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

Foreign: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Imagine writing a book when your typing speed is roughly half a word per minute. That picture of painstaking persistence only scratches the surface of the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, the French Elle magazine editor who suffered total paralysis after a stroke that left him only able to communicate by blinking his left eyelid. It was by this method, blinking when an assistant who recited the alphabet reached the next letter of whatever word Bauby was trying to spell, that Bauby wrote his story, giving rare insight into the life of a person imprisoned within their own body. Julian Schnabel's filmed version of Bauby's memoir is Schnabel's third biopic in as many films. The director seems to have a unique gift for making the lives of others into beautiful films, having already done so with artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and the poet Reinaldo Arenas. This latest has been earning him the highest honors yet, including a best director prize at Cannes, a Golden Globe nomination for best foreign film, and a lot of Oscar buzz for best picture, foreign or otherwise. Schnabel takes on the difficult task of showing the world through Bauby's perspective for much of the film, through either his one good eye, or through the active life of his mind and memories. His commitment to the source material was such that he learned to speak French specifically for the making of the movie, despite pressure from American producers to make the film in English. The result has become one of the most hotly anticipated films of the year.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Bethesda Row.

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Major Release: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

Don't like musicals? Don't worry, neither does Tim Burton. Or Johnny Depp. Which may make them odd choices to adapt Stephen Sondheim's classic retelling of the popular English folk tale of a vengeful barber slitting throats and supplying the meat pie business of his downstairs neighbor. Hardcore Sondheim fans may balk at the casting of actors with little to no musical theater training in many of the primary roles, and at the truncating or cutting altogether of some of the songs, but its hard to deny that taken on its own, Burton's vision works wonderfully. It's the best collaboration the pair have done since Ed Wood, playing to both of their strengths without ever descending into the caricatures of which each have been somewhat guilty lately. Depp's performance is a picture of searing rage, drawing on the wordless acting of classic horror actors; screenwriter John Logan has cut most of the character's non-sung lines, leaving him glowering and brooding when he's not breaking into song. And oh, how Depp glowers and broods. And he's a more than passable, if unremarkable singer. But as Sondheim himself said, playing Todd is more about acting than singing. As for Burton, in addition to nailing the macabre atmosphere of the material, he takes mischievous glee in spraying buckets upon buckets of vividly colored blood as Todd slashes his way through the jugulars of Fleet Street.

View the trailer.
Opens (veins) tomorrow at theaters all over the area.

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Special Event: The Star Wars Holiday Special

Back in 1977, a little independent film by the name of Star Wars had some modest success. Its creator, George Lucas, wanted to make the sequel bigger and better, but like so many indie artists, didn't want to sell out his vision to a big studio. So he did what any similarly principled underground director would do: he licensed his characters for a holiday variety special of the sort the '70s were exceptional at producing, and went happily to work on his sequel while the nice TV folks made the special. The result is generally considered to be one of the most abominable television programs ever to see the front end of a cathode ray tube, and the most egregious insult to the Star Wars legacy until the production of The Phantom Menace. I was watching when it aired that Christmas in 1978, but for a significant portion of my internet-free childhood, I thought it was just a dream I'd had. What really happened is that Lucas, seeing what he'd unintentionally wrought, managed to ensure that it would never air beyond the one telecast guaranteed in the contract, in an attempt to bury it far away from the conscious minds of an entire generation. But the glorious wretchedness of The Star Wars Holiday Special could not be contained, particularly when legions of doting fanboys spent most of the '80s dubbing 2nd, 3rd, and 10th generation VHS and Beta bootlegs of the broadcast. If you can find a video store with a copy stashed in its shelves, you're lucky, and if you can find a public screening, you're luckier still. Takoma Park's Video Americain is offering just such a rare occurrence tonight at 10:30 p.m. The plot, such as it is, revolves around Chewbacca trying to return to his home planet of Kashyyyk for a "Life Day" celebration (it seems the Wookies scored a resounding victory in their own War on Christmas). Along the way, there is the inevitable pursuit by the evil Galactic Empire, a return to that hipster dive in Mos Eisley where Greedo got iced, some cartoons, and the cast of Star Wars in extremely bad television makeup singing heartwarming Life Day songs. Mark Hamill is wearing so much eyeliner he might as well be in drag. Oh yeah, and there's Bea Arthur dancing with aliens. If your head hasn't exploded yet, you are the target audience for this movie, and you should get a transport to Takoma tonight for a full two hours of this insanity.

View a five-minute condensed version of the special.
Playing at Video Americain in Takoma Park, at 6937 Laurel Avenue tonight at 10:30 p.m. Free.

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Indie: The Savages

It's been an excellent year for Phillip Seymour Hoffman. He's done two acclaimed films for legendary directors Sidney Lumet and Mike Nichols, and earned high praise for his performances in both. For his 2007 hat trick, he's teamed with Slums of Beverly Hills director Tamara Jenkins for a heartwarming comedy about putting elderly parents out to pasture. OK, so rest homes might not be the most obvious source of humor outside of the Simpsons or the Look Who's Talking canon, but Jenkins has a talent for biting sarcasm that finds the little moments of humor in the tragedies of everyday life. Hoffman plays the type of sad-eyed loser that he often finds himself playing. In a lesser actor, that might come off as a lazy willingness to be typecast, but the reality is that his roles display an impressive range and ability to disappear into a character. Laura Linney is another actor with similar qualities. Here, the pair play siblings, marching relentlessly towards middle age and being forced to deal with their own issues with family and growing older as they decide what to do with their ailing father. Which might not make for warmest and fuzziest of holiday fare, but we're big fans of bitter laughs here at Popcorn & Candy.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street and the Avalon.

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Repertory: Au Hasard Balthazar

Often considered the crowning achievement of Robert Bresson's career, the director examines the different facets of human nature and of fate through the unlikeliest of lead actors: a donkey. The Balthazar of the title is a donkey, passed from owner to owner through the course of his life, and subject to the whims of chance as the quality of his life depends largely on who is his next master. If your first thought is Mr. Ed, you're headed in the wrong direction. Bresson doesn't seek to anthropomorphize Balthazar. He's nothing but a donkey, but in that simple state becomes a filter through which we see humanity, with its many flaws, with stunning clarity. The film is utterly heartwrenching, but never stoops to emotional manipulation, being one of those rare films that actually earns the tears it inevitably causes you to shed.

Playing at the AFI on Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.