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

The Harder They Come

Ask most people who was responsible for the influx of reggae and Jamaican culture into the U.S., and you'll probably get Bob Marley back as a response. And while it was Marley who flooded the country and the airwaves, it was The Harder They Come, released a year before Marley's debut, that opened the floodgates. The first feature film produced in Jamaica, the movie was a huge hit there, and managed to score some fans on the festival circuit, enough to get picked up by Roger Corman for U.S. distribution, where it failed miserably. But Corman was savvy enough to realize that the film's rough-edged blaxploitation feel and infectious island soundtrack were a perfect fit for the burgeoning midnight movie movement, and the film became a cult smash, playing on the midnight circuit for most of the 70s.

The movie stars Jimmy Cliff, who was already a big star in Jamaica, but unknown here; though his contributions to the soundtrack probably did more to make him a U.S. star than his appearance in the film. Cliff plays a naïve singer who moves to Kingston to become famous; but he gets taken advantage of at every turn, most egregiously by a record producer who forces him to basically give away rights to his recording if he wants it to become a hit. Through a fairly implausible turn of events, Cliff becomes an outlaw and a folk hero. The plot contrivances are standard-issue exploitation fare, but its historical significance and that soundtrack, along with lots of revealing documentary style footage of life in Jamaica in the early 70s, make it a must-see.

View the trailer.
Screens Friday and Saturday night at the AFI; Saturday's screening, in keeping with the movie's roots, is at midnight.

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Cinematic Collaboration: The Italians

Film history is filled with Director-Actor pairings where both artists did much of their best work in tandem with the other. The Smithsonian's Resident Associates program has been running a recurring program examining the mechanics of some of these relationships. Not a screening per se, the programs are mostly lectures, with film clips used to illustrate the points. This weekend's lecture promises to be an excellent one, looking at two pairs, Federico Fellini & Marcello Mastroianni, and Michelangelo Antonioni and Monica Vitti. Max Alvarez, the film coordinator for the Museum of Women in the Arts, and film critic for the Washington Diplomat, leads the discussion.

Sunday afternoon from 1-4 p.m. at the S. Dillon Ripley Center as part of the Smithsonian's Resident Associate Program. Tickets $15-$20.

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Bigger, Stronger, Faster*

Filmmaker Chris Bell tackles a high-profile subject from a very personal perspective in his first documentary. Bell grew up in a family where steroid use was the norm, and managed to fare better than his brothers in dealing with its effects. Documentaries that star their makers have become commonplace, and Bell's film is firmly within that school; he's telling his own story and that of those close to him as much as he is looking at performance enhancers in society as a whole. Which is an effective tool when dealing with a problem so large that many people feel justified in wondering if there's anything really wrong with it. As the movie's tagline asks, if everyone's doing it, is it really cheating? Of course, rationalizations mask the damage done by performance enhancers, and Bell seeks to document the human tragedies associated with its use. Starting with those that hit him hardest.

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

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Mother of Tears

Horror legend Dario Argento has been absent from theatres in recent years, even when he has been making movies. His output over the past decade or so has been of pretty spotty quality, and in the U.S. anyway, hasn't seen much in the way of theatrical release. That doesn't look to change with his latest, which is in pretty limited release, and is only going to be at one theatre in D.C., and only for a week. But it's a significant film, as Argento has finally made the last installment of his long fallow "Three Mothers" trilogy, which started with the classic Suspiria, and continued with the somewhat less lauded Inferno. The trilogy concerns three centuries old witches, each with her own installment in the trilogy. In the finale, an ancient evil is unleashed in the form of the third witch, the Mater Lachrymarum, and an art student played by Argento's daughter Asia may be the only one who can stop her. In addition to the attraction for horror aficionados to see how Argento winds up the trilogy, surely some will come out to see just what sort of family dysfunction plays out on screen. Asia has often said she had a poor relationship with her often absent father as a child, and Dario has consistently cast her in his movies in roles where she is put through the ringer, even going so far as to direct his own daughter in her first nude scene at the age of 16 (Trauma), and filming her in a rape scene in 1996's The Stendahl Syndrome. And you thought Woody Allen had issues.

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

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Red, White, and Zero

Red, White and Zero was to be a portmanteau of three short films based on stories by British playwright (and Morrissey fave) Shelagh Delaney, directed by three of the greats of British cinema, Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, and Peter Brook. But it never came to pass. Richardson and Brook decided to make shorts completely unrelated to Delaney, which makes one wonder just who it was at United Artists that was supposed to be supervising the project. At any rate, all three completed their segments, but left with three shorts that had absolutely nothing to do with each other, UA never released them as a unit. The Library of Congress screened all three together for the first time locally in 2000, 33 years after they were made, and now, 8 years later, there's another opportunity to see the trio, which include Anderson's telling of Delaney's The White Bus, Richardson's Red and Blue, a light musical starring Vanessa Redgrave and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and a Zero Mostel-starring comedy, Ride of the Valkyrie from Brook.

Screens tonight at the Library of Congress' Mary Pickford Theatre at 7 p.m. Free.