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

Repertory: The Third Man

The AFI continues to please with yet another showing of an absolute must-see classic. Last week it was The 400 Blows, and this week it's three showings of Carol Reed's gripping British noir, The Third Man. Based on a story and a screenplay by Graham Greene, the movie is a study in dark mystery, as characters skulk about the inky shadows of post-war Vienna trying to figure out just what it is that happened to Harry Lime, the character played with dark menace by Orson Welles. Here's a case where production difficulties actually may have contributed to some of the unintended brilliance of the final product. Reed was forced to shoot around the absence of his star, who pulled a Marlon Brando and showed up weeks late to the shoot. Reed filmed a number of scenes with a body double, and as a result, in many of Welles' scenes, he appears as simply an unrecognizable shape, melting into the shadows before we can get a glimpse of him. The film was ranked the best British Film of all time by the British Film Institute, and, oddly enough, the 57th greatest American film of all time by the American Institute (based on one American producer). We'll go with the Brits: #1 seems a far better place for a film this good to reside.

View the trailer.
Showing on Tuesday, and then Saturday and Sunday of the following
weekend at the AFI Silver Theatre.

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Indie: Juno

Juno has a couple of things working against it. First, there's its status as this year's quirky little indie (or quasi-indie) that could. That title almost went to the surprisingly excellent Lars and the Real Girl, but buzz for Juno is reaching Little Miss Sunshine proportions. And, as LMS taught us, movies that sell themselves purely on cutesy quirk are bound to disappoint, even if they are entertaining. More annoying is the constant habit of the film's marketing team to mention at every chance they get that the film's writer, first time screenwriter Diablo Cody, used to be a stripper. Hasn't pretty much every screenwriter held a weird odd job or two before they finally managed to sell a script? Granted, in Cody's case, she was disrobing as a sociological experiment, but all the movie's PR firm seems to want you to know is, "Wow! She was a stripper and then she wrote a movie!" Which is pretty insulting when you read the surprise implied in their tone. Anyway, apart from all this, the movie's drawing rave reviews, so it appears this one is more than just the sum of its quirks. At the very least it's an opportunity to see two cast members from the sorely missed Arrested Development back on screen together again.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street, Bethesda Row, and Georgetown.

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Special Event: Holiday
Classics at the AFI

If you have a soft spot in your heart for classic Christmas tales, the AFI has you covered. Granted, two of the three films they're featuring you can see approximately 238,931 times on television between now and Christmas Day. But have you ever watched It's a Wonderful Life or A Christmas Story on a big screen with a bunch of strangers looking for warm Christmas fuzzies or big holiday laughs, respectively?

The communal sharing of holiday cheer is, of course, part of the point. That and hearing a crowded theater all scream, "You'll put your eye out!" in unison. And if you're content to catch one of the bazillion TV screenings of those two movies, you can always go to see Michael "I've never been offered a role I didn't take" Caine as Scrooge in the Muppet-ized take on Dicken's A Christmas Carol, which has the dubious distinction of being the first Muppet movie to be produced without Jim Henson at the helm.

At the AFI from tomorrow until Christmas Day. See the AFI's site for showtimes.

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Foreign: Dr. Akagi

The Shohei Imamura retrospective taking place at both the AFI and the Freer and Sackler Galleries seems to be without end, and this week the Freer/Sackler features one of his excellent later works, Dr. Akagi, concerning a doctor fighting a hepatitis epidemic during the second world war. Like much of Imamura's work, there is a sharp societal critique in the narrative, in this case of the military, which hinders Akagi's work at every turn and makes him into a political scapegoat when the war begins going badly. And, if that's not enough Imamura for you, you can also catch The Profound Desire of the Gods at the Freer/Sackler on Sunday, and Endless Desire at the AFI tonight, Sunday, and Monday.

Dr. Akagi plays tonight at the Freer and Sackler Galleries in the Meyer Auditorium at 7 p.m. Admission is free for movies at the gallery (admission is charged for the AFI screenings mentioned).

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Major Release: I Am Legend

Honestly, without having even seen this one, we're going to guess that we liked it better when it was called The Omega Man and starred Chuck Heston at his apocalyptic sci-fi best. It's not that we don't think Will Smith can't pull it off. There's a great actor buried underneath all that grinning charm and action hero bravado. He'll have some seriously long stretches onscreen alone as the last man in New York after a 28 Days Later-style viral apocalypse has wiped out most of the population and left legions of infectees with symptoms that seem strangely vampire-like. At least, that was the direction of Richard Matheson's original book. Reports are that the script sticks closely to the storyline of the earlier Heston flick, which dropped the vampire angle in favor of more generalized cannibalistic killers that only come out at night. At any rate, it's not Smith's ability to pull it off we doubt so much as the potential for success in a movie that has been passed around as much as this one was during development, and which by all rights should be a summer blockbuster, not dropped into the end of the December mix of family fare and Oscar bait. But there are no other movies opening wide this weekend, so expect Smith to clean up. And if you need something mindless to take your brain off all the shopping you have yet to finish, we're sure it'll do the trick.

View the trailer.
Opens in theaters all around the area tomorrow.