Whether you need something to watch while you prepare your scaled-down Thanksgiving feast, you're jonesing for some yuletide entertainment, or you're ignoring the holidays and looking for other streaming options, you'll find plenty to choose from this week. See them below, from the video game doc Insert Coin to a gender-flipped Black Beauty Remind Like List voiced by Kate Winslet. Plus, if you haven't heard, the Mercury's amateur porn film festival HUMP! is accepting submissions through January 8, as is the stoner short film fest SPLIFF, through March 5!
Jump to: Locally Streaming: New & Noteworthy | Locally Streaming: Ongoing | Film Festivals| Nationally Streaming| In-Person
Want to stay in the loop? Follow Mercury EverOut on Facebook to get the latest updates about things to do in Portland.
LOCALLY STREAMING: NEW & NOTEWORTHY
El Cuento de las Comadrejas / The Weasel's Tale
Past Event
Like
List
The Portland Latin American Film Festival presents Oscar-winning Argentian director Juan Jose Campanella's (The Secret in Their Eyes) thriller about a group of old friends in the movie industry whose existence at a large house in the country is threatened by a new-to-town young couple.
Portland Latin American Film Festival
Wednesday only
Insert Coin
Praised as the "Sex Pistols of the video game industry," this documentary provides an oral history of a group of highly dedicated Chicagoan geeks who created some of the most iconic video games of our time, from Mortal Combat to NBA Jam.
Hollywood Theatre
Zappa
Past Event
Like
List
If 2016's Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words didn't quell your obsession with the zany, occasionally cringy, ultimately very talented late rocker Frank Zappa, bust open a jar of peanut butter (Zappa's favorite tour snack) and catch this new documentary from Alex Winter, aka the guy who stars alongside Keanu Reeves in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.
Hollywood Theatre and various platforms
Opening Friday
FILM FESTIVALS
HUMP! Greatest Hits, Volume 2
Past Event
Like
List
The HUMP! team is bringing back some fan-favorite amateur porn shorts from years past in the second volume of streamable compilations.
EverOut
Saturday only
LOCALLY STREAMING: ONGOING
Beasts Clawing at Straws
This sharp new feature from Korean director Kim Yong-hoon follows a group of down-on-their-luck misfits who hunt for the bigger fortune behind a Louis Vuitton bag stuffed with cash.
Hollywood Theater
City Hall
From acclaimed director Frederick Wiseman, who's been making documentary epics for decades, comes another standout. Not to be confused with the 1996 thriller starring Al Pacino, City Hall takes a strictly observational look at the Boston City government and its Mayor Marty Walsh. When I say observational, I can't overstate how much that defines the film. City Hall doesn’t feature the typical talking heads and cutaways that make up most documentaries. Instead, we're a fly on the wall, watching meetings on meetings about the future of the city of Boston. It's often riveting and enlightening though it may not be the type of doc you pop on to unwind after a long day of doomscrolling. This is mostly due to the documentary being over four and a half hours long. WAIT! Don’t let that put you off. If that's too daunting, watch it in segments with breaks. CHASE HUTCHINSON
Cinema 21
Coded Bias
Past Event
Like
List
When MIT Media Lab researcher Joy Buolamwini discovers that most facial-recognition software does not accurately identify certain mugs (those with dark skin and feminine features, specifically), she delves intoan investigation of widespread bias in algorithms.
Northwest Film Center
Collective
Past Event
Like
List
An unflinching look at the investigative journalists of the Romanian newspaper Gazeta Sporturilor, Collective is a necessary examination of the corruption that can spread unchecked without a robust press to hold it accountable. It takes place following the horrifying fatal 2015 fire at the Collectiv nightclub in Bucharest, Romania. The fire killed 27 people. Widespread government health care fraud, corruption, and greed on all levels would kill 37 more. The film shows footage of the initial fire itself, caused by a pyrotechnic effect that set alight soundproofing foam, and the chaos that ensued. It is a starkly terrible event, which only makes it more horrific that the aftermath saw more preventable death. When the fire was put out, the horror continued for the victims and their families. The focus of the documentary is journalists Cătălin Tolontan, Mirela Neag, and Răzvan Luţac, who head up the team that blows the lid off the entire scandal. It is their reporting that shakes the country to its core. CHASE HUTCHINSON
Hollywood Theatre
The Dark Divide
Past Event
Like
List
This new documentary starring David Cross and Deborah Messing is based on the true story of renowned butterfly expert Dr. Robert Pyle’s 1995 journey across one of America’s largest undeveloped wildlands.
Hollywood Theater and Northwest Film Center
DOCNYC
Remind
Like
List
Touting itself as "America's largest documentary film festival," the online edition of this NYC-based, celebrity-packed annual event (whose special guests from previous years have ranged from Hillary Clinton to Itzhak Perlman to Martin Scorsese to Big Bird) will move online for all to enjoy.
Cinema 21
Free Time
Remind
Like
List
For his latest work, the 88-year-old director Manny Kirchheimer (Stations of the Elevated, Dream of a City) restored 16mm footage that he and his friend Walter Hess (heard of him?) shot in New York between 1958 and 1960, which shows a different version of the city we're used to seeing—one filled with quiet "in-between moments" and architecture around the boroughs.
Cinema 21
Ganja & Hess
Past Event
Like
List
In Bill Gunn’s classic 1973 Blaxploitation horror, the protagonists combat racist cultural stereotypes through vampirism after Dr. Hess Green, an anthropologist (played by Night of the Living Dead’s Duane Jones), gets accidentally stabbed with an ancient cursed dagger by his assistant. "If horror reflects our terrors and traumas, it can also embody our best hopes—albeit sometimes in a negative cast," wrote former Stranger staffer Joule Zelman.
Hollywood Theater
A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
Just when you thought there was no gas left in the tank of revisionist vampire cinema, along comes A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, a tale billed as “the first Iranian vampire western.” Though it’s unlikely to become a crowded field, this black-and-white Farsi-language gem is rich in allusive metaphor (blood-oil-sex-religion) and deep, dark texture. First-time writer/director Ana Lily Amirpour comes by her genre bona fides honestly, via a palette of cinematic and literary influences—Jim Jarmusch most strikingly, but also Leos Carax, Jim Thompson, and Raymond Chandler—not usually seen in horror films of any nationality. And while Amanpour doesn’t deliver the visceral scare factor of Let the Right One In, she does manage to out-Jarmusch Jarmusch’s recent vampire inversion, The Only Lovers Left Alive. In the opening scene, a lean, rockabilly-styled kid rescues a stray cat and walks languidly through the sun-blanched streets of the deserted desert town Bad City. As he crosses a small bridge, oil derricks pumping savagely in the distance, you only casually notice the ravine full of corpses below his feet, and understand that you’re in for a smart, super-creepy film that demands and rewards close attention. SEAN NELSON
Hollywood Theater
Kiddomatic Children's Film Festival
Past Event
Like
List
Family-focused films from all over the world fill out this online festival, presented in partnership with the Roxy Theater.
Hollywood Theatre
La Haine
A riot erupts in the suburbs outside of Paris after a young Muslim man is arrested and beaten by police. From there, three of the victim's friends walk around in the aftermath, trying to cope with their anger over the injustice. Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 film won César and Cannes awards.
Hollywood Theater
Love in Dangerous Times
Filmed and set in Portland during COVID, writer-director Jon Garcia's romantic comedy follows a playwright who, in the midst of struggling to finish a play (could this be its own genre? seems like it) gets in meaningful cahoots with a woman he matches with on a dating app. Dating during the pandemic is something many of us can relate to, and everyone goes about it differently, so this should be an interesting anthropological study.
Various platforms
Monsoon
Remind
Like
List
Hong Khaou's latest film stars Henry Golding (Crazy Rich Asians) as a Vietnamese-born Englishman who returns to Ho Chi Minh City for the first time since childhood to reconnect with his roots after the death of his mother. There, an online date with an American clothing designer (Southside With You's Parker Sawyers) turns into something more.
Cinema 21
Myth of A Colorblind France
The list of Black artists and creatives who have traveled to France (specifically Paris) to free themselves of America's racist bedrock is a long one, and ranges from James Baldwin to Josephine Baker to Augusta Savage. But to what extent was the City of Lights more accepting of people of color than the US? That's at the center of this documentary featuring interviews with French scholars Michel Fabre and Francis Hofstein, as well as contemporary artist Barbara Chase-Riboud, poet James Emanuel, hip-hop producer Ben the Glorious Bastard, and others.
Cinema 21
Nationtime
Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte narrate William Greaves's long-lost, newly-restored film about the National Black Political Convention of 1972, where 10,000 black politicians, activists, and artists went to Gary, Indiana, to forge a national unity platform.
Hollywood Theater
Native Son
Remind
Like
List
When it came to adapting Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son into a film, ex-patriate Frenchman Pierre Chenal and Argentinian producer Jamie Prades swooped in when American filmmakers and actors at the time abandoned the project out of discomfort surrounding the deep current of racism in America that the story reveals. With Wright himself in the leading role, it's a noir thriller about a Black man trying to survive in a white world. This is a brand-new restoration.
Cinema 21
Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin
Past Event
Like
List
There are documentaries, and then there's Werner Herzog turning the camera on himself to muse about all manner of existential concern. And that's what's going on here, with Nomad featuring the director/philosopher discussing his long friendship with travel writer Bruce Chatwin, who shared with Herzog an unquenchable thirst for truth.
Hollywood Theatre
Our Time Machine
Looking at the works of contemporary Chinese artist Maleonn, it's easy to see how much his father's former role as the artistic director of the Shanghai Chinese Opera Theater inspired him—Maleonn's conceptual pieces often center subjects in thespian-like costumes, surrounded by props, lit by warm spotlights. In this documentary, Maleonn undertakes a new project to connect with his aging dad through a couple of steampunk-ish mechanical puppets. "I want to use it to show my father how much I appreciate everything he's done for me," says the artist. You will absolutely sniffle and ponder your own mortality.
Hollywood Theatre
RBG
Past Event
Like
List
"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.' 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," wrote Katie Herzog about Julie Cohen and Betsy West's 2018 documentary. RIP, RBG.
Hollywood Theatre
Silent Voices
Donna Hayes's new film Silent Voices centers nine people of color who have been killed by Portland Police over the years, with each character coming to life to tell their stories. As they speak, a chorus of words taken from comments posted online and news articles about their killings echo in the background.
Open Signal
Smooth Talk
Past Event
Like
List
Laura Dern just wants to go to the mall with her friends and flirt with boys her age to pass the summer months before her sophomore year of high school, but a predatory, deceptively charming older man won't leave her the hell alone. This '80s thriller is based on a short story by Joyce Carol Oates.
Hollywood Theatre
Softie
A human-rights activist and provocative photojournalist decides to run for office in a regional election in his native Kenya, determined to prevail with a "clean campaign" despite his opponents' corrupt practices.
Hollywood Theatre
At the Video Store
Past Event
Like
List
John Waters, Bill Hader, Nicole Holofcener, and other movie nerds weigh in on the lasting importance of a dying breed: video stores.
Hollywood Theatre
Totally Under Control
Past Event
Like
List
You don't need us to tell you that the current administration is largely to blame for the miserable failure in controlling the novel coronavirus and potentially avoiding the hundreds of thousands of deaths from the virus. Together with Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney explores why the system-wide collapse was possible in the first place.
Northwest Film Center
Vinyl Nation
Has the resurgence of vinyl in the digital age made music fandom more inclusive or more divided? This documentary traces the audio format's history and revival.
Hollywood Theatre
NATIONAL
Black Beauty
Remind
Like
List
Per the classic story by Anna Sewell (with a few gender flips), an orphaned girl forges a strong bond with a wild mustang (whose internal monologues are voiced by none other than Kate Winslet) that endures even when the horse gets sold to a string of ruthless new owners.
Disney+
Starting Friday
A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving
Past Event
Like
List
A change.org petition made A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (and A Charlie Brown Christmas) viewable for free on PBS last week, but now it's back to Apple TV+ only. Make like Snoopy and prepare a feast of popcorn and toast if you like, but don't ignore the fact that the special's only Black character is seen sitting alone at a separate table during dinner.
Apple TV+
Wednesday-Friday only
Dance Dreams: Hot Chocolate Nutcracker
Remind
Like
List
Actress and producer Debbie Allen brings a heartwarming family-friendly documentary to Netflix this holiday season, all about the behind-the-scenes prep work that goes into the biggest production of the year for the young performers of the Debbie Allen Dance Academy.
Netflix
Starting Friday
The Flight Attendant
Remind
Like
List
The simple sight of an airplane at full occupancy, which would be a literal death trap in these times, may add some extra chills to this playfully self-aware thriller series about a flight attendant (Kaley Cuoco) who goes home with a swarthy passenger and wakes up next to his dead body. Think The Night Of (both protagonists don't remember the events of the night before and they both inexplicably decide to clean up the crime scene before fleeing, even though they're not sure they're guilty) but more cheeky.
HBO Max
Starting Thursday
folklore
Remind
Like
List
As an accompaniment to her live album recorded with Jack Antonoff and the National's Aaron Dessner, Taylor Swift's Disney+ film set in the National’s Hudson Valley studio Long Pond sees the three artists reflecting on folklore and performing a stripped-down version of the record.
Disney+
Friendsgiving
Remind
Like
List
A quiet Thanksgiving for two erupts into a full-blown reunion among a gaggle of friends, lovers, and past acquaintances in Nicol Paone's holiday comedy starring Malin Akerman, Aisha Tyler, and Kat Dennings.
Amazon Prime
Happiest Season
Remind
Like
List
'Tis the season for a star-studded holiday rom-com that looks...actually very fun. Kristen Stewart plays Abby, a woman who's meeting her girlfriend Harper's (Mackenzie Davis) parents over Christmas, only to find out that her girlfriend is not yet out to her family. Alison Brie, Victor Garber, Dan Levy, and Mary Steenburgen fill out the supporting cast.
Hulu
Pieces of April
Remind
Like
List
Late Dawson's Creek's-era Katie Holmes plays a rebellious teen who, upon finding out that her mother is dying of cancer, prepares a Thanksgiving feast for her estranged family.
Hulu
Saved by the Bell
Remind
Like
List
The '80s/'90s high-school sitcom is getting a modern reboot wherein Zack Morris, one of the former teens of Bayside High, is the governor of California.
Peacock
Small Axe: Lovers Rock
Remind
Like
List
Steve McQueen, the Oscar-winning director of 12 Years a Slave, is hitting Amazon Prime with an ambitious anthology of five films, released every Friday, that center London’s West Indian community over the course of two decades. The debut feature, Mangrove, tells the true story of the Mangrove Nine, a group of Black British activists arrested at a 1970 protest against racist police harassment. The second, Lovers Rock, is set in 1980 (when Black people still weren't welcome at white London nightclubs) and follows a night of music, racial tensions, and young love.
Amazon Prime
Stardust
Remind
Like
List
It's not the mid-2000s fantasy starring Michelle Pfeiffer as an evil witch; it's a biopic about David Bowie's first tour in America and the birth of his most recognizable alter ego, Ziggy Stardust! Played by actor and folk-rock musician Johnny Flynn, the film shows the late, great Thin White Duke as he struggles to find his place in a changing industry. Marc Maron plays his publicist.
Available to rent on various platforms
Superintelligence
Remind
Like
List
Set in Seattle, this new Melissa McCarthy-helmed comedy arrives just in time for your tryptophan coma. She plays Carol Peters, a regular lady who's randomly chosen by an artificial intelligence entity to give a convincing argument outlining why the human race shouldn't be destroyed. Much silliness and panic ensues.
HBO Max
Starting Thursday
Uncle Frank
Remind
Like
List
Even with its killer cast (Stephen Root plays an abusive patriarch of a wealthy South Carolina family; Margo Martindale plays the warm-hearted wife and mother; Lois Smith plays a devout aunt; Steve Zahn plays the favored son; and Judy Greer plays a sister-in-law), NPR calls Alan Ball's '70s-set melodrama about a closeted New York college professor who's forced to travel home and come out to his family "undercooked and over-seasoned." But you can decide for yourself, obviously!
Amazon Prime
IN-PERSON
The Santa Clause
Past Event
Like
List
Tim Allen plays a divorcee who doesn't give his kid's love of Christmas the time of day until Santa falls off his roof and he accidentally agrees to take the jolly man's place.
99W Drive-In
Friday-Sunday