monster of darkness and conformity named IT. Disney’s new blockbuster isn’t the A Wrinkle in Time I read as a child. Director Ava DuVernay (Selma, 13th) has updated the story and placed it squarely in the now: There’s an extended roller coaster-esque flight scene over otherworldly landscapes, a multiracial cast, instructions for self-care, and Oprah. DuVernay doesn’t cut the weird without adding wonder. Her update to the three Mrs. W’s is particularly spectacular. Rather than the beak-nosed ladies they were in the book, these Mrs. W’s are luminous, ever-changing chameleons in couture gowns. There’s an informal pairing off—one child for each extra-dimensional being—and Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey) is predictably charged with the anxious Meg (Storm Reid), who, like many of Oprah’s followers, just needs a little boost of self-confidence before she’s ready to stand up to a universe-devouring evil. SUZETTE SMITH
Various locations

Stay in the know! Get all this and more on the free Stranger Things To Do mobile app (available for iOS and Android), or delivered to your inbox.