We’re four days into the 2025 Seattle International Film Festival. Hopefully, you spent the weekend hopping from screen to screen, but now it’s Monday, free time is harder to come by, and perhaps you’re looking for a little guidance. Well, you’re in luck. For our 2025 SIFF Issue, we watched over 100 festival films to tell you which ones are amazing and which ones you can miss.

Today, across five theaters from downtown to Shoreline, SIFF is showing twenty films (the full list is below), and we’re here to help you pick. There are four we think are great (The Balconettes, Heightened Scrutiny, BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, She’s the He), all marked with a (★), and two we think you absolutely shouldn’t miss (Blue Sun Palace, Khartoum), marked with a (★★). If you see a (?) next to a film, it means, sadly, we didn’t get access to a screener of it, so you’ll have to find out for yourself. Looking to grab a drink or some happy hour snacks before or after your movie? We have some recommendations for that, too, right here.

We also put together a SIFF Bingo card (because we like you) and at least a few of today’s films can help you check off some squares! Look for “medium to big naturals,” “a movie made in the PNW,” “the life-saving power of music,” and at least one example of “parents fucking up their kids.”

Happy watching! Let us know what you liked!

(?) The Village Next to Paradise, 3:00 p.m., SIFF Film Center

Somalia, 2024 (133 min), Dir. Mo Harawe

A breakout from the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, The Village Next to Paradise delivers a “sensitive and empathetic” view of Somalia, “an underappreciated and often vilified nation.” The film centers on a family struggling to not only survive, but thrive in a village where drone strikes fill the sky and living until tomorrow never feels like a sure thing. NATHALIE GRAHAM

(★) The Balconettes, 3:15 p.m., SIFF Cinema Downtown

France, 2024 (104 min), Dir. Noémie Merlant

In Portrait of a Lady on Fire, star Noémie Merlant’s directorial debut, tensions and libidos run high as Marseille is caught in a sweltering heat wave. The titular “Balconettes” are Nicole (Sanda Codreanu), a sexually frustrated novelist; Elise (Merlant), a glamorous actress retreating from the overzealous attentions of her possessive husband; and Ruby (Souhelia Yacoub), a carefree camgirl. When the roommates flirt with the mysterious man on the balcony across from their building, a series of devastating events is set in motion. What starts out as a feminist take on Rear Window (starring Merlant as the consummate Hitchcock blonde) soon shifts into a surrealist revenge fantasy full of bright colors and unapologetic physicality: titties hanging out, farts, orgasms, etc. The effect is something like an episode of Broad City as directed by Pedro Almodóvar. One thing’s for sure: You’ll never look at a rocking chair the same way again. JULIANNE BELL

(★) Heightened Scrutiny, 3:15 p.m., SIFF Cinema Uptown

USA, 2025 (85 min), Dir. Sam Feder

Last year, ACLU attorney Chase Strangio became the first trans attorney to argue before the US Supreme Court in the first big trans-rights case of this second shitty Trump era. The question at the center of US v. Skrmetti: Was the state of Tennessee violating the constitutional rights of transgender kids when it banned puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy to treat gender dysphoria, while allowing doctors to offer the exact same treatments to intersex and cis kids for different medical reasons? Heightened Scrutiny makes the high-as-fuck stakes clear through shots of community meetings and serious interviews with serious people sitting in bare rooms, pizzicato strings plucking away seriously in the background. But it’s also a sweet profile of Strangio, who says arguing a case before the court is not his dream, but a nightmare for a nice normal guy with an albatross of responsibility around his neck. It’s not the most intimate profile—it couldn’t be, Strangio is a high-profile, media-trained lawyer—but Feder’s made a political document worth seeing. VIVIAN McCALL

(?) The New Year that Never Came, 3:30 p.m., AMC Pacific Place

Romania, 2024 (138 min), Dir. Bogdan Mureşanu

On one hand, The New Year That Never Came is an award-winning and critically acclaimed film about six lives intersecting on the streets of Romania on December 20, 1989. Their stories unfold throughout the day while Nicolae Ceaușescu’s communist regime famously falls. But with a movie poster that highlights the ensemble cast, I can’t help but imagine it as some kind of Love, Actually or New Year’s Eve rom-com starring Zac Efron and Katherine Heigl… but with a presidential execution at the end. I’d watch the fuck out of that. MEGAN SELING

Sudden Outbursts of Emotions, 3:30 p.m., SIFF Cinema Uptown

Finland, 2024 (97 min), Dir. Paula Korva

Sudden Outbursts of Emotions gets increasingly superficial the longer it carries on. It tells the story of a woman who, when not working at a travel agency, is burdened with soothing the fragile ego of her insecure boyfriend as his acting career seems to have stalled. She begins to question her life and relationship, just as said boyfriend suggests they open their relationship and attend a sex party where she meets someone new who will soon upend all she thought she knew about herself. At least, that’s what it feels like it ought to be, in theory. But the execution is far too narrow, and it’s oddly afraid to lay bare the body or the soul. CHASE HUTCHINSON

(★) BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions, 4:00 p.m., SIFF Cinema Uptown

USA, 2025 (113 min), Dir. Kahlil Joseph

If you like your Blackness bold, creative, eccentric, complex, profound, mind-blowing, thought-provoking (hell, if you just like Blackness), Kahlil Joseph’s “cinematic installation” BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions is your flick. A mixtape of images, histories, and imagined futures, it refuses easy description like it refuses the white gaze. From Du Bois to Raekwon, Million Man March to Ghanaian streets, encyclopedias to encrypted futures—this is Blackness remixed and re-centered. Joseph invites us into a world where history flashes like strobe lights (epileptics beware), and meaning pulses through image, sound, and silence. This isn’t a movie. It’s an experience. MARCUS HARRISON GREEN

(?) Evergreens, 5:30 p.m., SIFF Cinema Uptown

USA, 2025 (120 min), Dir. Jared Briley

Spokane-based director Jared Briley didn’t take shortcuts when crafting his directorial debut, Evergreens. When Eve and James set out on a road trip through Washington State, we see “heaps of gorgeous shots of Leavenworth, Seattle, Bainbridge, and the forests and waters in between.” It also features music by Damien Jurado and Lacey Brown. PNW AF. MEGAN SELING

(★★) Blue Sun Palace, 5:45 p.m., Shoreline Community College

USA, 2024 (116 min), Dir. Constance Tsang

Tsang immediately proves herself a master of tight-space framing in her feature-length debut, ostensibly about a Queens massage parlor but really about so much more. Every bedroom, kitchen, lobby, stairwell, divey restaurant, rooftop, and mini-mall in Blue Sun Palace is immaculately staged. Fluorescent lights become angelic. Brief stutters of the hand after a bad phone call land like daggers. And intimacy, disgust, and grief fly off the screen in sequences that convey mountains of wordless emotion. Tsang’s trust in her cast pays off handsomely, as she lets conversations play out with zero cuts and one camera tucked into a tight room’s quarters. The results—the laughs, the bashfulness, and the stone-eyed stares—feel uniquely and powerfully American, as a Mandarin-fluent cast grapples with identity, homesickness, community, loss, isolation, violence, and shame in ways I haven’t seen in a SIFF film in some time. Bravo. CW: Sexual assault. SAM MACHKOVECH

(?) 1-800-ON-HER-OWN, 6:00 p.m., SIFF Cinema Uptown

USA, 2024 (78 min), Dir. Dana Flor

Ani DiFranco has lived a fascinating life. She’s self-released more than 20 albums, he’s an ardent activist, using her platform to speak out against homophobia, racism, and other inequalities. She’s worked with orgs that make music education accessible to kids, spoken out against predatory major labels, and collaborated with everyone from Prince to Cyndi Lauper. So it’s unfortunate to hear that Dana Flor’s DiFranco documentary 1-800-ON-HER-OWN is “a pedestrian musician documentary” (New York Times) and “a snooze” (The Hollywood Reporter). MEGAN SELING

Tinā, 6:00 p.m., SIFF Cinema Downtown

New Zealand, 2024 (103 min), Dir. Miki Magasiva

Tinā (which means “mother” in Samoan) is part Sister Act 2 (with rich kids, though), part Samoan grief opera, and part slow-burn school drama set in post-earthquake Christchurch. After losing her daughter in the 2011 quake, Mareta—a grief-stricken but quietly formidable teacher—takes a job at a posh Catholic school where the students are privileged, the staff are casually racist, and the choir doesn’t yet exist. She builds one from scratch, connecting with emotionally closed-off kids while working through her own loss. There’s class tension, personal tragedy, and who doesn’t love when all roads in the high school movie lead to a high-stakes music competition? The pacing is slow, but the film is carried by Mareta’s low-key intensity and culminates in a genuinely very moving final performance. BREE McKENNA

The Gloria of Your Imagination, 6:00 p.m., SIFF Film Center

USA, 2024 (98 min), Dir. Jennifer Reeves

The Gloria of your Imagination is either a tough or a really easy sell, depending on who you are. The “dual-projection performance” shares footage from recorded therapy sessions with a 30-year-old single mother in 1964. Gloria, perfectly coiffed, chain-smoking, and toting a wicker pocketbook, shares her anxieties about men, sex, and motherhood with three spectacled dudes, who emit varying levels of douchiness: Gestalt founder Fritz Perls (who calls Gloria “phony” in session), humanistic psychology founder Carl Rogers, and rational emotive behavior therapy founder Albert Ellis. The audience learns that Gloria consented to having the sessions filmed, but not to their being publicly exhibited—which they were, widely. Gloria sues for damages. This reveal causes me to question, then, my complicity in watching the sessions now. After all, The Gloria of your Imagination encourages conclusions that most of us have come to before—the ’60s were an exceptionally sexist time, and modern psychotherapy has its flaws. LINDSAY COSTELLO

Dancing Queen in Hollywood, 7:00 p.m., SIFF Cinema Uptown

Norway, 2025 (87 min), Dir. Aurora Gossé

This movie was definitely not made for me. Yes, I love hip-hop and hip-hop dancing. But the way I enjoy these forms is not at all represented in any part of this film, which has a bunch of Norwegian kids going to LA to do their hip-hop dance thing. The filming is ugly, and the acting is barely above what we find in Kenan & Kel. In the words of Skepta: “That’s not [for] me.” CHARLES MUDEDE

Jean Cocteau, 7:00 p.m., AMC Pacific Place

USA, 2024 (94 min), Dir. Lisa Immordino Vreeland

Jean Cocteau is a perfect example of a documentary with a captivating subject, but unfortunately, bland filmmaking. While I appreciated that the film let the iconic Renaissance man speak for himself—weaving together interviews, journals, and clips from his films—narrative gaps were filled by walls of text that I found clunky and uninspiring. However, this was also the first biography of Cocteau I’ve seen that gives adequate attention to his identity as a gay man and love affairs with collaborators like Jean Marais, Raymond Radiguet, and Édouard Dermit. The film also touched on his controversial friendship with Nazi sculptor Arno Breker, but lacked a stance, quoting Cocteau’s belief that friendship is more important than politics. As the credits rolled, I wasn’t particularly surprised to see that the film was funded in part by fashion giant Chanel, whose founder, Coco (a known Nazi sympathizer), designed costumes for many of Cocteau’s stage productions. AUDREY VANN

Fly Me to the Moon, 8:30 p.m., Shoreline Community College

Hong Kong, 2023 (112 min), Dir. Sasha Chuk

Fly Me To The Moon tells the story of a family from mainland China who have just migrated to Hong Kong to make a better life for themselves. Beginning in the late ’90s, the film spans two decades, focusing on the coming of age of two young daughters as they come face to face with the growing pains of the migrant experience. While trying to escape social ostracization from schoolmates through assimilation, the daughers find that things are not any easier at home as their father falls into a pattern of drug use and petty theft and is in and out of jail over the course of their adolescence. The film is a slow meditation on growing up and how we forgive, forget, and forge new paths in light of broken dreams. MICHAEL McKINNEY

Cloud, 8:30 p.m., SIFF Cinema Uptown

Japan, 2024 (124 min), Dir. Kiyoshi Kurosawa

If ever an action-thriller could be described as “quiet,” Kurosawa’s Cloud fits the bill. (No, not Akira Kurosawa. This is Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the one who made Cure, Pulse, and other moody, often-overlooked J-horror gems.) Cloud’s murky nightmare unfolds in the world of digital dropshipping, which lands ruthless seller Ryôsuke in real-life danger when a band of buyers take issue with his get-rich-quick scheme. The slow, calculated action-thriller communicates in soft steps and hushed tones, broken only by the occasional gunshot beneath overcast—cloudy, even—skies. Cloud treads tricky terrain, though. I won’t spoil the story entirely, but it unravels in a way that strains plausibility. It’s clear the real villain isn’t Ryôsuke, but the suffocating grip of late-stage capitalism. LINDSAY COSTELLO

Unclickable, 8:30 p.m., SIFF Film Center

Greece, 2024 (74 min), Dir. Babis Makridis

Ad fraud, in which fraudsters show fake people fake websites that attract real ads for profit, may account for every third dollar spent on digital advertising, and it’s a hair-on-fire problem that director Babis Makridis lays squarely at the feet of Google and Facebook. The movie is convincing: I buy that ad fraud is a huge problem, likely killing local newspapers, funding misinformation, and plain ripping people off. For those reasons alone, governments should force big tech to deal with it. I also buy Makridis’s moral revulsion. But for a movie about what’s supposedly one of the biggest criminal schemes of our age, it’s boring, and the soundtrack (mostly fingers rocking back and forth between two notes on a Casio keyboard) nearly drove me insane. VIVIAN McCALL

(★) She’s the He, 9:00 p.m., SIFF Cinema Uptown

USA, 2025 (81 min), Dir. Siobhan McCarthy

This queer teen comedy starts, like many teen comedies do, with a harebrained deception scheme. Playing on conservative hysteria surrounding all-gender bathrooms, She’s the He finds best friends Ethan (Misha Osherovich) and Alex (Nico Carney) pretending to be trans to enter the girls’ locker room at school, leading Ethan to the realization that she actually is trans. The quick-witted film with a majority trans cast checks off the high school movie tropes, including makeover scenes, a blooper reel, and raunchy jokes, while creating tender moments where Osherovich’s full-hearted performance makes the coming-out story shine. It’s a lot of fun! And the costumes were so cool, I went back to the credits to track down who the designer was (Leah Morrison) and creepily requested her private Instagram. ROBIN EDWARDS

(★★) Khartoum, 9:30 p.m., AMC Pacific Place

Sudan, 2025 (81 min), Dir. Anas Saeed, Rawia Alhag, Brahim Snoopy, Timeea Mohamed Ahmed, and Phil Cox

In Khartoum, five directors collaborate with five refugees from different backgrounds to reenact their life-changing experiences in the Sudanese Civil War. Sometimes their stories are supported by props and CGI renderings of the places they’re describing; other times, they’re acted out in front of blank green screens with a boom mic dipping into frame. Either way, the subjects take turns acting in each other’s stories, positioned and fed lines as they go, often embodying people who had drastically different experiences than their own. It’s a collective effort with something to say about community, justice, and storytelling. Khartoum is special. BRIGID KENNEDY

Viktor, 9:30 p.m., SIFF Cinema Downtown

Denmark, 2024 (89 min), Dir. Olivier Sarbil

Viktor is a samurai-obsessed, deaf, Ukrainian photojournalist who wishes he were a soldier. Director Olivier Sarbil really, really wants you to know all that, but Viktor is at its best when Sarbil gets out of the way. Throughout (especially in the too-perfect ending) Sarbil and Viktor are telling us two separate stories, and I prefer Viktor’s. His sullenness clashes with the swelling music and close-ups of bombing victims’ hands in plastic bags. It’s refreshing—they may air raid you every night, but they’ll never take your freedom to be a little bitchy when you get a haircut you don’t like. If you want a straight documentary about this war, watch 20 Days in Mariupol. If you’re more of a vibes guy and it won’t piss you off to watch a film about a photographer who never once gives us a clear view of his photographs, Viktor’s worth your time. BRIGID KENNEDY

Spermageddon, 9:30 p.m., SIFF Cinema Uptown

Norway, 2024 (80 min), Dir. Tommy Wirkola and Rasmus A. Sivertsen

I could call Spermageddon a big stupid cum joke. But that would be selling it short. It’s about ballsack, too. VIVIAN McCALL