DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

Foreign: Stalker
Revered in his prime as perhaps one of the best filmmakers Russia ever produced, Andrei Tarkovsky built his reputation on just seven feature films. As is so often the case, some of the most poignant art comes from those artists who must fight to bring their vision to an audience. Tarkovsky's films, often restless examinations of spirituality and the search for God, constantly clashed with a Soviet government that was made uncomfortable by religious discussions of any sort. His films can be arduous affairs, typified by long stretches of quiet, and takes that stretch on and on, refusing to cut away. Stalker, the director's second adaptation of a science fiction novel (after his earlier Solaris) follows a writer and a professor as they search through a post-apocalyptic and purportedly dangerous land for a room that is said to grant wishes. Leading them there is the Stalker, a translation that is closer to "guide" or "tracker" than "creepy guy with dangerous obsessive crushes." As with Solaris, the sci-fi plotline is peripheral. It's mainly a framework around which Tarkovsky can build a philosophical discussion of the differing worldviews maintained by each of his main characters. The result is both difficult and hypnotic, but richly rewarding.

Saturday afternoon at 2:30 p.m. at the National Gallery of Art's East Building Auditorium. Free admission.

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Special Event: DC Shorts Film Festival
Always feel left out while watching the Academy Awards as they announce the winners for best short subject films? OK, so there's no guarantee that any of the shorts screening at this week's DC Shorts Film Festival will be represented at the Kodak Theatre in February. But there are precious few opportunities to see short films in a theatrical setting, so we'll welcome the chance to catch dozens of works in the under-represented form when they come.

Runs from today through September 20, with all screenings at E Street Cinema. A full schedule can be found here.

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Major Release: Eastern Promises
Two years ago, David Cronenberg completed his transformation from the cultish and gory horror of his early years to serious and, dare we say, elegant master of cinematic tension. Which is to take nothing away from his early work, which always had more going on than just the elaborate (and usually moderate-to-severely disgusting) make-up effects. In History of Violence, though, the director dropped both the shock value of gore and much of the dark atmospherics to make a thriller that relied more on pure storytelling than visuals to twist the audience's guts into knots. His latest, Eastern Promises, looks to be cut from similar cloth, though with a heavier noir visual sense, the story of a Russian mobster in London (Cronenberg again works with Viggo Mortenson here) who finds his loyalties conflicted when he becomes involved with a woman who is drawing the wrong kind of attention to herself in the investigation of the death of a young Russian woman.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Gallery Place.

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Repertory: The Draughtman's Contract & A Zed and Two Naughts
Peter Greenaway is probably best known to most audiences for the delicious twist of an ending to his 1989 breakthrough, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. That twist catapulted him out of art-house obscurity, but at nearly 50 years of age Greenaway had already built a long and acclaimed career as an editor and director. This week the AFI screens two of the director’s early 80’s classics. The Draughtsman’s Contract is a period piece about a young artist who becomes sexually involved (by contract) with both a wealthy woman and her daughter, and the fallout that results when the family patriarch turns up murdered. A Zed and Two Naughts again hits on odd relationships, as two twin brothers become involved with the woman who killed both their wives in a car accident. Greenaway’s painterly visual sense is made for the big screen.

Playing at the AFI Silver tomorrow through Tuesday.

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Indie: The Devil Came on Horseback
One of the most acclaimed documentaries of the year, Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg's film looks at the conflict in Darfur via the photographs and experiences of Brian Steidle, a military observer who was on hand with a camera through a series of harrowing experiences at the heart of the conflict. As a military observer with greater access than a journalist, Steidle saw more than many others have been allowed -- enough that he felt compelled to resign and returned to the U.S. to pass on what he'd seen.

View the trailer.
Now playing, through September 20, at The Avalon Theatre.