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

The Gates, with a post-screening discussion with Jeanne-Claude and Christo

Larger than life installation artists Jeanne-Claude and Christo are coming to D.C. this weekend. No, they aren't planning to wrap the White House (even if sealing off the building until next January seems like not a half-bad idea) or drape Roosevelt Island in lime green nylon. They'll be in town for a screening of Albert Maysles and Antonio Ferrera's documentary, The Gates, about the multi-decade effort the artists went through to hang miles of saffron curtains along the paths of Central Park. The film screened last year at the SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary festival, but never really got a proper theatrical release, which is a shame. Maysles makes no secret of his affinity for the artists, and openly mocks those who find their work to be of questionable merit. The fly on the wall approach that made Maysles and his late brother David famous is subverted somewhat when the film's subjects are interacting with the fly, but the movie rises above what should be a limitation by framing the back story of the installation as a classic battle between the quest to make something beautiful and the small-minded bureaucrats who do all they can to drag it down. In the end, of course, the artists win out (with the help of a more sympathetic bureaucrat in Michael Bloomberg), and the bulk of the last half of the film is dedicated to marveling at the simple and serene beauty of The Gates, rendered in lingering high definition shots that lovingly showcase the vivid color set against the unrelenting grey of February in New York.

View the trailer.
Plays Sunday at 5:00 p.m., discussion with the artists to follow, in the National Gallery's East Building Auditorium. Free.

---

Youth Without Youth

Francis Ford Coppolla returns to crafting film after a decade of crafting little more than wine. For his comeback, he's chosen to adapt a 1976 novella by Romanian theologian and philosopher Mircea Eliade about a suicidal septuagenarian linguist who is struck by lightning as he is on the verge of offing himself. When his burns heal, he is miraculously 30 years younger and more intelligent than he ever was before. He's been given a second chance at the life he failed at the first time, but as the second world war is on the verge of beginning, the scientists of the Third Reich are interested in finding out how to fend off death. Throwing in further complications is a run-in with a lost love who is also struck by lightning with her own aging running opposite to his own, and an unexpected side-effect of becoming spontaneously fluent in a number of ancient languages. The linguist finds this fascinating, of course. If it sounds like a metaphysical mess, by all accounts it is. The film is drawing some of Coppola's harshest reviews since Jack, yet another film about fractured timelines. But even if that's the case, it looks like a gorgeous mess, and one has to admire Coppola's nerve in fashioning (and self-financing) such an impenetrable and difficult film at a stage in his life when he could have his pick of cushy larger budget studio-sponsored projects, or when he could just rest on his laurels and continue trying to build a better Cabernet.

View the trailer.
Opens today for one week only at E Street Cinema.

---

Charade

While the Thin Man series may have set the standard for comedic mystery/thrillers back in the '30s, the genre was really perfected in Stanley Donen's 1964 peak. Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant were never more charming than as this somewhat odd couple thrown together by a plot to steal the fortune of Hepburn's recently deceased husband. Donen manages to keep things thrilling and legitimately dangerous even as Hepburn and Grant are trading witty and sardonic one-liners that never feel forced, and are often hilarious. The love story that develops between the older man and the younger woman also manages to avoid contrivance, all combining to make one of the most consistently entertaining films of the 1960s. The plot hinges on the issue of stamp collecting, which is the tie-in to the National Postal Museum, where the film screens this weekend, with a discussion regarding that connection to follow.

View the trailer.
Screens on Saturday at the National Postal Museum at 1:30 p.m., followed by a discussion led by NPM Research Chair Daniel Piazza. Free.

---

England's New Wave Film Series

Directors like Lindsay Anderson and Tony Richardson redefined British cinema in the late '50s with angry and bitter films that openly criticized British government, monarchy and society. Britain's New Wave reflected many of the techniques and ideas going on across the channel, but tended to trade the often playful tone of many French New Wave films for a darker realism. The National Gallery of Art kicks off a series of nine of the best of these films this afternoon with a screening of Richardson's The Entertainer, starring Laurence Olivier as a failed stage performer trying to keep his meager career afloat amid great personal difficulties. Saturday has Richardson's adaptation of John Osborne's landmark play, Look Back in Anger, featuring Richard Burton as the original angry young man of British theatre, Jimmy Porter. Later that afternoon, it's Room at the Top, which examines the issues of class and social status that inform so much British drama.

The Entertainer screens today at 3:30. Look Back in Anger and Room at the Top both screen tomorrow, at noon and 4:30 p.m. respectively, all in the National Gallery's East Building Auditorium. Free.

---

Twelfth Annual Iranian Film Festival

The Freer and Sackler Galleries' Iranian Film Festival continues this weekend with two films. The first, Unfinished Stories, screens tonight and Sunday, and features three separate stories of troubled relationships that are all tied together. Tomorrow, the documentary Iran, Seven Faces of a Civilization uses animation together with archaeological reconstructions to piece together the history of the country going back seven millennia.

Unfinished Stories screens tonight at 7 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m., while Iran, Seven Faces of a Civilization screens tomorrow at 2 p.m. In the Freer's Meyer Auditorium. Free.