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DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Foreign: 2007 Washington Jewish Film Festival
The Washington D.C. Jewish Community Center’s annual film festival has become one of the largest and longest running of the local festivals. This year’s program encompasses over 40 films, from 11 countries. Nearly half of the selections are films from Israel, in recognition of the nation’s 60th year. The event kicks off tonight with the local premiere of Brazil’s official Academy Award submission, The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, and runs for nearly two weeks at venues in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. Highlights include this year’s Cannes Camera d’Or winner, a classic Soviet silent film, an Israeli Academy Award winner, the Sundance International Jury Award winner, and lots of special guests in the form of directors, producers, writers, and subjects of many of the films. A great option for foreign movies in the area over the next couple of weeks (with a few U.S. titles thrown in as well).
Opens tonight and runs through December 9, with screenings at five venues in the area. See the schedule for a full accounting of times and locations.
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Special Event: Mountainfilm on Tour
Mountainfilm in Telluride, a festival with a 30-year history of showing films dedicated to the great outdoors, has sent around a collection of their festival short films this year. The D.C. stop happens tonight at the National Geographic Society, and features six shorts, covering sport (mountain biking, surfing, fly fishing), conservation issues (destruction of old growth forests, alternative energy, and climate change), and outdoor adventure vacations. That last one, a short called Rita, answers that question you've often asked yourself: what if, as a child, your parents took you to Mount Everest instead of Space Mountain?
Playing tonight only at the National Geographic Society, 1600 M Street, NW. Admission is $15 for members, $18 for non-members.
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Indie: The Life of Reilly
For a lot of folks of my generation, the bulk of our memories of Charles Nelson Reilly come from old re-runs of The Match Game, where he taught us as youngsters more about the well placed gay-themed double entendre than Three's Company ever could. Not to mention how not to choose a convincing hairpiece. But Reilly was more than just a campy game show icon, and his résumé of theater and film work is long and varied, and includes Tony awards, directing on the screen and stage, and work as an educator of young actors. He's even been a voice actor for Spongebob Squarepants. Pneumonia claimed Reilly after a long illness this fall, but in The Life of Reilly, directors Barry Poltermann and Frank Anderson have put together a fitting capstone for the entertainer, filming the final two performances of Reilly's autobiographical one-man stage show, Save it for the Stage: The Life of Reilly, which he had toured around the country for a number of his later years. The film cuts a great deal of the stage show's running time, so while it's not the comprehensive spoken autobiography fans might hope for, it's still a much more intimate look at the man behind those huge glasses than watching the Game Show Network could ever provide.
View the trailer.
Opens Friday for one week only at E Street Cinema. Co-director Barry Poltermann will make an appearance at the Monday night 7:40 p.m. showing.
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Repertory: Beau Geste
P.C. Wren's 1924 novel about a jewel heist, and the subsequent flight of the three brothers (including the titular hero) suspected of the crime to the French Foreign Legion, has been adapted for the screen in various versions over a half-dozen times. Treatments range from the most famous, Academy Award-nominated 1939 version starring Gary Cooper, to Marty Feldman's 1977 parody, which even made a joke out of the number of film versions the book had seen previously. But the very first adaptation went into production practically before the ink had even dried on the first pressing of the novel. The result, this rarely seen 1926 silent version, served as nearly a shot for shot template for the later Cooper film.
Playing at the Library of Congress' Mary Pickford Theatre Friday at 7 p.m. Free, call (202) 707-5677 to reserve seating.
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Major Release: Playing catch-up.
After unleashing an avalanche of new movies into theaters for the Thanksgiving holidays, only one movie is new to mass audiences this week: the Hayden Christiansen/Jessica Alba thriller, Awake. Considering the Weinstein Company is keeping this away from critics as if it was the fifth Saw sequel, and that the whole he's-awake-while-they're-about-to-cut-into-him premise was already done (probably better) by Hitch a half century ago, we're going to say that this is a good time to catch up on something you've missed over the past few weeks. Maybe you haven't seen No Country For Old Men yet, or are going back for second or third helpings on it. Maybe a good Stephen King scare is what you need this weekend. And we'd be remiss if we didn't mention Michael Clayton, one of the best (and more underappreciated) films of the fall, which is still in plenty of area theaters.
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