The 23 Best Movies to Stream Online This Weekend—and How to Support Seattle Businesses in the Process: April 10-12, 2020 Hand-Picked Cat Videos, Vitalina Varela, and More Movies to Watch from Home

Take a break from gazing longingly outside your window and turn your attention to a 40-minute compilation of adorable content plucked from SIFF's CatVideoFest

The sun might—nay, will, definitely—taunt you this weekend, but perhaps a virtual screening of the vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows will inspire you to stay indoors. To fill the void of going out to your favorite indie movie theaters, we've rounded up our picks for this weekend's locally presented streaming options brought to you by Grand Illusion, Northwest Film Forum, SIFF (the latest addition to the virtual streaming club), and elsewhere, whom you'll be supporting in the process. Read on for details, and, for more ways to support Seattle venues from home, check out our roundup of local places offering live streams and virtual content.

Best of CatVideoFest: Creature Comforts Edition

Local feline enthusiast and Henri the Cat creator Will Braden, bless his heart, has plucked 40 minutes of quality content from SIFF's CatVideoFest—an annual celebration of the divine conjunction of cats and internet—for your viewing pleasure.

Available via SIFF

Colonel Redl

This pre-WWI-set Hungarian film, which won the Cannes Grand Jury prize in 1985, chronicles Alfred Redl's ascension to head of counter-intelligence of the Austro-Hungarian Army, all the way up to his (spoiler, sorry) apparent suicide.

Available via SIFF

Confidence

In this 1980 Academy Award-nominated film, two resistance members in WWII-era Hungary pretend to be husband and wife in an effort to hide in plain sight from Nazi occupiers. The woman, Kata, is married in real life, which causes turmoil when she and her fake husband start to develop feelings for each other.

Available via SIFF

Corpus Christi

When a spiritually inclined young man fresh out of juvie isn't allowed into the seminary, he takes matters into his own hands: He impersonates a priest and ministers to a church in a rural town. He's good at his job, but his past threatens his new vocation. This Polish film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. Its star, Bartosz Bielenia ("a bundle of intensity with a buzz cut," according to the New Yorker's Anthony Lane), has drawn much attention for his sheer, alarming energy.

Available via Northwest Film Forum

Extra Ordinary

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. Critics all over the place are charmed; Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com calls it "a defiantly odd piece of work." Leilani Polk writes, "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."

Available via Grand Illusion



Festival of (In)Appropriation #11

The 11th annual Festival of (In)Appropriation, with curators Jaimie Baron, Greg Cohen, and Lauren Berliner in attendance, highlights artistic, innovative, and inappropriate uses of existing film or video footage. This year, they promise pieces that include everything from "elegant exquisite corpses with dark political undertones to jocular YouTube mash-ups and music-video supercuts."

Available via Northwest Film Forum

Ismo, Ismo, Ismo Umbrales: Experimental Women Filmmakers from Latin America

This program celebrates pioneering, convention-flouting Latin American women filmmakers like Narcisa Hirsch (1971's Come Out), Lydia García Millán (1955's Color), Poli Marichal (1982's Blues Tropical), and Ximena Cuevas (2003's Devil in the Flesh).

Available via Northwest Film Forum

Mephisto

The 1981 Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film went to Hungarian director István Szabó's Mephisto, which follows a struggling actor who cooperates with Nazis in occupied Germany in order to become a star. Ingmar Bergman deemed "an impassioned work of art."

Available via SIFF

The Neverending Story

A guileless wimp stumbles into Fantasia and finds himself head to head with the most existentially profound antagonist in all of children's literature, nothingness itself.

Available via Distant Worlds Coffeehouse

Saturday only

Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band

With Once Were Brothers, Roher presents a conventional contextualizing rock doc with marquee-name talking heads—Van Morrison, George Harrison, Bruce Springsteen, et al.—and efficiently reveals Robertson's early family life (his mother was indigenous, his father Jewish) and musical evolution. Robertson is an articulate, passionate memoirist; the film is based on his 2016 autobiography, Testimony. With equanimity, he registers the Band's soaring highs and devastating lows, while his French ex-wife Dominique adds crucial observations about the inter-band dynamics and substance abuse that dogged the members. Tracing a story of relentless, upward mobility through the music industry, the doc emphasizes Robertson's inner strength and boundless ambition, which helped him to avoid the booze- and drug-related pitfalls that afflicted his mates. For fans of the Band, this film will inspire tears of sorrow and joy, if not rage. Now more than ever, their music stirs emotions with a profundity that feels religious, but without the stench of sanctimony. DAVE SEGAL

Available via SIFF and Northwest Film Forum

The Perfect Nanny

In Lucie Borleteau's thriller, two young Parisian parents hire a woman who appears to be the ideal nanny, but things start getting possessive real fast.

Available via Northwest Film Forum

Slay the Dragon

Barak Goodman and Chris Durrance's documentary investigates how gerrymandering has damaged our democracy, and how citizen-led activist groups have been crucial agents of change when bigger systems fail.

Available via SIFF

Sorry We Missed You

From British filmmaker Ken Loach (Loach on Loach, Jimmy's Hall) comes a working-class family drama that exposes the maybe-not-so secret dark side of the gig economy. The New York Times' Wesley Morris calls Loach "one of Earth’s most venerable and venerated directors."

Available via SIFF

SPLIFF 2019

A new vibe of stoner entertainment is emerging—witness the rise of Broad City, High Maintenance, and basically every TV show created on Viceland. And, most importantly, The Stranger presents SPLIFF, your new favorite film festival created by the stoned for the stoned. Because we can no longer congregate in person, we're rescreening the 2019 festival online! Got some weed on hand? Check it out from the comfort of your home. All contributions received will be shared with the filmmakers.

Available via The Stranger

Virtual Moving History III Activism in the Archives

This inspiring-sounding virtual edition of Moving History will gather up locally archived clips highlighting social justice warriors, digitized by the Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound.

Available via Northwest Film Forum

Vitalina Varela

Five years after Horse Money, which Charles Mudede called "a film you will remember more for its images and episodes than its story," the nonprofessional actor Vitalina Varela reprises her role as a character who shares her name, a widow who travels to Lisbon to try to piece together her estranged husband's last days. Richard Brody of the New Yorker writes, "From the start, Costa endows the tale with a pictorial majesty, rooted in a hands-on transformation of film-noir, Expressionist-rooted cinematography. His images (realized by the director of photography Leonardo Simões) feature piercing bursts of light and sepulchral shadows, striated and fragmentary illumination that blends with largely static frames to fuse space and mood, action and emotion."

Available via Northwest Film Forum

What We Do in the Shadows

Cowritten by, co-starring, and co-directed by Taika Waititi and Flight of the Conchords’s Jemaine Clement, this reality TV-style vampire mockumentary from 2014 is already a classic. Escape into its absurd comforts, and then maybe go watch the equally wonderful series spinoff.

Available via Distant Worlds Coffeehouse

Sunday only

The Whistlers

Festival favorite Corneliu Porumboiu (The Treasure, Police, Adjective) delves into the noir genre, complete with a beautiful crook, a crooked inspector, and...a secret whistling language?

Available via SIFF

OTHER NOTEWORTHY STREAMING OPTIONS

Fleabag Live

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's Fleabag is some of the best television made in the last 10 years period. A lot of people have heard it was adapted from a one-woman-show she did in London, but recorded performances of that show haven't been too easy to see... until this weekend, when Waller-Bridge partners with Amazon Prime (the platform that streams her show) to make her 2019 Wyndham Theatre performance available for $5, with all the proceeds going to The National Emergencies Trust, NHS Charities Together, Acting for Others, and the Fleabag Support Fund. Oh, and the show? It's somethin'. If you saw season one, you'll recognize some of it, but even if you know where it's all going, Waller-Bridge's storytelling is going to surprise and shock you a little. But a little surprise and shock shouldn't be enough to stop you getting into bed with Fleabag, right? Like Waller-Bridge herself says, "It's for charity!" BOBBY ROBERTS

Available Friday on Amazon Prime

Bond Marathon!

Speaking of Ms. Waller-Bridge, another big deal debut was supposed to happen this weekend, when her writing work on No Time to Die, the last Bond film to star Daniel Craig, was going to be heard in theaters all across America. Except theatres aren't open, and the movie got postponed to November anyway (Maybe they'll be open then? Maybe people will want to crowd into dark rooms full of inconsiderate strangers in various stages of recovery from a virus that has no vaccine? Sure!) So why not celebrate what should have been Bond Day by organizing a Bond marathon! You can handpick your 00-playlist at Amazon Prime (our suggestion: From Russia With Love, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Spy Who Loved Me, License to Kill, and GoldenEye), or you can do it old-school style: Just turn on Pluto TV, scroll to the Bond channel, and have yourself a lazy weekend while a small parade of janky-yet-charming Roger Moore movies stretch out with commercial interruptions. BOBBY ROBERTS

Available now on Amazon Prime

Coachella: 20 Years in the Desert

With the major California summer music festival Coachella postponed to October, the organizers have released Coachella: 20 Years in the Desert, a documentary featuring seminal performances and behind-the-scenes stories, on YouTube. For your movie-watching sustenance needs, Shake Shack is offering "Couchella" burger specials and free shipping on orders over $20 through April 12.

Available via Coachella on YouTube

Saturday Night Live

There's almost nothing about regular life that COVID-19 hasn't interrupted. Going to the movies, going to a concert... going outside at all. Also interrupted? The steady sketch comedy comforts of tuning in "Liiiive, from New York!" on Saturday night! But after announcing season 45 (!) was suspended indefinitely, a new, "remotely-produced" (read: Zoom'd) episode of the show went online at 11:30 pm on Saturday! Just like normal! And in keeping with that sense of normalcy, you're probably waiting until Sunday morning to find out which sketches are actually worth watching on YouTube, and then clicking on only those!. God it feels good to slide back into routines from what already feels like a lifetime ago. Who'd have thought anyone would be happy to see Colin Jost's face again, right? Right. BOBBY ROBERTS

Available Saturday on NBC

Tiger King After Show

Been noticing that there's a recent groundswell of negative attention focused on the quarantine-fueled success of Netflix's Tiger King? Hoping that you can get in on squeezing every last sour drop of schadenfreude before a backlash of (checks notes) "decency and basic human compassion" swallows this shitshow whole? GREAT NEWS: Netflix is providing one last bite of the poisoned apple via a Tiger King after-show hosted by Joel McHale, a veteran of looking at human trainwrecks and pouring gasoline on their dwindling fires as the host of E! Network's The Soup. He was also on a show about junior college too, apparently. ANYWAY: Special guests will include one of Joe Exotic's ex-husbands, a reality show producer and his wife, and Saff. Looks like meat's back on the menu, boys! BOBBY ROBERTS

Available Sunday on Netflix

Source: Thestranger.com

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