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

Bergman, Burnett, & the Coens at the AFI

If you don't live near Silver Spring, you may want to think about just setting up camp there for the next month. After a slow January at the AFI Silver with a sparse selection of non-new releases, tonight the theater kicks off three month-long retrospectives full of fantastic programming. A little over six months after the death of Ingmar Bergman, the theater has set up a series in remembrance of the director. From his extensive filmography, the AFI has picked 10 movies, including audience favorites The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and Summer With Monika. The Coen brothers get the complete review treatment, as every single feature they've made will hit the Silver's screens over the next month, including twelve films from Blood Simple through The Ladykillers, plus No Country for Old Men, which continues the run that it started back in November. Lastly, there's a timely look at the films of Charles Burnett, a director for whom interest has rekindled of late with last year's re-release (and subsequent DVD release) of the legendary but little seen indie classic Killer of Sheep. In addition to screenings of Killer, the AFI will cover two other Burnett features, as well as a series of short films by the director spanning four decades.

All three series open tonight at the AFI Silver Theatre.

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Taxi to the Dark Side

Alex Gibney's follow-up to his Oscar-nominated film detailing the spectacular demise of Enron shines the same bright and unforgiving light on the Bush military's use of torture since Sept. 11. The whole affair would be (should be?) a scandal of gargantuan proportions if not for the fact that much of the American public has been convinced that torture is a sound and effective idea. Gibney humanizes the issue by framing the investigation around the story of an Afghani cab driver who was beaten to death while in American custody in 2002. He's hardly the only one, but when it came out that he had no ties to terrorists and that his death had been ruled a homicide by the military's medical examiner, his case became a catalyst for intense scrutiny of U.S. interrogation policy in the war on terror. Gibney scores interviews with some of the very officers who administered beatings, as well as military experts on interrogation techniques. Much like last year's No End In Sight, Taxi is lent a great deal of credibility through the voices of soldiers and officials who at one time were on the other side of the issue. Also like No End, the result is measured and carefully reasoned in its approach, but infuriating in its effect, and has earned Gibney his second consecutive Best Documentary Oscar nomination.

View the trailer.
Opens tonight at E Street Cinema. Director Alex Gibney will be on hand for Q&A at tonight's 7:10 p.m. screening.

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In Bruges

Despite his relative youth (he's not yet 40), playwright Martin McDonagh has been wowing theater audiences for over a decade now, since he burst onto the scene in 1996 with The Beauty of Queen Leenane, which piled up a slew of awards and set him up as a young playwright to watch. He's lived up to the hype in the intervening years, building a body of work that tends towards violent and dark humor that seems custom built for a jump to the big screen. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the first time he laid his hands on a camera he managed to score an Oscar, for the short film Six Shooter in 2005. Now, with In Bruges, McDonagh completes his transition with his very first feature. The film appears to continue his penchant for mixing blood with black comedy and analyzing the deeper psychological motivations behind violence, and concerns two hitmen holing up in a Belgian tourist trap while they wait for further instructions from their boss.

View the trailer.
Opens today at Bethesda Row, and in Chinatown.

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Mapping Stem Cell Research: Terra Incognita

The National Cathedral may not be the first place one expects to find a film screening, particularly one on a politically charged scientific issue. But since most of the political opposition to stem cell research derives from issues of faith, a screening of Maria Finitzo's new documentary on the subject there doesn't seem so out of place. Finitzo focuses on Dr. Jack Kessler, a researcher at Northwestern who changed the focus of his stem cell research from developing a cure for diabetes to helping those with spinal injuries. His interest was personal as well as professional: his teenage daughter suffered a spinal injury in a skiing accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down. With the Kessler's story as a starting point, Finitzo examines all sides of the issue, religious, political, scientific, and human.

View the trailer.
D.C. premiere this Saturday at 4 p.m. at the National Cathedral. Director Maria Finitzo will be on hand afterwards for a Q&A, and will also be at the Cathedral the following morning for a discussion on "Faith & Bioethics" with Bioethicist Cynthia Cohen.

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Best of the D.C. Shorts Film Fest:

Short film, as a medium, never gets the audience it deserves, since no one seems able to come up with an effective distribution model for getting it in front of people. It’s a shame, since it would be interesting to see what many directors could do with a condensed subject, but as it stands now, what motivation is there for most established filmmakers to make the effort to make a ten-minute film that hardly anyone will ever see? It was refreshing last year to see Wes Anderson, who launched his own career on a short, go back to the format.

Since shorts have no commercial theatrical release, that leaves festivals and special, dedicated shorts events as the best way to see them on a big screen. The DC Shorts Film Festival has been providing just such an outlet for local audiences, and this weekend they’re compiling the best films from their 2007 festival into two programs of 10 films each that screen tonight and tomorrow.

Tonight and Saturday nights at the Goethe Institut. There are two different programs each night, at 7 and 9:30 p.m. respectively. All screenings are currently sold out, but it's still possible you can get in on standby.