Popcorn & Candy: Only in Dreams
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
King: A Filmed Record...Montgomery to Memphis
The year after Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, directors Sidney Lumet and Joseph Mankiewicz began compiling archival footage of the civil rights leader for a documentary. The result was a sprawling three-hour collection of footage that seeks to tell MLK's story through this newsreel footage, with a ton of celebrity narrators including Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Burt Lancaster, and Charleton Heston, among others. Unfortunately, after an extremely limited one-day-only benefit run in theaters, and a couple of television airings, the critically acclaimed and Oscar-nominated film was released to home video slashed in half and without the narrations. Even that version is now long out of print, making it extremely difficult to see one of the first documents of a nation's grief after King's murder. Hopefully that oversight will soon be remedied. Until then, thanks to a collaboration between the AFI and TV One, the Silver Theater hosts two free screenings on Monday's holiday of the full, original cut of the film.
Playing at the AFI Monday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. Screenings are free, and tickets may only be obtained at the AFI box office after 9:30 Monday morning, limit four per person.
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Call me a glutton for punishment, but I just can't resist a new Woody Allen film. It's a thankless inclination, since for every Sweet and Lowdown or Match Point in the director's late-career catalog, there seem to be five Anything Elses. His latest, Cassandra's Dream, follows the (mis)fortunes of two brothers, played by Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell, who find themselves in a spot of financial difficulty and must resort to crime to pull themselves out. It's not unfamiliar territory for Allen, who seems to spend a lot of time contemplating the existential implications of murder. What the film definitely has going for it is that it's deadly serious. Despite his comic reputation, his dramatic-leaning movies, with a few exceptions, nearly always play better than his straight comedies. And while his ruminations on morality in the face of an absent god and cruel fate can be awfully wordy, when he's at the top of his game, they're fascinating to watch.
View the trailer.
Opens today at E Street and Bethesda Row.
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While Lindsay Anderson may have not been the most prolific of feature directors, making only seven movies (interspersed between many theater and television projects) over 25 years, those films that he did make established him as one of the most talented directors the UK ever produced. His first film was a stunning achievement: a culmination of everything the British New Wave had done to that point, yet larger and more ambitious, looking forward to the bleak counterculture films that Anderson would go on to make and that would help define British cinema. The film follows the story of a miner, played by a young and fiery Richard Harris, who is invited to join a professional rugby team after taking a brutal (but respectable) beating at the hands of an entire team. His meteoric rise from nobody to violent rugby success stands in stark contrast to his personal difficulties, and the film is remarkable not just for its dark and hopeless tenor, but also for some of the best sports cinematography you're ever likely to see.
Playing at the National Gallery of Art's East Building Auditiorium tomorrow at 4:30 p.m. Free.
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For 16 years now, the Goethe-Institut has presented Film|Neu, a collection of German language cinema from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Tonight kicks off the 2008 edition with director Marcus Hausham Rosenmueller's Grave Decisions, a black comedy that was a huge hit in Germany in 2006, concerning a young boy with a rather unusual fascination with death. The festival continues through next week and includes ten films in total, including a fascinating-looking documentary about the early movies of Wim Wenders, which are all but unknown to most American audiences.
Tonight through January 24, all screenings at E Street Cinema. See the full schedule for dates and times.
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Resistance is futile. J.J. Abrams is taking over. Much as Judd Apatow is the current king of comedy, Abrams is slowly building an empire of action/thriller media that should have Jerry Bruckheimer shaking in his boots. Chief among his strengths is his ability to create prolonged tension through the dropping of clever and sporadic hints and mysterious tidbits of information. Which works great when you have weeks to play out that kind of strategy on a TV series like Lost, but how to do it with a movie? Of course, the marketing campaign! Cloverfield, in reality, is little more than a gimmick-driven monster movie, and a wisp of one at that, clocking in at under 90 minutes. The gimmick is that the entire movie is supposed to be shot on a camera belonging to one of the characters, which was subsequently found by the authorities after the whole nasty ordeal is over. But Abrams knows his Blair Witch history, and knows with a little internet buzz and a lot of smoke and mirrors, a gimmick like that can be gold. I know this is going to inevitably be a disappointment, but I'm strangely drawn to the multiplex all the same. Damn you, Abrams, consider my ticket purchased.
View the trailer.
Now playing all over the area.