Film/TV

The Best Movies to Watch in Seattle This Week: Feb 11-17, 2021

Judas and the Black Messiah, Minari, and More Top Picks

February 10, 2021

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After a sneak preview via Northwest Film Forum on Thursday (tickets for which are currently sold out), Shaka King's buzzy new film Judas and the Black Messiah will come to HBO and select local theaters starting Friday. (Glen Wilson)

In addition to the films shortlisted for the 2021 Oscars, promising new releases pick up speed here in town this week with Shaka King's Sundance submission Judas and the Black Messiah Past Event Like List and Lee Isaac Chung's Minari Past Event Like List hitting local virtual cinemas and local in-person theaters. We've rounded up the details below, along with other options, like the short film collection Our Right to Gaze: Black Film Identities Past Event Like List , and nationally streaming picks, like the Silence of the Lambs spinoff Clarice on CBS. 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!

Jump to: Streaming: Local Connection | Film Festivals | Streaming: Nationwide | Playing in Theaters

Streaming: Local Connection

Black Girl Past Event Like List
Senegalese director (and novelist) Ousmane Sembène's debut 1966 film adapts the story of a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white couple and soon begins to experience life in their small apartment as a kind of prison.
Grand Illusion
Starting Friday

Judas and the Black Messiah Past Event Like List
Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah, a favorite of this year's online Sundance Film Festival, stars Lakeith Stanfield as FBI informant William O' Neal and Daniel Kaluuya as Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton. This sneak preview will be available to watch for 24 hours before hitting HBO and local theaters on Friday. Update: tickets for Thursday are sold out.
Northwest Film Forum preview on Thursday; also screening at local theaters and HBO Max starting Friday

Lapsis Past Event Like List
Set in an alternative present-day New York, wealthy shareholders and investors take major advantage of gig workers whose job is to compete with robots in pulling wires over rough terrain at the dawn of the quantum computing revolution. Fed up with the harsh conditions, the workers band together to fight back.
Grand Illusion & Grand Cinema
Starting Friday

Liebigstraße 34 Berlin Eviction Story Past Event Like List
Liza Lindgren and Siri Hedenström's short documentary chronicles the unfortunate eviction of Liebigstraße 34, one of Berlin's last "legalized squats" that housed a collective of queer anarchist feminists. The screening will be followed by an online discussion with former residents of the house.
Northwest Film Forum
Saturday only

Little Fish Remind Like List
The new film Little Fish hit home in many unexpected and profound ways. To start, it's set in Seattle, as the city and its people face a mysterious, threatening virus. Thankfully, it's not about the coronavirus or our pandemic, even as it feels remarkably prescient. It's very much a story all its own, based on the fantastic short story by Aja Gabel that Mattson Tomlin has now adapted into an incisive screenplay. It's a science-fiction love story about a couple, played by Olivia Cooke and Jack O'Connell. They must contend with a memory-erasing virus that threatens to steal away the history the two have together. It's directed with a confident hand by Chad Hartigan. I spoke to him about his new film, the parallels to our present moment, and what it means to lose what we love. CHASE HUTCHINSON
Various platforms

Our Right to Gaze: Black Film Identities Past Event Like List
While they span genres, these six short films all tell stories of Black artists making sense of the world around them and how they're perceived. The program includes Antu Yacob and Lande Yoosuf's Love in Submission, Toryn Seabrooks's A Hollywood Party, Ya’ke Smith's Pandemic Chronicles, Zora Bikangaga's Auntie Zariyah, Kyla Sylvers's The Black Banshee, and Lin Que Ayoung's Nowhere.
Northwest Film Forum & Grand Cinema
Starting Sunday

Mandabi Past Event Like List
A seemingly auspicious money order quickly causes bureaucracy-driven mayhem for a jobless man in Ousmane Sembène's seminal feature from 1968, which followed his debut, Black Girl Past Event Like List . It's an adaptation of the director's novella of the same name and the first movie ever made in the Wolof language of Senegal.
Grand Cinema
Starting Friday

Minari Past Event Like List
There is so much to love about the sublime Minari, the reasons why could fill a film of its own. So, forgive me if I'm a little effusive. Taking place in 1980s Arkansas, it follows a Korean American family as they attempt to start a farm. It's alluded that they've previously worked somewhere in California and in Seattle, where they were making just enough of a living to get by. Now, the family has purchased land that no one else wants in a long shot at making their own Garden of Eden. Jacob (Steven Yeun), the family's somewhat naive but caring patriarch, initially gives the farm the biblical name. It soon becomes clear that he is driving the family to take the leap of faith with him. There is Monica (Yeri Han), the justifiably worried matriarch, who must balance out her husband's dreams with keeping the family whole. The film clearly comes from a personal place for writer and director Lee Isaac Chung, who delicately breathes life into every corner of the film. His down-to-earth story combines with visuals that are boldly full of wonder—from the rich reds, seen in the hat on actor Steven Yeun's head, to the tranquil greens of the natural world around them. CHASE HUTCHINSON
Northwest Film Forum & Grand Cinema (also screening at local theaters; see details here) Past Event Like List
Starting Friday

Mirror Past Event Like List
Andrei Tarkovsky's classic film traverses three generations of a poet’s family in 20th-century Russia, reflecting on both human memory and Russian history. Don't miss a chance to see this brand-new restoration.
SIFF
Starting Friday

The Best of VHSEX Past Event Like List
Just in time for Valentine's Day weekend, this smutty compilation of vintage tapes from Scarecrow Like List 's Sexploitation room features "the best awkward adult situations, humorous humping and weird sexual interludes."
Grand Illusion
Starting Friday

Film Festivals

2021 HUMP! Film Festival 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
Thursday-Friday & Sunday

Indigenous Peoples' Film Festival Past Event Like List
Spend Indigenous Peoples' Week watching on-demand documentaries, shorts, and feature films (and sitting in on virtual discussions) that focus on the value of Indigenous food systems and resilience in the face of COVID-19 in this online event hosted by the International Fund For Agricultural Development. It's free!
Thursday-Friday

Reel Love Film Festival Past Event Like List
Twelve feature film premieres, three shorts blocks, live events, and a collection of "lovecasts" will explore love in its many forms, opening with the punk-rock love story Dinner in America and centering on Tim Sutton's Funny Face.
Friday-Sunday

Streaming: Nationwide

Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar
The dictionary defines “culottes” as knee-length or calf-length pants cut to look like a skirt. Did you know that? Now you do. It’s weird to open a movie review with a definition, isn’t it? And I don’t think this information is all that crucial. But the filmmakers behind the new comedy Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar decided it was fundamental enough to the plot of the film to open with it on a title card. And I wondered: Why is this random definition so central to this plot? Who doesn’t already know what culottes are? Is there something wrong with me for already knowing what culottes are? Is this film for me? Or is it already too cool for me? Within 60 seconds, this movie got me deeper inside my brain than I’ve been in months, and then it went on for another 104 silly, charming, and seriously wacky minutes. BASGTVDM is from the same team who brought us Bridesmaids, although I hesitate to point that out, because this is very not that. Bridesmaids was funny stuff happening in a seemingly normal universe, whereas Barb and Star are basically middle-aged midwestern MacGrubers in Talbots who exist beyond normality. The result is confusing, but delightful. It’s like if you gave Skittles to Ben Franklin and told him it was food; it would take him a minute to believe you, but then he’d admit it was pleasant. Yes, this movie experience is akin to someone born in 1706 trying modern candy. ELINOR JONES
Amazon Prime & Google Play
Starting Friday

Behind Her Eyes Past Event Like List
Let this adaptation of Sarah Pinborough's sexy psychological thriller novel step in as your new Netflix binge.
Netflix
Starting Wednesday

Clarice
The fictionalized cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter has received his fair share of spinoffs, but now it's time for Clarice Starling, the FBI agent played by Jodi Foster in The Silence of the Lambs, to get her own. This CBS limited series stars Pretty Little Liars' Rebecca Breeds.
CBS

Demonlover
In its newly restored glory, French master Olivier Assayas's 2002 techno-thriller (one of the few that doesn't star Juliette Binoche) presents a ruthless world of corporate espionage and murderous ambition in which executives from different conglomerates battle for the rights to highly coveted pornography.
VOD
Starting Friday

Map of Tiny Perfect Things
Lev Grossman's YA novel gets the Amazon Prime Original treatment in this film about a couple of teens (Kathryn Newton and Kyle Allen) who fall in love as they relive the same day over and over. If you like Groundhog Day Remind Like List and Palm Springs Remind Like List , chances are this one will strike your fancy.
Amazon Prime
Starting Friday

Men in Kilts Past Event Like List
With banter that gives The Trip duo Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan a run for their money, this series sees Outlander stars Sam Heughan and Graham McTavish driving around Scotland and being quite Scottish indeed.
Starz
Starting Sunday

Young Rock Remind Like List
Dwayne Johnson stans, this one's for you. NBC's newest sitcom lets the action star reminisce over his upbringing and early stardom with younger actors playing him in his various blossoming stages.
NBC
Starting Tuesday

To All the Boys: Always and Forever
The final installment of Jenny Han's delightful hit Netflix trilogy about teen romance sees its heroine, Lara Jean, facing the familiar on-screen hurdles of senior year: prom, college, and boyfriend dilemmas.
Netflix
Starting Friday