Take a minute to browse the best films to see this weekend—our critics' picks, plus a few more that look interesting, from idiosyncratic new releases like Brigsby Bear and Logan Lucky to the new Ferguson documentary, Whose Streets?, to an unmissable masterpiece of black cinema, Killer of Sheep. You can find more ideas in our film events calendar and movie times listings, not to mention our list of outdoor movie screenings.

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THURSDAY ONLY

1. Celebrating Cary Grant
Once again, SAM has spent the summer celebrating the devilish charms of Cary Grant. Finish off the series with the almost ludicrously sexy Alfred Hitchcock caper, To Catch a Thief.
Seattle Art Museum

2. Endless Poetry
With this autobiographical film, Alejandro Jodorowsky, the surrealist genius behind El Topo and The Holy Mountain, has created the most accurate portrayal of a poet’s life in cinema history. When young Alejandro discovers a book of Federico García Lorca’s, he escapes his family’s house, becomes a poet, moves into a weird artist co-op, and physically ages only after having major life experiences. Every nonartist in Santiago de Chile, where the action takes place, is either a sleeping drone or a murderous pervert. Life in this world seems impossibly lonely until he meets a pink-haired woman warrior who kicks and spits at everyone she encounters. Equal parts goofy and gorgeous, violent and theatrical. Muy magnífico. Highly recommended. RICH SMITH
Grand Illusion

3. Josie and the Pussycats: Pause and Draw
At this screening of Josie and the Pussycats (a satire of pop music and subliminal messaging) they'll periodically pause the movie so you can draw a picture of the scene. You'll leave with flashbacks to your awesome 2001 self and some rad fan art. Emily and Lelah of Tacocat will host.
Central Cinema

4. Pop Aye
Kirsten Tan’s feature debut Pop Aye begins with a hitchhiker in Thailand trying to catch a ride. Trudging along the side of the road, the man holds out his hand once, with no luck. He tries again and a truck slows. The driver seems unfazed as he loads the man’s cargo: a sweetly cooperative elephant. The hitchhiker is Thana, an esteemed architect who became so frustrated with his life that he trashed it. Feeling disrespected at his job and reviled by his wife at home, he sees an elephant he recognizes from his childhood and offers to buy him on the spot. Even on film, the presence of a creature like that is enough to briefly take your breath away—and coupled with old memories, it’s enough for Thana to set out on a slow, sweet, strange cross-country journey to his hometown with the beast. JULIA RABAN
Grand Illusion

5. Rifftrax Live: Doctor Who
The expert snarkers of Mystery Science Theater 3000—Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy, and Bill Corbett—will take on the notorious "Five Doctors" Doctor Who special, in which the Doctor's past selves are spirited to Death Zone of Gallifrey for mysterious purposes.
Pacific Place

THURSDAY-SATURDAY

6. War for the Planet of the Apes
The director of War for the Planet of the Apes and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Matt Reeves, has an incredible skill for creating the plausibly crumbling natural world Caesar and his tribe are about to inherit. He's also very good at balancing the necessary irony of Harrelson's performance with the even more necessary total conviction of Serkis's (and the other mo-cap ape actors). Even better: Though the film is full of violence, Reeves makes every death matter to someone on-screen. He's less good at noticing when his film overreaches with the whole "But who is the savage, now?" shtick. At one point, the Colonel forces a cadre of ape POWs to build a (wait for it) wall outside his commandeered fortress. "Why do they need a wall?" one of them asks, and only barely resists looking damply into the camera at Trump's America. But guess what: This is Trump's America, and Reeves makes an admirable effort to present it/us with a credible catastrophization of the moral and spiritual trajectory we can't even seem to fully acknowledge, much less avert. SEAN NELSON
Meridian 16

7. Wonder Woman
In Wonder Woman, innocence is Diana’s foil. She’s read at great length about the world, but has never lived in it. And as Diana deals with her naïveté and her foes, Wonder Woman is exciting and fun—even though it devolves into typical blockbuster spectacle near its end, I’d recommend it to anyone who loves action films, and there’s also just enough subtext to feed a philosophical mind. How much harm does Wonder Woman do when she strides boldly into war? Is this what power looks like? Is it cool just because she’s a woman? Hopefully these questions will be answered in future films. For now, Wonder Woman is a thrilling start. SUZETTE SMITH
Ark Lodge Cinema, AMC Seattle 10, Meridian 16

FRIDAY ONLY

8. NOddIN Japanese Film Collective
See new short films created by Japanese film collective NOddIN—this event, curated by NWFF Executive Director Courtney Sheehan and artist Etsuko Ichikawa, will be the US premiere of NOddIN’s work. After the screening, meet some of the filmmakers in person.
Northwest Film Forum

FRIDAY-SUNDAY

9. Dune
This is David Lynch's notoriously troubled adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi classic. Despite Dune's critical and box office failure (and lengthy, arduous exposition, the convoluted storyline, and the way that Lynch himself rejected the film) it has in some ways become a cult classic, and is worth revisiting.
Central Cinema

10. In This Corner of the World
There’s an elephant in the room throughout Sunao Katabuchi’s latest animated film. That elephant is the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima—an action that changed war forever and turned the world into the kind of place where a hundred thousand lives could be extinguished in an instant. So from the moment we meet Suzu, a dreamy girl who loves to draw stories, we watch her grow up in the seaside of Hiroshima, and we know where In This Corner of the World is headed. Meanwhile, the animation’s delicate, sketch-work style mirrors Suzu’s drawings. During one daytime firebombing, Suzu sees the explosions in the sky as flashes of paint. Yes, this is her way of coping with the constant danger all around her, but it’s also some sugar on the pill that Katabuchi is asking the audience to swallow—some artistry and beauty to keep us watching a film about a hard part of history that we shouldn’t ever forget. SUZETTE SMITH
SIFF Cinema Uptown

11. Moonrise Kingdom
Wes Anderson warmly embraces the slightest of plots—in the 1960s, a precocious pair of adolescent lovers go on the run together, whipping their repressed island community into a frenzy—and plunges over the side of a waterfall with it. Anderson coaxes an all-star cast into strong, mannered supporting performances: Bruce Willis spoofs his own damaged tough-guy shtick; Frances McDormand and Bill Murray play the parents with a poky, amicably antagonistic sizzle; Edward Norton is a sublime pleasure as a good-hearted scoutmaster. PAUL CONSTANT
Central Cinema

12. Taipei Story
Taipei Story is a 1984 feature by Edward Yang, one of the leaders of the New Taiwanese Cinema movement, starring another Taiwanese master, Hou Hsiao-hsien, as a failed baseball player. He and his upwardly mobile girlfriend dream of marrying and emigrating, but the conflict between traditional values and modern globalism creeps into their relationship. See the recently restored version of this urban drama.
SIFF Film Center

13. Whose Streets?
Most of us remember scrolling through news about the Ferguson protests on Twitter in 2014, but Sabaah Folayan and Damon Davis’s directorial debut Whose Streets? fills in the blanks of the story, offering a humanizing, much-needed portrait of those involved. Throughout Whose Streets?, citizen journalists and activists armed with cameras offer stunningly raw snapshots of human emotion, like when Brown’s mother, Lesley McSpadden, waits with community members to hear that a grand jury decided not to indict Brown’s killer. Or when Brown’s memorial site was set on fire. Or when plain-to-see conflict plays out on the face of a Black female police officer as she’s involved in an intense standoff with protesters. Or when resistance leaders speak to crowds, making my arms break out in goose bumps and my eyes well-up with pride. JENNI MOORE
Northwest Film Forum

SATURDAY ONLY

14. Carnival of Souls
The 1962 independent thriller Carnival of Souls, directed by Herk Harvey, features an embattled church organist fleeing death through a spooky deserted carnival. Imagine a vintage Coney Island horror show combined with Final Destination-type determinism.
Scarecrow Video

15. The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Everyone's favorite disturbingly sexy despotic queer scientist returns with devilry and horrifically catchy songs. Buy prop bags full of things to throw at the screen for $2 at the door.
Rendezvous

SUNDAY ONLY

16. Bronx Gothic
Performer Okwui Okpokwasili weaves a one-woman show about two teenage black girls growing up in the Bronx in the 1980s. This film, directed by Andrew Rossi, is a full portrait of Okpokwasili on and off the stage.
Northwest Film Forum

17. Peyton Place
A classic story of rape, suicide, and murder in a small town in New England.
Scarecrow Video

ALL WEEKEND

18. 13 Minutes
Downfall, director Oliver Hirschbiegel's exploration of Adolf Hitler's final days, succeeded by going deep, fully acknowledging its subject's unimaginable monstrousness while also locating an aggrieved peevishness that made him fascinatingly, horribly relatable. (Can a zillion YouTube parodies be wrong? Well, yes, but not in this case.) 13 Minutes, Hirschbiegel's return to the time frame, unfortunately can't quite manage the same burrowing feat. Although its depiction of courage under titanic pressure is both harrowing and heroic, it never really pinpoints the central character's defining moment. ANDREW WRIGHT
Varsity Theatre

19. Annabelle
The setting: A mid-century Andrew Wyeth landscape with an Edward Hopper house. A busload of orphans and a kindly nun move into a mansion run by the saturnine Mr. Mullins and his recluse wife. We know why the Mullinses are so gloomy: Years earlier, their daughter Annabelle was killed in a car crash, and her old room remains stuffed with creepy vintage toys. Orphan Janice, crippled by polio and neglected by the other girls, is quickly lured into the room, where she finds an unpleasant-looking doll and winds up terrorized by a demonic force in the form of the dead daughter. Only her big-eyed, dorky friend Linda guesses what’s happening, and no adult believes her until people start getting ripped apart. This capable if conventional haunted house movie assumes a grave sweetness while it concentrates on the intense friendship between its two young protagonists, who deserve more screen time before the standard phantasmagoria of the Conjuring franchise crowds in—scary antiques, bone-snapping demons, malicious tea party dollies. JOULE ZELMAN
Meridian 16 & AMC Seattle 10

20. Atomic Blonde
Atomic Blonde isn’t subtle. On about the 89th shot of Charlize Theron walking coolly down a Berlin street wearing sunglasses to an 1980s new wave hit, I wondered if it wasn’t a little excessive. Yes, of course—it’s absolutely excessive. But also: great! Excess is great! Sunglasses and Charlize Theron and 1980s jams are all great. Theron plays a British spy (OR IS SHE?) trying to out-spy some other spies (OR ARE THEY?) who murdered this one other spy (HRRMMM??) and there’s also a mega-list of spies to track down (SPY SPY SPY!). Look, no one can explain the plot of a spy movie without sounding dumb or crazy or both, and the hallmark of a good one is giving up and saying, “Whatever, it’s fun!” (This is what I am doing here.) ELINOR JONES
Meridian 16, Pacific Place, AMC Seattle 10

21. Baby Driver
Once its tires grip pavement, Baby Driver becomes a full-throttle ballet of motion, color, and sound. The tunes are great, the getaway chases will leave you breathless, and the motley team of robbers—which includes Kevin Spacey, Eiza González, and an excellent Jamie Foxx—comes from the kind of screenplay you wish Tarantino still wrote. And a superbly villainous Jon Hamm shows there’s more to his post-Mad Men career than H&R Block ads. NED LANNAMANN
AMC Seattle 10 & Pacific Place

22. The Big Sick
This film comes with a few red flags attached (rom-com set in the world of stand-up, etc.), but haters be damned. The true story of Kumail Nanjiani (Silicon Valley, Portlandia) and his real-life wife Emily Gordon’s tumultuous courtship is hilarious, warm, and genuinely affecting—a best-case scenario in every department. The cross-cultural differences at the center of the story are written and played with empathy and truth, and the performances (especially from Nanjiani, Zoe Kazan, Holly Hunter, and Adeel Akhtar) are deep, surprising, and bursting with multidimensional humanity. SEAN NELSON
Various locations

23. Brigsby Bear
The bear looks dumb. I get it, I do. You don’t want to see some dumb-looking bear movie! And it’s got that nerd from SNL in it. And the trailer looks artsy and precious and... post-apocalyptic? And every fiber of your being is going, “Ughhhhh, do I gotta go see this dumb bear movie?” I am here to tell you that yes, you do gotta go see this dumb bear movie. Brigsby Bear is great. It’s beautiful and hilarious and it has something fundamentally compelling to say about how we tell stories. A lot of Brigsby is about the increasingly porous distinction between fan and creator, and both the joys and responsibilities that come from inserting yourself into the creative process. It’s also about how fun it is to grab some friends and a camera and just make shit. BEN COLEMAN
AMC Seattle 10

24. Columbus
Allow writer and director Kogonada to take you on a bizarrely fascinating, visually stunning, and subtly sensual tour of Columbus, Indiana’s modernist architecture. Besides churches by Eero and Eliel Saarinen, libraries by I.M. Pei, and Will Miller’s enviable living room interior by Alexander Girard, the film centers on intersecting stories of familial responsibility. Jin (played with authority by John Cho) is a middle-aged man who should care that his father is dying in a hospital, but he doesn’t. Casey (played by Haley Lu Richardson, who turns in a phenomenally good, sophisticated performance) is a recent high-school grad who needs to cut the cord, but that’s complicated. The two shouldn’t like each other in any sort of romantic way, but that’s also complicated. Kogonada includes all the troubles Indianans face—meth problems, having to work two manual-labor jobs to pay rent, racial tension—but he smartly builds it into the characters’ motivations and backstory. Elisha Christian’s cinematography and Kogonada’s story reveal the deep relationship between architecture and people that many might miss. RICH SMITH
SIFF Cinema Uptown

25. Detroit
It's July 1967. The Summer of Love, right? That, of course, is the white-privilege version of history, as Kathryn Bigelow's film Detroit vividly reminds us. The year 1969 was dubbed the "Days of Rage" after Chicago cops started cracking the skulls of white college students, but the burned-out neighborhoods of Watts and Newark testified to a different, more personal kind of rage—one based not on opposition to foreign wars, but to racial injustice at home. Detroit morphs from a tale about a city in crisis to a parable of authoritarian cruelty and dehumanization. Bigelow, using a handheld camera, shoves our faces close to the brutality and terror of this one long night. It's an incredibly effective technique to allow us to experience the emotions, the confusion, and the claustrophobia of the victims... If you can watch Detroit without thinking of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Philando Castile, Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, or any of the other victims of racist violence masquerading as law enforcement, then, as the bumper sticker says, you're not paying attention. MARC MOHAN
Various locations

26. Dunkirk
From May 26 to June 4, 1940, the evacuation of Allied troops from the French port of Dunkirk and its surrounding beaches, known as Operation Dynamo, was a hugely important event in the history of World War II. After the war was over, the survivors of Dunkirk would almost all liken it to Hell. It was Hell on earth, a living Hell. The question is this: How do you present Hell on earth, Hell in the air, and Hell at sea on celluloid? For Christopher Nolan, much of the answer is do it in ultra-high-definition 70 mm IMAX film and show it in IMAX cinemas. Dunkirk is meant to be a nonstop 114 minutes of unalleviated spectacle, a massive collage of beautifully composed pictures, each one lasting for only a few seconds, of gunfire, flames, drowned corpses, exploding bombs, aerial dogfights with numerous plane crashes, and more, much more. Dunkirk shows a world full of terror, but Nolan goes to great lengths to ensure that his audience is never terrified. We sit in our seats munching popcorn and watch other people undergoing terrifying experiences. JONATHAN RABAN
Various locations

27. Killer of Sheep
Some of the most powerful images in all of black cinema are to be found in a black-and-white movie Charles Burnett completed almost 40 years ago. (1) Boys battling with rocks, concrete, and cardboard shields, (2) a standing girl with a dog mask on her head, (3) boys standing upside-down with their legs against the wall of a house, (4) a car engine falling out of the back of a “skoroskoro” (a beat-up car), and, my favorite, (5) a young couple dancing to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth.” Killer of Sheep shows us the twilight of the black worker, the man who labored too hard for the small cuts of bacon he brought home. To obtain an adequate understanding of the film—which is about a sad man in a black Los Angeles neighborhood who kills sheep for a living—you must watch it much more than once, which is why we recommend it every time it shows. CHARLES MUDEDE
Northwest Film Forum

28. Logan Lucky
Logan Lucky is a caper movie that combines the style and sensibility of Soderbergh's biggest crowd pleasers (Ocean's Eleven, Out of Sight) with the dusty Southern outlaw vibe of 1970s films like White Lightning or Moonrunners. The result is an odd hybrid of masterful filmmaking and a kind of culture jamming impulse that walks a tightrope between savviness and condescension. The red state drag show that Soderbergh has convened here feels not merely unconvincing, but a tiny bit uncomfortable, too. That is to say: a bunch of fantastically talented and beautiful movie stars (Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Riley Keough, Daniel Craig) working really hard to seem at home in NASCAR America, where the American flag battles camo for fashion primacy, where people play toilet seat horseshoes, and an interminably melismatic rendition of "America the Beautiful" by LeAnn Rimes as Blue Angels roar overhead brings grown men to tears. SEAN NELSON
Various locations

29. Landline
Gillian Robespierre, writer-director of Obvious Child, reunites with Jenny Slate for this serio-comic take on secrets and lies in Giuliani-era Manhattan. Frustrated adman Alan (John Turturro) is keeping something from hypercritical wife Pat (Edie Falco), engaged daughter Dana (Slate) can't resist a man from her past, and teen sister Ali (Abby Quinn) is sneaking out to go clubbing. True, they're normal middle-class problems, but Robespierre has a knack for embarrassingly salty dialogue, and Slate and Quinn are perfectly cast as sisters straining against the yoke of expectations. These two elements come together to make a very satisfying movie experience. KATHY FENNESSY
SIFF Film Center & SIFF Cinema Egyptian

30. The Little Hours
Though nuns are often portrayed as beacons of purity, they’re anything but in The Little Hours, Jeff Baena’s film set at a convent in medieval Italy. These sisters unleash torrents of profanity, violently lash out at men, chug sacramental wine, and explore their sexuality with wild abandon. The film’s best moments come when we get to spy on them—wringing out the laundry, grooming the donkey, stealing turnips from the garden and later going to confession over the theft. The Little Hours finds comedy in mundanity; its jokes, thankfully, make up for its unoriginality. CIARA DOLAN
SIFF Cinema Egyptian & Varsity Theatre

31. Spider-Man: Homecoming
Spider-Man: Homecoming isn't just the best Spider-Man film ever made—it might just be the current reigning champion in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe. Instead of being crammed with typical action set pieces and clunky character development, Homecoming is actually a good-natured teen comedy in the vein of John Hughes's best work, rather than the action-packed blockbuster behemoths we've grown accustomed to. It's the closest a Spider-Man film has come to capturing the insecurity and bubbly effervescence displayed in the Marvel comics of the 1960s, and Tom Holland's earnest, engaging style has a lot to do with it. WM. STEVEN HUMPHREY
Pacific Place, Admiral, Meridian 16

32. Step
Recall Hoop Dreams, the 1994 documentary about two black American teenagers who dream of becoming pro-ballers and making millions. Step is not like that. Though having the same urban and class setting as Hoop Dreams (this time Baltimore and not Chicago), these black American teenagers are not dreaming of fame or riches. There are no such illusions for them. Their goals are more realistic: graduate from high school, get into college, obtain a degree, and secure stable employment. As for step dancing (which is not really at the center of the documentary), it provides pleasure, discipline, and a way to discharge a lot of inner-city pressure. Life for these young women is not easy at home or in the classroom. Sometimes there’s no food in the fridge; other times, homelessness is one unpaid bill away. The documentary is straightforward and powerful. CHARLES MUDEDE
SIFF Cinema Uptown & Ark Lodge Cinema

33. Wind River
Beginning with a scarily enigmatic midnight chase, the plot follows a Wyoming wildlife officer (Jeremy Renner) tasked with hunting predatory animals through the frozen high lonesomes. (Viewers with a fondness for wolves should be prepared to avert their eyes early on.) After discovering the corpse of a young Native American woman in the mountains, he teams with an inexperienced FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen) to track down the killer—and as their path leads them to the local reservation, he must deal with his own ties to the deceased. As his previous screenplays have indicated, screenwriter/director Taylor Sheridan has a real gift for the tired wiseassery of lawmen, and his streak continues here, with the byplay between jaded professionals giving spark even to routine procedural scenes. (Graham Greene, as the reservation’s deadpanning sheriff, not only steals every scene he’s in, but possibly those of whatever is playing next door in the multiplex, too.) If Sheridan proves to be a little more indulgent toward moments of tough guys waxing poetic than the directors of his previous work, at least the extra words earn their keep. ANDREW WRIGHT
Meridian 16 & AMC Seattle 10

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