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

Repertory: The 400 Blows

Expect to see plenty of French New Wave retrospectives over the next year or so, as 2008 represents the movement's 50th anniversary. If Claude Chabrol's 1958 Le Beau Serge lit the fuse, François Truffaut's 400 Blows was the first in a subsequent series of cinematic explosions that announced France's new generation of filmmakers to the world. Truffaut's debut feature is a remarkable achievement on a number of levels, not least of which is how fresh and vibrant and new it feels even a half-century after its release.

The film is a semi-autobiographical account of the filmmaker's own troubled childhood, as his onscreen alter ego Antoine Doinel is born to an already broken home, raised by a number of relatives along with his own selfish mother and surly stepfather, and ultimately placed unceremoniously in a reformatory after a series of incidents of delinquency and petty theft. The film was not only one of the kickoffs of the New Wave and the strong opening to Truffaut's career, but also initiated one of the most fruitful director-actor relationships in film (at least until Martin Scorcese met Robert DeNiro), as Truffaut would go on to make five more features and one short with Jean-Pierre Léaud, the 14-year old unknown he picked for the lead role in The 400 Blows. And four of those six would be the further adventures of Antoine Doinel, as Truffaut continued to make films about his alter ego for 20 years. If you've never seen this one before, you owe it to yourself to make it up to the AFI this week, and if you're already familiar, you already know this bears repeated viewings.

View the trailer.
Playing at the AFI for a special one-week engagement starting tonight through December 13.

---

Foreign: Fimfárum

For the past year, the Avalon has, in conjunction with the Embassy of the Czech Republic, been presenting the Lions of Czech Film series. The latest installment is Aurel Klimt and Vlasta Pospísilová's Fimfárum, a series of five animated Czech folk tales the pair worked on over the course of nearly two decades. With subject matter that, on the fairy tale continuum, leans more towards Grimm than Disney, the shorts are definitely adult-oriented, and told with visually inventive (and slightly demented) stop motion animation and puppetry.

View the trailer.
Playing at the Avalon Theatre for one night only, Wednesday, December 13 at 8 p.m.

---

Indie: What Would Jesus Buy?

Rob VanAlkemade's documentary, which had its local premiere over the summer at Silverdocs, has a familiar subject, as left-leaning anti-consumerist, anti-corporatist documentaries have been a booming subgenre of their own for much of the decade. The many anti-Bush docs that have been released during the same time period are cut from the same angry cloth, and it's no accident that both of these types of film have enjoyed concurrent heydays. Produced by Morgan Spurlock, whose 2004 Super-size Me was one of the most visible of that crop of documentaries, WWJB follows self-styled performance-artist/provocateur Reverend Billy and his "Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir" on a nationwide tour to raise awareness of the true costs of consuming. If you're well versed in docs like The Corporation, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, or Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, most of this isn't going to be new material, but seeing it preached by a bleach-blonde "reverend" with a fully gowned choir probably adds an entirely new dimension.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the Loews Dupont Circle 5.

---

Major Release: Atonement

British wunderkind Joe Wright can seemingly do no wrong, for after his successful early career on British telly, and his acclaimed 2005 adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, he has now adapted Ian McEwan's Atonement. And if you noticed a strange hum in the air already, that's the Oscar buzz you're hearing. Where most young directors believe it's necessary to be edgy as all hell to get noticed, Wright takes his cues from staid and sober classicists like David Lean. The approach seems to be working. Atonement takes on epic proportions (another Lean characteristic) as it follows its characters over a multi-decade arc that goes from picturesque British countryside to the battlefields of World War II, as a woman attempts to make amends for the horrible lie she told that separated her sister from the man she loved. Since early reviews indicate that The Golden Compass is going to be a huge disappointment, this is the big release to see this weekend.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Cinema.

---

Special Event: In Search of the Essay Film

Making a film as an essay, with the focused, personal and subjective voice that implies, is one of the least approached forms in the medium, though modern position-based documentaries tend to borrow more and more from the genre. Hofstra English professor and author of American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents until Now, Philip Lopate lectures at the National Gallery this weekend on the subject, and presents two famous examples of the film afterwards. The first, Alain Resnais' 1955 classic Night and Fog, is a brief (31 minute) meditation on the Holocaust, as Resnais juxtaposes the horrible events with quiet, serene, and often surprisingly beautiful images of the camps where they took place. Then, in Alan Berliner's 1996 widely acclaimed masterpiece Nobody's Business, the filmmaker grapples with another difficult subject: his own father. Much like Ross McElwee's Sherman's March, Berliner shows that the inward or family focused documentary can be just as fascinating as a documentary about subjects of more obvious universal interest, as Berliner works out his personal issues with his father on film, to spectacular results.

Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. in the National Gallery's East Building Concourse, Large Auditorium.