As you tuck into potato salad and corn on the cob this Fourth of July, why not brush up on our nation's history? Our picks for this weekend's best movies to stream at home include an award-winning tale of one of America's Founding Fathers (Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, streaming through Disney+) and a documentary about an influential civil rights leader (Dawn Porter's John Lewis: Good Trouble, streaming through Ark Lodge, SIFF, and the Northwest Film Forum). We've rounded up those and more excellent options—including Crystal Moselle's Skate Kitchen—below. Longing for the big(ger) screen? Check out our guide to drive-in movie theaters in the Seattle area.

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Jump to: New & Noteworthy: Supporting Seattle Businesses | BIPOC-Focused Films | New & Noteworthy: Nationwide | Ongoing: Supporting Seattle Businesses

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New & Noteworthy: Supporting Seattle Businesses

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

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 explores Lewis's childhood, his 1957 meeting with Martin Luther King, Jr., and his lasting legacy on the social justice movements of the present.
Available via Ark Lodge, Northwest Film Forum, and SIFF

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
Thursday only

The Invisible Witness
A wealthy Italian businessman becomes the chief suspect of his young lover's murder when he wakes up next to her dead body. But did he do it?! In a Night Of-style series of events, the man in question, Adriano Doria, struggles to piece together the night leading up to the crime (like how he got the cut on his forehead, why the floor was covered in scattered banknotes, and why he wound up in bed with Laura, whom he was allegedly planning to break up with in an effort to save his marriage). If you're a sucker for moody blue-grey lighting and tough defense attorneys who've never lost a case, give Stefano Mordini's thriller a go.
Available via Grand Illusion
Opening Friday

Stage Russia HD – Anna Karenina Musical
Angelica Cholina directs and choreographs this Vakhtangov Theatre production of Anna Karenina that communicates the classic story through music, dance, and spectacular production design, here shown onscreen as an encore.
Available via Northwest Film Forum
Opening Friday

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

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

Just Mercy
Destin Daniel Cretton directs this legal drama starring Michael B. Jordan as civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson as he travels to Alabama to defend Walter McMillian (Jamie Foxx) against a wrongful conviction. 
Available via multiple platforms

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

#AnneFrank. Parallel Stories
Released on the 75th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation, this documentary retells the story of Anne Frank (the Jewish diarist who famously chronicled the years she and her family spent in hiding during the German occupation of the Netherlands), presented by British actress Helen Mirren, who reads from Diary of a Young Girl in Frank's reconstructed bedroom in Amsterdam. The film also features testimony from several living Holocaust survivors and their families. 
Available via Netflix

The Dick Van Dyke Show
If you're looking to honor the legacy of the late comedy master Carl Reiner by streaming his work, start with the good, clean, sophisticated fun of the Dick Van Dyke Show, which features the leading man in his prime, doing what he's great at (grinning goofily and gesticulating grandly with his wildly long limbs) and not doing what he's not great at (faking a British accent). Fun fact: The show was originally called Head of the Family, and Reiner cast himself as the lead. That clearly didn't work out, but he does play Alan Brady, the star of the show-within-the-show, in the version that made it on TV.
Available via multiple platforms

Hamilton
Filmed onstage by director Thomas Kail and cinematographer Declan Quinn at the Richard Rodgers Theater in June of 2016 (back when audiences could pack an auditorium shoulder-to-shoulder), Lin-Manuel Miranda's Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway musical about Alexander Hamilton is coming to Disney+. If you still haven't seen the show because you're wary of musicals, take the cue from its consistently glowing reviews—its hip-hop, jazz, and rap numbers have made people all over the country rethink their rigid anti-musical stance, and offered them juicy, controversial history about one of their Founding Fathers.
Available via Disney+
Premiering Friday

Homemade
After your jealousy of the beautiful homes and neighborhoods where filmmakers like Kristen Stewart and Paolo Sorrentino reside, take in this collection of short films made during the past couple of months in quarantine, which IndieWire deems "inquisitive, unpredictable and often life-affirming." Like any wide-ranging collection of shorts, it's bound to be a mixed bag for everyone. But since you'll be watching it on Netflix and not in a theater, no one will care if you skip ahead to Sebastian Lelio's domestic musical or Maggie Gyllenhaal's close-to-the-bone apocalyptic sci-fi.
Available via Netfix

Schindler’s List
"Individual hate is a terrible thing," Steven Spielberg told NBC Nightly News when asked in 2018 what he hoped present-day audiences would take away from the timely rerelease of his 1993 film. "But when collective hate organizes and gets industrialized, then genocide follows." The Oscar-winning Schindler’s List, set in Nazi-occupied Krakow, is now streaming on Netflix.
Available via Netflix

Unsolved Mysteries
The latest docuseries coming in hot on Netflix is a re-imagining of the classic spooky-stories series hosted by Robert Stack. This version has declined to go chasing after that specific style of magic (there is no host at all, the mysteries "will speak for themselves" according to producers) but the theme song is still here, still raising goosebumps, and the mysteries presented will hopefully live up to their predecessors' standards. BOBBY ROBERTS
Available via Netflix

Welcome to Chechnya
When confronted about the persecution of LGBTQ+ people in the Russian republic of Chechnya, pro-Kremlin leader Ramzan A. Kadyrov replied, "This is nonsense. We don't have such people here." A 2017 New York Times article reads, "Gay men have never had an easy life in Chechnya. But the targeted, collective punishment of gays that began last month [...] is a new turn in the region’s long history of rights abuses." David France's (How to Survive a Plague) new documentary spotlights activists who smuggle people facing threats of violence or abduction for their sexual or gender identities to Canada, Eurasia, and other safe zones, where they have to live in secrecy while they await asylum applications.
Available via HBO

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

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

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

Aviva
Boaz Yakin's expressive dance film explores the fluidity of gender through two characters, Eden and Aviva, who toggle both mentally and physically (each character is played by two different actors) between strong masculine and feminine identities. "The dancing is gutsy, sensual, uninhibited and a little too full of itself. Pride in frank eccentricity pushes at times into the unintentionally absurd. Still, it’s exciting how these dance sequences are treated like any other scene, and disappointing when the compulsion to justify them takes hold," reads a New York Times review.
Available via Northwest Film Forum

Beats
Set during the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which banned unlicensed raves across the UK, this film follows BFFs Johnno and Spanner who sneak out to an illegal party for one last night together after realizing they're destined for opposite life paths. 
Available via Grand Illusion

Carmen & Lola
Arantxa Echevarría’s assured debut revolves around two Roma teens in Madrid. The brassy Carmen, a high-school dropout, can’t wait to get married and become a hairdresser. The solitary Lola, a graffiti artist and closeted lesbian, longs to be a teacher. The women meet while working at their family’s market stalls, lust blooming with the touch of a hand. Soon they’re sneaking out for smoke breaks and passionate kisses. The potential for tragedy comes from their patriarchal community’s inability to accept same-sex romance, but the possibility for triumph lies with their stubbornness and strength. Bonus: The riot of sequins with which their culture celebrates even the most mundane occasions. KATHY FENNESSY
Available via Northwest Film Forum

César 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

Fisherman's Friends
A London music exec is tasked with signing a group of shanty-singing fishermen in a remote Cornish village to a major label in this lighthearted comedy. 
Available via Grand Illusion
Thursday only

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

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

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

The Last Tree
A Nigerian British teenager moves from rural Lincolnshire to the unfamiliar London to live with his mom in Shola Amoo's debut feature.
Available via SIFF

Marona’s Fantastic Tale
For a wholesome mental recharge, turn to Anca Damian's expressionistic French animated film told through the eyes of a stray dog who just wants a loving human to hang out with. 
Available via SIFF

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

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

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

Queen of Lapa
Luana Muniz, now in her late 50s, houses a new generation of fellow trans sex workers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This documentary explores their day-to-day lives and the guidance they receive from Muniz, who has long dealt with the anti-LGBTQ+ attitudes in the city.
Available via Scarecrow Video and Northwest Film Forum

Shirley
Renowned horror writer Shirley Jackson (whose most famous works include The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle) is in the middle of writing her masterpiece when a young newlywed couple shows up and throws her—and her already-rocky relationship with her philandering husband—off track. It looks devious and kinda juicy.
Available via Northwest Film Forum and Hugo House

Spaceship Earth
Matt Wolf's oddly uplifting documentary tells the true story of Biosphere 2—a self-engineered replica of the Earth's ecosystem inspired by a project that began in the 1970s, and in which eight people (self-described "biospherians") attempted to quarantine themselves for two years in the early '90s. While the experiment was cut short, the fact that this film chronicles daily existence in the face of a life-threatening ecological disaster makes this a timely online release. 
Available via Ark Lodge

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

The Whistlers
Festival favorite Corneliu Porumboiu (The Treasure, Police, Adjective) delves into the noir genre, complete with a beautiful crook, a crooked inspector, and...a secret whistling language? 
Available via SIFF

A White, White Day
In Hlynur Pálmason's follow-up to Winter Brothers, an off-duty police chief in a remote Icelandic town begins to suspect a local man of having had an affair with his late wife. In thriller-meets-Nordic-art-house fashion, the man becomes obsessed with finding the truth, at the expense of his (living) loved ones. 
Available via SIFF

Yourself and Yours
Hong Sang-soo’s 18th feature—all of them absurdist but humanely perceptive variations on the intractable nature of romance between men and women—sees him dolefully refining his abiding conceit, as ever played out over long, fumbling conversations fueled by soju and beer. Youngsoo, an artist whose mom is dying, is faced with jealous doubts after his imbibing girlfriend Minjung is rumored to be fooling around with other men. Hong envisions desire as its own form of duplicity, which structurally plays out in the film’s elusive and illusory replication of Minjung, who singularly (or collectively?) busts the myth of a “truly impressive man.” JAY KUEHNER
Available via Northwest Film Forum

You Don't Nomi
A filmic argument for the greatness of Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls, Jeffrey McHale's documentary features interviews with Adam Nayman (Vice Guide to Film), April Kidwell (I, Nomi), and Peaches Christ (Milk), along with archival interview footage with the cast and crew of Showgirls.
Available via Northwest Film Forum