Some of the summer's blockbusters seem to be winding down, but something big is coming our way: The 70mm Film Festival, which you absolutely cannot miss. But our film critics also recommend indie films galore—the paranoid British puzzler The Ghoul, the charming New Jersey rap movie Patti Cake$, and the stunning French animation The Girl Without Hands are just some of the possibilities. See all of the movies they recommend below, and follow the links for showtimes and trailers. Still searching? Find plenty of options in our movie times, our film events page, and our outdoor movie schedule.


Jump to: Thursday Only | Friday Only | Friday-Sunday | Saturday Only | Sunday Only | All Weekend


Get all this and more on the free Stranger Things To Do mobile app—available now on the App Store and Google Play.

THURSDAY ONLY
1. 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

2. 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
Meridian 16 & AMC Seattle 10

3. 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
Pacific Place

4. The Ghoul
The British import The Ghoul is a clever, deceptively chilly example of narrative unreliability, presenting an increasingly askew perspective in a way that’s somehow both off-putting and absorbing. It lingers. Writer/director Gareth Tunley wastes no time in establishing the basis for an intriguing psychological thriller: As a favor to his former partner, an off-duty cop poses as a depressed patient in order to covertly gather information on a murder suspect from a psychiatrist. The film scarcely finishes setting up this premise, however, before beginning to tear it down, dropping increasingly large, worrying hints about the worldview of its central character. By the time another therapist with an infectious interest in the occult enters the picture, the lines between fantasy and reality are thoroughly scribbled over. ANDREW WRIGHT
Grand Illusion

5. Harmonium
A married father with a young daughter decides to employ his ex-con friend in his workshop—and soon regrets it. This cold-hearted thriller by Koji Fukada tears apart the idea of family. Its "atmosphere of dread [which] Mr. Fukada tends with such ruthless precision — and more than a little sadism" was praised by the New York Times's Jean Catsoulis, and indeed, it's been met with basically universal (if somewhat shuddery) critical acclaim.
Northwest Film Forum

6. 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 Cinema Egyptian

7. 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
Varsity Theatre

8. Rifftrax Live: Doctor Who—The Five Doctors
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

9. 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

10. Wattstax
Revisit Wattstax, a 1972 celebration of African American culture and music and commemoration of the Watts Rebellion of 1965, through a documentary devoted to this festival. Stay on for a dance party inspired by Stax Records, who produced the original festival.
Central Library

FRIDAY ONLY
11. Puget Soundtrack: Holy Mountain
Alejandro Jodorowsky may be best known for the films he did not make. The Chilean film director and comic-book luminary unsuccessfully attempted to make a huge adaptation of Dune in the late 1970s. That project never came to fruition, but it did create the entire 1980s sci-fi film renaissance, according to a ridiculously entertaining 2013 documentary about the maverick director’s attempt to interpret Frank Herbert’s novel. Before then, Jodorowsky was more famous for existentialist, sexual, and absurdly entertaining fantasy films like 1973’s The Holy Mountain, which was funded by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. It makes perfect sense that local ambient psychedelic rockers Zen Mother will provide a live soundtrack to this genre-defying, mythopoetic epic. JOSEPH SCHAFER
Northwest Film Forum

FRIDAY-SUNDAY
12. The Girl Without Hands
This French animation is based on one of the nastier of Grimms' fairy tales, in which a young girl is sold to the Devil and only escapes with the loss of her hands, but SĂ©bastien Laudenbach's gorgeous, shifting animation seems much more likely to astonish than depress. Fans of The Belladonna of Sadness are strongly encouraged to take a look.
SIFF Film Center

13. Thelma & Louise
If you have somehow missed the past 20 years of mainstream feminist pop culture, here's the plot of Thelma & Louise: Two women, self-reliant waitress Louise and quiet stay-at-home wife Thelma, go on what's intended to be a carefree jaunt and end up on the lam after Louise shoots Thelma's would-be rapist. Their flight is both a liberation and a path to doom.
Central Cinema

SATURDAY ONLY
14. Attack the Block
Watch a slambang pulpy alien-monster movie made by Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) starring John Boyega and Jodie Whittaker. Part of the ticket proceeds will benefit Pork Filled Productions' POC theater initiatives, and you get unlimited popcorn.
Grand Illusion

15. Chicagoland Shorts v. 3
This compendium of short works by queer, women, and POC filmmakers introduces audiences to experimental, animated, documentary, and music videos from Chicago.
Northwest Film Forum

SUNDAY ONLY
16. Southside with You
The film follows a young, chain-smoking Barack Obama (Parker Sawyers) and a deeply principled Michelle Robinson (Tika Sumpter) as they traverse Chicago's South Side on their first "date." It may be difficult for viewers to believe that the real Barack and Michelle spent so much of their first date outlining their childhoods, their experiences with structural oppression, and their theories of change as Movie Barack and Movie Michelle did. But that stuff doesn't really matter anyway. Southside with You, while sweet and overly schmaltzy at times, powerfully reminds viewers that the story the Obamas gave us over the past eight years—an eight years that may look a paradise since Trump won—is one worth holding onto and retelling for future generations. SYDNEY BROWNSTONE

ALL WEEKEND
17. 70mm Film Festival
Put down your phone and surrender to the splendor of actually-epic-scale cinema in the cathedral that is the Cinerama. Not much unites the films in this 10-day festival other than a commitment to MAGNITUDE, but several are essential viewing. I know you’ve heard it before, but I’ll say it again: Seeing a film in a darkened theater with strangers is a secular sacrament. The fact that you can't pause, talk, text, or tweet until it's over is a feature. Please enjoy it while it's still available. (And if you must pick one, the answer is always Lawrence of Arabia—a film that couldn’t be more timely.) SEAN NELSON
Cinerama

18. Annabelle: Creation
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
Various locations

19. 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
Various locations

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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

24. Good Time
Good Time has the keen eye for anthropology you find in a lot of Sundance movies—the casting feels both unconventional and authentic, and there’s an interest in subcultures that you don’t normally see on screen—but the beauty is that it packs this sensibility into a taut genre thriller. Robert Pattinson, previously of the Twilight series and clearly thrilled to be in a role that doesn’t require him to brood, smolder, or sparkle, plays Connie Nikas, a twitchy grifter who cadges money from his obnoxious, possibly mentally challenged girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and gets his definitely mentally challenged brother, Nick (Benny Safdie, who also co-directed the film with his brother), caught up in a lamebrained heist. The crime goes bad and Nick gets pinched—sending Connie on a night-long odyssey through the wilds of Queens to try to make the money for Nick’s bail. VINCE MANCINI
Various locations

25. 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

26. 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

27. Patti Cake$
A teenage girl in a boring strip-mall-riddled New Jersey town sets out to forge a rap career, ignoring the jerks who make fun of her dreams and her weight.
SIFF Cinema Egyptian

28. 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
Meridian 16 & Pacific Place

29. 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
Various locations

30. 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. 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. 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

31. 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
Various locations

32. 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
Meridian 16

Get all this and more on the free Stranger Things To Do mobile app—available now on the App Store and Google Play.