It's time to rip open a family-sized bag of assorted bonbons and revisit haunted hotels, pumpkin kings, and Jeff Goldblum-insect hybrids! We've rounded up all the Halloween-appropriate movies showing at drive-ins and select theaters—as well as plenty of streaming picks for at-home movie nights—into "scary" and "spooky" categories below, from a Nocturnal Emissions screening of The House on Haunted Hill to a Rocky Horror livestream fundraiser. Per our usual movie roundups, we've also included non-Halloween picks for when you're all spooked out, including The Donut King Remind Like List and a new episode of The Mandalorian. For more options, check out our guide to drive-in movie theaters in the Seattle area this week Like List , or our calendar of on-demand movies streaming through local theaters, and our fall guide to online film festivals Like List . 

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Jump to:  Scary Picks | Spooky Picks | In-Person: Non-Halloween | Streaming: Non-Halloween

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Scary Picks

Bad Hair
A woman's new weave takes on a life of its own and terrorizes all who cross its path in this Hulu original horror-comedy from Dear White People's Justin Simien. "This movie builds its fright night around the oppression Black women face in the form of discrimination against their natural hair. But despite the potentially heavy (or heavy-handed) material, Bad Hair is self-consciously and pleasingly campy, and it delivers a new cinematic monster: the sew-in weave," writes Teo Bugbee for the New York Times.
Hulu

The Changeling
Set in Seattle but filmed mostly in Vancouver, this 1980s classic stars George C. Scott as a famous composer whose wife and daughter are killed in a horrible accident. He immerses himself in his work, relocating to Seattle, where he rents a (haunted!!!) mansion. When the house starts acting funny, he discovers a long-suppressed shameful tragedy that took place there.
Shudder, Amazon Prime Video, and other platforms

Come Play Past Event Like List
Jacob Chase's feature-length adaptation of his short film "Larry" follows a young autistic boy who falls victim to a creepy creature who preys on children by breaking into their world through electronic devices. Full disclosure: This film has pretty universally bad reviews, but if you want to see a jumpy movie in theaters on Halloween, it's an option. 
AMC, Cinemark theaters, and Rodeo Drive-In
Opening Friday

The Empty Man
In David Prior's supernatural horror film based on Cullen Bunn and Vanesa R. Del Rey's graphic novel, a terrifying midwestern urban legend known as the Empty Man is assumed among the locals to be the culprit of a string of teen disappearances. 
AMC and Cinemark theaters

The Exorcist Past Event Like List
A preteen screams at mom, vomits pea soup, and masturbates with a crucifix in William Friedkin's eternally scary 1973 horror that gave way to a slew of exorcism movies. 
Cinemark theaters; also streaming on Fubo

The Fly
No matter how many times you plead with Jeff Goldblum to stay out of his little science pod and just go have a romantic picnic with his girlfriend, he does it anyway, and he becomes a disgusting human-sized bug. This '80s remake of the 1956 horror sci-fi, the progenitor of the famous line "Be afraid. Be very afraid," is terrifying, but Geena Davis's pantsuits are inspiring. 
Hulu, Amazon Prime, and other platforms

Halloween (1978) Past Event Like List
"John Carpenter’s Halloween wasn’t the goriest, the trashiest, or the kitschiest. Yet it essentially spawned an entire genre: the slasher film," wrote former Stranger contributor Vince Mancini when the 2018 version of the film came out. See its original incarnation, if nothing else than for educational purposes. 
Cinemark theaters (Friday only); also streaming on Shudder and Amazon Prime Video

The Haunting of Bly Manor
Fans of 2018's truly terrifying The Haunting of Hill House will ease into this new anthology about a ghost-ridden manor, likewise inspired by Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. 
Netflix

Monsterland Past Event Like List
Rooting for the vulnerable human in the horror movie is usually standard procedure, but Hulu's new psychological horror anthology series puts creepy characters—blood-drooling monsters, zombies, vampires—in the role of the underdog. Based on Nathan Ballingrud's 2013 short story collection North American Lake Monsters and adapted for TV by Mary Laws (The Neon Demon), this looks like a fun and freaky diversion from your usual Halloweentime binge. 
Hulu

Nightmare on Elm Street Past Event Like List
The Wes Craven original about a man named Freddy with a stripy shirt, funny hat, gross face, and scissor hands who visits you in your dreams.
Cinemark theaters; also streaming on Fubo

Night of the Living Dead Past Event Like List
It's the George Romero classic that spawned a thousand zombie flicks—not to mention essays on race relations in America. The ravenous dead besiege a group of white survivors, who are led by a determined Black man (Duane Jones). Low-budget, occasionally laughable...and still a punch in the gut. 
Burien Drive-In; also streaming on Amazon Prime
Saturday only

Nocturnal Emissions – House on Haunted Hill Past Event Like List
On a stormy night, an eccentric, filthy rich man (Vincent Price) invites a group of strangers to his secluded estate and offers them $10,000 each to stay the night. The catch? The mansion is full of life-threatening frights. This screening of Wiliam Castle’s 1959 campy horror is brought to you by Nocturnal Emissions. 
Northwest Film Forum
Saturday-Sunday

Poltergeist Past Event Like List
Ghosts bend silverware, break glassware, take spiritual possession of a large tree in the backyard, and ultimately decide to open a sizable portal in the living room.
AMC theaters; also streaming on Netflix

Psycho (1960) Past Event Like List
Do you know why everyone acts like Psycho is so great? Because it IS. A fun experiment while you're watching the film in a room crowded with people who know what's coming is to imagine it's 1960, when 95 percent of the film's likely audience would have been literally incapable of imagining that Norman Bates was anywhere near as fucked up as he turns out to be. Remembering that recasts Hitchcock's technique as a willful erosion of human innocence, which makes the whole thing even more powerful. SEAN NELSON
Wheel-In (Port Townsend); also streaming on Amazon Prime Video and Shudder
Friday-Sunday

Satanic Shorts: Halloween at Home Past Event Like List
See three short silent films by the French filmmaker Georges Méliès, with world-premiere scores by Frances Pollock (The Infernal Cauldron), James Young (The Astronomer's Dream), and Joshua and Jeremiah Bornfield (The Devil in a Convent). You can "meet" the composers in their video introductions and show off your costumes from home on social media with the hashtag #OSsatanicshorts. 
Occasional Symphony
Saturday only

Scream Past Event Like List
The first installment of Wes Craven's cult-classic slasher series is a genre parody that will have you scoff-laughing but also systematically locking every door in your house. 
Burien Drive-In (Friday only) and Cinemark theaters; also streaming on Amazon Prime Video and Shudder

The Shining Past Event Like List
The Shining towers over every film made before or since about hauntings, possessed children, beleaguered wives, and psychotically murderous ax-swinging lunatics. (And there are a lot.) There's something beautifully, coldly opulent about its portrait of American violence, with Kubrick and cinematographer John Alcott's inexorable tracking shots rushing us toward overwhelming evil.
Shudder and Amazon Prime Video

The Sixth Sense Past Event Like List
Aside from a handful of truly scary scenes (like when Haley Joel Osment gets locked in a closet with a vengeful ghost), M. Night Shyamalan's acclaimed psychological horror is a tender reflection on the death of loved ones. If you get through the scene of Toni Collette and HJO in the car (you know the one) without sobbing, we don't know what to tell you. 
Burien Drive-In; also streaming on Amazon Prime Video
Saturday only

SLAY Past Event Like List
From the freaks who brought you the HUMP! and SPLIFF Film Festivals comes something new, fun, and totally terrifying: SLAY! SLAY calls for filmmakers to send in homemade short horror films—eight minutes or less—capturing what scares them most. From classic ghost stories and slasher films to dystopian cults and political nightmares, SLAY dares you to show us your darkest fears. We know reality is scarier than fiction right now. Let’s purge our fears together. WM. STEVEN HUMPHREY
EverOut
Saturday only

Unstreamable: Blue Sunshine
Horror movies are fun, to me, because they are products of whatever societal and existential fears were going on at the moment they were made. And Blue Sunshine is very much attempting to process the failed promises and optimism of the sixties from the lens of the late '70s. In the film, nice well-adjusted people start losing their hair and having psychotic breaks that turn them into killing machines. The only connection between them all is a strain of LSD they took in the '60s called Blue Sunshine. Their indulgences ten years prior have come to bite these now upstanding citizens in the ass, long after their initial trips are over. The plot is honestly a bit murky—somehow a Sean Pean lookalike is the only one who's threading the needle here—but the premise is interesting enough to start making you paranoid. What if the psychedelics you took now, along with your open-hearted, optimistic nature, came back to zombify you in 2030? I thought about it for exactly one second before I decided that'd be pretty freakin' sick. JASMYNE KEIMIG
Scarecrow Video

Unstreamable: Encounters of the Spooky Kind
Like most '80s-era Hong Kong horror films, Encounters of the Spooky Kind (great title) is feverish with nonstop and nonsensical gags and stunts. There are arms that extend across rooms, decapitated chickens, zombies afraid of eggs...... Encounters of the Spooky Kind is known for being the father of the jiangshi film genre, which is based around the "hopping zombies" mentioned in Chinese folklore. Not just any basic ass zombie, these freaks are reanimated corpses controlled by Taoist priests. These zombies also, as the name suggests, hop, which is cute. Encounters takes the jiangshi folklore and mixes it with comedy, kung-fu, and horror to create a hybrid genre that's very fun. CHASE BURNS
Scarecrow Video

Unstreamable: Lizard in a Woman's Skin
Lizard in a Woman's Skin isn't actually about a lizard in a woman's skin. Sorry. It's a psychological horror with strong late-'60s psychedelia. While there are very few lizards, there are lots of lady-on-lady fuck scenes. Some people like that. The turning point between the '60s and '70s is my favorite era—a contradictory pivot sometimes called Hippie Modernism. The era saw the vilification of the hippie, which is something to get into but not right now. Just know that this colorful trash film has a lot of fun hippie-vilification. And a LOT of acid, which is supposed to be scary? The film is most famous for its scene where dogs appear to be cut open and surviving on machines. (It's a little like Midsommar if you know what I mean.) It's gory but in a giallo way. The blood is too red. Dusty, even. Still, viewers were legitimately horrified and the prop master had to go ON TRIAL to show that his dogs were just prop dogs. The court was suspicious. I love that. CHASE BURNS
Scarecrow Video

Unstreamable: Sssssss
The pacing in Sssssss (which, yes, I chose for this column purely because of the name) is terrible. There's an old, evil herpetologist Dr. Carl Stoner (Strother Martin), who turns his sorta hot assistant, David (Dirk Benedict), into an unwitting guinea pig, injecting him with cobra venom in an attempt to transform the man into a sentient king cobra. And for the first hour, the film plods along with its rather uncharismatic leads and thin plot. HOWEVER. Your patience is more than rewarded in the final third of the film, when David starts going full snake. The makeup is incredible, done by John Chambers who is best known for his work on Planet of the Apes. It makes the sequence where David actually turns into a King Cobra hilarious, but also deeply unsettling, elevating this mostly trash film into something noteworthy. Also of note was that Dr. Stoner was based on the real-life herpetologist Bill Haast, who would extract venom from snakes in front of audiences at his Serpentarium in Florida starting in the late '40s. The film also used real venomous snakes that were not defanged during production, giving Ssssss that oily, snaky sheen. JASMYNE KEIMIG
Scarecrow Video

Us Past Event Like List
The first thing that flashes on-screen in Us, from Get Out writer/director/producer Jordan Peele, is a creepy little tidbit of information: There are thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the United States with “no known purpose at all.” The anxiety that line triggers—that anything could be happening right under our feet—courses throughout Us. Us is a movie about doppelgängers—our evil twins that, according to folklore, must be killed, lest they kill us and assume our identities. But Us is also about shadows emerging from their own darkness; the illusory depths of mirrors; the fear we project onto the “other” instead of examining our own brutality; and, more abstractly, the barbaric history of slavery and mass genocide that America has unsuccessfully tried to bury, how the country is actively destroying itself, and what it’ll look like when its chickens finally come home to roost. CIARA DOLAN
HBO Max

The Witch Past Event Like List
"If you like your horror smart, slow-burning, and suffused with allegorical dread, then you can’t do better than this dark folktale of colonialism, religion, family, and nature gone amok in 1630s New England," wrote Sean Nelson about Robert Eggers's excellent 2015 horror The Witch.
HBO Max and Kanopy

Spooky Picks

The Addams Family (1991) Past Event Like List
Reunite with your favorite creepy, kooky, altogether spooky family as they defend their fortune, their ghostly mansion, and their gothic stoicism against a fraudulent man who claims to be their long-lost relative. 
Vasa Park Drive-In; also streaming on Netflix
Saturday only

A Clockwork Orange
A ruthless, violence-addicted gang-rapist is transformed into a docile, brainwashed member of society in this film by Stanley Kubrick.
Netflix
Opening Saturday

Collide-O-Scope: Best of Halloween Past Event Like List
Spend the holiday experiencing a delightfully freaky, swirly montage of music and mayhem made of found-footage phantasmagoria from the archives of Collide-O-Scope's past Halloween screenings.
EverOut
Friday only

The Craft Past Event Like List
Chase Burns once proclaimed, "There are many reasons you are/should be/will be obsessed with The Craft, Andrew Fleming's cult '90s-era film about telekinetic wannabe witches. I will list four of them. One, Nancy's studded choker. Iconic! Two, Neve Campbell's fake cries. Horrible! Three, Laura Lizzie losing her hair for being a racist piece of shit. Satisfying! Four, LIGHT AS A FEATHER, STIFF AS A BOARD!" You can absolutely stick to the classic and forgo the reboot. 
Amazon Prime Video

Extra Ordinary Past Event Like List
This Irish supernatural comedy pits a middle-aged driving instructor with underused magical powers against a failed rock star (Will Forte) who's made a deal with the devil. Former Stranger staffer Leilani Polk wrote, "Everything about this movie is done subtly right. The vague retro atmosphere, the quasi-horror soundtrack, the mildly distorted PSA-like videotape breaks—it could be the late 1970s or early '80s à la Stranger Things, though the era is never actually specified. The unexpected plot, the hilariously gross comedy—Extra Ordinary doesn't feel like it's trying too hard to get laughs, but manages to draw them out with regularity—and, most importantly, the excellent casting." 
Kanopy and Amazon Prime Video

Ghostbusters Remind Like List
Bill Murray and his fellow ex-parapsychology professors strap on magic vacuums with which to suck up rabble-rousing ghosts—one of whom possesses the body of Sigourney Weaver, who would much rather look out the window and eat peanut butter. 
Blue Fox Drive-In and Skyline Drive-In; also streaming on Amazon Prime Video
Through Monday

Hocus Pocus Past Event Like List
This beloved fantasy/comedy film features a trio of witches (played by Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker) who want to suck out children’s souls in order to be young and hot forever.
Cinemark theaters, Blue Fox Drive-In and Rodeo Drive-In; also streaming on Disney+

Hubie Halloween
In an unexpected but ultimately fine move following Uncut Gems, Adam Sandler puts on a slapstick lisp and rides around town on his bicycle protecting his Salem neighbors from a Steve Buscemi werewolf and other small-town Halloween threats. 
Netflix

It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
The Peanuts gang disputes the myth of the Great Pumpkin, a benevolent gourd who gives candy to good children on Halloween, in this timeless 1960s special. Keep it on loop in your house to set that cozy fall mood. 
Apple TV+

The Nightmare Before Christmas Past Event Like List
A permanent fixture in the Halloween canon, Tim Burton's animated musical classic invents a fateful merge of All Hallows' Eve with its cheery winter counterpart, inspiring the pumpkin king—who genuinely wants to scare people but has become tired of his routine—to darken the spirit of Christmas by kidnapping Santa Claus.  
Lincoln Square/Cinemark, Pacific Place/AMC, and Rodeo Drive-In; also streaming on Disney+
Thursday-Saturday

Over the Garden Wall Past Event Like List
Two brothers, Wirt and Greg, are lost in a strange forest and are trying to get home. Their Peter Pan-like outfits hark back to olden times, but their modern vernacular suggests otherwise. It all becomes clear eventually, after encounters with a village of people with pumpkins for heads, talking bluebirds, raspy-voiced highwaymen, child-gobbling witches, several frogs, and at least two songs that will be stuck in your head forever. This Cartoon Network series is a beloved autumn rewatch for kids and adults alike. 
Hulu

The Rocky Horror Picture Show Past Event Like List
Rocky Horror star Tim Curry, whose fishnetted gams could make even a literal potato question its sexuality, will be joined by his former co-stars Barry Bostwick and Nell Campbell for a livestreamed screening of everyone's favorite picture show to benefit the Wisconsin Democrats. Expect live music from the likes of the Dresden Dolls, Miss Peppermint, Eiza González, Josh Gad, and Ben Barne.
Saturday only

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Sweeney Todd has everything—rape, murder, cannibalism, more murder. Tim Burton's film of Stephen Sondheim's Broadway musical is by no means perfect; Helena Bonham Carter can't sing, for starters. But you couldn't ask for a better antidote to compulsory holiday cheer than Burton's nightmare vision. London is a grim and grisly grindhouse. It's hard to argue with Johnny Depp's Sweeney when he decides that the "lives of the wicked should be made brief, for the rest of us death will be a relief," or Mrs. Lovett's suggestion that they're going to "save a lot of graves, do a lot of relatives favors." DAN SAVAGE
Hulu
Opening Saturday

The Witches
If Guillermo del Toro and Robert Zemeckis stood at opposite ends of a movie and pulled as hard as they could in opposite directions, the output would likely not be dissimilar from the new adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches, which has one of the most haunting, heartfelt, spellbinding first acts of a film I’ve ever seen before it dissolves into a generic cartoon. I’m glad it exists, I’m glad I watched, I’m glad to recommend it; but I wish my brain weren't so distracted by questions about how such a gorgeous film could derail so completely at the halfway mark. The first hour is an astounding improvement upon the original novel, which I didn’t believe was possible. Updating the setting to 1968 Alabama with a predominantly Black cast is an inspired idea. It creates an entirely new intent for the story, which at its outset is about human responses to unfairness and conflicting impulses to despair and to endure. A critique of American racism and class lurks as close to the surface as possible, and the movie’s strength is in what goes unsaid between weary, knowing glances, as well as some arresting touches of horror. Then the movie climaxes with a joke about a rat biting Stanley Tucci on the dick. And I don’t want to linger on this critique, but the cartoon elements of the film are distractingly uncanny, with every creature animated like someone pushing jello blobs through a pile of hair. Anne Hathaway, incidentally, is incredible. MATT BAUME
HBO Max

In-Person: Non-Halloween

Akira 4K Past Event Like List
My introduction to this movie was like many people’s: I told an older friend I liked Robotech or Voltron or some shit like that, and this kid then gave me a VHS tape with Akira on it and said, “If you want to know what anime is really about, watch this.” This is probably one of the worst introductions to both the genre and to Akira. It’s sort of like telling a little kid, “Oh, you think GI Joe is cool, huh? You should check out Apocalypse Now.” And yet, the artistry of the film is so compelling that revisiting it becomes almost mandatory—an animated itch you just can’t scratch to satisfaction, no matter how often you go back. The story never quite makes sense, even after your second or 12th viewing, but the combination of sights and sounds are still, more than 30 years later, one of the most potent examples of pure cinema there is. BOBBY ROBERTS
AMC and Cinemark theaters

Alita: Battle Angel
I can’t stop dreaming about the glimmering city in the clouds that hovers above the film’s sci-fi setting. The story (cyborg woman is found comatose in trash heap, makes heroic journey to rediscover her past and her martial arts skills) lovingly smooshes at least three story arcs’ worth of plot into a single 122-minute film. I have no idea how Alita could have been done better. I’ve read all the Battle Angel comics, which manga artist Yukito Kishiro started publishing in 1990, and I could rattle off all the differences and references in director Robert Rodriguez’s adaptation. But I’d rather talk about what this film is: a fun, exhilarating realization of a sci-fi story that, even now, audiences may not be ready for. Salazar’s sensitive portrayal—enhanced by Alita’s robotic limbs and oversized, anime eyes—only strengthens the focus on conflict and competition that makes Alita so exciting. From the very start, Kishiro’s Alita was a battle comic—a serialized story to entertain young people with artful fight scenes. SUZETTE SMITH
AMC and Cinemark theaters

Apollo 13: 25th Anniversary Past Event Like List
Ron Howard is going to be flying the Millennium Falcon through a galaxy far, far away very soon, but the first time he took a trip into outer space he returned with the best entry in his long filmography: this 1995 dramatization of NASA’s workmanlike efforts to rescue three astronauts stranded in orbit, using literally nothing more than some tubing, some duct tape, and math. The cast is amazing (Ed Harris, Bill Paxton, Kevin Bacon, Tom Hanks), James Horner’s score is an all-timer, and the ending is appropriately triumphant, although time has made it bittersweet since, yunno, our country has basically abandoned space exploration and science in general. We weren’t always this disgustingly ignorant and willfully stupid, and Apollo 13 is one of the better reminders of what we used to be. BOBBY ROBERTS
AMC theaters
Sunday only

Honest Thief Past Event Like List
Determined to change his bank-robbing ways for his true love, Liam Neeson decides to turn himself in and pay his dues. But when he realizes that the Feds are just as corrupt as his cohort of criminals, he decides to fight back. Don't expect any Oscar-worthy performances, but do expect mindless fun. 
AMC and Cinemark theaters

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. 
AMC theaters; also available on VOD

Monsters, Inc. Past Event Like List
In this Disney-Pixar classic, a little girl named Boo ventures into the world's largest scare factory, leading the blue-furred James P. Sullivan (John Goodman) and the one-eyed Mike Wazowski (Billy Crystal) to try to smuggle her back home by disguising her as a little monster. 
Cinemark, AMC, Skyline Drive-In, and elsewhere

New Mutants Remind Like List
Supposedly the last film in the X-Men franchise (and if Dark Phoenix is any indication, the end can't come soon enough), The New Mutants is a superhero/horror hybrid about five young mutants held captive in a scary facility. With Anya Taylor-Joy as a teleporting mutant, Maisie Williams as a werewolf, Charlie Heaton as a kid who can sort of fly, Blu Hunt as a mutant who can weave illusions, and Alice Braga as their doctor and mentor.
Admiral, Pacific Place, Varsity, and other theaters

Synchronic
BFF paramedics (Anthony Mackie and Jamie Dornan) uncover a dangerous psychedelic drug while attending to a series of gruesome accidents. 
AMC and Cinemark theaters

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 a complicated storyline that will have you "shush"-ing your theater-going companions and IMAX-worthy bangs and booms.
Admiral, Pacific Place, and other theaters

Yellow Rose
Broadway performer Eva Noblezada stars in Diane Paragas's new film as a Filipina teen torn between staying in small-town Texas with her close-knit family or pursuing her dream of becoming a country music singer.
Varsity and AMC 10

V for Vendetta Past Event Like List
In 2006, cultural critic and philosopher Steven Shaviro described V for Vendetta as a film that “pull no punches” and “doesn’t draw back from its more dangerous initial implications in the ways that high-budget adaptations of comics so often do.” He also stated that the “destruction of the British Parliament at the end of the film is the most emphatic such endorsement of subversive terrorist action since Fight Club.” The 2005 movie is based on a graphic novel by Alan Moore, stars Natalie Portman, and gave anarchists around the world an identity: the Guy Fawkes mask. And it is here that Shaviro provided a deep insight about revolutions. The transformation of an ordinary subject into a revolutionary one requires the destruction of the former. Shaviro, borrowing from another important cultural critic (Slavoj Žižek), calls this “subjective destitution.” CHARLES MUDEDE
AMC and Cinemark theaters

Streaming: Non-Halloween

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 full of cash.
Grand Illusion
Opening Friday

Damnation Past Event Like List
I could tell you that Damnation is a black-and-white movie from 1987 about adultery, but to be honest, it's hard enough to distinguish between the characters without trying to figure out who's harassing, haranguing, and cheating on whom. The little bursts of plot are incidental to director Béla Tarr's main business: long, lulling takes of rain hitting puddles, or a man who peers around columns, or bucket-trams of coal ascending and descending a mountain. There's a still shot near the beginning of a hill of glasses and steins, beautifully composed and accompanied not by the busy clinking of drinks but by the meditative clack of off-screen billiard balls. It's a shot worthy of a gelatin-silver print, except more mesmerizing. You don't just want to look at the scene, you want to look at it while seated in that rural dancehall—drunk, with a bleary gaze that makes the lights curve and run together. ANNIE WAGNER
Grand Illusion
Opening Friday

The Donut King Remind Like List
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
SIFF
Opening Friday

Engauge Experimental Film Festival 2020 Past Event Like List
This experimental film festival, which has moved online, will once again screen "films that originated on film" from artists around the world. 
Thursday-Sunday

French Cinema Now Past Event Like List
This festival of French and Francophone cinema culture that's usually crammed (effectively) into a single week will get over three months of attention at SIFF. Nine of this year's feature films, presented on TV5MONDE, are directed by women, including emerging filmmakers like Manele Labidi, whose Arab Blues follows a woman who, after years of studying abroad in Paris, returns home to Tunis to pursue her dream of opening up her own psychotherapy practice.
SIFF

The Mandalorian: Season 2
If you've been waiting since last December for the return of Baby Yoda, you'll be glad to know that the first episode of the new season comes out Friday.
Disney+
Premiering Friday

NFFTY Past Event Like List
The "young filmmaker's Cannes"—Charles Mudede called it "world-class"—the National Film Festival for Talented Youth assembles the best films made by directors under 25. See works by promising cineastes who will make you feel very old. We're already choked up over Bloom, about a victim of assault who learns to cope in her abstract world made of clay. There's also Athol Park, wherein a girl searches for her missing school teacher, and a new Chong the Nomad music video. 
Thursday-Sunday

The Oval Office and The Box Office: Election Movies Past Event Like List
With less than a week to go until the election, join film historian Lance Rhoades on a "multi-media whistle-stop tour" of memorable moments from election-themed movies. 
Scarecrow Video
Friday only

Prospect
Is this the first major work of Northwest science fiction? Indeed, it imagines a moon that is like the evergreen forests that surround Seattle. The whole planet is green—gothic green. And the light on this strange moon is sharply slanted like Northwest light. The superb film is about prospectors (a father and daughter) looking for a root-made gem that will make them rich. The daughter, however, is keen to get off the planet because the line to it is about to be shut down. But her father is money-mad. If he does not make it here, he will never make it anywhere in the galaxy. Translucent insects float through the air. There are other money-mad prospectors in the endless forest. You do not leave this planet without paying a big price. Money is the root of all evil. CHARLES MUDEDE
Netflix
Opening Sunday

The Undoing Past Event Like List
Big Little Lies moves to the Upper East Side in Susanne Bier's new miniseries starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant.
HBO Max
New episode Sunday

VHS For President Redux Past Event Like List
The archives of Scarecrow Video have come through with an assortment of VHS gold to wrap up this hellfire of an election season, including made-for-TV movies, pulpy propaganda, hysterical histories, grotesque gasbags, and moronic mysteries. (Amazing alliterations courtesy of Grand Illusion.)
Grand Illusion
Opening Friday

The Year of the Yahoo Past Event Like List
The President of the United States wants a liberal Senator defeated, so political operatives and media hucksters of the party decide to run Hank Jackson, a country-western singer, for office.
Grand Illusion
Opening Friday

Looking for more ways to support local movie theaters? These on-demand streaming options through the Northwest Film Forum, SIFF, and elsewhere are available to watch anytime.