This weekend at the movies, skip so-so films like The Last Word (which plays like an HBO drama that suddenly turns into a Disney Channel movie) and instead, take advantage of your last chance to see Moonlight in Seattle theaters, celebrate the opening of the The Seattle Jewish Film Festival, check out new releases like T2 Trainspotting, revel in sexy Polish horror musical The Lure, or take a vacation in a celebrity's mind while watching Being John Malkovich. See all of our critics' picks below, and click through the links to see specific movie times and trailers. For more options, check out our complete movie times calendar (as well as our list of special film events).

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Jump to: Thurs Only | Fri Only | Fri—Sun | Sat—Sun | All Weekend

THURSDAY ONLY

1. Before I Fall
Before I Fall is an all around well-made film that concerns a conventionally beautiful teenager who is trying to get out of the maze of the last day of her life. One of the movie's many excellent scenes has two teens running through the twilight of a green-dark forest. This is, indeed, green gothic at its best. Seattle-based visual artist Matthew Offenbacher was the first to theorize this kind of gothic aesthetic. He described it as a feeling, a mood (stimmung in the German expressionist sense) that captures the region’s monstrous aspect. The dusky quality of its sharply slanted light, its dusk-green trees, its urban wilderness blending with the wilderness of the woods. All of this is in Before I Fall, which was filmed in and around Vancouver B.C., the capital—the Transylvania—of green gothic. CHARLES MUDEDE
Pacific Place

2. Fences
Recently, while leaving a screening of the solid and engaging film adaptation of August Wilson's play Fences, which was directed by Washington himself, a man walking behind me said to the woman walking next to him that this is not the kind of Denzel Washington film he likes. It's too act-y, it's all about the Academy Awards. Clearly, he wanted Washington to shoot more and talk less. But Fences has no guns and a whole lot of talking about life—it deals with failed dreams, race relations in mid-century America, marital problems, parenting problems, working-class problems, drinking problems, problems with debts, mental health, and, ultimately, death. What might kill the character Washington plays in Fences, Troy Maxson, is not a car chase or a shoot-out, but blocked arteries to the heart. He is a normal guy with a very standard suite of personal and social issues. CHARLES MUDEDE
Varsity Theatre

3. John Wick Chapter 2
As with the first John Wick, each action sequence—and there are a lot of them—aims to entertain, surprise, and deliver the sort of thrill that can only come from a hyper-stylized, perfectly orchestrated shoot-out. Or car chase. Or fistfight. Even if it doesn’t have the freshness of the original, Chapter 2 offers plenty: It never stops being Looney Tunes funny, but it’s also baroque, dark, and weird, moving at a burning-rubber pace. John Wick: Chapter 2 does not disappoint, and it’s a welcome reminder of how fun and exciting a well-crafted action movie can be. If Buster Keaton were alive today and saw John Wick in action... well, he’d probably be disgusted and horrified at how violent movies are now. But once he got over that, he'd probably clap pretty hard. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Pacific Place

4. The LEGO Batman Movie
Let's start with the good: There’s finally a Batman movie you can take the kids to! The Lego Batman Movie follows up 2014’s surprisingly wonderful The Lego Movie by focusing on that cinematic universe’s version of Batman, a growling, too-cool-for-school badass voiced by Will Arnett. With a blend of computer animation and actual Lego bricks, the dizzying Lego Batman bursts at the edges of the screen. Now for the bad: The Lego Batman Movie may be geared a little too much toward kids. Sure, there are plenty of wisecracks and throwaway gags for eagle-eyed grownups and Batman nuts, but the movie grinds to a halt several times so Batman can learn A Very Important Life Lesson. For a movie that contains this much pure silliness, it’s too bad it thinks it needs to talk down to kids. NED LANNAMANN
Meridian 16

5. Moonlight
Moonlight is a film that has all of the major film critics in the country singing the loudest praises, and is already breaking box-office records, and happens to be a coming-of-age tale of a black American male. But I want to make this clear: The director of Moonlight, Barry Jenkins, did not come out of nowhere. He also directed and wrote one of the best films of the previous decade, Medicine for Melancholy (2008). The wonder is that it took him so long to make his second feature, which will most likely make a big splash at the next Oscars. Expect Jenkins to be one of the few black Americans to win the award for best director. CHARLES MUDEDE
Sundance Cinemas

6. Mr. Gaga
The most remarkable thing about choreographer Ohad Naharin is that he didn't start his professional training until he was 22, after his mandatory enlistment in the Israeli Army. Naharin studied simultaneously at both Juilliard and the School of American Ballet, and has been running Tel Aviv’s Batsheva Dance Company since 1990. Although the film doesn't truly define Naharin’s Gaga style of dance, it's still a fascinating look inside the life and mind of the reigning godfather of modern dance (while fulfilling every stereotype we've already seen of a dance company’s pompous artistic director). This Gaga has nothing to do with the other, more famous, Gaga. RACHEL GABRIELLE
Northwest Film Forum

7. The Only Son
The films in SAM's tribute to one of the three masters of Japan's Golden Age of film, Yasujiro Ozu, are all beautiful and have at their core the quiet spirit of their times and places—mid-century, post-war Japan. The series begins with the 1936 drama The Only Son (Ozu's first "talkie"). CHARLES MUDEDE
Seattle Art Museum

8. RoboCop
A police officer is ripped to pieces by thugs and then turned into a super cybernetic cop designed to clean up the mean streets of Detroit in 1987. Unfortunately, this is not based on a true story.
Scarecrow Video

FRIDAY ONLY

9. The Andromeda Strain
Based on the 1969 novel by Michael Crichton, this creepy sci-fi gem about a threatening extraterrestrial boasts a soundtrack by Gil Mellé that Dave Segal describes as "disturbingly microbial."
Scarecrow Video

FRIDAY—SUNDAY

10. Being John Malkovich
An out-of-work puppeteer (John Cusack) takes a job at a corporation. One day he discovers a small door hidden behind a file cabinet in his office. He crawls inside and finds that it is really a portal that allows him to become actor John Malkovich (played by John Malkovich!) for 15-minute intervals, after which he wakes up in a ditch on the side of a highway. Cusack tells a co-worker (Catherine Keener), and together they hatch a money-making scheme wherein poor slobs can enter John Malkovich for a price—a bizarre vacation, of sorts. BRADLEY STEINBACHER
Central Cinema

11. Donald Cried
Comedies like these often run into trouble translating a keen eye for human failings into a compelling narrative, and Donald Cried is not immune to this. Avedisian’s film seems happy to meander from suburban cul-de-sac to suburban cul-de-sac, occasionally stumbling on a scene of legitimate intensity or oblique emotional truth. Those peaks justify the valleys, if only just; so long as you know what you’re getting into, there’s a lot to unpack here. And if nothing else, Donald Cried will give you something to think about the next time you swing back through your podunk hometown. BEN COLEMAN
Sundance Cinemas

12. Land of Mine
Released in Denmark in late 2015 as Under Sandet (“Under the Sand”), writer/director Martin Zandvliet’s World War II drama Land of Mine almost deserves the clunky, Anglicized title it’s been saddled with for American audiences. There are few surprises buried in its compact running time, offset by a couple of moments any savvy filmgoer will spot well before they arrive. It’s only due to the tension wired into the plot and the wisdom of its casting that it avoids ignominy. It may be made with the subtlety of an unexpected explosion, but the aftereffects are harrowing and lasting. ROBERT HAM
Seven Gables

13. The Lure
The Lure works on a few different levels. On one hand, it’s a sexy Polish horror musical about savage mermaid sisters trying to eat people. (Everybody who’s into that already has their ticket.) But dig a bit deeper and The Lure is what I wish films were more often allowed to be. Agnieszka Smoczyska’s debut is original and beautiful, and it showcases powerful, charismatic women. SUZETTE SMITH
SIFF Film Center

14. Sunset Boulevard
Hollywood’s greatest movie about itself is a fearlessly dark-hearted psychodrama narrated by a dead man and built around one of the mind-fuckiest performances in cinema history. Gloria Swanson—a former silent movie star with limited luck transitioning to sound—stars as Norma Desmond, a former silent movie star with zero luck transitioning to sound who goes extravagantly insane, dragging a struggling young screenwriter along with her. DAVID SCHMADER
Central Cinema

SATURDAY—SUNDAY

15. The Seattle Jewish Film Festival
The 22nd annual Seattle Jewish Film Festival is a nine-day cinematic exploration and celebration of Jewish life around the globe. They promise dozens of Jewish and Israeli films from countries including France, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Turkey, and Poland, along with exciting guests, a VIP Gala, opening and closing night parties, and the rest of the usual film festival draws. (Less standard offerings include a Matzoh Momma Sunday Brunch, complete with Klezmer music.)
Pacific Place

ALL WEEKEND

16. Get Out
Get Out is a feature-length version of the not-quite-joking sentiment among African Americans that the suburbs, with their overwhelming whiteness and cultural homogeneity, are eerie twilight zones for Black people. Far from being a one-joke movie, however, Jordan Peele’s directorial debut is both a clever, consistently funny racial satire and a horror film, one that mocks white liberal cluelessness and finds humor in—but doesn’t dismiss—Black people’s fears. ERIC D. SNIDER
Various locations

17. Hidden Figures
The function of white ideology is to place the blame of black poverty on black people themselves. They are not smart enough, they are lazy, they are like children—therefore they live in the projects, they are on welfare, they perform poorly academically. But the golden bowl of this logic gets a crack whenever a person or an event makes the truth visible: Blacks are as stupid or as smart as any other group of people. This is why a movie like Hidden Figures is so important—a film about a black mathematician, Katherine Johnson (played by Taraji P. Henson), who worked for NASA and participated in its key projects in the 1960s. The mathematician was also a woman, and so she challenged not only white ideology but also male ideology. She had to be hidden twice. The movie also stars Janelle Monáe, who made her mark in the best movie of 2016, Moonlight. CHARLES MUDEDE
Pacific Place

18. 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
Sundance Cinemas and Varsity Theatre

19. Kedi
The enchanting Turkish documentary Kedi works triple time as a nature documentary, a travelogue, and a meditation on the human-animal bond. Director Ceyda Torun makes a case for Istanbul as the new Rome for stray cats. When she isn't soliciting the thoughts of caretakers and observers, her cinematographer, Charlie Wuppermann, shoots the furry subjects from ground level such that they fill the screen while humans fade into the background. These street-smart cats congregate around teahouses and markets for treats and back rubs. Torun follows several around town, like the orange tabby that steals food for her kittens, the gray tabby that sleeps in an auto shop, and the black-and-white cat that chases mice from a restaurant. She exalts these hardy creatures while portraying Istanbul as a city of compassionate citizens. It's a side of Turkey we don't see often enough. KATHY FENNESSY
SIFF Cinema Uptown and Guild 45th

20. Kong: Skull Island
In an interview with Suzette Smith, director Jordan Vogt-Roberts said: "Kong represents the vulnerability in all of us. He represents an unknown, mythic quality in the world. A big part of this film is also just about becoming okay with not having all the answers. There are things we cannot understand and the sooner we understand that the better off we are." SUZETTE SMITH
Various locations

21. La La Land
You guys, I LOVED La La Land, and you will too. Don’t be afraid of it just because it’s a musical about a struggling actress (Emma Stone) and a pretentious jazz musician (Ryan Gosling) who meet and fall in love and sing and dance in a romanticized, cartoony LA. Yeah, it’s splashy and grandiose and full of hazy violet Southern California sunsets, but its emotional core is genuine. Take it from shriveled-hearted me, the Unearned Sentiment Police: La La Land is a grand, over-the-top, razzly-dazzly love story that won’t make you puke one bit. It might even help you forget the horrors of reality, however momentarily—and after the year we’ve had, that practically makes La La Land a public service. MEGAN BURBANK
Pacific Place

22. Lion
Based on Saroo Brierley’s memoir A Long Way Home, the film, an inspiring drama that earns tears without jerking them, begins with five-year-old Saroo (played by a bouncing ball of energy named Sunny Pawar) becoming separated from his mother and brother and ending up a thousand miles away in Calcutta. Saroo’s path may be unclear, but Lion’s isn’t: Like the train that took him away in the first place, the film moves steadily toward its tearful destination, propelled by sincere performances and Volker Bertelmann and Dustin O’Halloran’s gently urgent musical score. Kidman shows great tenderness as the adoptive mother, underscoring the theme of “family” not being limited by biology, and Patel is serious-minded and haunted. But it’s little dynamo Sunny Pawar that you’ll remember best, his infectious cheery optimism encapsulating the film’s hopeful tone. ERIC D. SNIDER
Ark Lodge Cinema and Sundance Cinemas

23. Logan
17 years after X-Men kick-started the superhero genre, we get something like Logan. Something that isn't just a great superhero movie, but a great movie. No disclaimers, no curve: Logan is fantastic. Make no mistake: Logan is such a superhero movie—such an X-Men movie—that at one point Logan (Hugh Jackman) flips through an X-Men comic featuring his spandexed alter ego, Wolverine. He's not impressed. "Maybe a quarter of it happened," he grumbles, "and not like this." Despite his crankiness, Logan is full of the same stuff as the yellowed pages of X-Men and Wolverine: superpowered mutants. Nefarious evildoers. A rock-solid belief that violence fixes everything. But for all Logan's nods to genre—and it's as much a western as a superhero movie—it's about bigger things, too. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Various locations

24. Paterson
Paterson is beautiful throughout—visually, in how Jim Jarmusch and cinematographer Frederick Elmes capture the wondrousness of an urban morning, and aurally, with Paterson's poems (written by Ron Padgett) becoming as much a part of the film as Laura's bulletproof optimism or the rumble of the 23. But there's something else beautiful about Paterson: Jarmusch's clearheaded, straightforward reminder that the most worthwhile art is made by those who scrounge, who have day jobs, who are the same as us: the people who drive and ride the bus, or who try to take up guitar and wonder if they can sell their cupcakes, or who hone their rhymes while waiting for the washing machine. The people who get through each day, finding and sharing bits of hope and truth as the world crumbles around them. ERIK HENRIKSEN
Grand Illusion

25. Personal Shopper
It took French filmmaker Olivier Assayas to make me appreciate the subtleties Kristen Stewart can convey. In 2014’s Clouds of Sils Maria, she held her own with the great Juliette Binoche. Now, in Personal Shopper, her latest collaboration with Assayas, she again manages to be enigmatic but not vapid. The movie is a cinematic Frankenstein monster, stitched together from different genres into something that transcends its sources: Stewart plays a young American in Paris working as an assistant for a globe-trotting supermodel, buying high-end clothes but never getting to try them on. (It’s a metaphor.) She’s also trying to make psychic contact with a twin brother who died from a heart defect—a disease she also has. MARC MOHAN
SIFF Cinema Uptown and Sundance Cinemas

26. The Salesman
Back in 2011, Asghar Farhadi effectively brought Iranian cinema, one of the most vital cinemas of our times, back to the center of the world stage with the film A Separation. It won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for best foreign language film. It made a big difference. It effectively weakened a war Mahmoud Ahmadinejad waged on the film industry when he became president of Iran in 2005. He was out of power a year after A Separation. The Salesman is Farhadi’s latest film, it is again centered on the middle class of Tehran, and it promises to be one of the best things acquired by Amazon Studios this year. CHARLES MUDEDE
SIFF Cinema Uptown

27. The Sense of an Ending
Ritesh Batra's The Sense of an Ending is based on the novel by Julian Barnes. The film explores a lie that the protagonist (played by Jim Broadbent) has been telling himself for years. The plot is full of sex, betrayal, and death, and the acting is lovely. Emily Mortimer is on-screen for only a few brief moments, and she makes impeccable use of every second; each twitch and motion is fascinatingly full of character. And even though the central themes are regret and nostalgia, Broadbent's performance never settles for boring angst—it's all about disbelief and incredulity. JULIA RABAN
Guild 45th

28. T2 Trainspotting
The native visual wit of Danny Boyle's direction has only grown more delightful with age—he revels in mischievous references to the original film. And there's something undeniably satisfying in seeing the four actors from the original reunited, and looking weathered. (It's also nice to hear Ewan McGregor speaking with a Scots accent again.) The original film was like a bone-marrow biopsy of the zeitgeist of its period. By contrast, the sequel revels in pricking its characters' articulate, self-aware out-of-timeness. It confines them to a Scotland that is simultaneously collapsing upon itself (high mountains of garbage loom everywhere) and exploding outward into an indistinguishable Europeanness, and it surrounds them with reminders of the selves they never managed to become. SEAN NELSON
SIFF Cinema Uptown and Guild 45th

29. A United Kingdom
What made Botswana a success and its next-door neighbor Zimbabwe a complete disaster? A part of the answer can be found in the new and excellent movie A United Kingdom, directed by one of the few working black female directors in the world, Amma Asante. The film is about the founder of modern Botswana, Seretse Khama, played by David Oyelowo (Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma). Though Kingdom's plot is centered on how Khama, a black African aristocrat, met, romanced, and married a middle-class British white woman, Ruth Williams (Rosamund Pike), it also shows how their interracial relationship was a diplomatic mess for the UK government, which still had close economic and political ties with a country, South Africa, that made racial separation (apartheid) official around the time the Khama/Williams romance began (the late 1940s). CHARLES MUDEDE
Seven Gables and Ark Lodge Cinema

30. Wilson
Wilson, the book, is composed of 71 single-page scenes, many of which end on a darkly funny/angry punchline, and at its best, the movie preserves that blackout-sketch feel. What it can’t replicate—even though Clowes himself wrote the screenplay—is the variety of visual styles the graphic novel employed to communicate different moods. It’s also hard to capture the book’s emotional starkness using real, flesh-and-blood actors. Still, Harrelson dives into the role, putting his psycho-eyed amiability to good use, creating something like the love child of R. Crumb and Larry David. If he were to see this movie, he’d like it, despite the dollops of sentiment that bubble up. And if others found it—or him—grating, so what? Most people are goddamn idiots anyway. MARC MOHAN
Pacific Place and Sundance Cinemas

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