For the first time in several months, movie night doesn't have to be inside your house this weekend: The 99W Drive-In Past Event Like List reopens Friday! If you're not ready to venture out, read on for our latest suggestions for things to stream—we've got everything from the Sundance Film Festival Past Event Like List to Italian Oscar contender Notturno Past Event Like List (playing via Northwest Film Center), and from HUMP! Past Event Like List to The Little Things on HBO Max.
IN-PERSON
Groundhog Day & Monster Hunter
Past Event
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Newberg's drive-in theater is back after a winter hiatus, just in time to screen the existential Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day in honor of the holiday itself next Tuesday. After an intermission, they'll also show the new video game movie Monster Hunter. "Good Oregon outdoor footwear" is recommended!
99W Drive-In
Friday–Saturday
VIRTUAL FILM FESTIVALS
Sundance Film Festival
Past Event
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2021
Past Event
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Unless you have plans to go to Park City in the winter someday, you may never have a better chance to check out the largest independent film festival in the country, so don't miss its virtual offerings this weekend. Sundance is also partnering with Seattle's Northwest Film Forum, so our colleagues at EverOut Seattle have a list of recommended movies to catch at the fest here
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. Highlights include Bring Your Own Brigade
Past Event
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(about wildfires in California), Robin Wright's directorial debut, Land
Past Event
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, and Together Together
Past Event
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, an unconventional rom-com starring Ed Helms and Patti Harrison, whom you may know as the bitchy secretary from Shrill.
Northwest Film Forum (Seattle)
HUMP! 2021
Past Event
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Every year, The Stranger puts out the call to sex-havers everywhere to submit a homegrown amateur porn film depicting whatever they're into (barring poop, kids, and animals, of course). The result is an incredibly diverse representation of human sexuality in all its straight, gay, trans, queer, kinky, funny, pissy, painful, and pretty forms. Let's see what wild spins people put on their submissions that were created during the lockdown, shall we?
EverOut
Saturday–Sunday
STREAMING: NATIONWIDE
The Dig
Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes play a widow and her archaeologist assistant in this period piece about a real-life excavation in pre-WWII England. Variety writes: "The Dig is not intended for children, yet it’s so subtle in its conflicts that culturally curious kiddos may take to it even more so than adults, although this is also a good Netflix option for audiences troubled by the more confrontational themes of modern cinema. It’s hard to say whether the period this picture exhumes was any more innocent than what the world now faces, but that’s certainly the way [director Simon] Stone plays it, acting like an urbane orchidologist, cross-breeding contemporary art-house touches with the old-school refinement of a vintage Masterpiece Theatre production. Sometimes the best escape from the craziness of today is to lose oneself in history."
Netflix
Starting Friday
Freaks and Geeks
The cult classic, single-season high school TV drama is now available to binge on Hulu, if you want a hit of nostalgia or you've never seen Judd Apatow's '80s set show.
The Investigation
Based on the real-life investigation into the 2017 murder of Swedish journalist Kim Wall, limited Danish drama series from Oscar-nominated writer-director Tobias Lindholm takes some artistic liberties with the team of investigators and divers who spent six months gathering evidence.
HBO
Starting Monday
The Lady and the Dale
This four-part docuseries produced by the Duplass brothers spotlights Liz Carmichael, a car-maker (coincidence?) who helmed a notorious auto scam during the 1970s gas crisis.
HBO
Starting Sunday
The Little Things
This psychological thriller from John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side, Saving Mr. Banks) stars Denzel Washington and Rami Malek as two LA cops trying to catch a serial killer in the '90s. Jared Leto stars as the creepy, long-haired top suspect. It's gotten mixed reviews for its failure to bring anything new to the table ("There’s scarcely a moment in the movie that doesn’t recall a dozen predecessors, in form or content or both," writes the AV Club), but if the cast is enough for you, go for it.
HBO Max; also playing at the Blue Fox Drive-In in Oak Harbor
Starting Friday
What Happened Was…
A first date between two Manhattan lawyers (played by Tom Noonan, who stars and directs, and Karen Sillas) takes some wild turns in this 1994 dark comedy, which has been newly restored for rerelease.
VOD
Starting Friday
LOCALLY STREAMING: ONGOING
I Blame Society
"Nobody wants you to make a movie as much as you want to make one yourself," says Gillian Wallace Horvat in her satirical low-budget faux documentary about a filmmaker who takes her nontraditional, female-driven murder plot into her own hands when male producers ignore it. She walks people through how she would commit the perfect murder, and in doing so walks the line between fiction and reality.
Clinton Street Theater & Cinema 21
The Changin' Times of Ike White
Past Event
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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
Collective
Past Event
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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
A Dog Called Money
On his reporting trips to Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Washington D.C., photojournalist Seamus Murphy was accompanied by none other than British punk-rock icon PJ Harvey, who used what she saw to record a live album whose recording sessions were open to the public. This music-filled documentary goes behind the scenes into the studio and the lives of the people the pair met on their journey.
Clinton Street Theater & Cinema 21
Free Time
Remind
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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
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
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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
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 & Cinema 21
Notturno
Past Event
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Oscar-nominated director of Fire at Sea, Gianfranco Rosi, tells the stories of those on the borders between Syria, Iraq, Kurdistan, and Lebanon in this 2021 contender for the Italian Oscars. This SIFF screening includes a special pre-recorded conversation with Rosi and fellow director Alejandro González Iñárritu.
Northwest Film Center
Psycho Goreman
Siblings Mimi and Luke unwittingly resurrect an ancient alien overlord who was entombed on Earth millions of years ago after a failed attempt to destroy the universe. They nickname the evil creature Psycho Goreman (or "PG" for short) and use the magical amulet they discovered to force him to obey their childish whims.
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
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
Some Kind of Heaven
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Four residents of America's largest retirement facility (Florida's gated, palm tree-lined Villages) strive for happiness and meaning in this Lance Oppenheim doc co-produced by Darren Aronofsky.
Cinema 21 & Hollywood Theatre
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
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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
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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