It is hot, hot, hot, and we just want to plunge our brains into some cool, none-too-taxing summer movies. Mission Impossible - Fallout to the rescue! You can also go classic with To Live and Die in L.A., or more serious with Carlos López Estrada's new drama Blindspotting. Follow the links below to see complete showtimes, tickets, and trailers for all of our critics' picks, and, if you're looking for even more options, check out our complete movie times listings or our film events calendar.

Movies play from Thursday to Sunday unless otherwise noted.

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Aliens
James Cameron’s second film (his first is The Terminator) is the second film in the Alien series, Aliens. Like the first film Alien, Aliens presents a critique of capitalism. The former concerns the old struggle between capital and labor; the latter concerns the ruthlessness of corporate power and an industrial military complex that serves not the public but corporate interests. We live in the era when the White House has become a business. Aliens is the perfect movie for our times. CHARLES MUDEDE
Central Cinema
Friday–Sunday

Ant-Man and the Wasp
While Ant-Man and the Wasp is fun, funny, and exciting, it also runs the risk of being incomprehensible to those uninitiated in the ways of Marvel. The first Ant-Man, while it showed promise in casting Rudd as the gentle, dad-bod superhero we’ve been waiting for, fell flat in a number of places and wasn’t nearly as funny as it could’ve and should’ve been. (The underuse of Rudd’s awkward, sweet natural charm bordered on egregious.) But Ant-Man’s visual playfulness saved the day: A movie about a tiny Paul Rudd had a unique opportunity to show audiences micro and macro perspectives, opening a whole new world of creativity and comedy. Happily, Ant-Man and the Wasp follows through on that stuff and goes even further with scale-shifting action sequences. More importantly, this film uses Rudd exponentially better, giving him plenty of opportunities to be goofy and charming and Paul Rudd-y. SUZETTE SMITH
Various locations

Barry Lyndon
As much as I dislike Stanley Kubrick (please examine carefully the edits and zooms of the instrument panel of the bomber in Dr. Strangelove—they are just awful, so awful, so cheese in cheesy, so Hanna-Barbera bad), I have a bit of a soft spot for 1975’s Barry Lyndon because, when I attended college (in the 1990s), it introduced me to the art of lighting. Barry Lyndon is the film that I first saw lighting’s power and so, the image of how to light a scene is, in the life history of my being/body, found in this movie. The rest of the film is forgettable as far as I’m concerned. CHARLES MUDEDE
Grand Illusion
Thursday only

Blindspotting
In rapidly gentrifying Oakland, Collin (Daveed Diggs) is trying to survive his last three days of probation when the slightest infraction will send him back to jail. However, his best friend Miles (Rafael Casal) is white, wild, and reckless. Collin should avoid Miles, but he doesn’t. While trying to get home before curfew late one night, he witnesses a rogue cop pursue and shoot a fleeing black man. CARL SPENCE
AMC Pacific Place

The Cakemaker
When Thomas, a Berlin baker, learns that his boyfriend, Oren, a married Israeli man who visits Germany once a month for business, has been killed in a car accident, he travels to Oren's home country to seek closure. Once there under a false name, he meets Oren's widow, Anat, whose struggling bakery he revives with his non-kosher cakes and cookies. But how far can he hide his relationship with Anat's dead husband? Critics have praised this original, tense drama about loneliness and love.
SIFF Film Center
Thursday only

Carole Lombard: Queen of Comedy
The cool, brainy star of 1930s cinema starred in great movies like To Be or Not To Be, My Man Godfrey, and Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith. Watch the films that made her famous at this weekly SAM series—this week, it's the delightful My Man Godfrey, about an airheaded socialite who hires a sardonic bum (William Powell) as a butler.
Seattle Art Museum
Thursday only

Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot
The latest from director Gus Van Sant follows Portland artist John Callahan (played by Joaquin Phoenix) from his hard-partying days, through a drunken accident that leaves him mostly paralyzed, to his kicking alcohol and becoming a much-loved and much-hated cartoonist. Callahan used his comics to make fun of living with a disability, religion, intolerance, and macabre subjects that ended up offending pretty much everyone. Even after the car crash, he didn’t stop his heavy drinking, and his life continued to be chaotic, until he eventually found a group of recovery misfits, led by a Lao Tzu–quoting gay alcoholic (Jonah Hill, going full-on Gregg Allman). The true story is an affecting one that doesn’t dismiss the hardships of being a quadriplegic or trying to turn your life around. GILLIAN ANDERSON
AMC Seattle 10 & SIFF Cinema Uptown

Eighth Grade
Ugh, the agony of being a middle-schooler. Kayla is a quiet kid being raised by a single dad. She has no close friends and drifts through her school days not being noticed by anyone. She reaches out to the world through her inspirational YouTube videos (“The topic of today’s video is being yourself”), but nobody is watching. She desperately wants to connect, to be appreciated by someone who isn’t just her dad (“If people would talk to me at school, they would find out that I am really funny and cool and talkative”). This is the first feature film by writer/director Bo Burnham (a stand-up comedian and former teen YouTube sensation!), who refreshingly puts the adolescent girl perspective front and center, unfiltered by Instagram. All the problems of young teenhood are on display here: awkward social skills, skin problems, trying too hard, and feeling too much. Elsie Fisher as Kayla is both extraordinary and completely unremarkable. The film is funny and sad and excruciating and hopeful. Eighth grade is the worst; Eighth Grade the movie is wonderful. Winner of best film and best actress for Fisher at this year’s SIFF. GILLIAN ANDERSON
SIFF Cinema Egyptian & AMC Seattle 10

Filmworker
A deep dive into a life obsessed with cinema, this documentary focuses not on Stanley Kubrick but on his unsung right-hand man, Leon Vitali, who played a role in Barry Lyndon and went on to play virtually every kind of professional role for the notoriously tyrannical director—"casting director, acting coach, location scouter, sound engineer, color corrector, A.D., promoter, and eventually restorer of Kubrick’s films," according to publicity materials. It's a necessary antidote to auteur mythology, which credits nearly every aspect of the film to its director—or, at best, the director and screenwriter.
Grand Illusion
Saturday–Sunday

Hereditary
If you’re not comfortable with the very real possibility that you’ll be drenched in sweat and cowering in the fetal position by the end of Hereditary, perhaps this is one cinematic experience you should skip. But you’d be missing out—writer/director Ari Aster’s feature debut might be one of the most beautiful and nauseating horror movies ever made. Hereditary centers on miniaturist artist Annie Graham (an Oscar-worthy Toni Collette), whose family is rattled by mysterious events following the death of her reclusive mother. Her daughter, tween outcast Charlie (Milly Shapiro), is apparently grieving the hardest of them all—she spends her free time making dolls out of dead pigeons and always looks like she’s got a category five hurricane brewing inside her head. Hereditary is brilliant—the whole thing hums with cold electricity that’s guaranteed to unsettle your soul. Aster gracefully illustrates humanity’s ancient fear of predestined fate in a setting, and with a family unit, that feels deeply rooted in reality. It’s also a powerful reminder of the horror genre’s underutilized potential as a source for empathy—proof that it’s possible to uncover great truths about the human condition, so long as we’re willing to kneel down in the dirt and pick apart the rotting carcasses of our worst fears. Like Hereditary, it’s gross, but it’s worth it. CIARA DOLAN
AMC Pacific Place & AMC Seattle 10

Incredibles 2
Incredibles 2 simply isn’t as tightly tied together as the first. Its villain, the Screenslaver, isn’t as key to defining Elastigirl’s character as Syndrome was to Mr. Incredible’s in the first film—so when everything climactically comes together in the third act, Incredibles 2 ultimately packs a weaker thematic punch. This isn’t really a knock, though. What Incredibles 2 (slightly) sacrifices in cohesion and heart it makes up for with action and comedy. He opens Incredibles 2 with back-to-back set pieces that quickly put the previous film’s finale in the rearview; he closes the film with a team-based triumph that any three X-Men flicks combined couldn’t compete with; and when he goes for the gag (which is often), it feels like Chuck Jones-era Looney Tunes via classic-era Simpsons (which Bird himself helped make classic). Incredibles 2 isn’t as good or affecting as the first, but it is prettier, louder, faster, and funnier—and if you have to make a trade, that’s not a bad one. BOBBY ROBERTS
Various locations

The Invisible Vegan
This Nights at the Neptune presentation is a film by Jasmin Leyva about "dietary trends among African Americans" and the interplay between food, agribusiness, and oppression. Keith Tucker will lead a Q&A after the film.
Neptune Theatre
Thursday only

Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
I totally understand why people object to these films and their CGI manipulations, but I am helpless before the allure of plausible dinosaurs wreaking havoc on humans. I thought the original Spielberg ones were killer. I thought the Joe Johnston third sequel was killer. I thought the reboot Jurassic World was killer. And I think this new one, again starring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard, both of whom I can usually live without, looks, guess what: killer. I love films with dinosaurs chasing and killing people. It’s what movies are for. SEAN NELSON
AMC Pacific Place & Meridian 16

Leave No Trace
If you lived in the Pacific Northwest in 2004, you remember it: The discovery that, for years, a father and daughter had been living in Portland's Forest Park in an undetected campsite. They were eventually found and housed by the authorities, but soon disappeared again. The story inspired a novel, My Abandonment, written by Reed College creative writing professor Peter Rock, and that book has been adapted into a compassionate, graceful movie by Winter’s Bone director Debra Granik. The father and daughter in Leave No Trace—played by Ben Foster and Thomasin McKenzie—aren’t meant to be stand-ins for the actual people, and the movie’s plot doesn’t precisely follow real-life events. But everything else about Leave No Trace feels entirely authentic, from its patient rendering of life in the pair’s urban-adjacent campsite to the way it shows how a parent and child are able to communicate without words. Foster is excellent as Will, a veteran coping with PTSD by getting as far as he can from the disturbing elements of civilization while also doing his best to provide for his daughter. But the movie belongs to McKenzie, whose extraordinary performance as daughter Tom is heartbreaking, inspiring, and unforgettable. NED LANNAMANN
Meridian 16 & AMC Seattle 10

Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is the most opposite of reality a movie can get. It is a universe of music and light and love, completely devoid of cynicism, hate, and ugliness. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again is a musical filled with ABBA songs. It stars some of the most likable white people out there, including Amanda Seyfried, Christine Baranski, Colin Firth, and Cher. Lily James plays a young Meryl Streep, living her best late-1970s life and hooking up with tons of hot dudes. It's important to be engaged, but mental-health breaks are important, too, and while you could just silence your phone and try to ignore each news alert signaling our further descent into doom, it'll be much better to watch Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again and fully immerse yourself in pure, batshit joy. ELINOR JONES
Various locations

Midnight Movie Madness
Have a blast watching public domain horror films, boozing it up at the pay-what-you-want bar, or playing board or video games with the horror sketch troupe Drop the Root Beer and Run. A must for fans of comedy, low-fi horror, and cheesiness.
The Pocket Theater
Friday only

Mission: Impossible – Fallout
What Mission: Impossible - Fallout brings to the table is the best action choreography I’ve seen since Mad Max: Fury Road and a serviceably twisty espionage plot. Functioning as a pretty direct sequel to 2015’s Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, Fallout assigns Cruise’s Ethan Hunt and crew (Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Rebecca Ferguson) a pretty standard “terrorists have nuclear bombs and that’s bad” scenario that gives them excuses to heist and fight and banter around Western Europe and Central Asia while dealing with an increasingly complex series of intelligence agency betrayals. But writer/director Christopher McQuarrie spoils a good thing by connecting a few too many vital plot threads to previous films in this decades-old, often-muddled series; even having recently rewatched Rogue Nation, I was still frequently baffled when characters started discussing the events of that film without context. In terms of pure action cinema, Fallout absolutely sings. Every punch cracks teeth, every bullet thuds against brick or body armor with a real sense of weight, and every stunt has a very real feel of risk to it. (Probably because there was.) BEN COLEMAN
Various locations

Movies at the Mural: The Princess Bride
Park your bum on some blankets in front of the Mural and see free, highly enjoyable movies, like The Princess Bride (this week's film), Get Out, and Wonder Woman. Each screening will be preceded by short films by Cornish students.
Mural Amphitheatre

Persona Non Grata
Chiune Sugihara, the Japanese diplomat who single-handedly provided life-saving documents to thousands of Lithuanian Jews during the Holocaust, finally gets a biopic in a Polish-Japanese co-production.
Scarecrow Video
Saturday only

RBG
All hail Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Better known as “RBG” to her fans (and “Bubby” to her grandkids), at 85 years old, the US Supreme Court justice still has a fierce intellect, a duty to the law, and an immense inner and physical strength. Over the long course of her career, RBG repeatedly defended the rights of everyone to live free from bias, but, as Supreme Court correspondent Nina Totenberg says, Ginsburg “quite literally changed life for women.” And she’s still doing it. With intimate interviews with family and friends, as well as RBG herself, the film captures the life of a woman with a heart none of us wants to stop ticking. KATIE HERZOG
SIFF Cinema Uptown & AMC Seattle 10

Ronin
After the Cold War ended, its spies were suddenly masterless. What to do in this situation? Where do spies find work? They need to eat, too. The whole world has agreed that capitalism is the end of history, and your bread and butter was the conflict between the capitalists of the world and the workers of the world, the eagle (USA) and the bear (USSR). This film found the answer. The masterless spies (ronins) go after and kill each other over anything, even if that anything is nothing. This was the last great film by an American mountain of a director, John Frankenheimer. CHARLES MUDEDE
Grand Illusion
Friday–Sunday

Rooftop Movies After Hours
Unwind at the end of the week with a free movie and maybe a movie-inspired cocktail—this time, pump up your adrenaline with Die Hard and lower it again with a "Yippee Kay Yay."
Motif
Friday only

Saving Brinton
An obsessive Iowan collector has devoted a good chunk of his life to restoring an amazing trove of archival films that belong to one William Franklin Brinton in 1900, including "rare footage of President Teddy Roosevelt, the first moving images from Burma, and a lost relic from Georges Méliès." Saving Brinton is a tribute to this archivist-hero, George Zahs.
Northwest Film Forum
Thursday & Sunday

Skyscraper
It's in Skyscraper—the latest in a streak of big-budget high-concept Dwayne Johnson blockbusters—that he finally claims Arnold Schwarzenegger's mantle. What Skyscraper represents is an absurd action movie that simply couldn't justify it's existence without Johnson's presence. He's an enormous charisma engine; drop him into a shiny plastic shell, and suddenly you've got a vehicle. That's not to say Skyscraper is poorly made. It's quick like a bunny and very aware of its formula. Skyscraper is a thoroughly 2018 action movie: Violent but largely bloodless, with a bit of heart, a bit of menace, no travel time between objectives, and zero downtime between set pieces. There's basically everything you need to keep the whole family entertained for 90 minutes. BEN COLEMAN
Various locations

Sorry To Bother You
When hip-hop collective the Coup released their sixth album, Sorry to Bother You, front man Boots Riley, a former telemarketer and Occupy Oakland activist, described it as "a dark comedy with magical realism." That description applies equally well to his razor-sharp directorial debut. The title phrase, of course, is how telemarketers, like Cassius Green (Atlanta's and Get Out's Lakeith Stanfied), launch cold calls to potential customers. He's just a young dude trying to earn enough to graduate from his uncle's garage where he lives with his girlfriend, Detroit (Tessa Thompson), a performance artist in Julianne Moore-in-The-Big Lebowski mode. Riley grounds things in a loose semblance of reality before shit starts to gets weird. Every time Cash makes a call, marks (people on the other end of the line) hang up on him, so he tries on a Putney Swope-like white voice (voiced by David Cross in spectacularly geeky form). Marks love their unctuous new pal and buy crap they don't need, and Cash finally gets to ride the Mishima-inspired gold elevator to RegalView's top floor where the Power Sellers, a shallow gaggle of strivers, congregate. The more money he makes, the more of a jerk he becomes. If he's making more than he deserves, his first-floor colleagues, like Danny Glover's old-timer Langston, are making less, at which point a union organizer (Steven Yuen), the film's true hero, steps up to the plate. Riley's satire enters the nightmare realm of Lindsay Anderson's O Lucky Man!. Riley's ability to transfer his leftist politics intact from turntable to screen is truly miraculous. His film has a distinct look that ranges from pop-art bright to demonically dark, and Stanfield's lightly absurdist performance holds it all together. KATHY FENNESSY
Various locations

Three Identical Strangers
What starts off looking like a standard issue Netflix doc about a zany family—replete with insulting reenactments and that creeping sense that you’ve just signed on for two hours with people who only think their story is worth telling—rapidly becomes one of the most complex, even shocking adoption stories you’ll ever hear. Short version: Within the space of a couple of days in 1980, three 19-year-old triplets who have never even heard of one another’s existence meet and become brothers, friends, and NYC media darlings. But the story of why they had never met—why, in fact, their existence was intentionally kept a secret—involves a conspiracy worthy of a psychological thriller. As the story unravels, you become astonished by the layers of complexity and injustice these three guys have experienced. And it doesn’t take long before your initial impressions are totally forgotten: These guys aren’t just lovable doofballs telling well-rehearsed chestnuts about their kooky life. They’re people who have suffered unimaginable hardship and now bravely submit it to further public scrutiny in the hopes of solving the mystery at the center of their lives. SEAN NELSON
Meridian 16 & AMC Seattle 10

To Live and Die in L.A.
William Friedkin (The Exorcist) directed this ultra-stylish crime thriller starring William Peterson as an unethical, reckless Secret Service agent who, along with his more upright partner, tries to take down a counterfit ring run by Eric Masters (Willem Dafoe).
Grand Illusion
Friday–Sunday

To Sleep with Anger
Let's take a film like To Sleep with Anger. No one has heard of it. Why? Not because it was directed by a black man, the great Charles Burnett. Nor because it stars Danny Glover, who was at his peak, fame-wise (thanks to the Lethal Weapon series), when the feature was released in 1990. It is unknown, and was completely ignored by the Oscars, because it's an intelligent film about black people, and yet has almost nothing to say or to do with white racism (it is mentioned only once, and at the very end of the movie, and comically concerns the slowness of the coroner's office when it comes to dealing with black corpses). CHARLES MUDEDE
Scarecrow Video
Sunday only

Under the Tree
Two neighboring couples who get along just fine in most respects start reeeeally getting on each other's nerves when they disagree on a tree and its pesky shadow. This dark comedy set in Icelandic suburbia was hailed as "Grim stuff, gloriously so" by the Globe and Mail. If you missed it at the Seattle International Film Festival, see it now.
SIFF Film Center
Friday–Sunday

Won't You Be My Neighbor?
The question isn't how much you will cry. The question, which only emerges days into the aftermath of seeing this extraordinary new documentary about the life and work of Fred Rogers, is this: What exactly are you crying about? Possibility number one: good old-fashioned nostalgia. A huge chunk of the film consists of clips from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, the public TV show for children Rogers created, wrote, and performed multiple roles in for 33 years. Seeing the way he spoke directly to his viewers, making sure we knew we were valued, cared for, seen, and known is a powerful reminder of the early validation the show provided. And learning that this style of address arose from radical education theory, developed by Rogers himself (in conjunction with learned colleagues like Spock, Braselton, and Erikson), about the benefits of being candid with children, only deepens the admiration. But this footage also stirs up the memory of inarticulate childhood sorrow his attention helped to alleviate, taking you back to the time before you were capable of constructing the armor required for this nightmare of a world. Possibility number two: the impossibility of such a human existing again, either on television or, indeed, on earth. He represented a strain of religious conviction that seems inconceivable now. Through his show, he demonstrated the precepts of his faith—kindness, empathy, dignity, peaceful coexistence, safety, love—without ever once mentioning, or even gesturing toward, a deity. SEAN NELSON
Various locations

Also Playing:
Our critics don't recommend these movies, but you might like to know about them anyway.

The Equalizer 2

Unfriended: Dark Web

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