SIFF 2025: 'Know Her Name' Movie Review

All-too-often people seem to believe there were no, or at least vanishingly few female filmmakers throughout the history of the medium. If Zainab Muse’s Know Her Name has anything to do with it, that won’t last much longer. Her documentary dives into the deep, rich, and integral, not to mention frequently overlooked and undervalued role women have and continue to play in film history. 

SIFF 2025: 'She's The He' Capsule Review

To get close to a crush, seniors Alex (Nico Carney) and Ethan (Misha Osherovich) pretend to be trans, a dicey proposition for sure. Here’s the twist, for one of them, she’s never felt so comfortable, so herself. Realizing she is in fact trans, the movie follows the fallout from that revelation. 

SIFF 2025: 'Sanatorium Under The Sign Of The Hourglass' Capsule Review

The Brothers Quay return with their first feature in 20 years, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. The haunting stop-motion offering, based on the book of the same name by Polish writer Bruno Schulz, adapts the surreal, fantastic journey of a young man, who, having recently lost his father, travels by train to a mysterious sanatorium.

SIFF 2025: '40 Acres' Capsule Review

Music video and TV veteran R.T. Thorne directs his feature debut, 40 Acres. In the apocalyptic wake of a fungal pandemic, new civil war, and sweeping famine, a family, led by no-nonsense former soldier Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler), must protect their fortified farm from threats within and without. Including potential cannibal invasion. 

SIFF 2025: 'Chain Reactions' Capsule Review

Documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe has delved into Alien, the shower scene in Psycho, David Lynch, and more. In Chain Reactions, he focuses on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, this time via extended interviews with Patton Oswalt, Takashi Miike, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stephen King, and Karyn Kusama. Each shares their interpretations and experiences with the iconic film, honing in on legacy and influence.

SIFF 2024: 'Tenement' Movie Review

Much of Cambodian import Tenement, making its North American debut at the Seattle International Film Festival, will be familiar to those reasonably well-versed in supernatural horror. The story follows someone returning to a place they once had a connection to and finding it haunted by more than memories. Though the film may lack a bit of originality, it delivers an effective, to-the-point, gorgeously staged chiller.

SIFF 2024: 'The Lavender Hill Mob' Movie Review

In 1951’s The Lavender Hill Mob, Alec Guinness plays Holland, a milquetoast bank clerk. He routinely supervises the delivery of hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of gold bullion. Honest to a fault, viewed by his coworkers as a goody two shoes, he’s the kind of bloke who reads to his elderly landlady at night. He would never. Right? When means, inspiration, and opportunity come together, however, Holland breaks bad and, with a ragtag crew of mismatched outlaws, heists his latest load.

SIFF 2024: 'Chuck Chuck Baby' Capsule Review

Sucks to be Helen (Louise Brealey). She works nights at the chicken-packing plant, lives with her dirtbag ex and his idiot 20-year-old baby mama, and cares for his dying mother, Gwen (a wonderful Sorcha Cusack), who’s as close to a mother as she’s ever known. When Joanne (Annabel Scholey), her schoolgirl crush, returns to town, it lights something ablaze within her. 

SIFF 2024: 'Eternal' Capsule Review

In Eternal, a rift on the ocean floor threatens to destroy not only Earth’s climate but the burgeoning relationship between a young submarine pilot and aspiring singer. 

SIFF 2024: 'Scala!!!' Capsule Review

From the 1970s to the ‘90s, London’s Scala theater was a haven for cinemaniacs. From arthouse to exploitation and everything in between, they screened oddities, avant-garde experiments, and whatever the hell they wanted.

SIFF 2024: 'Scorched Earth' Movie Review

12 years after skipping town, career thief Trojan (Misel Maticevic) returns to Berlin, desperate and looking for work. What he finds is a world that’s moved past his old school ways, adopting new technology and the unfamiliar attitudes of those who adapt to such things, and a list of old contacts who have gone straight or otherwise left behind the life. When he finally lands a job, a four-person art heist, things spiral ever out of control. Such begins Thomas Arslan’s Scorched Earth. (Not to be confused with the DTV post-apocalyptic joint starring a certain disgraced former MMA star of the same name.) 

SIFF 2023: 'The Night Of The 12th' Capsule Review

As the protagonist of The Night of the 12th says, every investigator has one case that haunts them, that they never solved and can’t let go. They let you know from the jump exactly how this will play out.

SIFF 2023: 'Burning Hearts' Capsule Review

What if Romeo and Juliet but with warring small town Italian farm mob families? That’s the basic conceit of Pippo Mezzapesa’s Burning Hearts, where a forbidden romance shatters a fragile truce and stirs up a generational blood feud.

SIFF 2023: 'The Last Exit' Capsule Review

When a pair of criminal brothers on the run attempt to find shelter from a storm in an isolated farmhouse inhabited by a reclusive family, they get much more than they bargained for as the mother, a steely, badass Joely Richardson, fights back.

SIFF 2023: 'Satan Wants You' Capsule Review

Nowadays we think of the Satanic Panic of the 1980s as almost quaint, forgetting how it decimated countless lives and gripped the country in a destructive frenzy. One talking head in Satan Wants You  refers to the book Michelle Remembers as “Patient zero for the Satanic Panic,” and the documentary digs into that now-discredited tale that fanned the flames of mass hysteria.

SIFF 2023: 'Egghead & Twinkie' Capsule Review

Well, Egghead & Twinkie is freaking adorable. In Sarah Kambe Holland’s twee, lo-fi indie comedy, when trans-racial adoptee Twinkie comes out to her conservative parents it doesn’t go great. She sets out on a cross-country adventure with her nerdy bff Egghead to meet her online DJ crush.

SIFF 2023: 'Mother Superior' Capsule Review

When a young orphan nurse takes a job caring for an ailing baroness at a remote estate, you know spookiness is about to happen. And filmmaker Marie Alice Wolfszahn’s Mother Superior doesn’t let us down.

SIFF 2023: 'A Disturbance In The Force' Capsule Review

Among fans, the Star Wars Holiday Special is a kind of myth, an artifact some have seen but that’s spoken of as a fable. In reality, it’s an ill-advised lunatic oddity aimed to cash-in on raging Star Wars mania that George Lucas tried to bury. Which just made people want it more. 

SIFF 2023: 'Circus Of The Scars' Capsule Review

To viewers of a certain age, the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow holds an infamous spot in our collective memory. For many ‘90s kids, it was our introduction to an updated carnival geek/freak show. Corey Wees’ documentary, Circus of the Scars, offers an in-depth time capsule of this specific cultural phenomenon and era.

SIFF 2023: 'Even Hell Has Its Heroes' Capsule Review

In certain circles, experimental metal band Earth is revered with a sense of mythic awe. Heavily influential, especially to the early grunge era and continuing today, Clyde Petersen’s documentary, Even Hell Has its Heroes, tracks the group’s path, specifically mastermind Dylan Carlson, offering a glimpse behind the reclusive curtain.