12 SIFF films that dazzled our critics over the years

If you are The Seattle Times movie critic — and just two people have held that title over the past half-century — SIFF is your yearly marathon: weeks of screening movies, sifting through titles, trying to find what would most thrill readers. (The Seattle International Film Festival is shorter now, but for most of its pre-pandemic history, it lasted 3 ½ weeks, plus several weeks of press screenings beforehand.)

John Hartl, the Times movie critic for 35 years, covered the inaugural festival in 1976 and tirelessly attended and reviewed countless SIFF films over the next quarter-century, using his stellar critical judgment to help fellow SIFFgoers find just the right title. Coming along in 2001 after John’s retirement, I had an incredibly difficult act to follow.

As we celebrate SIFF’s 50^th anniversary, it doesn’t feel right that John, who did so much to share SIFF’s offerings with the world, isn’t here to join in the festivities. John died in 2022, though I still find myself looking for him at screenings, thinking I still see him sitting quietly on an aisle in his trademark dark-blue jacket. So it seemed right to have his voice join mine for this story. Here are a dozen SIFF films that dazzled us over the years, in the words that we wrote at the time. (John’s were chosen with the help of The Seattle Times archives and John’s husband, former Seattle Times arts writer Michael Upchurch.) Happy anniversary, SIFF, and thank you for the memories.  

Six from John Hartl

“My Life as a Dog” (SIFF 1987)

“Like the rhythmic return of the chorus in a song, the movie keeps coming back to the image of the night sky and the thoughts of Ingemar, a 12-year-old boy who uses comparisons to cope with the disasters in his life … ‘My Life as a Dog’ seems destined to become a special memory to anyone who sees it. It’s that rarity: a soul-soothing masterpiece.” (Streaming on The Criterion Channel, available to rent on Prime Video)

“Apartment Zero” (SIFF 1988)

“A virtuoso directorial turn by Martin Donovan, ‘Apartment Zero’ is one of the most audacious and unsettling American movies in years. Colin Firth portrays Adrian, a fastidious and repressed repertory-film theater owner who is forced to take in a boarder to help make ends meet. Into his life walks Jack (Hart Bochner), a charmingly devilish enigma … Breathtakingly twisted.” (Not currently available to stream, though as of this writing there’s a bootleg version on YouTube.)

“The Moderns” (SIFF 1988)

“A wonderful film … The movie looks and sounds so seductive that some have mistaken it for a triumph of self-conscious style over substance. Not so. ‘The Moderns’ has a great deal to say, in its unsentimental way, about what has value and what is counterfeit in life, art and relationships. But as usual with [director Alan] Rudolph, the movie establishes its own pace and agenda for expressing that point of view.” (Not currently available to stream)

“War Requiem” (SIFF 1989)

“Derek Jarman’s screen rendering of Benjamin Britten’s oratorio, ‘War Requiem’ is arguably the best film in the festival: beautiful, unsparing and moving. It’s exactly the kind of movie the festival was made for — audacious, difficult to categorize, not guaranteed to get a commercial run in Seattle. Featuring Laurence Olivier, Nathaniel Parker and Sean Bean, it’s essentially a silent film built around the music (the original 1962 Decca recording of Britten conducting the London Symphony) and mixing Jarman’s recreations of World War I … with ‘found’ footage of WWI and other wars.” (Streaming on Kanopy, Kino Now)

“The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl” (SIFF 1994)

“Its German writer-director, Ray Muller, not only demonstrates what Riefenstahl [the German auteur notorious for making films with and for Hitler’s Nazis] achieved; he gets up close and personal, showing just what kind of person she was and is … ‘The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl’ was the runaway winner for best documentary at the Seattle International Film Festival last month. But it’s a shame to pigeonhole it with the ‘d’ word. It’s also head-and-shoulders above anything else in the festival — not to mention any fiction film that’s opened here so far this year.” (Streaming on YouTube; available on DVD)

“Nights of Cabiria” (SIFF 1998, screening with a newly restored seven-minute sequence not seen since the 1950s)

“I was 16 when I saw my first foreign film: Federico Fellini’s ‘Nights of Cabiria,’ which turns up in restored form … as part of the Seattle International Film Festival. Call it imprinting, call it nostalgia for the glory days of art-house classics, but it remains my favorite foreign movie. I’d never encountered a sensibility like Fellini’s on film before. It changed the way I looked at movies and it changed the way I looked at a lot of things.” (Streaming on Kanopy)

Six from Moira Macdonald

“Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner” (SIFF 2002)

“Filmed in the Canadian Arctic town of Igloonik, ‘The Fast Runner’s simple drama of love and revenge unfolds within glowing igloos, and on endless plains where the white snow blends with the faintly gray sky. It’s gorgeous, riveting storytelling, illuminating a corner of the world that cameras rarely invade.” (Available to rent on Apple TV+)

“American Splendor” (SIFF 2003)

“Throughout SIFF and for several weeks beforehand, three screenings a day are held Monday-Friday for the benefit of press and full-series passholders. It’s a tough audience, and when a film earns a rare round of applause from this crowd, it’s generally something special. ‘American Splendor’ is one of those films. The story of a file clerk turned comic-book author turned everyday superhero — and still a file clerk — it’s an artful blend of truth and fiction … [Paul] Giamatti creates a memorable portrait of an inspired oddball: a man brave enough to put his life into the pages of a comic book, but turtle-like when attention is focused on him, his head almost visibly pulling into his shell.” (Streaming on Max, Hulu)

“The Best of Youth” (SIFF 2004)

“Yes, six hours (more, if you count waiting-in-line time) is a big commitment, but the emotional payoff of this film is immense, as we get to know the characters — a multigenerational Italian family, followed over four decades — far more intimately than any standard-length film could allow. When it’s over, many memories stay with you: the sunlit warmth of Maya Sansa’s smile; the angelic eyes of a child; the camera lingering sadly over the neat belongings of a character now gone; and a magical closing scene on a quiet path as three people come together for one last time. ‘Everything is truly beautiful,’ says a character late in the film — and by the end of ‘The Best of Youth,’ you just might believe it.” (Available to rent on Prime Video, Vudu)

“Wordplay” (SIFF 2006)

“[Director Patrick] Creadon’s film is cleverly structured like a good crossword puzzle — it starts off with bits and pieces, not really connecting, and eventually it all becomes thematically linked, with each square representing someone we’ve come to know. Holding it all together is the easy smile of Will Shortz, editor of The New York Times crossword puzzle since 1993 and, as Jon Stewart describes him in the film, ‘the Errol Flynn of crossword puzzling.'” (Streaming on The Roku Channel; available to rent on Prime Video)

“The Hedgehog” (SIFF 2010)

“Mona Achache’s lovely film version of Muriel Barbery’s novel ‘The Elegance of the Hedgehog’ … is a reminder that, sometimes, the movies can get a beloved book exactly right. A young French filmmaker in her feature debut, Achache delicately recreates the book’s mixture of irreverence, wit and poignancy, letting her camera affectionately circle the three main characters, all outsiders and eccentrics living — very differently — in a vintage Paris apartment building.” (Available to rent on Apple TV+)

“The Farewell” (SIFF 2019)

“Lulu Wang’s comedy/drama revolves around a secret: A young woman (Awkwafina) travels to China to visit her dying grandmother — as part of her family’s scheme to keep its matriarch from knowing that she has a fatal illness. No movie this year made me cry more; no movie left me happier.” (Streaming on Max, Hulu)