:::: Films of 2023 ::::

TOP FILMS OF 2023 IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
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Jonathan Glazer  "The Zone of Interest"  (United Kingdom)
Mstyslav Chernov  "20 Days in Mariupol"  (Ukraine)
Lucien Castaing-Taylor & Véréna Paravel  "De Humani Corporis Fabrica" (France)
Victor Erice  "Close Your Eyes"  (Spain)
Cyril Schäublin  "Unrest"  (Switzerland)
Ira Sachs  "Passages"  (France)
Jafar Panahi  "No Bears"  (Iran)
Alice Rohrwacher  "La Chimera"  (Italy)
Bertrand Bonello  "The Beast"  (France)
Nuri Bilge Ceylan  "About Dry Grasses"  (Turkey)
Hirokazu Kore-eda  "Monster"  (Japan)
Pedro Costa  "Daughters of the Fire"  Short (Portugal)
Laura Citarella  "Trenque Lauquen"  (Argentina)
György Fehér  "Twilight"  Restored Rereleased (Hungary)
Budd Boetticher  "The Ranown Westerns"  Restored Rereleased (United States)
Juliet Berto & Jean-Henri Roger  "Snow"  Restored Rereleased (France)
David Lynch  "Inland Empire"  Restored Rereleased (United States)
Jean Eustache  "The Mother and the Whore"  Restored Rereleased (France)
Wim Wenders  "Anselm" & "Perfect Days"  (Germany/Japan)
Ryusuke Hamaguchi  "Evil Does Not Exist"  (Japan)
Kôji Fukada  "Love Life"  (Japan)
Yorgos Lanthimos  "Poor Things"  (Greece)
Ulrich Seidl  "Wicked Games: Rimini Sparta"  (Austria)
Lukas Moodysson  "Together 99"    (Sweden)
Wang Bing  "Youth: Spring"  (China)
Pham Thien An  "Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell"  (Vietnam)
Pablo Larraín  “El Conde”  (Chile)
Takashi Yamazaki  "Godzilla Minus One"  (Japan)
Hayao Miyazaki  "How Do You Live?"  (Japan)
Makoto Shinkai  "Suzume"  (Japan)

For decades now, this annual overview has acted as a summation of the music, film, dance, theatre, visual art exhibitions and festivals attended and covered. Both domestic and international. As we enter into the post-phase after the global pandemic one would assume that the continuance of such opportunities would be returning in an assertive manner. Yet here in the urban northwest, the effects of the pandemic on cultural and social life are still manifesting themselves in a dynamic manner. Businesses and cultural venues continue to have limited hours, close early on weekday and weekend nights, and program with a reduced scale and truncated durations over what we saw in the years preceding the pandemic. Some of which regionally even reducing hours more than when they had initially after reopening two years ago. The once essential component of urban social life in the Northwest, the espresso cafe, has been particularly hard hit. With many of them no longer offering evening hours of any variety. Regionally, arts venues and cultural institutions returned to in-person programming in the fall of 2021, cautiously opening the doors to music stages, galleries and movie houses. After a year and a half of navigating the complexities of the pandemic restrictions and closures, programming returned in August and September to the majority of these Northwest culture spaces. It is important to consider that the benefits of the Save Our Stages Act, alongside the Shuttered Venues Grant are a significant component as to the continuance of arts beyond the pandemic. The benefits of the various relief bills, alongside regional infrastructure like the 4Culture Relief Fund, awareness efforts like the Washington Nightlife Music Association, crowdfunding and philanthropy like the ArtistRelief, ArtsFund grant, and GiveBig Washington, all came in the 11th hour for many of our regional cultural institutions and art venues. Most of which would not have doors open to their cultural community now two years later, without these resources.

Unlike last year's convergence of the Venice Biennale and Document in Germany, the art seen and traveled to this year was all of a domestic nature. The Seattle Art Fair returned at the height of summer, offering works from over 80 galleries from around the globe, and the satellite event Forest for the Trees, concurrently presented a volume of regional work in Pioneer Square. In cinema, after the discontinuation of the Seattle Art Museum's film program, and the termination of its programmer, Greg Olson found a new home for his long-running film noir and italian cinema series at SIFF Cinema. The most significant filmgoing news of the year came with the unexpected convergence of cultural and civic rehabilitation funds, the legacy of Paul Allen, and the Seattle International Film Festival organization with their acquisition of the Seattle Cinerama Theater. Other notable annual events returned with the array of horror and genre film returned in the fall, significant jazz performances were seen, both within the Earshot Jazz Festival and outside its programming, and SIFF Cinema presneted a near-complete retrospective of the films of David Lynch. In music events, Seattle's recently launched Tremolo had a second successful festival of shoegaze, noise-rock and dream pop sounds at the Central Saloon, and the goliath of metal, noise and hardcore that is Northwest Terror Fest, returned to Neumos and Barboza with a sprawling and qualitative fifth iteration. Over the course of the summer, a set of legendary gothic rock and early electro-industrial bands had tours, presenting The Cure's "Songs of a Lost World", and after nearly 40 years of darkly theatrical music, the final tour from Skinny Puppy. The year also saw a series of closures and conclusions within the arts community. Two hard-hitting losses came at the end of the summer, the first of which was the newly launched visual art and community space, Museum of Museums, and the second not soon after its opening and inception for, XO Seattle in the space of the historic Coliseum Theater. Even Seattle's longstanding and prestigious literary arts mecca finds itself in uncharted water, due to a recent turn of events, "Seattle's Hugo House Faces an Uncertain Future". The year also saw the announcement of the, "Closing of both Linda Hodges and James Harris Galleries" and all the while, the gutted void-space of downtown has seen a few vacant storefronts become creative arts venues. In a lengthy discussion with NPR's Libby Denkmann and Mike Davis, Museum of Museums founder Greg Lundgren addresses the reality of, "Is Seattle's Arts Infrastructure Crumbling?"

While there are now opportunities again to engage with film, music and visual art, domestically as a culture we are still relying on online resources more than was necessary pre-pandemic. Yet these deliver only a modicum of the sensations, social engagement, and sensory thrills and satisfactions of in-person cultural happenings. The pragmatic response would be to accept the inherent losses and embrace what vestiges of a cultural life that could be salvaged online. Two major events in the year revealed the fragility and impermanence of our quality online arts platforms. The first of them came with a series of corporate buyouts of the online direct-to-artist platform and community that was Bandcamp. First by Epic Games, who quickly dispensed with the platform, "Epic Games’ Sale of Bandcamp Has Left the Artist-Friendly Music Platform in Limbo", and then by Songtradr, as artists and professionals working in music had a unified response which was shared by The Guardian, "The Music site Bandcamp is Beloved and Unique. I Shudder at its Corporate Takeover". The second came with what Wired called, "HBO Max, Netflix, Disney+, and the Day Streaming Died", after Warner Brothers Discovery gutted the leadership team of Turner Classic Movies, a group of famed directors then came together to "Fight to Save Turner Classic Movies". Which concluded in a positive outcome and a rare reversal for the network, "TCM to Include Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Paul Thomas Anderson Taking Active Role". So, now at year's end, for those who have not found compelling new sounds, digital retailers like Boomkat, online institutions like The Quietus, and magazines like The Wire, represent the kind of expertise you’ll not find brought together online outside the framework of their curatorial legacy. A particular advantage, The Wire offers the opportunity to Listen to The Wire Top 50 Releases of 2023. Similarly, film institutions like those below offer a worldly scope, compiling the life’s work of people who have made watching their enterprise. Year in and year out again, Sight & Sound, Film Comment, Cinema-Scope, Criterion Collection's The Current, and The Guardian's excellent film coverage have brought focus to the year of moving pictures from around the globe.

Yorgos Lanthimos' "Poor Things" and Ira Sachs' "Passages" Streaming on Mubi and at SIFF Cinema: Dec 14 - Jan 4 | "The Pleasure Principle" | Sight & Sound

As a follow-up to Catherine Shoard's 2019 editorial for The Guardian, "Cut! Is This the Death of Sex in Cinema?", Christina Newland's "The Pleasure Principle", for Sight & Sound tackles the newest Ira Sachs film, "Passages", which received an NC-17 rating in the United States due to its honest and frank depictions of sex. Such is the cultural moment that a prohibitive MPAA rating, trigger warning supplied by the exhibitor, or outright retraction and editing of material in response to poor audience reception of on-screen sex is not unheard of. Shoard's piece for The Guardian illustrates over numerous observations and citations, the reasons for this being concurrently made complicated and narrow-minded by the two sides of a polarized political landscape. Wherein sex has become that much more weaponized in its entanglement with identity and representation, and the discomfort experienced by audiences who feel their identity politics not complimentarily represented defines no small part of their enjoyment, or even acceptance, of thematic and psychological content in fiction. In the eyes of a currently influential constituency, for whom artistic merit must be allied to a certain branch of moral and political virtue, there are vast realms of the erotic, suggestive, and sexual material on screen that will not pass such demands. Regardless of said material's truth or honesty in representing the complexity of these matters in relation to life. In the case of the Ira Sachs film, what followed was an outcry in response from the domestic distributor, Mubi, and the film's director, "Director Slams MPAA Decision as ‘Cultural Censorship that’s Quite Dangerous’". Sachs speaks with Newland for the British Film Institute on the rating and the cultural and political moment that his film has navigated; "It’s really about a form of cultural censorship that is quite dangerous, particularly in a culture which is already battling, in such extreme ways, the possibility of LGBT imagery to exist”. NC-17 movies have gotten lots of attention in recent months thanks to the release of Andrew Dominik's "Blonde" a Marilyn Monroe biopic that scored Ana de Armas an Oscar nomination for best actress, and "Infinity Pool" which director Branden Cronenberg re-cut so that it could be released with an R rating. Sachs did no such thing with "Passages"."

Newland continues in the pages of Sight & Sound; "It’s possible that a combination of factors, both culture-wide and industry-specific, have contributed to this odd moment of both the avoidance of and a fixation on sex acts on screen. Initial hesitation around on-set safety post-MeToo, and a sense of discomfort around sensitive topics, has perhaps been fueled by social media pearl-clutching and a Gen Z backlash against the idea of ‘sex-positive’ feminism." The latter is supported by recent statistics, like those highlighted in NPR's coverage "Gen Z Wants Less Sex in Their TV and Movies" of the UCLA study, which featured such descriptors as the content being found, "Icky, Pointless, and Invasive", wherein half of those polled were, "Turned Off by Onscreen Sex". Nonetheless, two high profile sex-positive arthouse films are endeavoring to contradict these trends. They arrived this year in the form of the previously mentioned "Ira Sachs Thorny Love Triangle Drama", and "Emma Stone's Sexual Adventure in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Virtuoso Comic Epic". Winning major awards at Venice and Sundance, and garnered notable praise in the cinephile press, the artists involved have made their stance in relation to on-screen sex very clear, with "Adèle Exarchopoulos: ‘Film Shoots are Like Little Summer Love Stories’, and "Lanthimos’s Poor Things Fuels Speculation of Sex Scene’s Return to Cinema". At the press conference in Venice before the film's premiere, Yorgos Lanthimos posed the question; “Why is there no sex in movies? It was a very intrinsic part of the Alasdair Gray novel itself, her freedom in everything, including sexuality”, Lanthimos said of the film’s sex scenes. He added: “It was very important for me to not make a film that was going to be prudish because that would be completely betraying the main character. We had to be confident Emma had to have no shame about her body, nudity, engaging in those scenes, and she understood that right away". In this tale of Emma Stone's recently reawakened Bella Baxter, Lanthimos draws on traditions from classic European cinema like Georges Franju’s "Eyes Without a Face", obvious references from gothic literature in Mary Shelley's legendary monster, David Lynch's depiction of Joseph Merrick, and Werner Herzog’s gloriously naive explorations of life via Kaspar Hauser, and along the way, "Interrogating Gender Dynamics and Sexuality from Nearly Every Angle". Our chance will come next month at SIFF Cinema, when "'Poor Things' Brings Hot Sex and Stone-cold Brilliance to the Screen" After an awkward MeToo hiatus, films are showing intimacy in messy, complicated ways again and in a late addition, The Guardian's Adrian Horton argues, "Why it Was a Good Year for Sex On Screen". As well as the question posed, "Provocative Sex is Back at the Movies. But are We Ready for It?", by Alexandra Kleeman, Guggenheim Fellow and author in the pages of The New York Times.

Alfonso Cuaron's "Roma" at Seattle Cinerama: Dec 6 - 19 | Lee Chang-dong's “Burning” at Northwest Film Forum: Dec 7 - 14 | Ali Abbasi's "Border", Yorgos Lanthimos' “The Favorite” & Hirokazu Kore-eda's “Shoplifters” at SIFF Cinema: Nov 23 - 29 & Dec 7 - 27

The fruits of this past summer's Cannes and Venice festivals are beginning to arrive in domestic theaters. The prestigious festival on the French Riviera was accounted for as having the strongest offerings seen in decades. This was represented by the extensive and enthusiastic coverage to be found in the pages of the The New York Times, The Guardian, and roundups from Film Comment and The British Film Institute's Sight & Sound. Venice also had a notable year, with new films by Alfonso Cuaron, Joel and Ethan Coen, Mike Leigh, Luca Guadagninos, Paul Greengrass, Jacques Audiard, Brady Corbet, Julian Schnabel, and the historic premier of a recently completed late film from the legendary American director, "'The Other Side of the Wind': Lost Orson Welles Epic is A Hurricane of Anger and Wit". Questions of inclusion and representation have been dominant in recent years in relation to festival programming and the awards process. One of the most high profile approaches to these concerns was seen in Cannes' Cate Blanchett-led jury, which included a cross race, culture, and gender assembly of notable actors, directors and artists. With such names as Chang Chen, Léa Seydoux, Kristen Stewart, Khadja Nin, Denis Villeneuve, Andrey Zvyagintsev, Ava DuVernay, and Robert Guédiguia, among their numbers. The jury's realization of Cannes mission to represent quality work, regardless of it's origin was elucidated by its president, "Cate Blanchett States that Change Will Come to Cannes, but Not Overnight". With the awards given, further elaborating on the question of representation was made, "Jury Head Cate Blanchett on Gender, Race and Choosing the ‘Right’ Palme D’Or".



Which brings us to the bestowing of Cannes' most prestigious award on Hirokazu Kore-eda's class conscious urban tale of "A Family That Steals Together, Stays Together". It was this most recent in a decades-spanning line of contemporary familial dramas that the Japanese director took home hist first Palme d'Or for "Shoplifters". While closely adhering to the form and content of the larger body of the director's filmmography, spanning his first breakout feature to this most recent, this "Unfancied Japanese Film Took the Palme d'Or", with Blanchett adding at the awards ceremony; “The ending blew us out of the cinema”. From the Italian festival on the Adriatic, Alfonso Cuaron's best director winning, "Roma" stood out as the director's revisiting of his own Central American of decades past. In "Alfonso Cuarón's Return to Venice with a Heart-Rending Triumph", the academy award winning director has made an exquisite study of class and domestic crisis in 1970s Mexico City. In "Alfonso Cuarón’s Masterpiece of Memory", the director uses one hosehold, and the location the the street where they reside as the point of vantage onto an expansive, emotional portrait of life buffeted by violent forces and change. Working on a scale often reserved for war stories and historic period dramas, yet with the sensibility of a personal diarist, "Cuarón’s 'Roma' Surrounds us with the Mexico City of His Youth". As seen in a recent string of releases funded by the platforms of Amazon and Netflix, for all the film's lauded quality, it will be receiving the shortest of theatrical runs at Seattle's Cinerama. Also arriving from Cannes, "Border" is a naturalistically fantastic second film from director Ali Abbasi, based on the short story from "Let the Right One In" author John Ajvide Lindqvist. Like Lindqvist's dark adolescent coming of age vampire story, Abbasi's film spends much of it's time teasingly parcelling out the romantic inclinations, and consequences therein, of the meeting of two mythological outcasts. Only in its closing chapter revealing the true nature of their world and it's consequences in the modern age of man.



Having built a filmography on outrageous premises, a self-conscious deadpan style, and actors skilled in a explicitly cryptic form of straight-faced absurdity, it seemed almost inevitable that Yorgos Lanthimos would work his way to period drama. He arrives fully formed in the genre with “The Favorite”. The newest in a filmography of "Polarizing Visions" from the Greek director, this is a venomous and often hilarious exercise, made that much more disorienting by the distended, off-kilter wide angle cinematography of Robbie Ryan. While, "Olivia Colman is Priceless in Yorgos Lanthimos Punk Historic Romp", it is the conflict between Emma Stone's Abigail Masham and Rachel Weisz' Sarah Churchill on which the film hinges. Weisz plays the Queen Anne's court favorite and intimate, Lady Sarah The Dutchess of Marlborough, deploying every sly and subversive trick to keep the monarch codependent and receptive to the raising of taxes for the ongoing French War. A rivalry arises between the two women of historic proportions with the arrival and influence of Marlborough's cousin, and it is in this that Lanthimos finds his most fertile and scabrous material. Upping his technical form and content, Lee Chang-dong's "Burning" is a sensuously shot and musically scored mystery, taken from a Haruki Murakami short story centering around the (sometimes hallucinatory) fixations of an obsessive love. Where it differs is that its psychological drama is set in the cultural fallout of modern consumerist Korea, with bold diversions into the pastoral and surreal, this visually gripping observation on, "Male Rage Blazes a Chilling Trail on the Korean Border". While desire, both physically ravenous and more romantically sinuous, is the defining theme of Chang-dong's film, it can't be said that "Love Ignites a Divided World". "Burning" foregrounds the uneasy violence that is seen glimpsed through the Murakami, leaving it's central mystery untouched while filling in the larger picture with the fine details of it's protagonists interpersonal and sexual relations, and the class divisions that separate them.

Yorgos Lanthimos' "The Killing of a Sacred Deer" & Ruben Östlund's "The Square" at SIFF Cinema: Oct 27 - Nov 23

A couplet of the jewels from this year's Cannes, as unearthed by Criterion, The Guardian, The New York Times, Sight & Sound, and the extensive coverage for Film Comment seen in Dennis Lim's "Keeping at It", Kent Jones' "A Six-Letter Word", Nicolas Rapold's "Catastrophes on Parade", and Amy Taubin's "The Speed of Light in a Vacuum", are finally seeing time on domestic screens with a monthlong run at SIFF Cinema. Foremost among them, there's been much ado both in cinema and visual art circles concerning the Palme d'Or winning, "The Square" in which director, "Ruben Östlund Turns Art World Satire into Performance-Art Cinema". Following on his observation on fear, masculinity and European middle-class woes, Östlund now "Takes Aim at Art, Sex, Money and More", in his "Lofty, Laboured Cinematic Lecture on Inequality". Set in a related class milieu, Yorgos Lanthimos' "Replays the Greek Tragedy of Iphigenia as Modernist Guignol", through "‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer’ Depicts Familiar Torment" as a thriller in which the movie’s subject becomes the bankrupt sterility of upper middle-class mores. Having built a solid filmography on outrageous premises, a self-conscious deadpan style, and actors skilled in a explicitly cryptic form of straight-faced absurdity, Lanthimos directs the proceedings through a vantage on the hermetic, comfortable privilege of one suburban American family, as it incrementally spins into bourgeois nightmare. But where Lanthimos' "The Lobster" adopted an ostentatiously eccentric, almost farcical mode of political satirism, with "Colin Farrell Playing a Divorced Man in a Loner-Hating Future Society", his newest foregrounds its seriousness in the form of a methodical, starkly ritualistic severity.



As is the tradition with Cannes, opinions diverge among the press. In the pages of The Guardian's coverage, "Cannes 2017 Awards: Visceral Power Overlooked in Favour of Bourgeois Vanity", Peter Bradshaw saw the festival bestow the fruits of this year's awards on a set of elegant dissections of bourgeois absurdity and vanity. In the process overlooking the more visceral power of entries seen in, "An Eerie Thriller of Hypnotic, Mysterious Intensity" from Andrei Zvyagintsev, "Joaquin Phoenix Turning Travis Bickle in Brutal Thriller" as directed by Lynne Ramsay, and Sergei Loznitsa's "Brutally Realist Drama Offering Up a Pilgrimage of Suffering". Similar observations can be found from Nick James in Sight & Sound, in which there was little consensus among critics on, "What Should have Won the 2017 Cannes Palme d’Or?". Arguing the divided nature of the awards are the product of the competition being the weakest of recent times, producing a wide open field expressed in the random enthusiasms of Pedro Almodovar’s jury. Yet there was consistency found in the consensus among critics that Lynn Ramsay's kidnap thriller, "You Were Never Really Here", Andrey Zvyagintsev’s disintegrating family drama "Loveless", and the Safdie brothers’ frenetically chaotic urban misadventure "Good Time", should have all walked away with more notice in the form of awards.

Seattle International Film Festival: May 19 - Jun 12

Seattle International Film Festival once again arrives bringing a spectrum of cinema from across the world! This year like the string of years since 2008, the festival sees a qualitative diversity dip in the percentage of all things foreign cinema, auteur, arthouse, experimental and progressive. These were content agendas that once had prominence within SIFF, making it a festival that approached the per-capita in these areas of Toronto and New York. Those times are now decades in the past. That said, this year's festival isn't as painfully omissive as 2011 or 2010 for that matter. We saw string of years that suggested relief from the lackluster programming described above which waned a bit in 2012 and a further positive trend in that direction in 2013. For the 2014 festival, their 40th Anniversary was celebrated with SIFF's strongest programming in almost a decade, suggesting a renewed vision for the festival. Nonetheless this year, like 2015, we're again seeing that same glut of middle ground contemporary romances and knowingly clever dramas for the sub-Sundance sect. One can speculate that this middle-road approach to programming has been taken to entice some imagined Northwest demographic out of their suburban hobbles and inner-city condos. The inclusion of showcases in the outlying areas of Bellevue, Kirkland and Renton are indicative of such. One can't help but consider these factors alongside the changing economic and cultural landscape of Seattle and what may be SIFF's bid at strengthening financial ties with it all.

By way of example, two west coast festivals that have produced smaller, yet significantly more qualitative festivals have established a standard that can clearly be seen from year to year. The San Francisco International Film Festival concluding just this week features not only a diverse body of work, ranging from commercial entertainment to the experimental, embracing both award winning auteur works, genre film and potential indie breakouts. A cross section of the programming can be seen in their selection of new historic documentary by Sergey Loznitsa "The Event" and the superior of last year's two haunting dramas by Kiyoshi Kurosawa "Journey to the Shore". Yorgos Lanthimos Jury Prize winning film "The Lobster", a decidedly "Kafka-esque Meditation on Romance and Estrangement" premiered at Cannes a year ago now and will have a brief run at Sundance Cinema along with Matteo Garrone's adaptation of Giambattista Basile's bawdy Neopolitan "Tale of Tales", adding some "Grown-Up Twists to the Fairy Tale". The festival also hosted what from the outset appears a traditional melodrama by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, "Happy Hour", belies a deeper core deserving of it's Film Comment mention in their Best Cinema from Asia feature. This year's SFIFF also saw Christopher Doyle's "Hong Kong Trilogy" and Lewis Klahr's cinematic archeology of the American unconscious, his "66" employing the unlikeliest of tools in it's telling of mass culture as myth. Happily there is some shared programming between the festivals. Zhang Yang's most recent "Paths of the Soul", Wener Herzog's much anticipated "Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World" and Vitaly Mansky's documentary on the fashioning of a North Korean family of "model citizens", all grace Seattle as well. Other highlights screening outside of the festival in the coming weeks include the Freudian psychedelia of Eiichi Yamamoto's "Belladonna of Sadness" and another of Naome Kawase's hushed familial melodramas, "Sweet Bean".

Screening in SFIFF and outside of the festival at SIFF Cinema, Ben Wheatley's adaptation of JG Ballard's "High-Rise" is ostensibly the most promising thing both festivals share in their programming this month. The Guardian's film of the week review going some way to how it is that the challenges of "High-Rise Takes Dystopian Science Fiction to a New Level". In a fashion, "The Nightmare of JG Ballard's Towering Vision" even proved daunting to the unmade Nicolas Roeg production of the late 1970s. Our neighboring city to the south, though smaller in scale and less urban in some sense, has a strong showing in their Portland International Film Festival again this year. It should be established that with each of them concluding some time before, the content of in each of these festivals was made available to the programming directors at SIFF. They simply made choices otherwise. Which begs the question, what kind of thinking is behind choosing to not program something like the pathos of an Otaku's transformation seen in Masaharu Take's "100 Yen Love"? Or Gabriel Ripstein's Best First Feature award-winner, "600 Miles" from this year's Berlin International Film Festival? Other global festival highlights featured in PIFF, include Jacques Audiard's Palme d'Or winning "Dheepan" and Nanni Moretti's "Mia Madre". With some unexpected surprises like Keiichi Hara's animated period feature, "Miss Hokusai" and another Cannes award winner in Ida Panahandeh's "Nahid". Portland also saw Patricio Guzmán's most recent meditation on the colonization of Chile, "The Pearl Button", festival favorite Hong Sang-Soo's "Right Now, Wrong Then" and Ben Rivers' epic, experimental merging of documentary and fable, "The Sky Trembles and the Earth Is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers". All of which are absent from this year's programming in Seattle.

Seattle International Film Festival in the past has existed as a focal point of visionary cinema curatorialship, with the resources, funds and legacy to be a hugely influential institution. From the above one can can adduce San Francisco and Portland producing festivals of a caliber that SIFF has seemingly un-learned as they continue to go astray of the standard of the international festival circuit embodied by New York, Cannes, Toronto, Rotterdam, Vienna, Venice, Berlin and Locarno. But there remain a handful of legitimate, original, well crafted cinema to be found in here too. Largely culled from the Contemporary World Cinema, Archival Presentations, Alternate Cinema, Documentary Films, Midnight Adrenaline, Catalyst, and New Directors sections, this year I found some approximate 20 or so films of interest, curiosity or gravitas that I plan to attend. These run the spectrum from directors of note, archival restorations and new developing artists. As a consequence the majority of the titles listed below are simply films of curiosity, rather than considered essential viewing. Not the least compelling year in recent memory, but not approaching the par established with SIFF's own stellar run spanning the decades of 1987-2007. It must also be said, this year's SIFFX sidebar does little in the way of compensating for these programming oversights. Nonetheless, I continue to be enthused about their home at the SIFF Cinema Uptown and expanded screens between the recently acquired SIFF Cinema Egyptian and Film Center. Their curation for these year-round venues has exhibited the scope of SIFF, with this year's Recent Raves series exemplifying a visionary path forward for the institution. Unfortunately the 42nd Seattle International Film Festival doesn't continue this high standard.

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Tuesday, May 17

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7:00 PM - Ben Wheatley "High-Rise"

SIFF Cinema Uptown
HIGH0517B

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=261&id=34443

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Friday, May 20
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4:00 PM - Terence Davies "Sunset Song"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
SUNS0520

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33757

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Friday, May 20
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6:00 PM - Hirokazu Kore-eda "Our Little Sister"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
OURL0520

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33612

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Saturday, May 21

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4:00 PM - Eiichi Yamamoto "Belladonna of Sadness"

Northwest Film Forum

http://nwfilmforum.org/live/page/calendar/3914

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Saturday, May 21
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6:30 PM - James Schamus "Indignation"
AMC Pacific Place 11
INDI0521

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33844

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Saturday, May 21
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9:00 PM - Mauro Herce "Dead Slow Ahead"
SIFF Film Center
DEAD0521

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=34075

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Sunday, May 22
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1:30 PM - Douglas Sirk "A Scandal in Paris"
AMC Pacific Place 11
SCAN0522

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33618

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Sunday, May 22
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9:00 PM - Bence Fliegauf "Lily Lane"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
LILY0522

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33769

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Monday, May 23
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3:30 PM - Yaelle Kayam "Mountain"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
MOU0523

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33697

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Monday, May 23

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7:50 PM - Matteo Garrone "Tale of Tales"
Sundance Cinema

https://www.sundancecinemas.com/coming_soon.html

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Tuesday, May 24
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7:00 PM - Orson Welles "Chimes at Midnight"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
CHIM0524

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33772

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Wednesday, May 25
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6:00 PM - Helen Walsh "The Violators"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
VIOL0525

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33919

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Thursday, May 26
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3:00 PM - Shunji Iwai "A Bride for Rip Van Winkle"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
BRID0526

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33776

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Thursday, May 26
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9:30 PM - Marcin Wrona "Demon"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
DEMO0526

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33558

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Friday, May 27
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4:00 PM - Zhang Yang "Paths of the Soul"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
PATH0527

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33559

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Friday, May 27
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9:00 PM - Marta Minorowicz "Zud"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
ZUDD0527

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33704

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Saturday, May 28
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11:00 AM - Ernst Lubitsch "Heaven Can Wait"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
HEAV0528

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33783

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Sunday, May 29
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3:30 PM - Ti West "In a Valley of Violence"
Lincoln Square Cinemas
INAV0529

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33793

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Sunday, May 29
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9:30 PM - Lucile Hadžihalilović "Evolution"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
EVOL0529

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33638

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Monday, May 30
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7:10 PM - Yorgos Lanthimos "The Lobster"
Sundance Cinema

https://www.sundancecinemas.com/coming_soon.html

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Tuesday, May 31
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6:00 PM - Naotaro Endo "Tsukiji Wonderland"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
TSUK0531

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33646

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Wednesday, June 01
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9:15 PM - Vitaly Mansky "Under the Sun"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
UNDER0601

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33722

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Thursday, June 2
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8:15 PM - Naome Kawase "Sweet Bean"
Northwest Film Forum

http://nwfilmforum.org/live/page/calendar/3972

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Friday, June 03
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9:30 PM - Jaco Van Dormael "The Brand New Testament"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
BRAN0603

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33808

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Saturday, June 04
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2:00 PM - Fernando Ayala "The Bitter Stems"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
BITT0604

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33812

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Saturday, June 04
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8:00 PM - Werner Herzog "Lo and Behold, Reveries of the Connected World"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
LOAN0604

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33578

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Sunday, June 05
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2:30 PM - Ferdinando Cito Filomarino "Antonia"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
ANTO0605

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33734

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Sunday, June 05
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8:30 PM - Małgorzata Szumowska "Body"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
BODY0605

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33547

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Monday, June 06
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7:00 PM - Sylvia Chang "Murmur of the Hearts"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
MURM0606

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33588

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Monday, June 06
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9:30 PM - José Luis Guerin "The Academy of Muses"
AMC Pacific Place 11
ACAD0606

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33908

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Tuesday, June 07
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9:30 PM - Sion Sono "Tag"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
TAGG0607

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33592

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Wednesday, June 08
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7:00 PM - King Hu "Dragon Inn"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
DRAG0607

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33820

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Thursday, June 09
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3:00 PM - Jia Zhang-ke "Mountains May Depart"
SIFF Cinema Uptown
MOUNT0609

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33826

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Thursday, June 09
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7:00 PM - André Téchiné and Céline Sciamma "Being 17"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
BEIN0609

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33827

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Friday, June 10
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7:00 PM - Mark Cousins "I am Belfast"
SIFF Film Center
IAMB0610

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=34084

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Saturday, June 11
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8:45 PM - Kiyoshi Kurosawa "Creepy"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
CREE0611

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33833

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Sunday, June 12
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4:30 PM - Gilles Legrand "The Scent of Mandarin"
SIFF Cinema Egyptian
SCEN0612

http://myaccount.siff.net/cinema/reserve.aspx?fid=346&id=33836