Sundance may be over, but it's still a noteworthy week in the world of virtual cinema, with films like Sundance submission A Glitch in the Matrix Past Event Like List , French Oscar submission Two of Us Remind Like List , and Heatworn Highways Past Event Like List streaming through local theaters, and with other options hitting national platforms, like the Zendaya-helmed drama Malcolm & Marie Remind Like List on Netflix. Plus, Dan Savage's porn film festival HUMP! Past Event Like List continues this weekend—and if you get inspired to make your own movie, don't forget that its sister festival, the stoner-centric SPLIFF, is accepting submissions through March 5! 

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Streaming: Local Connection

A Glitch in the Matrix Past Event Like List
At the core of A Glitch in the Matrix is an all-American tragedy connected to The Matrix, which was released in the last year of the 20th century and is about a bunch of machines who create a virtual reality program for their primary source of energy, human bodies (the sky is scorched or something like that). If you wake up from this VR program, which is supposed to keep humans calm enough to be stably productive, you end up in the "desert of the real," which has no steak or cool clobber. (Digression: The VR program that keeps most sleeping humans happy does not simulate a classless Utopia but what the celebrated French economist calls a "proprietary society" that has the exact same inequalities that plague the real world beyond the silver screen, our world [if you are wondering], and often results in revolts by the poor and oppressed—an examination of this point will bring the whole marvelous, spectacular, cinematic edifice of The Matrix crashing down.) What the Glitch examines, but somehow fails to flesh out (in that pun hovers the phantom of Maurice Merleau-Ponty), which is why the doc is disappointing but still worth watching, is an issue that is much more related to gun control rather than dangers of virtual reality or the possibility that humans live in a simulation. CHARLES MUDEDE
Grand Illusion & Northwest Film Forum
Starting Friday

Heatworn Highways Past Event Like List
In this 1976 gem of the music documentary canon, filmmaker James Szalapski travels to Texas and Tennessee in search of folk and bluegrass musicians who were rejecting the mainstream Nashville sound of the day. Think Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, and Steve Young, whose faces and songs all appear in the film.
Northwest Film Forum
Starting Friday

Madeline Anderson: Integration Report 1 (1960) & I Am Somebody (1970) Past Event Like List
Newly preserved by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, Madeline Anderson's films Integration Report 1 (1960) and I Am Somebody (1970) take place on the front lines of the civil rights movement.
Northwest Film Forum
Starting Monday

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project Past Event Like List
Just as the 24-hour news cycle was taking hold, Marion Stokes, whose formative years were shaped by the civil rights era, obsessively recorded TV coverage of the 1979 Iranian Hostage Crisis, which led to a reclusive life of obsession with TV news. Matt Wolf's documentary parses through the near-70,000 VHS tapes that Stokes kept.
Northwest Film Forum

M.C. Escher: Journey To Infinity Past Event Like List
The instantly recognizable and kaleidoscopic work of the Dutch graphic designer M.C. Escher floats throughout this documentary (voiced by British actor Stephen Fry), which also includes insights into the artist's life and ideas through his own diary entries, lectures, and correspondence.
Grand Illusion & Grand Cinema Tacoma
Starting Friday

Two of Us Remind Like List
Longtime lesbian lovers Nina and Madeleine have been together for decades in secret, but their relationship is put to the test when something happens that limits their ability to move freely between each other's apartments. Filippo Meneghetti's debut feature is France's official 2021 Oscar submission.
SIFF & Grand Cinema Tacoma
Starting Friday

Film Festivals

HUMP! 2021 Past Event Like List
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
Friday-Saturday

Streaming: Nationwide

Bliss
A depressed divorcee (Owen Wilson) meets a woman living on the street (Salma Hayek) who's convinced that reality is nothing but a computer simulation. As the pair get to know each other better—and fall in love—the doubtful man starts to latch onto her theory.
Amazon Prime
Starting Friday

Firefly Lane: Season 1
Based on a novel by Bainbridge Island author Kristin Hannah, this Netflix series follows two childhood best friends in the Seattle area (played in their adult incarnations by Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke) who, as childhood best friends tend to do, begin to head down different life paths after decades of closeness. 
Netflix

Malcolm & Marie Remind Like List
HBO's Euphoria creator Sam Levinson directs this Netflix original drama that also happens to star that show's heroine, Zendaya, as one half of a Hollywood couple (the other half is John David Washington) who debate art, representation, and authenticity as tensions in their own relationship bubble over.
Netflix
Starting Friday

Possessor Remind Like List
Writer/director Brandon Cronenberg's terrifying-looking sci-fi thriller follows a corporate assassin who takes control of people's bodies using brain-implant technology. "A strange blend of horror with science fiction, Possessor is a picturesque and nightmarish meditation on violence," writes Stranger film contributor Chase Hutchinson, who can't stop thinking about a particular bloody neck wound in the film.
Hulu

The Red Shoes
If you don't have a Criterion Channel subscription, you'll be glad to know that Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's classic and haunting 1948 ballet fantasia The Red Shoes is now on Amazon Prime Video. 
Amazon Prime Video, Criterion