Our local cine-smorgasbord returns this week – and how a year has already passed since the last go-round, I can’t really say. But the 51st Seattle International Film Festival will indeed run from May 15-25, across many usual venues (the beloved Egyptian is still dark for repairs), followed by a week-long streaming window for select titles online.
Opening Night is Thursday 5/15 with Darren Thornton’s Irish comedy Four Mothers, at The Paramount; Eva Victor’s terrific A24 drama Sorry, Baby will wrap things at SIFF Cinema Downtown (formerly Cinerama). The overall lineup boasts 245 films from 74 countries, including 83 features, 122 shorts, 35 documentaries, and two mystery screenings. Of these, 19 are world premieres, 27 North American premieres, and 13 U.S. premieres.
As of 5/13 I’ve been able to check out a small bit of the lineup pre-fest (first dozen capsule reviews are below), will surely get to a few more during-fest, and as in prior years will update this post throughout with fresh takes as I go.
5/17 update: added reviews of 40 Acres and Know Her Name.
5/22 update: added a review of Suburban Fury. And, with that, I wrap my SIFF 2025 adventures! (Sorry, Baby is absolutely my best-of-fest — do check it out Closing Night. And stream some other stuff after that!)
Reviews:
40 Acres
{screenings concluded}
Director R.T. Thorne moves from music videos to this gripping feature debut with a jumble of post-apocalypse action, horror, and drama that’s by turns tense and touching. At the center is Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler), a no-nonsense ex-military matriarch who keeps her family trained for survival. Their rigid drills become terrifyingly relevant when cannibalistic raiders threaten their land, forcing them into a fight for survival. Friction between Hailey and her son Manny (Kataem O’Connor), who dares to challenge his mom’s hardened approach, keeps tension simmering through high-stakes battles and quiet, loaded family moments. Deadwyler, shifting between fierce warrior and deeply complex mother, makes the (occasionally speechified) themes of trauma and resilience come truly alive.
By Design
{streaming 5/26-6/1}
“Resentment is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die” is an oddly apt quote attributed (probably incorrectly) to one of the many strange characters in this slim and surreal genre-defier by Amanda Kramer. It concerns a lonely woman named Camille, portrayed by Juliette Lewis, who swaps bodies with a fascinating wooden armchair (!), then proceeds to spend the rest of the film mostly looking vacant. Meanwhile her friends and mom hover into and out of her orbit, as the chair’s new owner (Mamoudou Athie) struggles to tolerate his life, and as all characters incorporate choreographed movements into the various loopty-loo messes they find themselves in. This film isn’t for everyone, and I can’t explain why it made me feel so giddy, but I was absolutely bubbling by the end.
Chain Reactions
{screenings concluded}
Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was released more than fifty years ago, and nearly instantly became a horror cinema benchmark. With this documentary (which, for the record, has a longer runtime than its subject) filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe (fab Lynch/Oz) examines the film’s enduring legacy, with the help of five notable fans: Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King, and Karyn Kusama. Philippe’s signature intercuts and splitscreen alchemy (Nosferatu and Days of Heaven and Poltergeist and Persona and Blair Witch and even City Lights are in the mix), alongside the interviewees’ thoughtful insights and very convincing arguments about the film’s place among masterworks of modern American art, make for one of the better movies about movies I’ve seen in a while.
Color Book
{5/24 and 5/25 Uptown; streaming 5/26-6/1}
After his wife’s sudden passing, Lucky (William Catlett) finds himself a single father to nine-year-old Mason (Jeremiah Daniels). Lucky is frustrated when Mason, who has Down Syndrome, goes on as if nothing has changed, occupying his time with a coloring book and TV baseball. Grief and life carry on, and eventually Lucky makes it his mission to take his son to his first baseball game; the two set off on what becomes a difficult trek across the sprawl of Atlanta to get there. The performances are terrific, the black-and-white cinematography often stunning, and debut feature director David Fortune is one to watch.
Diamonds
{5/24 and 5/25 Downtown}
Turkish-Italian maestro Ferzan Özpetek’s 1974-set melodrama is a memory film about the glorious Sartoria Canova, a costume shop for film and theatre, run by two sisters: severe Alberta (Luisa Ranieri, surely a relative of Gaga) and emotional Gabriella (Jasmine Trinca). During work on an important commission for a period film, the sisters and their female employees confront issues in their personal lives — domestic violence, mental health issues, trauma and loss are woven into the rich fabric — with the support of their warm community. All the while, there’s juicy drama afoot everywhere: a murder plot, flirtations with scantily-clad beefcake, bitchy drama between actresses. It’s all a lot for one movie, and loose threads are abundant; the material might have worked better as a multi-part TV series. And it has a very jumbled start, but about halfway through the 135-minute runtime I realized I was hopelessly smitten. I love when that happens. It’s not Özpetek’s best, but it is his highest-grossing ever, a huge hit in Italy last holiday season. Diamonds dazzled this reviewer, and it will look amazing on SIFF Cinema Downtown’s big-ass (formerly-Cinerama) screen.
The Gloria of Your Imagination
{streaming 5/26-6/1}
In 1963, a 30-year-old divorced waitress named Gloria agreed to be filmed having sessions with three different therapists representing three distinct modalities; unbeknownst to its subject, the footage would be made, years later, into a PBS series called, originally, Three Approaches to Psychotherapy. With The Gloria of Your Imagination, director Jennifer Reeves contextualizes and deconstructs the series and the sessions by mixing in biographical information about Gloria, in text form, superimposed on representations of women at the time from industrial films, commercials, and home movies. The quasi-documentary could have been 15+ minutes shorter; enjoyment will be relative to your interest in psychotherapy and your appreciation of dual projection style experimental found-footage art fantasias. I’m into all, and I enjoyed Gloria quite a lot.
Idyllic
{screenings concluded}
This amazing Dutch film’s big ensemble of characters includes Annika, a famous opera singer facing a health crisis (she might even be experiencing a Sliding Doors situation to boot); her brother Viktor, newly out of the closet in his 40s and navigating a confusing new scene; and their hilarious crank of a grandmother Joke, who wants to die and makes that clear to anyone who will listen. Elsewhere in the intricately woven plot there’s Timo, a 10-year-old boy who’s informed by a dubious fortune teller that he will die in 7 days; and Musa, a dour school teacher enduring a potentially career-ending scandal. The characters are given plenty of room for their respective existential crises – all somehow conveyed with an engaging, light touch – and the performers make it all absolutely delightful to witness. Sure to be a SIFF 2025 highlight.
Jean Cocteau
{streaming 5/26-6/1}
The latest from filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland (Truman & Tennessee) is a lovely and often quite riveting portrait of the filmmaker, visual artist, playwright, and poet – told largely in his own words (archival filmed stuff plus narration by superhot Josh O’Connor) via excerpts from an extensive selection of journals, letters, and creative output. The unconventional documentary gorgeously demonstrates how Cocteau became famous by accident (collaborating with Picasso, Breton, Proust, and even Coco Chanel on various projects over his years maybe made it a bit less accidental), why his work has endured, and why the creative impulse must be prioritized and nurtured. Moving and wonderful.
Know Her Name
{5/23 Shoreline; 5/25 Uptown; streaming 5/26-6/1}
From the earliest days of cinema, women have been at the helm of storytelling, though much of their work has since been lost, and their contributions are frequently de-emphasized in (if not omitted completely from) film history. This rich and affecting documentary explores the idea of historical amnesia, unearthing the stories of visionaries like Alice Guy-Blaché, Zora Neale Hurston, Esther Eng (who gave a very young Bruce Lee his first on-screen role, by the way), Lois Weber, and Dorothy Arzner, whose work continues to shape the cinematic world today. Archival footage and interviews with contemporary filmmakers, scholars, and historians help fill in some of the more egregious gaps – all with poignancy and rhythm and intention. We really should know their names.
Moon
{5/23 Pacific Place}
Sarah (played by Austrian performance artist Florentina Holzinger) is a recently-retired MMA pro who accepts a job offer from a wealthy Jordanian man to relocate temporarily and become a private trainer for his three sheltered younger sisters. But who is this family, why are they under constant surveillance, and what is seriously going on in that uber-lavish house? Kurdish-Austrian filmmaker Kurdwin Ayub’s sophomore feature is often quite thrilling (an engaging and quick 93 minutes), even when Sarah’s superior attitude toward her own freedom gets annoying (despite its authenticity).
Paying For It
{screenings concluded}
It’s 1999 in Toronto, where introverted cartoonist Chester (Dan Beirne) lives with TV presenter Sonny (Emily Lê). Sonny announces she’d like to open up the relationship, and this enjoyably brief feature, adapted by Sook-Yin Lee from Chester Brown’s graphic novel of the same name (with John Cameron Mitchell among the producer credits), follows the partners over a three-year transformation of their lives together. Chester comforts Sonny through breakups, and Sonny grapples with Chester’s approach to being open: hiring sex workers with whom he seeks ongoing friendships. The film never inserts morality into the proceedings, and the comic-inspired concision of visuals, narrative, and performances is appealing throughout.
Raptures
{5/23 and 5/24 Uptown}
Tonally shaky drama about a devout Christian woman living along the near-Arctic Finland-Sweden border in the 1930s and stoically trying to protect her family from her cuckoo husband’s newly formed sectarian cult. This is the first-ever feature film using the indigenous language Meänkieli, and in that regard it’s remarkable; some beautiful landscape imagery elevates the regional Nordic-ness as well. The first hour is stilted to the point of discomfort, but things improve significantly in the back half, and the conclusion, in which a new evil begins to encroach, is rather stunning indeed.
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
{5/23 Downtown}
For their first feature in 20 years, the Brothers Quay adapt multiple works of Polish writer Bruno Schulz into a short-and-surreal (76 min.) concoction of stop-motion puppetry, live action, and digital. The story, if you need one given the edible you might want to enjoy on your way to the theater, concerns grief and memory: A man arrives at a sanatorium after father has died, but is told by the doctor that time is delayed there and his father is not yet dead. Bookmarking this and other strange diversions is a seven-lensed machine that contains the final images witnessed by the dead owner; each lens is its own little chapter, and any attempt to predict anything is futile. The Quays’ cult status is well-earned, and though Sanatorium is no Street of Crocodiles it feels like event cinema – for the mood and visual experience if nothing else. An excellent choice for SIFF Cinema Downtown’s big screen.
Sorry, Baby
{Closing Night, 5/24 Downtown}
SIFF may have saved the best for last with this wondrous film, the directorial feature debut of writer and actor Eva Victor, which takes the beautiful form of several nonlinear chapters in the life of an English professor in a small coastal New England college town. We first meet Agnes (Victor) as her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) arrives for a visit to the house they shared as graduate students; the weekend unfolds with revelations and reunions, and the hint of a violation that shattered Agnes for a time. Then subsequent chapters reveal more: After a traumatic event, life goes on, with all the introspection and humor and messiness that can entail. Each time-hop vignette is better than the last — a scene with John Carroll Lynch has some of the best filmed moments I’ve seen all year — and together they make a droll and wry and gentle whole.
Suburban Fury
{5/23 Uptown}
Sara Jane Moore is an upper-class, Bay Area mother of four… and a would-be assassin of U.S. president Gerald Ford. Her prior allegiances had been contradictory, and her motivation for the 1975 shooting attempt was highly specific. She was given a life sentence, got paroled in 2007, had to request Secret Service permission to appear in this film, and insisted she be the only interviewee. She is fascinating. Local documentarian Robinson Devor (Zoo, Police Beat) teams up again with co-screenwriter Charles Mudede for this interesting if overlong documentary incorporating Moore’s interviews, archival material, and (groan) a shady Batman-esque voiceover by Devor as an all-but-hypothetical FBI agent. Moore is an entertainingly unreliable narrator – has any important historical figure ever been completely transparent? – and the film is all the more fizzy and compelling for it.