While Men in Black 3 attempts to knock The Avengers out of its box office domination, this Memorial Day Weekend brings SIFF into its second week, so the screening list will be understandably abbreviated this week.
Parallax View continues to update its SIFF 2012 guide here, with links to capsules, features, and reviews from The Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, The Stranger, Straight Shooting, and others.
Meanwhile, two imports with macabre dimensions compete for festival audiences. Headhunters, a black comedy from Norway, pits a business professional who moonlights as an art thief to maintain his lavish lifestyle against a millionaire art collector. Robert Horton, writing for The Herald, says: “We always have a few foreign titles that try to out-do Hollywood at the suspense game, and Headhunters is an especially berserk example.” It opens at The Varsity. More reviews here.
Post Mortem, Pablo Larrain’s follow-up to Tony Manero, is a darkly comic piece about a morgue clerk in 1973 almost oblivious military coup exploding around him. Tom Keogh, writing for The Seattle Times calls it “mesmerizing, somehow otherworldly… a kind of horror movie on two levels.” Plays for a week at Grand Illusion.
More Openings
First Position, a documentary about young ballet dancers training for the Youth America Grand Prix, gets high marks from Seattle Times film critic Moira Macdonald: “The movie doesn’t dwell on the very real possibility that none of these young people will spend their careers as professional dancers (only a tiny fraction of students achieve this); instead, it lets us enjoy their youthful exuberance, lingering with them on every jump.” Opens at Seven Gables.
Hit So Hard, a documentary on Patty Schemel, the openly lesbian rock drummer of Hole, plays for a week at NWFF. Ms. Schemel will be on hand for the Friday and Saturday shows. Gene Stout reviews it for the Seattle Times.
Question One, a documentary on the civil rights battle over gay marriage in Maine, plays for a week at NWFF. Reporter Dominic Holden reviews it for The Stranger.
Repertory
The UCLA Festival of Preservation concludes at NWFF with screenings of News of the Day and Soundies (Saturday, May 26), a collection of newsreels and proto-music videos from yesteryear, and This is You Life (Sunday, May 27), featuring three complete episodes of the classics TV series. All shows at 7pm. Complete schedule and film notes at NWFF website.
For more alternative screenings, read Moira Macdonald’s At A Theater Near You roundup at The Seattle Times.
Schedules and Showtimes
You can check your favorite independent cinemas, neighborhood theaters and multiplexes here.
Independent theaters:
SIFF Cinema
Northwest Film Forum
Grand Illusion
Seattle Art Museum
Central Cinema
The Big Picture
Majestic Bay Theatres
Cinerama
Multiplexes and Chains
Cinebarre
Landmark Theatres (Egyptian, Guild 45, Harvard Exit, Varsity and others)
Regal Cinemas (Meridian 16, Thornton Place and others)
AMC Cinemas (Pacific Place, Oak Tree, Alderwood and others)
Kirland Park Place
Lincoln Square Cinemas
Village Roadshow Gold Class Cinemas