The 52nd Seattle International Film Festival kicks off this week! Running in person from May 7-17 the festival features 203 films playing in-person: with most in SIFF’s Lower Queen Anne Headquarters and at the SIFF Downtown.
Author: Josh
SIFF 2026 Northwest Connections Notebook: Assets & Liabilities
I guess this is growing up? Set in Tacoma, Zach Weintraub’s tightly scripted feature finds his fictional counterpart “Zach” settling into the realities of adulthood: making uncomfortable calls to his property management company to weasel his way into having his starter house sold out from under his renters, spending days jockeying his tech job from home, taking care of his young daughter, noticing gray hairs and fine lines around his eyes. It happens to the best of us, gradually and then all at once.
For better and worse Billie Eilish’s new concert film with James Cameron brings fans into the arena tour
What a time it is to be a pop star. When the arena tours have done a year of sales, you can share the experience with fans who couldn’t score a ticket via the magic of the multiplex. Taylor did it with Eras, Beyonce did it with Renaissance, immortalizing their mega-shows and collecting some extra cash. Between concert films and jukebox biopics, movies that feature familiar music have become one of the surer things in a shaky industry. Now, curiously enough, it’s Billie Eilish’s turn and she’s doing so by sharing co-directing credit with none other than James Cameron and in 3D, no less. The experiment and its result is mildly perplexing.
With stunning performances, Mother Mary conjures visions of a pop star in crisis
David Lowery’s latest, Mother Mary, shares with his filmography an openness to the surreal as well as the ability to give main character energy to bolts of fabric. Bolstered by two entrancing performances from Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, it joins his others as deeply fascinating and surprisingly revelatory examinations of humanity.
Miroirs No. 3 explores the eerie kindness of strangers
With something always tantalizingly out of reach, Christian Petzold’s films carry a certain rigor of academic riddles, albeit koans populated by characters nursing their own quiet tragedies. With vibrant interiority, Paula Beer’s melancholic university music student becomes a makeshift bandage for a rural family in the wake of a freak car crash.
Project Hail Mary makes a hugely winning bet on interstellar bromance
Project Hail Mary (2026 | USA | 256 minutes | Phil Lord & Christopher Miller) Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s hotly anticipated …
Sirāt rattles the body to shock the soul
Instant reactions to movies playing at the Toronto International Film Festival, which is in full swing from September 4-14 with celebrities and films flooding downtown.
Suburban Fury allows Sarah Jane Moore to make her own myth
One of the best entries in last year’s SIFF Northwest Connections program is situated 800 miles south on I-5 and a half century in the past: the biography of Sarah Jane Moore, one of two women who independently attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford while he campaigned for election in California. Eschewing typical documentary conventions, the story of the would-be assassin is told by the subject herself, having been released from prison 32 years into her life sentence.
Pillion brings BDSM to the multiplex
Who could have possibly guessed that the squirmiest elements of watching a meek all-grown-up Dudley Dursley (Harry Melling) inadvertently stumble his way into a submissive arrangement with a godlike motorcycle dom played by Alexander Skarsgård would be the amount of holiday barbershop quartet singing?
How to Make a Killing taps the breaks on the Glen Powell Experience
John Patton Ford taps Glen Powell to star in his loose re-imagining of a 1949 black comedy in which an outcast needs to eliminate everyone on the family tree ahead of him in the line of succession to inherit a fortune. For once, his charisma isn’t enough to make it work.