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softschofield · 5 years ago

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Can you give some leslie/schofield hcs? Im so interested in that dynamic :) !!

yes please!!!!!

so i’ve said before that it seems an awful lot like that dug-out isn’t the first time scho and leslie have met - scho’s not just rigid and stiff for the entire scene, in a way that he wasn’t even with officers far out-ranking and more worthy of distrust than leslie, he seems like he’s seething, like he’s bitter; leslie gets all up in scho’s face to make a nasty, personal comment about widows when he apparently doesn’t even know scho’s married; he looks scho up and down for an uncomfortably and, quite frankly, inappropriate amount of time before they go over the top - like he’s committing every detail of him to memory in case he doesn’t come back; i could go on. so, naturally, i went well, that’s clearly a result of a fling-gone-wrong, because i have no shame.

so, headcanons:

they first meet when the yorks are relieving the east surreys at the front. they pass each other in a comms trench, the surreys trudging along in silence, the yorks both restless and quiet with fear; leslie is no more than a junior officer in charge of a platoon, not yet forced into a role he was never meant to have and a little more friendly for it. he’s slugging through the mud with the other officers, listening absently as the major and the captain and the other lieutenants chatter quietly; and the yorks are clean and fed and rested, and the surreys are slugging through with their heads down and their uniforms filthy and blood-dark and their faces tired and drained, and then he sees him - this lance corporal walking by himself, silent and haunted and ignored, and his scarf is neat despite the dirt under his nails, and his face is clean and raw and red from the cold and from where he’s scrubbed away the grime with wool and cotton just to get it off, and his eyes are downcast and blue, and he’s beautiful.

and leslie’s always been a bit of a poet, more than he lets on - and if he tried to emulate the aesthetic and absorb his favourites books to form his personality inherited a bit (a lot) of his snark from pouring over oscar wilde’s plays when he was a teenager and he could hide them under the covers of his childhood bed without his parents finding that filth, what of it. he’s always been a bit of a poet, in love with loneliness and dust motes and savagery and love, and that boy with the sad, broken eyes is all of that.

he passes scho and lingers for a moment, just looking at him - and inside, he’s shy, but all that anyone’s going to see is the dark, hooded eyes and the sneer and the judgement. he looks at him, and finally scho feels himself being looked at and raises his head, and their eyes meet - and scho’s a bit bewildered, his mind struggling to catch up to the present moment when he’s been lost in his own quiet for so many days, and he just stares back; and leslie lights a cigarette, and smiles, and walks away with a last little look over his shoulder. and scho is left standing there, confused and shaken and hungry, until a soldier behind him pushes him forward and snaps at him to keep moving.

and they don’t see each other for a little while, while the war rages on and the shells fall, and scho is left to quietly panic mull over what that look meant - because he’d thought any part of him that might once have sought out affection had long since been broken and this has brought up all kinds of unsettling needs that feel like being alive again, and he’s forgotten how to be alive so it just feels like something restless trying to spark to life inside of him when the rest of him is half-decayed. and it’s terrifying. and it’s addictive.

and then eventually, because a twink is worth facing the hun for, leslie wanders down from the reserve camp to the front line and he finds scho sitting with his back against the mud, curled over himself - and he stops beside him and just stands there smoking like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and scho looks up, shaky and bleary-eyed, and just gapes up at him.

and while everyone else dozes or murmurs softly around them, leslie stands there and strikes up a conversation like he couldn’t care less about the answers. and scho’s mind is still struggling to catch up, so he answers vaguely and haltingly and with a frown - and eventually he must say something right, because leslie slips down to sit behind him, resting his arms on his knees and offering scho his cigarette. and scho doesn’t smoke but he takes it - because leslie’s pretty, and his eyes are kinder than his voice, and he’s seen men doing this sort of thing before, as a quiet are you like me? he holds leslie’s gaze, and slowly takes the cigarette and puts it between his lips, and he watches leslie’s eyes slip down to his mouth as he inhales - and he exhales the smoke and hands the cigarette back, and their fingers brush, and it’s as much an answer as either of them need.

and leslie stays there until dark, until pitch black, when the men around them start to wake up and the first of the german flares go up in the sky. and he waits until the verey lights die and night falls around them again, black and cold and just for a moment between flares - and he pulls scho to him, and kisses him in the pitch dark with all those soldiers around them; and they can’t see each other, but they can hear, and feel, and their breaths are warm on each other’s cheeks, and the kiss is desperate, and they both break away starving for more.

ever the tease, leslie half-grins with those dead, dark eyes, and flicks another cigarette at scho, and drags himself to his feet, and leaves without looking back. and scho is left staring after him, trying to catch his breath, rearranging himself against the trench to try and unknot the feeling in his stomach, and because his nerves aren’t used to feeling this alive and it feels like being kicked in the chest. it feels like dying. it feels like being touched for the first time when all your nerve endings are on fire.

and for the next few months, they continue to steal away to see each other. sometimes the yorks and the surreys share the reserve camp, and it’s easy. illicit, and fun, and easy. more often, they’re caught between rotations and it’s harder. but they find a way. and scho opens up and finds that old spark of himself that can babble about something for hours if you find his passion, and that passion is art, and books, and the countryside, and the women’s suffrage movement, and he rambles about john constable and what every one of his brushstrokes meant with his hands waving through the air and his face turned up to the stars and this big, open, excited grin on his face, and leslie just smiles at him, and listens, and thinks i could fall in love with him.

and you would think it’s scho who catches feelings, because he’s softer, he’s gentler, he’s quiet and lonely and broken - or at least he’s not as good as hiding those things as leslie is. but, no. it’s leslie. he starts to fall for him - and scho’s terrified. he retreats. he thought he could, thought he could love someone else out here, when his wife is so far away and all he has of her is a photograph, but now it’s happening, now the opportunity is looking him cold in the face, and he can’t.

and leslie is heartbroken. and when leslie’s heartbroken, he shuts down, and he goes quiet, and he pretends not to care. oh, i said i loved you? how nice that must have been for you. he gets this look on his face, bitter and cruel, and he bites before he can be bitten. scho tries to reassure him, tries to comfort him, tries to apologise, with soft, desperate, guilty words and gentle hands and assurances that he still cares about him, it doesn’t have to end, he’s sorry. but leslie’s already looking at him like he hasn’t known him a minute in his life, and it’s over.

and after that, scho is left lonelier and more broken than ever, and leslie closes his heart off even more, and as much as they both miss each other, as much as scho might daydream about finding him and apologising, as much as leslie might daydream about that very same thing, they don’t.

and then blake arrives. then they’re sent to find the yorks. then leslie sees schofield with a new, sweet-faced, warm-eyed boy, and schofield can barely look him in the eye - and all he wants to do is hurt him. he brings up his wife - because he knows it isn’t fair to hate the woman, and a part of him loves scho for it, for his stupid devotion, but she did this, she caused this, what happened to you and i, because you couldn’t be disloyal to a memory for one fucking moment and love me. then schofield goes over the top and all leslie wants to do is scream at him to get back down and tell him he forgives him. but he doesn’t. both their lives are just a collection of words neither of them will ever say.

and… basically i’ve just realised i’m a wreck over them!

#1917 #ask #anon #i love you anon thank you SO much for asking!!!!!!!#'can i give some hcs' *writes you a fucking essay*#asodhaosiuhgduadas ily sweetheart #mine #happy scho once you get him rambling is happy george in interviews #i love him

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recentnews18-blog · 6 years ago

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30 Movies Worth Watching in Seattle This Weekend: Nov 15-18, 2018

Widows is a damn fun thriller from an artsy director.

You’ve got many options for movie thrills this weekend, from Steve McQueen’s spectacularly cast Widows to the creepy/comedic classic Beetlejuice. For artsier fare, don’t miss Frederick Wiseman’s new documentary on small-town America, Monrovia, Indiana. Follow the links below to see complete showtimes, tickets, and trailers for all of our critics’ picks, and, if you’re looking for even more options, check out our film events calendar and complete movie times listings.

Stay in the know! Get all this and more on the free Stranger Things To Do mobile app (available for iOS and Android), or delivered to your inbox.

Beautiful Boy I’ve never been a parent or a junkie (yet!), but I found a lot that resonated in Beautiful Boy, a low-key film based on a pair of interconnected memoirs from father and son David and Nicolas Sheff. David (Steve Carell) chews himself up over son Nic’s (Timothée Chalamet) spiral into meth and heroin addiction, asking what he could have done to prevent it and wondering how he can fix it. Nic, meanwhile, copes with not only his body’s betrayal but with the disappointment he feels, both self-directed and from his patient, confused father. From Beautiful Boy’s perspective, Nic is really only guilty of having a curious mind, while David, a good father in every recognizable way, might have simply waited too long to show his beloved son some tough love. The performances make the whole thing sing. Carell and Chalamet both do expectedly good work, and they’re matched by Amy Ryan as Nic’s mother and Maura Tierney as his stepmother. Beautiful Boy is driven by the real-life horror of watching a loved one succumb to drugs, but it’s a family drama devoid of most of the genre’s manipulative qualities, substituting them with honesty, empathy, and fully drawn human beings. NED LANNAMANN Meridian 16 (Regal) & Oak Tree

Beetlejuice Newly dead Adam and Barbara Maitland aren’t down with the Deets family, who moved into the couple’s home after their unfortunate passing and don’t seem at all phased by the Maitlands’ attempts at scaring them out of it. Enter rotten, pervy Betelgeuse (“Beetlejuice”), who sells himself as a bio-exorcist capable of getting rid of their living pests, though he turns out to be a dangerous nuisance who’s more trouble than he’s worth. Tim Burton’s first film (and my first Tim Burton film, too) is on-point with vibrantly weird visuals, quick-witted comedy, and strong before-they-were-big-stars performances from (goddamn he looks young) Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis (extra dimply, woman-next-door funny), a teenage gothed-out Winona Ryder, and Michael Keaton at his comedic one-liner-throwing best—like, has he ever been this good? It’s bizarre yet delightful and still tons of fun three decades later. Even the dated special effects retain their charm. LEILANI POLK Central Cinema Friday–Sunday

Bohemian Rhapsody I heart Queen. The song this film is named for was on the soundtrack of my youth. But early reactions to the film biopic (that’s more about Freddie Mercury than the British rock band he led) have been mixed to bad. The New York Times’ Kyle Buchanan tweeted that Bohemian Rhapsody “is a glorified Wikipedia entry but Rami Malek plays Freddie Mercury (and wears his wonderful costumes) with incredible gusto.” Our own Chase Burns was not a fan at all. (“The 15-minute long shit I took during the middle of the movie was more nuanced than the straight-washed hagiography peddled in that movie theater.”) In sum, enter at your own risk. LEILANI POLK Various locations

Boy Erased This film features the most prolific twinks of our time: Troye Sivan, Lucas Hedges, and Nicole Kidman. These three gays will dazzle the screen in this year’s most star-studded gay flick—oh wait, Troye Sivan is the only gay among them. Lucas Hedges has said he’s “not totally straight, but also not gay and not necessarily bisexual,” and Nicole Kidman, despite being the world’s most famous twink, is surprisingly a 51-year-old Australian woman. While think pieces on Hedges’s sexuality will probably dominate the conversation around Boy Erased, it looks like a cute holiday movie about gay conversion therapy. Go see it! CHASE BURNS SIFF Cinema Uptown & Meridian 16

Can You Ever Forgive Me? In Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Melissa McCarthy stars as real-life best-selling biographer Lee Israel. But this isn’t a life of literary glitz and glamour that you’re imagining after such a juicy introductory sentence! After falling on hard biographer times, Israel turned to a life of writerly crimes, forging letters from long-dead authors to make just enough cash to pay her rent, take her cat to the vet, and aggressively drink. This all sounds sad, I know, but there’s warmth underneath, thanks to Israel’s friendship with the charming, equally self-destructive Jack Hock (Richard E. Grant). McCarthy, who’s made a career of portraying loud women, is a different kind of jerk here—a real person who lashes out not for laughs, but because life is hard and she knows she’s making bad choices. ELINOR JONES SIFF Cinema Egyptian & AMC Seattle 10

Cinema Italian Style The Cinema Italian Style is a weeklong SIFF mini-festival featuring the best in contemporary Italian cinema. This final day, watch Euphoria, about two very different brothers who come together in difficult circumstances. SIFF Cinema Uptown Thursday only

Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch If you’ve ever wondered how the jammy vocals of Benedict Cumberbatch would sound coming from a neon-green Seussian monstrosity, you have your chance in this visit to Whoville. This time, the Grinch has a doggy sidekick named Max. Angela Lansbury voices the Mayor and Rashida Jones does Donna Lou Who. Various locations

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald Twee hunter Newt Scamander returns for more J.K. Rowling-inspired exploits. Of the previous Fantastic Beasts film, critic Bobby Roberts wrote: “It is eager to please and amaze, but undersells its spectacle until that spectacle becomes perfunctory. It milks sentiment drier than the Arizona desert Newt’s trying to get to. It’s a goofy blast of kid-lit in love with Looney Tunes-inspired adventure—except when it’s a sour metaphor for child abuse and intolerance that owes one hell of a debt to Stephen King’s famous prom queen.” The new one has Johnny Depp as the titular dark wizard. Various locations

First Man The space stuff is great. When La La Land director Damien Chazelle’s biopic about Neil Armstrong focuses on NASA’s insanely ambitious and dangerous plan to put a man on the moon, it thrums with thrill and threat—from the astonishing scope of space to the claustrophobic confines of the command module, the best parts of First Man are worth experiencing on the biggest screen possible. Ryan Gosling offers an excellent turn as Armstrong, but even Gosling can’t liven up the story’s more pedestrian elements, which largely involve Armstrong’s relationship with his wife (Claire Foy) and his stoic mourning of his daughter. First Man bears the familiar curse of the biopic—it somehow feels both overlong and unsatisfying—and never quite escapes the shadow of The Right Stuff, Philip Kaufman’s remarkable 1983 film that told a similar story with more grace and smarts. Still: the space stuff is great. ERIK HENRIKSEN Meridian 16 & AMC Pacific Place

Free Solo This highly praised, dizzying documentary reveals the heart-stopping journey of Alex Honnold as he conquered Yosemite’s El Capitan wall without ropes or safety gear. You don’t need to be a climber to be thrilled at this glimpse into human accomplishment. Various locations

Hep Cats Cats in movies have symbolized everything from elegance to curiosity to evil, but sometimes they are simply their wonderful selves. Hep Cats delivers a handful of these ailurophilic flicks, like Harry and Tonto, a charming road movie about a man and his cat forced to leave their Upper West Side apartment. It stars Art Carney, who won an Oscar for the role. JOULE ZELMAN Northwest Film Forum Saturday only

HUMP! Film Festival The 14th Annual HUMP! Film Festival, the world’s biggest and best porn short film festival, premiers in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco this November! After the opening festival concludes its run, HUMP! will hit the road in 2019 and screen in more than 50 cities across the U.S. and Canada. HUMP! invites filmmakers, animators, songwriters, porn-star wannabes, kinksters, vanilla folks, YOU, and other creative types to make short porn films—five minutes max—for HUMP! The HUMP! Film Festival screens in theaters and nothing is ever released online. HUMP! films can be hardcore, softcore, live action, animated, kinky, vanilla, straight, gay, lez, bi, trans, genderqueer—anything goes at HUMP! (Well, almost anything: No poop, no animals, no minors, no MAGA hats.) DAN SAVAGE On the Boards

Meow Wolf The adorably named Santa Fe artist collective Meow Wolf caught the fancy of George R.R. Martin, who helped them take over a disused bowling alley for an epic art exhibition. But success comes with its own struggles. Enter their world and find delirious, DIY inspiration. Northwest Film Forum Thursday only

Mid90s Mid90s tells the story of 13-year-old Stevie (Sunny Suljic) who, after he’s rejected and bullied by his older brother Ian (Lucas Hedges), finds new role models in a crew of skaters led by the wise and magnanimous Ray (Na-kel Smith). Stevie’s willingness to repeatedly fall on hard concrete as he tries to maneuver a skateboard that looks half his height endears him to his newfound friends. The resultant feelings—and the film’s title—places Mid90s squarely in Hill’s nostalgic memory, where he both dramatizes and idealizes the kids’ adventures. SUZETTE SMITH Various locations

Monrovia, Illinois The amazingly prolific documentarian Frederick Wiseman (Ex Libris, In Jackson Heights, National Gallery, and 40 more films!) explores a tiny American hamlet steeped in old farming traditions and periodic ceremonies, like church services, Town Council meetings, Freemason rituals, weddings, and funerals. Northwest Film Forum Friday–Sunday

Mystery Train Exactly one year ago, I was walking down a street in Memphis, Tennessee, when I had what is known as a Proustian experience (or what literary critics call an “involuntary memory”). But in Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past, the involuntary memory sends the narrator, Marcel, to a town he visited as a boy (Combray). My memory, which was triggered by crossing a street, sent me to a film, Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train, which is set in Memphis and concerns young Japanese lovers who are obsessed with American popular culture. The couple walks around Memphis a lot. And while I walked around Memphis, I found myself walking, not through my Memphis, but theirs. This movie does not have much of a plot. CHARLES MUDEDE Grand Illusion Thursday only

Narcissister Organ Player The feminist body-shocker Narcissister, who carries out her performance art mostly naked and masked, muses on her Moroccan, Jewish, and African American roots and her intense relationship with her mother in this absurdist, experimental documentary. Northwest Film Forum

Night Heat They proliferated in anxious postwar America and still occasionally return to brood and smolder onscreen: films noirs, born of the chiaroscuro influence of immigrant German directors and the pressure of unique American fears. Once again, the museum will screen nine hard-boiled, moody crime classics like this week’s Night of the Hunter, one of the most unusual and thrilling films ever to come out of Hollywood. The veteran actor Charles Laughton took inspiration from the stylistic extremity of German Expressionism to film this hallucinatory tale of a psychotic preacher pursuing two young children who know he’s murdered their mother. Clear your Thursday night schedule for this one. Seattle Art Museum Thursday only

Night on Earth Five cabbies and five passengers around the globe share funny, weird, and intimate moments in Jim Jarmusch’s quirky classic—a little inconsequential, but charming and beautifully acted. Thanks to Roberto Benigni’s performance, you’ll never look at a pumpkin quite the same way again. Grand Illusion Thursday only

The Old Man and the Gun Based on a true story, the latest from David Lowery (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) reteams the filmmaker with Robert Redford, who plays Forrest Tucker, the charming, handsome leader of a trio of geriatric bank robbers. Forrest’s partners in crime are Teddy (Danny Glover) and Waller (a fantastic Tom Waits). Like one of Forrest’s disarmingly polite robberies, The Old Man and the Gun starts out pleasant and sweet before revealing hints of darkness—each of these characters is deeper than they first appear, and one’s never quite sure what any of them are going to do next. Lowery is happy to tag along, capturing lives that are polished by time and dented by experience but remain bright and sharp with wit and passion. Watching Redford have this much fun is, as always, a goddamn delight. ERIK HENRIKSEN Admiral Theater

Overlord While carrying out a vital pre-D-Day mission, a ragtag bunch of American Dogfaces stumble across a small French village that’s just packed to the rafters with secret Gestapo experiments. (Note: In what may be a controversial move in this day and age, the Nazis are unequivocally depicted as the Bad Guys.) Genre mashups are often content to rest on their high-concept laurels, but this J.J. Abrams production is very willing to do the grunt work, solidly establishing its war movie bonafides—an early paratrooper sequence is genuinely alarming—before transitioning into full-tilt body horror. (This is an extremely moist movie.) If this sounds even remotely like your sort of thing, Overlord’s combination of heavy artillery and horrid creatures should prove to be pretty irresistible. When it comes to B-Movies, nasty, brutish, and short all count as positive traits. ANDREW WRIGHT Various locations

Ponyo You can pretty much guarantee that anything with Hayao Miyazaki’s name attached to it will be superbly wrought, fantastically animated, and delivered with a fine dose of poignant storytelling. He has left a fine legacy of films in his (no longer retired, for now) wake, including Ponyo, which has its 10-year anniversary this year and is being celebrated in a series of screening events across the country. This anime fantasy is loosely based on The Little Mermaid (Hans Christian Andersen’s version, not Disney’s), about an austere, potentially malevolent warlock/sea king whose young amphibious daughter runs (swims) away from her home. Sosuke, the little boy who scoops her from the waves, believes she’s a goldfish, names her Ponyo, and introduces her to a small slice of his world before her father finds her and brings her back to their underwater kingdom. But Ponyo’s taste of food and friendship fuels her next escape, setting off a chain of events that will change her (and Sosuke) forever. This film gets me choked up every time. LEILANI POLK SIFF Cinema Egyptian Saturday only

Prospect Is this the first major work of Northwest science fiction? Indeed, it imagines a moon that is like the evergreen forests that surround Seattle. The whole planet is green—gothic green. And the light on this strange moon is sharply slanted like Northwest light. The superb film is about prospectors (a father and daughter) looking for a root-made gem that will make them rich. The daughter, however, is keen to get off the planet because the line to it is about to be shut down. But her father is money-mad. If he does not make it here, he will never make it anywhere in the galaxy. Translucent insects float through the air. There are other money-mad prospectors in the endless forest. You do not leave this planet without paying a big price. Money is the root of all evil. CHARLES MUDEDE Meridian 16

Sadie The latest from local filmmaker Megan Griffiths (Lucky Them, Eden) has a perfect Northwest feel. Sadie is 13 and lives with her mother in a dilapidated trailer park. Sadie worships her absent father while being impossible with her harried mother. She is smart and precocious, trying to come to an understanding of how the world works, but the adults around her have their own problems. The film shows the way adults communicate with kids, never talking to them directly, trying to fool the kid and themselves. This leaves young people with half-ass ideas, and they run with them without really understanding the situation, with mixed results. The film has a great cast: The wonderful Melanie Lynskey plays the mom, with Sophia Mitri Schloss as Sadie. GILLIAN ANDERSON SIFF Cinema Uptown Sunday only

Seattle Turkish Film Festival The Turkish American Cultural Association of Washington will present the sixth annual edition of their community-driven, volunteer-led festival featuring a rich panorama of new Turkish films. For the final weekend, check out Something Useful, an intense drama about two women, one of whom has a grim mission, who meet on the train; The Legend of the Ugly King, about the Kurdish actor/director Yilmaz Güney; and Taksim Hold’em, about a man determined to play his weekly poker game despite the massive anti-government protests taking place outside. SIFF Film Center Friday–Saturday

SHRIEK!: Thirst The class focusing on women and minorities in horror is back with a screening and discussion of Park Chan-wook’s Thirst, about a saintly Catholic priest transformed into an insatiable blood-drinker and sex fiend by a risky medical experiment. Here’s an excerpt from the review Lindy West wrote at its release: “Thirst is a horror movie, albeit a silly one. Actual scares are few to none—instead, Sang-hyun’s painfully earnest consternation at trying to live as an ethical monster (losing his priestly virginity, daintily sipping a comatose man’s blood straight from the IV) make it a funny, cartoonish, and strangely sweet fable about ethics versus instincts: ‘Is it a sin for a fox to eat a chicken?’ Unfortunately, Thirst drags on for a punishing gazillion hours—ethical monster shacks up with manipulative harpy and the complications pile up like bodies (because, you know, they literally are bodies)—and you feel like you’ll never see your home or your mom or the precious golden sun again.” It might not be the most positive of reviews, but you’re guaranteed to get a good discussion out of it with organizers Evan J. Peterson and Heather Marie Bartels. Naked City Brewery Sunday only

Suspiria Call Me by Your Name director Luca Guadagnino’s reinterpretation of Argento’s film Suspiria is a precisely choreographed mindfuck, and progressing through the film’s six acts feels like peeling off layers of an onion until you reach the reeking core. It’s swift, brutal, and breathtaking, but it’s also frequently bogged down by overcomplicated subplots and distracting details. The original premise remains the same—ancient ballerina witches trying to live forever by sacrificing students—but this time around, the Markos Dance Academy is located right next to the Berlin Wall in post-World War II Germany, and Susie Bannion (a very meh Dakota Johnson) is a runaway Mennonite from Ohio. Whatever parallels Guadagnino hoped to draw between the traumatic aftermath of the Holocaust and the bloody chaos going on inside the coven ends up feeling more confusing than profound. CIARA DOLAN AMC Pacific Place & SIFF Cinema Uptown

A Star Is Born If you’re entering the theatre simply desiring a couple solid musical numbers, then your $15 will not have been spent in vain. Unfortunately, the movie falls flat as only a two-dimensional vignette of common misogyny can. Ally, the lead character played by Lady Gaga, is a woman who knows she has talent but needs to hear that she is sufficiently pretty to be an appropriate vehicle for said talent. Like any woman vying for a piece of the proverbial pie, she is just one man away from success. One man to lead her, to mold her, to push her through to the finish line. This man-shaped void is filled by her father, her husband, her manager, her producer, her choreographer, and her photographer, all of whom take credit or receive credit from other men for her creative output and appearance. A Star Is Born is a classic tale, meant to be mutable, fluid, to adapt within each age it is reimagined. But the flaws of the inherent narrative are too real, too every-day damaging to continue being told in the form of a cinematic fantasy. KIM SELLING Various locations

Voyeur Presents ‘The Prowler’ The November edition of VOYEUR brings “one of the bleakest noirs ever made,” Joseph Losey’s The Prowler, about a man who’s determined to get what he feels society owes him—an unhappily married woman played by Evelyn Keyes. Scarecrow Sunday only

Widows Arriving a week before Thanksgiving, Widows is an overflowing plateful of entertainment, piled high with juicy plot, buttery performances, and plenty of sweet genre pie. It’s a mash-up of pulp and prestige that shouldn’t work well on paper but plays out tremendously well on-screen. Director Steve McQueen (12 Years a Slave, Shame) cowrote the twisty script with novelist Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl, Sharp Objects), and while the interconnected webs of Chicago’s crime underworld and its racially charged local politics contain more than enough intrigue, the performances are what’ll grab you. I mean, just look at this cast: Harry (Liam Neeson) leads a crew of career criminals (including Jon Bernthal and Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) in a heist that goes disastrously wrong, leaving their widows Veronica (Viola Davis), Linda (Michelle Rodriguez), and Alice (Elizabeth Debicki) with a serious problem when crime boss Jamal Manning (Brian Tyree Henry) and his enforcer brother Jatemme (Daniel Kaluuya) demand they return the stolen money. The real fun is watching McQueen, Flynn, and this ridiculously large talent pool of actors lay the groundwork for a slick, rich, tantalizing thriller, and then connecting all the dots. NED LANNAMANN Various locations

Also Playing: Our critics don’t recommend these movies, but you might like to know about them anyway.

The Girl in the Spider’s Web

Instant Family

Nobody’s Fool

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

Venom

Stay in the know! Get all this and more on the free Stranger Things To Do mobile app (available for iOS and Android), or delivered to your inbox.

Source: https://www.thestranger.com/things-to-do/2018/11/15/35633515/30-movies-worth-watching-in-seattle-this-weekend-nov-15-18-2018

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