It’s official: SIFF has announced their lineup, and we have a complete calendar of screenings (including reviews from our critics) online, here. In preparation for the upcoming film festival, we recommended that you practice sitting, laughing, crying, and staring at a screen this weekend at the movies. Below, you’ll find our critics’ favorite films, including a Danish dark comedy, The LEGO Movie, and the new Captain America flick. For more options, see our complete movie times listings, follow our Things To Do calendar for everything happening in arts and culture around Seattle…or sit on your butt, download Tidal, and watch (be real, re-watch) Lemonade.
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NEW RELEASES
1. Captain America: Civil War
If you want to get super technical about it, Captain America: Civil War isn’t so much a Captain America movie as the third flick in the Avengers series. While Cap may be the heart and soul of this film, Marvel made sure to cram in as many of their products as humanly possible. But what should’ve been a 2.5-hour mess is another seemingly inconceivable Marvel miracle. Frenetic action set pieces are plopped in at regular intervals, and the uniformly terrific cast makes the long running time more than bearable. It’s way better than the marginally enjoyable Age of Ultron, and packs more fun than Winter Soldier, while still maintaining that film’s dark, paranoid edge. At this point, we know Marvel’s got an expansive, ongoing game plan, and this movie is just another piece in their puzzle. That’s why I’ve decided to trust and not start a war about it (civil or otherwise). WM. STEVEN HUMPHREY
LIMITED RUNS
2. Julie Taymor’s Midsummer Night’s Dream
Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience performs Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream with a special introduction by acclaimed director Julie Taymor.
3. Men & Chicken
This dark comedy from Denmark presents an absurd and satirical take on family, inheritance, and eugenics.
4. Mommie Dearest
Central Cinema will screen the cult classic Mommie Dearest, which David Schmader described as “the 1981 biopic that made Joan Crawford a child-abuse icon, ruined Faye Dunaway’s career, and thrived in infamy. Make no mistake: Mommie Dearest sucks. But Ms. Dunaway’s fearless exertions elevate overacting to the status of an Olympic event.” On Sunday night, the film will be screened in “Hecklevision,” which as you might guess, requires a little bit of audience participation—but they’ll provide the props!
5. Purple Rain
All around the city, theaters are screening Purple Rain—the film that gave Dan Savage his last wet dream—to celebrate the life of the late, great Prince.
ONE-NIGHT SCREENINGS
6. My Golden Days
One among the many great moments in My Golden Days, a charming French film about young love, about the beauty of youth, about the best years of life, happens like this: The hero is heading to school in a car while listening to De La Soul’s “Jenifa Taught Me (Derwin’s Revenge).” This is the late 1980s, and this is the kind of music the French youth were listening to at the time. In the next scene, the hero meets for the first time the love of his life. She has great ’80s hair. Because nothing much happens during one’s youth, nothing heavy happens in this film by Arnaud Desplechin. CHARLES MUDEDE
(Thursday only)
7. Pali Road
Pali Road, a film about waking up, very suddenly, in the middle of a new and different life, was filmed on Oahu and premiered at the Hawaii International Film Festival, where it was nominated for Best Feature Narrative.
(Thursday only)
8. The LEGO Movie
The story seems obvious: A hapless chosen one—an ordinary minifigure named Emmet (Chris Pratt)—is called by destiny to save creation from the villainous, fastidious President Business (Will Ferrell) and his chaos-ending Krazy Glue. Of course Emmet prevails—after a wild ramble, all full of gags and nerd references, that pokes fun at LEGO’s crossover-laden past. But instead of plodding through like one more cynical big-screen commercial (hi, Transformers!), The LEGO Movie manages to weave an enlivening magic spell of nostalgia that’s equal parts hysterical, subversive, beautiful, and sweet. DENIS C. THERIAULT
(Saturday only)
9. Puget Soundtrack: Erin Jorgensen presents Daisies
The young and beautiful stars of the 1966 surrealist Czech film Daisies, Jitka Cerhová (Marie I) and Ivana Karbanová (Marie II), date and dump older men, giggle a lot, eat a lot, walk around the city, get drunk and rowdy, play with each other in bed, and get philosophical about life and desire. They came from nowhere; they are going nowhere. They are happy to be here forever. What a lovely movie. Erin Jorgensen, who will provide a live soundtrack for Daisies tonight, says it is like a page from her diary. CHARLES MUDEDE
(Saturday only)
CONTINUING RUNS
10. April and the Extraordinary World
This French-Belgian-Canadian animated thriller, starring Marion Cotillard, is based on Jacques Tardi’s 1976 graphic novel about an adventurer exploring a warped, fictional universe.
11. Elvis & Nixon
“You’ve seen the photo: the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll and the Leader of the Free World, shaking hands in the Oval Office with cautious smiles and dazed looks in their eyes. Elvis & Nixon is an account—from director Liza Johnson and co-writer Cary Elwes—of that bizarre meeting in 1970. Elvis & Nixon‘s contained scope and underplayed humor make for a deft, lighthearted comedy about two pretty tragic dudes.” NED LANNAMANN
12. Everybody Wants Some!!
“Over the course of two hours, Everybody Wants Some!!, Richard Linklater’s ‘spiritual sequel’ to 1993’s Dazed and Confused, goes from detestable to damn near lovable—it’s an eventually enjoyable movie that I almost walked out of. It’s broad and cheesy and kind of porny, but eventually you come to realize that it’s not ‘college’ porn, but a very specific porn based on an idealized version of Linklater’s own college experience. College hijinks have been done to death, but there’s something endearing and slightly universal about a middle-aged man looking back on his college years and only remembering the parts that were super awesome(!!).” VINCE MANCINI
13. Eye in the Sky
“If Eye in the Sky accomplishes one thing, it’s to function as a gripping thriller despite dealing almost exclusively with people staring at screens while talking on the telephone. But if the film accomplishes two things, it also generates awareness of what modern warfare technology looks like (awesome, brimming with unintended consequences), and encourages careful consideration of the ethical liability that comes with this power. What Eye in the Sky doesn’t do, however, is provide a faithful portrayal of how those who are in power have weighed that responsibility.” MARJORIE SKINNER
14. Green Room
“Bad guys are bad guys. The goal is to escape their clutches by any means possible. And so it goes for the punk band that ends up playing a gig at a white-supremacist compound in Oregon—shades of Malheur—out of sheer desperation. Then they witness a murder and the neo-Nazis give them the Hotel California treatment. From that point forward, it’s punks versus skinheads set to a soundtrack of Bad Brains, Slayer, and Poison Idea. The fun is in witnessing the ingenious ways the punks—including two turncoats—fight back using the crudest tools available. It’s fast, bloody, and, when you least expect it, hilarious.” KATHY FENNESSY
15. Midnight Special
“Midnight Special, Nichols’s latest, continues the director’s winning streak. While on its surface an affectionate throwback to the kid-friendly sci-fi adventures of yesteryear (as the critic Matt Zoller Seitz said on Twitter, if this had been made in the ’80s, it’d never stop playing on HBO), its underlying themes of families under pressure make it very much of a piece with the filmmaker’s other work.” ANDREW WRIGHT
