It's a particularly nerve-shaking week here in Portland and on Earth, what with a historic number of votes still being counted in key battleground states. You've gotta take a break at some point to keep from perishing into a pile of anxiety-ridden dust, so here are this week's best movies streaming online and showing in person at select theaters and drive-ins, like the new Frederick Wiseman documentary City Hall (screening through Cinema 21), a drive-in double-feature of Toy Story Past Event Like List and National Lampoon Past Event Like List (at 99W), and Alice Gu's directorial debut The Donut King (available for private screenings at Cinema 21 and Living Room).

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IN THEATERS

Action U.S.A
If you've seen one too many slice-of-life dramedies lately and are just itching to be overwhelmed by 89 minutes of action-packed shenanigans filmed in 1980s Texas, John Stewart (not to be confused with TV host Jon Stewart) has your ticket with this cinematic calamity.
Cinema 21 (private screenings)

The Donut King
The directorial debut from Alice Gu, The Donut King, is both a portrait of a donut king and a look at the historical role he played in 1980s California. Ted Ngoy, the titular king, fled the Khmer Rouge with his family to come to the United States to achieve the American dream. After initial struggles, Ngoy found success by building a network of shops throughout the region called Christy’s Doughnuts. The buildup and step-by-step journey Gu takes us on is masterful. You learn so much about Ngoy and Cambodia, and her filmmaking is as insightful as it is compassionate. That only makes the steep decline all the more painful. Without going into too much of the details, the kingdom Ngoy built around him crumbles, the dream he achieved becomes a nightmare, and the donut king flies too close to the sun. CHASE HUTCHINSON
Living Room Theaters (private screenings); also streaming via Cinema 21

Escape from Extinction
Helen Mirren narrates this documentary about major zoological organizations around the world combatting what scientists are calling the Sixth Mass Extinction. 
Cinema 21 (private screenings)

Kajillionaire
Rife with the eccentricities you'd expect from the director of The Future and You and Me and Everyone We Know, Miranda July's latest comedy stars Evan Rachel Wood as the youngest in a small family of grifters who parkours her way through Los Angeles avoiding security cameras and droning in a voice that hangs as low as her extremely long hair. The family's opposite is met in Melanie (Gina Rodriguez), an optician’s assistant who, through her endless optimism and comfort with displays of love, brings the family's insecurities to the foreground.
Cinema 21 & Living Room Theaters (private screenings); also streaming via Amazon Prime Video

National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation Past Event Like List
Chevy Chase ruins Christmas by loving it too much in this 1989 John Hughes romp, screening at the drive-in for all you pre-Thanksgiving holiday fanatics. 
99W Drive-In
Friday-Sunday

Possessor Remind Like List
Definitely leave your impressionable offspring at home for this private in-person screening of writer/director Brandon Cronenberg's terrifying-looking new sci-fi thriller, which follows a corporate assassin who takes control of people's bodies using brain-implant technology. We're terrified of what this "uncut" version has in store. 
Cinema 21 and Living Room Theaters (private screenings)

Save Yourselves!
Seeking a break from the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn, a Millennial couple (Sunita Mani and John Reynolds) decide to ~go offline~ and head upstate to Ben Sinclair's (High Maintenance) grandpa's cabin, only to be accosted by a host of deceptively cute aliens.
Living Room Theaters (private screenings); also streaming via Amazon Prime Video

Shithouse
Writer/director Cooper Raiff stars as Alex, a lonely college freshman who attempts to make friends at Shithouse, a fraternity infamous for its wild parties. There he forges a friendship with Maggie, who later ignores him, and whose attention he tries to win back again by returning to the booze-laden abode. This Grand Jury Prize Winner at the 2020 SXSW Film Festival is executive-produced by indie boy Jay Duplass. 
Living Room Theaters (private screenings); also streaming via Amazon Prime Video

Toy Story Past Event Like List
The nostalgic plot pits an old-fangled toy against a new-fangled one, but the computer animation wins out in the end.
99W Drive-In
Friday-Sunday

LOCALLY STREAMING

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
Opening Friday

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

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

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

Marona’s Fantastic Tale Past Event Like List
For a wholesome mental recharge, turn to Anca Damian's expressionistic French animated film told through the eyes of a stray dog who just wants a loving human to hang out with.
Northwest Film Center

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

Pahokee Past Event Like List
In this documentary, directors Ivete Lucas and Patrick Bresnan explore the joys and anxieties of four high-school seniors in the rural Florida Everglades. 
Northwest Film Center

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

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

You Never Had It: An Evening with Bukowski
Past Event Like List A special screening of this short documentary that does exactly what it says it does: Puts you in Charles Bukowski's living room for a night as the famously grumpy poet and writer smokes about five million cigarettes, drinks, and opines on whatever the hell crosses his frontal lobe at the time.
Clinton Street Theater

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

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
Friday only

Portland Latin American Film Festival XIV Past Event Like List
The Hollywood Theater is moving the Portland Latin American Film Festival online, which is bittersweet. Bitter: Everyone loves a big screen, especially at this historic gem. Sweet: You'll have a full 48 hours to watch a film once you hit play. From September to November, the festival will present six movies from Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Mexico, Switzerland, and Belgium that celebrate and honor the cultural diversity of Latin America. The upcoming film is Juliana Fanjul's Radio Silence (starting Thursday), about a journalist who fights misinformation at the radio station where she's worked for years.
Hollywood Theatre

NATIONAL

Election Remind Like List
This brilliant dark comedy follows an unctuous overachiever’s (Reese Witherspoon) campaign for student council president, and the high school teacher (Matthew Broderick) determined to foil her. You might think a movie about an election is the last thing you want to see in the midst of an anxiety-inducing actual election, but, trust us, this will do you good.
Amazon Prime

Moonbase 8 Past Event Like List
While working to qualify for their first lunar mission, astronauts Fred Armisen, Tim Heidecker, and John C. Reilly trip over their own shoelaces, so to speak, while stationed at NASA's Moon Base Simulator in a remote part of the Arizona desert. 
Showtime
Premiering Monday

A Teacher Remind Like List
Seattle-bred actor Nick Robinson stars alongside Kate Mara (House of Cards) as a student embroiled in an affair with his teacher. 
FX on Hulu
Premiering Tuesday