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

Be Kind Rewind

It appears that video tape will likely be to the generation currently growing up what 8-tracks were to my own. So it's probably time to prepare for the day when the only references to VHS in movies will come attached to anachronistic jokes at the expense of my own nostalgia. That's unlikely to be the case in the new film from Michel Gondry, though, since he's a director known for avoiding digital age solutions to filmmaking problems. Be Kind Rewind is about a video store that still dispenses miles and miles of that magnetic tape, which becomes a problem when a friend (Jack Black) of a clerk (Mos Def) at the store inadvertently erases the store's tapes after a freak accident in which his head becomes magnetized during an attempt at industrial sabotage. Faced with the threat of Def losing his job, the pair do what any reasonable people would do in such a situation, and attempt to remake the movies with a camcorder, casting themselves as the stars of films such as Ghostbusters, Driving Miss Daisy, and Robocop. Sound implausible? Perhaps, but this is the world of Gondry, where just this kind of magically realistic whimsy is the norm. He is, after all, the man who convinced audiences that a machine that looked suspiciously like it was made of used kitchen implements could target and erase selected memories in the brain. For an audience willing to follow his flights of fancy, anything is possible.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at a number of area theaters.

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Barton Fink

While Fargo and No Country for Old Men tend to be the top critical darlings from the Coen brothers, and The Big Lebowski is the rabidly adored fan favorite, my own personal pick remains the surreal nightmare of 1991's Barton Fink. Playing out like a David Lynch film scripted by Preston Sturges, Fink is both wildly hilarious and darkly disturbing, often at the same time. John Turturro's turn in the title role is a career best, as an acclaimed young New York playwright who heads west to Hollywood to bring his theater of the "common man" to a larger audience, but ends up hopelessly blocked after he's assigned a B wrestling picture to pen. John Goodman plays the mysterious traveling salesman in the room next door at the long-term hotel the studio has booked the writer into, and also puts up some of the best work of his career. The Coens satirical edge has never been sharper, as they cut into both low-brow Hollywood culture and high-minded (but out of touch) literary leftists with equal mad-eyed glee. The film builds to a wildly absurd and dream-like conclusion, ending with one of the most bizarrely appropriate final images in cinema history.

View the trailer.
Screening at the AFI tomorrow and Sunday at 9:15 p.m., and Monday at 9:10 p.m.

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Wild Style

Earlier this month the National Portrait Gallery kicked off an exhibit called Recognize, which highlights hip-hop culture. This weekend, the museum is screening one of the earliest motion picture portraits of hip-hop, Charlie Ahearn's cult classic, Wild Style. Ostensibly a narrative feature about one graffiti artist called Zoro, the film is as much a documentary about the birth of hip-hop culture as it is a simple work of fiction. From the music to the art to the dancing, the film serves as a realistic slice of life from early '80s New York, and features appearances by Fab Five Freddy, Grandmaster Flash, Kool Moe Dee, and a host of hip-hops originators. As an added bonus, Ahearn will be on hand to talk about the film after the screening.

View the trailer.
Sunday at 2 p.m. in the National Portrait Gallery's Nan Tucker McEvoy Auditorium. Free, tickets first come, first served. Q&A with director Charlie Ahearn to follow.

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Michael Haneke: A Cinema of Provocation

If you've ever seen any film by Michael Haneke, you likely still bear the psychological scars. Haneke's work is unforgiving and difficult, rejecting seemingly as many standard filmmaking and storytelling conventions as he can in service of conveying pictures of a cold and often uncaring world. Haneke came to feature filmmaking relatively late in life, after stints as a musician, actor, playwright, and TV director, and with each new project continues to confound anyone in the audience who might try to pigeonhole the artist and enter the new film with any expectations based upon past work - one of the few consistencies being his often blank and unresolved endings. He's tackled tense dramas on bourgeois life, brutal thrillers, and even post-apocalyptic sci-fi. The Goethe-Intitut of Washington is sponsoring a month-long retrospective to take place at their own screening room as well as at the Austrian and French Embassies. Just don't expect to come out unscathed.

Runs from February 25 to March 24 at the Goethe-Institut. See their website for a full list of films, times, locations, and ticket prices.

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The Signal

Carrying with it one of the strongest and most mysterious buzzes of any film to emerge from last year's Sundance film festival (perhaps due to it's unusual concept, perhaps due simply to smart PR), The Signal is a horror film in three movements, by three different directors, taking on a common incident from three different vantage points. The three directors agreed on a concept: that a signal was invading cell phones and causing homicidal tendencies on the part of those receiving them, and then went about making their films without knowing what any of the others was up to. Which adds up to a low budget thrill ride that producers seem to be attempting to spin into a Blair Witch-esque internet hype machine, but which sounds fascinating either way.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at Chinatown and Potomac Yards.