This weekend is a great time to get moving, get (marginally) social, and take a trip to the movies (did you think we were going to suggest playing more Pokémon Go?). To ensure you have the best experience doing so, our critics have picked your most promising options, ranging from new releases like Ghostbusters (angry nerd bloggers, stand down) to limited runs and one-night screenings like Sixty-Six with filmmaker Lewis Klahr in attendance and Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975. As always, for more options—including cult classic Conan the Barbarian, which Lindy West called “more boring than a Ken Burns documentary about Bettie Page’s actual wig stand”—check out our complete movie times listings.
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NEW RELEASES
1. Captain Fantastic
Starring the incredible Viggo Mortensen, Captain Fantastic is the hippie, sustainable, anti-capitalist Little Miss Sunshine that will endear you to the characters one minute, and make you loathe them the next. After two hours of real humor and shockingly successful displays of nostalgia and emotion, I walked out of the theater uncontrollably smiling. JULIA RABAN
Wide Release
2. Ghostbusters
Because I’m so enthralled by all four lead actors, and even more enthralled by watching the world of bitter, obstructionist dorks implode with rage over their casting, I was almost ecstatic to see how well the whole thing turned out. It’s not just that it works and is hilarious and has great special effects and all the candy—It’s also a perfect commentary on gender inequality in movies. Leading by example. SEAN NELSON
Wide Release
LIMITED RUNS
Thursday Only
3. Les Cowboys
Thomas Bidegain’s French Western Les Cowboys starts with a father’s quest and ends with a son’s discovery. Alain (the steely-eyed François Damien), an appliance salesman in Rhône-Alpes, wears Stetson hats and sings country songs. When his 16-year-old daughter, Kelly, goes missing in the prelude to 9/11, he springs into action like John Wayne (or maybe even George C. Scott). Instead of a Comanche tribe, Kelly has run off with an 18-year-old Muslim. Then Alain finds out they’re involved with an Islamist group, possibly Al Qaeda, so he sets out to track her down. A few years pass, and he’s still looking, but now his son, Georges, aka Kid, has joined the search. KATHY FENNESSY
Guild 45th
4. Messiah of Evil
This horror film by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz (Howard the Duck, American Graffiti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) offers a surreal, gothic-inspired take on the zombie apocalypse.
Northwest Film Forum
5. Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously
Writers rarely achieve true celebrity. The documentary Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously depicts a rare case: an author whose persona is closer to a rock star than an academic. In the film, we watch Gaiman navigate his final signing tour in the U.S. and U.K., where he meets thousands upon thousands of fans and offers them thoughtful advice, hugs, and self-deprecating anecdotes. He develops immense pain in his signing hand, and soaks his wrist and elbow in a bucket full of ice water every night (a technique he picked up from a massage therapist in Seattle). He is exhausted, and tries not to show it. His thumbnail falls off. JULIA RABAN
Grand Illusion
6. Tickled
The title suggests a film about a harmless fetish, but this chilling documentary uncovers more emotional pain than physical pleasure. In the prologue, a television reporter describes David Farrier as “New Zealand’s favorite pop culture reporter.” One day, he comes across a call for a competitive endurance tickling contest that involves flights to Los Angeles and four-day hotel stays. On the evidence of the video clips, the scene is rather wholesomely homoerotic (the male participants remain fully clothed during sessions). KATHY FENNESSY
Guild 45th
Friday Only
7. Leningrad Cowboys Go America
This celebrated 1989 road movie by Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki follows a fictional (then, after the film was released, real) Russian rock band called the Leningrad Cowboys. It was described by Vincent Canby as rigorously avoiding “sociology, easy laughs or even irony.”
Scarecrow Video
8. Sixty-Six with Lewis Klahr
Filmmaker Lewis Klahr will be in attendance for this screening of Sixty-Six, a feature-length anthology of stop-motion animation that “draws upon years of short-form experimentation, leaving a trail of vignettes.”
Northwest Film Forum
Saturday Only
9. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 bears the pros and cons of its titular format: It never dwells overlong on any one subject, but it also sacrifices depth and cohesion. This mishmash of vintage footage of speeches, interviews, rallies, and rioting culled from various Swedish news organizations and recent interviews with black musicians like Erykah Badu, Talib Kweli, and Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson chronologically—and sympathetically—examines the movement’s triumphs, defeats, and tenets. Given the current Occupy Wall Street protests, Olsson makes us realize that black people’s grievances resonate as urgently today for all downtrodden Americans as they did 40 years ago. DAVE SEGAL
Scarecrow Video
10. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
How does a new generation of fighters for trans rights inherit Dr. Frank N. Furter of Transsexual, Transylvania (played by Tim Curry), in this campy 1975 horror musical? Susan Sarandon costars, along with ripped fishnet stockings, corsets, and the dreams of science fiction.
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
All Weekend
11. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
Sure, Hunt for the Wilderpeople’s scope is small, but it gives you everything you could want from a movie: It’s smart, emotional, and even a bit action-packed once Ricky and Hec embark on an unplanned adventure in the forest. But most of all, it’s funny. So, so funny. Wilderpeople is a hugely loveable movie that’s suitable for date night or the whole family, and I know that sounds like a hacky movie poster blurb. But when a movie’s this good, it’s tough to avoid clichés, so I’ll leave you with another: Don’t miss it. NED LANNAMANN
SIFF Cinema Egyptian & Sundance Cinemas
12. Maggie’s Plan
The screwball comedy Maggie’s Plan is filmmaker Rebecca Miller’s most satisfying film to date. Greta Gerwig plays Maggie, a college arts adviser, who has had lousy luck with men, but longs to have a baby. So she comes up with a plan—it involves underwear-model-turned-actor Travis Fimmel—but fate intervenes when she falls for Ethan Hawke’s unhappily married anthropology professor, John. Miller loves these characters, including Maya Rudolph and Bill Hader as Maggie’s unfiltered friends, too much to paint any of them as villains, and if Maggie’s plans—there are three altogether—are complicated by the vagaries of human desire, her happy ending feels fully earned. KATHY FENNESSY
Sundance Cinemas
13. Zero Days
“This was obviously the first, biggest, and most sophisticated example of a state or two states using a cyber weapon for offensive purposes,” says New York Times national security correspondent David Sanger in Zero Days. He’s talking about Stuxnet—an elegant, dense, and massive piece of malware. First discovered via an “epidemic of computer shutdowns” in 2010, eventually it was recognized as something far greater: a powerful, covert American and Israeli cyber attack on an Iranian nuclear facility. Alex Gibney’s documentary Zero Days delves into how Stuxnet happened—a tale that’s part 007-style spy caper, part computer nerds waxing rhapsodic about code—and what it means that the Obama administration refuses to acknowledge its role in the attack. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Sundance Cinemas
CONTINUING RUNS
14. The BFG
The BFG is an oddly paced but eventually rewarding film, with one or two flat-out magnificent stretches. You probably remember Dahl’s book as being bubbly and bright, but the English author’s humor and fluidity with language disguised a dark tale of Dickensian sorrow and Greek-god violence. Sophie is an orphan, a completely isolated (and tiny) figure in a decidedly inhospitable world. When she, in the dead of night, spies the 24-foot-tall BFG—which stands for Big Friendly Giant, although she doesn’t know about the “Friendly” part just yet—outside her orphanage window, he abducts her and squirrels her away in his secret cave in Giant Country. NED LANNAMANN
15. The Conjuring 2
For horror fans accustomed to wandering through acres of dreck for a meager jolt, James Wan is the real deal. The Conjuring 2, the director’s return to the horror game after the amiably knuckle headed Furious 7, is a brilliantly staged, strangely exhausting work of a filmmaker in complete thrall to his chosen genre. This is a movie where virtually every scene is designed expressly for the purpose of causing the viewer’s colon to have an out-of-body experience. ANDREW WRIGHT
16. Finding Dory
I never thought a movie about animated fish would make me cry so much. But then again, not all fish are Dory, the charming protagonist of Finding Dory, Pixar’s sequel to 2003’s Finding Nemo. Although the movie is intended to be a follow-up, Finding Dory holds its own 13 years after its predecessor debuted and anchored itself in the hearts of then-10-year-olds like me. As an adult, I discovered a new appreciation for the characters of my favorite Pixar film. ANA SOFIA KNAUF
17. Independence Day: Resurgence
Twentieth Century Fox did not screen Independence Day: Resurgence for critics, probably because the film is so good it would annihilate critics’ ranking systems. For how does one give a film “five stars” when it deserves all the stars in the universe? How does one offer “two thumbs up” when a more accurate assessment would be to have each person on Earth join together to raise all of our thumbs to the heavens? And how does one rate “10 out of 10” when one knows ∞ is the only numerical concept that could come close to representing Independence Day: Resurgence? ERIK HENRIKSEN
18. The Lobster
Here’s the thing about The Lobster, the thing that’ll either make you want to see it or never see it: It captures what it feels like to be single. And not just that—it captures what it feels like to be single in a society obsessed with everyone having someone. That’s not a particularly fun thing to address, but it’s not particularly awful, either, so The Lobster splits the difference: surreal and heartfelt, it’s both laugh-out-loud funny and eerily melancholy. One minute, characters are wondering if they’ll ever find a partner; the next, they’re deciding which animal they’ll turn into if they end up single. ERIK HENRIKSEN
19. Our Kind of Traitor
Ewan MacGregor and Naomie Harris are a bit too glamorous to convincingly play a poetics professor and his lawyer wife, but Stellan Skarsgård is great as a Russian gangster who befriends them on their vacation in an attempt to go clean. The camerawork, saturated in unnatural blues and golds, is distracting and diffused, but John le Carré’s source book makes for a ripping great story, in which international intrigue is shot through with a surprising amount of heart. NED LANNAMANN
20. The Secret Life of Pets
Watch pets personified in The Secret Life of Pets: a take on what Fido and Fluffy are up to behind our backs, with voice actors including Louis C.K., Kevin Hart, and Jenny Slate.
21. The Shallows
Even at its most overt, The Shallows shows just how bracing and propulsive a good B-movie can be, especially in the hands of a director who knows exactly when to linger on a shot of the indecently beautiful scenery, and when to dip the camera below the waterline for maximum unease. It’s pulp, but artful pulp. ANDREW WRIGHT
22. Swiss Army Man
If you want your dreams to be weird for the rest of your life, see Swiss Army Man, directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, and starring Daniel Radcliffe and Paul Dano. Radcliffe, working hard to quash your beloved associations of Harry Potter, portrays a farting corpse—a farting corpse that serves as a companion, prop, and man Friday to Dano’s very sad young bearded man, Hank. Hank is just like most sad young bearded men, except he’s also a castaway on an island, where his creepy new pal washes ashore. MEGAN BURBANK
