At the movies this weekend, you could put yourself in a sexy summer-dance mood with Madonna: Truth or Dare, see what you think of Spike Lee's solid BlacKkKlansman, or feel your heart beautifully broken with Grave of the Fireflies. Follow the links below to see complete showtimes, tickets, and trailers for our critics' picks, and, if you're looking for even more options, check out our guide to the biggest and best movies this month, our complete movie times listings, or our film events calendar.
Movies play from Thursday to Sunday unless otherwise noted.
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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
AMC Pacific Place & AMC Seattle 10
Araby
Brazilian filmmakers Affonso Uchoa and João Dumans's film, set in the outskirts of an industrial town, is about a young man who discovers a wounded factory worker's notebook and follows his elder's tracks on a journey to find himself. Village Voice called Araby "a beautiful bummer of a movie" about a worker's frustrating search for happiness in a marginal existence.
SIFF Film Center
Friday–Sunday
BlacKkKlansman
Based on retired police detective Ron Stallworth’s 2014 memoir Black Klansman, director Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman stars John David Washington (son of Denzel Washington) as the first Black cop on the Colorado Springs police department in the early 1970s. Answering a recruitment ad in the local newspaper—and a knack for talking on the phone using his best “white guy” voice—Stallworth gets in good with the local Klan in Colorado Springs. But his attempt to infiltrate the organization hits an obvious stumbling block when it comes time to meet in person. Enter fellow police officer Flip Zimmerman (Adam Driver), a nonpracticing Jew who agrees to pretend to be Stallworth in person. It’s difficult to know what to make of Lee’s latest joint. As with many of his other films, BlacKkKlansman constantly feels like Lee’s not sure what tone he wants to hit, so he hits them all, often with the subtlety of a brick to the face. It’s a solid work, albeit one that’s flawed in the same ways that nearly all of Spike’s best films are flawed. DAVID F. WALKER
Various locations
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 Seattle 10 & AMC Pacific Place
Carole Lombard: Queen of Comedy
The cool, brainy star of 1930s cinema acted 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's film is Nothing Sacred, in which a woman pretends to have radium poisoning in order to garner a reporter's interest.
Seattle Art Museum
Thursday only
Center City Cinema: A League of Their Own
There's no crying in baseball, or so says Tom Hanks in the venerable classic A League of Their Own. Before the movie screens outside at dusk, enjoy baseball-themed games and activities.
Freeway Park
Friday only
Chicagoland Shorts vol. 4
This compendium of short works by queer, women, and POC filmmakers introduces audiences to experimental, animated, documentary, and music videos from Chicago. Funky, innovative, and very cool.
Northwest Film Forum
Sunday only
Dark Money
In 2010, the US Supreme Court declared that pumping corporate cash into elections is a form of free speech. We have been witnessing the consequences of the high court's Citizens United ruling ever since. But because so many of those consequences benefit Republican politicians, there can be a tendency to view opposition to Citizens United as primarily a leftist preoccupation. What's brilliant about Dark Money, a powerful documentary directed by Montana native Kimberly Reed, is how it proves the falsity of this notion by telling the story of Republican state lawmakers who found themselves in the crosshairs of a very effective dark-money blitz. It all makes the problem crystal clear: Corporate power is corrupting American democracy using massive contributions and complex voter-manipulation schemes at levels we've never seen before—levels that, to this day, we barely comprehend. It's a dynamic that hurts community-accountable Republicans and Democrats alike while helping only cosseted plutocrats. ELI SANDERS
SIFF Film Center
Thursday only
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
Various locations
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
Thursday only
Finding Christa
In 1961, an overwhelmed woman named Camille Billops gave away her four-year-old daughter for adoption. Mother and child meet again decades later, and Camille's film uses re-enactments, home movies, music, and more to depict their relationship. When it came out in 1991, Vincent Canby of the New York Times called it "mass of fascinating contradictions." Shown in 16mm.
Northwest Film Forum
Saturday only
Fuselage Dance Film Festival
At this inaugural festival, see dance films from artists based in the Pacific Northwest and beyond.
Yaw Theater
Saturday only
Generation Wealth
Lauren Greenfield (who made the critically praised The Queen of Versailles) takes a jaundiced and infuriating look at the unbelievably wealthy in China, Russia, and America, exploring how the pursuit of wealth warps everything for those who want to appear rich while lacking the means to buy luxuries. Glenn Kenny of RogerEbert.com called the documentary "compulsively watchable," but Scott Tobias of NPR criticized it for its "scattershot" approach.
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Thursday only
Grave of the Fireflies
Two siblings—teenaged Seita and little Setsuko—struggle to survive in the aftermath of a World War II firebombing in Kobe. This film commanded new respect for the possibilities of anime, and Studio Ghibli films in particular, for emotion-driven filmmaking. Some critics, Roger Ebert in particular, considered it one of the best war films of all time. This screening is dubbed into English.
AMC Pacific Place
Sunday only
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
Meridian 16 & Varsity Theatre
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
Meridian 16
Khu.éex: The Magic of Noise
Dave Segal has written, "Led by bassist [and renowned glass artist] Preston Singletary, large Seattle ensemble Khu.éex’ forge a unique fusion of robust funk, fiery, Pharoah-esque jazz, and Tlingit vocalizing and storytelling." Nights at the Neptune will screen a documentary on the fascinating musical group.
Neptune Theatre
Thursday only
Madonna: Truth or Dare
The Seattle Weekly once panned Madonna’s classic rockumentary Truth or Dare—and on its 20th anniversary! Rude!—while claiming the only interesting part of the film was “just how not scandalous” it was in our current age of pop princesses showing their vaginas on the internet. I agree that Truth or Dare, like anything approaching 30, has become less rowdy with age, but judging the film on its shock value (it was very shocking then, but it is not very shocking now) ignores the many ways Truth or Dare continues to influence global—and gay—culture. The film is stylish, bratty, and braver than it admits. CHASE BURNS
Central Cinema
Friday–Sunday
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
The Miseducation of Cameron Post
Even though this movie deservedly won the top prize at Sundance, I wasn’t initially sure we needed another story about a teenage lesbian forced to go to pray-away-the-gay conversion camp. However, a hell of a lot has changed since 1999 when But I’m a Cheerleader came out. Cameron Post (Chloë Grace Moretz) is sent to the camp after being caught with her pants down with another girl on her prom night. The irony is that sending gay kids to the same place provides them with a sense of community and the ability to discover they are not alone in the world. While not all of the kids make it out unscathed, Cameron is able to form a secret support group to survive. Infused with humor without being campy, this is a sophisticated and refreshingly honest adaptation of the Emily M. Danforth novel of the same name. CARL SPENCE
SIFF Cinema Uptown
Friday–Sunday
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
Park your bum on some blankets in front of the Mural and see free, highly enjoyable movies—this week, it's Little Shop of Horrors, of which Sean Nelson wrote, "The film has aged brilliantly, the songs are still excellent, and the puppetry remains incomparable." Each screening will be preceded by short films by Cornish students.
Mural Amphitheatre
Saturday only
Moving History: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Film Forum
Probably the best and worst thing about my brain is the zeal with which it approaches the task of rummaging. The idea that the next stack of papers, the next bin of records, the next shelf of books, the next batch of DVDs, or the next weirdly unmarked reel of film is going to reveal some irreplaceable treasure is enough to keep me searching through dusty junk forever. This presentation appeals to that little particle in my psyche. Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound scoured the vaults of local museums and libraries, and their findings include oral history recordings, archival footage, and photographs from the Southwest Seattle Historical Society’s Log House Museum, a “gay camp classic” from Scarecrow Video, selections from the recently digitized Vi Hilbert Collection at the UW Ethnomusicology Archives, as well as clips from Seattle Art Museum, King County Archives, and UW Libraries Special Collections. SEAN NELSON
Northwest Film Forum
Sunday only
Nico, 1988
Susanna Nicchiarelli dramatizes the twilight of Nico (played by Danish actor Trine Dyrholm), the cavernous-voiced former singer of the Velvet Underground and later independent artist, as she reluctantly heads out on a last tour, struggles with drug use and mental illness, and tries to reconcile with her estranged son. It certainly looks downbeat, but perhaps also more nuanced and affecting than your average musician biopic.
Grand Illusion
Friday–Sunday
Outland
This 1981 Sean Connery space thriller might recall The Expanse to modern viewers. Miners on Io, a moon of Jupiter, start killing themselves and others in bizarre ways, and Marshal O'Neil decides to get to the bottom of it. His investigation turns up a deadly drug, a corrupt boss, and a terrifying plot.
Grand Illusion
Thursday only
Peddler Movie Night
Head to Peddler's outdoor yet covered beer garden, where you can watch a movie while enjoying the summer breezes. (You can even bring your dog.) This week, hot young Harrison Ford swings into sweaty adventure in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Peddler Brewing
Thursday 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
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
Rooftop Movies After Hours
Unwind at the end of the week with a free movie and maybe a movie-inspired cocktail, like this week's Super Troopers paired with the "MEOW-Garita!"
Motif
Friday only
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
Various locations
Wayne's World
A spin-off of a SNL skit about two dumbass metalheads who host a public-access show in their basement, which, in the film adaptation, catches the attention of a slimy TV executive who gives them a fatty TV deal. Hilarity and conflict ensue. This was one of those films that shouldn’t have been so commercially successful (it grossed $121 million, the highest of 1992), or become so deeply rooted in pop culture that some of us can still recite lines from it, while not actually realizing we’re doing so (“That’s what she said”—yeah, I know it’s a one-liner way older than Wayne’s World, but they brought it back into the public consciousness). Also, Wayne’s World will forever get credit for introducing me to “Foxy Lady” (I was 12 and not well-versed in Jimi Hendrix), “Dream Weaver” (yacht rock at its best), and “Bohemian Rhapsody” (the group sing-along scene in the car is one of my favorite things ever—I still crack up about Dixie cup barf dude). In sum, it’s a ’90s-era comedy classic that isn’t award-worthy, but is pretty righteous. LEILANI POLK
Central Cinema
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
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