Huddle around your electronic device of choice and peruse your options for movies and shows gracing virtual cinemas this week, including Hollywood Theatre's Christmas horror offerings Dial Code Santa Claus Past Event Like List , Silent Night, Deadly Night Past Event Like List , and Rare Exports Past Event Like List . We've rounded up those and other options below, including picks from nationwide platforms, like the Chadwick Boseman-fronted Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Remind Like List and The Last Blockbuster Remind Like List on Amazon Prime Video. 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!

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LOCALLY STREAMING: NEW & NOTEWORTHY

Dial Code Santa Claus Past Event Like List
This recently unearthed 1989 French thriller-comedy takes the plot of Home Alone (which would come out a year later) and freaks it up a bit: Thomas, a typical kid who loves Rambo, RPGs, and his dog, is trapped at home with his equally vulnerable grandpa over Christmas as a maniacal Santa slides down chimneys and raids homes all over the neighborhood.
Hollywood Theatre
Starting Friday

Rare Exports Past Event Like List
What if Santa were actually buried under a mountain in northern Finland, an unforgiving winterscape populated by wolves, reindeer, and a few burly, hardscabble men? Excavators unearth him a few days before Christmas, and now this naked, feral Santa's out for the blood of children. At times, Rare Exports is effectively creepy, and the icy locations in Lapland are stunning. But its sly humor is portioned out too sparingly, leaving the brief movie—scarcely over an hour—feeling a little short on holiday cheer. NED LANNAMANN
Hollywood Theatre
Starting Friday

Silent Night, Deadly Night Past Event Like List
It’s time for the Hollywood’s annual screening of the 1984 grindhouse flick Silent Night, Deadly Night. It’s no Black Christmas, but 1984’s inevitable Santa-turns-slasher bloodbath has a few likeable qualities nonetheless: You’ve got your sex with nuns, you’ve got a multitude of arbitrary victims introduced and subsequently murdered in roughly one half of one scene, not to mention a smattering of increasingly ludicrous Christmas songs that all seem to be composed specifically for the movie. On the downside, you’ve got the needlessly expository first two-thirds of the movie, plus perhaps the least convincing horror villain of all time: a dashing, doe-eyed WASP-y dude in a Santa suit whose creepy one liners alternate between the equally un-scary “Puuunish!” and “Naaaw-tee!”—delivered in a nearly unintelligible monotone.
Hollywood Theatre
Starting Friday

NATIONAL

Ammonite Remind Like List
Brimming with the soothing ASMR you'd expect from a film set on a southern coast in the 1800s (think Portrait of a Lady on Fire, but in England), Francis Lee's latest film follows the love affair between a poor and brilliant fossil hunter (Kate Winslet) and a wealthy visitor's wife (Saoirse Ronan).
VOD

Blackbird Remind Like List
At peace with death, a woman (Susan Sarandon) with a terminal illness summons her star-studded friends and family (including Kate Winslet and Mia Wasikowska) for one last hurrah before going through with an assisted suicide. If you're drawn to beach house/cabin-set reunion dramedies, you know exactly what you're getting into with this new feature from the director of Tea With the Dames.
Amazon Prime Video

The Expanse: Season 5 Remind Like List
The latest season of this popular science-fiction series, based on the novel by James S. A. Corey, is set in a future where humanity has colonized outer space, which doesn't feel too far from reality what with SpaceX and all—yet another case of a sci-fi scenario becoming more sci than fi in 2020. New episodes air on Wednesdays.
Amazon Prime

Greenland Past Event Like List
Curl up with the familiar righteousness you've come to love from Gerard Butler in this action flick about a man trying to reunite his family as deadly fragments of space debris fly toward the Earth. 
VOD
Starting Friday

The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Special Remind Like List
If you watched the new K-Stew holiday rom-com Happiest Season Remind Like List on Hulu, you've already gotten a taste of Seattle drag legends Jinkx Monsoon and BenDeLaCreme's holiday special, which is available to rent on-demand on iOS, Android, Apple TV, Roku, and Chromecast. According to press materials, it's the story of two queens who set out to create a classic Christmas TV variety show but just can’t agree on how. It also involves the spirit of DeLa's deceased grandma, who resides in a glass of eggnog, and plenty of musical numbers.
Hulu

The Last Blockbuster Remind Like List
Bend, Oregon saw the last outpost of a once-booming business: video-rental stores. Ones where you could find the latest releases and pop them into your DVD player (or your Blu-ray player, if you're fancy) over bags of popcorn you could pick up at the check-out counter. Taylor Morden and Zeke Kamm's whimsical documentary The Last Blockbuster tells the story of the end of a franchise.
Amazon Prime

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Remind Like List
Viola Davis stars in this George C. Wolfe adaptation of the August Wilson play, which harks to the fiery appearance of a trailblazing blues singer, Ma Rainey, at a Chicago recording studio in 1927. It also sees the late, great Chadwick Boseman in his final role as the singer's band's ambitious trumpet player. 
Netflix
Starting Friday

The Stand Past Event Like List
Like many post-apocalyptic novels, Stephen King's The Stand focuses on the aftermath of a global pandemic, and we're sure this limited-series adaptation starring Whoopi Goldberg, James Marsden, and Alexander Skarsgård—filmed in the COVID era we're currently living—will have a fresh, particularly chilling prevalence. 
CBS

Tenet Remind Like List
In Christopher Nolan's action-packed thriller, John David Washington stars as a secret agent who manipulates time to try to save the world from World War III. It's got IMAX-worthy bangs and booms and a complicated storyline that will have you "shush"-ing your household.
VOD

LOCALLY STREAMING: ONGOING

The Changin' Times of Ike White Past Event Like List
Released in 1974, Changin' Times was the first commercial album recorded inside an American prison by an inmate, Ike White, who at 19 was sentenced to life for murder and eventually released under the endorsement of Stevie Wonder. This documentary delves into the R&B artist's life and unconventional career.
Hollywood Theatre

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

Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan
You know Shane MacGowan as the wild-toothed lead singer of the Irish punk-rock band the Pogues, but Julien Temple's documentary delves into the musician's story before achieving fame, highlighting his extensive knowledge of music. Variety classifies it "in the upper echelon of recent rock docs."
Hollywood Theatre

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

The German Lesson
As part of his prison sentence after WWII, a man writes an essay reflecting on his childhood in a German village during the war.
Clinton Street Theater

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

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

Jazz on a Summer's Day
Filmed on a balmy night in Fort Adams State Park at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, this 4K-restored classic is believed to be one the first concert films ever recorded (!). It boasts Louis Armstrong, Thelonius Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Anita O'Day, Chuck Berry, Dinah Washington, and other legends among its lineup, closing with Mahalia Jackson's rendition of "The Lord's Prayer" at midnight
Clinton Street Theater

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

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

Sing Me a Song
Returning to one of the subjects of his 2013 drama Happiness, Thomas Balmès's new film follows a teenage boy studying in a monastery in the Buddhist kingdom of Bhutan, where smartphones and other modern technology are beginning to compete with ancient practices. Zoomer that he is, the music-loving student strikes up a friendship with a singer on WeChat from the capital city of Thimphu, and he ends up selling medicinal mushrooms to raise enough money to meet her IRL. 
Cinema 21

Song Without a Name
The newborn baby of Georgina, an Indigenous Andean woman, is stolen from the clinic at which it was born and is never returned. When she's met with indifference by the Peruvian legal system, Georgina goes to a journalist, who uncovers an epidemic of fake clinics and abductions in 1980s Peru. Melina Leon's thriller is based on true events.
Clinton Street Theater

World of Wong Kar-wai Remind Like List
Let Chinese director Wong Kar-wai take you over with the sonically perfect, poetic, excruciatingly cool, often blood-soaked romantic time-jumpers and thrillers featured in this Janus Films series. It includes all his greatest hits from the late '80s to the early 2000s, including As Tears Go By, Days of Being Wild, Fallen Angels, Happy Together, The Hand, and his best-known works Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love. With many of the same actors gracing the screen in each film, we have no doubt that taking in his entire oeuvre will feel like one long, wild ride in a singular universe.
Hollywood Theatre & Cinema 21

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