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

Doctor Zhivago

My earliest distinct memory of seeing a movie in a theater is at the age of four or five. Was it the latest from Disney, or maybe a Lucas space opera? No, it was Doctor Zhivago, which was showing at the local college. Whether or not my mother—or the lack of a ready babysitter—can be thanked (or blamed) for the 30-odd years of movie obsession that followed is debatable, but at the very least, having a three and a half hour romantic epic by David Lean as one's first cinema memory is bound to make some kind of lasting impression. Having seen it again since then, I tend to prefer Brief Encounter for the romantic Lean, Lawrence of Arabia for the epic Lean, and Bridge on the River Kwai for the wartime drama Lean. All the same, Zhivago stands alone as the director's most fully realized synthesis of his four major areas of expertise (throw in his penchant for classic literary adaptations as number four).

The source material, Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning novel, was an instant classic in its own right, a political history of early 20th-century Russia told via the eponymous Doctor and the conflicted life he led, pulled between duty to his wife and love for his mistress (who he is constantly separated from and reunited with) amid the tumult of the first world war and the Russian Revolution. The novel is painstaking in its details of the lives of the protagonists. The chief gripe, in fact, about Lean's adaptation is often how much he left out, which is a little staggering considering the 197 minute running time of the edit being shown this week. Omar Sharif, of the soulful eyes and smoldering good looks, plays the doctor, Julie Christie the mistress. Supporting turns are made by an impressive cast including Tom Courtenay, Alec Guinness, the always crazy Klaus Kinski, and a particularly hateful Rod Steiger.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow and runs once each afternoon for the next week at the AFI.

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Manoel de Oliveira, Portuguese Marvel

It is often the case that in the anniversary year of a director or actor's birth, festivals of the artist's films will spring up everywhere, celebrating a life and work that is usually long since complete. The case of Manoel de Oliveira, who was born 100 years ago this December, is no different on first glance. A retrospective was shown in New York in the spring, and a similar one begins this weekend at the National Gallery. What makes this different from the norm, though, is the fact that not only is de Oliveira still alive, but the director is still producing films, at the Woody Allen-ish pace of one per year since he was in his early 80s. But in a very non Woody Allen-ish fashion, his late work is regarded as the equal of his early films, if not his career's ongoing pinnacle. The director, who, for political reasons, produced a scant handful of films during the first half-centry of his life, has become increasingly active, producing a wide variety of work that runs from documentary to narrative film, from black and white to color, silent to sound, and short to 7+ hour epics. A retrospective of his work is as much a look at nearly a full century of film as it is a look at one man's creative life. The National Gallery has selected 15 films from throughout his career, starting this Saturday with his first film (a silent short, Douro, faina fluvial) and his first feature (Aniki Bóbó).

Opens Saturday at noon at the National Gallery of Art and runs on various dates through the end of September. See the NGA's schedule for specific dates and times.

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is one of those rare confluences of heady cinematic artistry and huge financial success. The film is one of only three to ever win all five of the "major" Academy Awards (Picture, Director, Screenplay, Actor/Actress), received nearly universal acclaim, and made over $100 million at the box office, a bona fide blockbuster in 1974, particularly on a modest budget of less than $5 million. Today it enjoys a spot on most all-time top 10 or 20 lists, and has likely eclipsed the Ken Kesey counterculture classic upon which it was based in terms of cultural import. A point which was likely a continual thorn in the author's side, considering that he hated the adaptation so much he sued the producers over their changes to his book. It's easy to chalk up the film's popularity to the anti-authoritarian zeitgeist of the mid-70s: a society finally rid of the albatross of Vietnam celebrating a rebel spirit, in Jack Nicholson's revelatory performance as convict R.P. McMurphy, who gets himself sent to an asylum to avoid prison work detail, and while there foments a patient rebellion against the restrictive rulemaking of the hospital's evil Nurse Ratched. But Nest wasn't so much timely as it is timeless; it feels at once a piece of the time from which it sprang, yet because it leans so heavily on metaphor and allegory, is as enduring as a fairy tale, though a very grim one indeed.

View the trailer.
Sunday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings at the AFI. Director Miloš Forman will attend Tuesday night's screening.

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Vicky Christina Barcelona

Speaking of Woody Allen, it's late summer bordering on early fall, which must mean that it's time for his latest. The relentlessly productive Allen draws his European Tetralogy to a close with Vicky Christina Barcelona—he returns to the familiar confines of New York City for his next film. VCB concerns a Spanish painter who manages to seduce two American tourists (Vicky and Christina) travelling together in Barcelona. Meanwhile, his unhinged ex is about to re-enter his life and make an awkward situation even moreso. A man with this much sex appeal might be difficult to put onscreen convincingly, except that the man in question is Javier Bardem, for whom I'm quite certain my girlfriend would leave me in a moment, even when he's playing an emotionless killer wearing a ridiculous pageboy haircut. Much to do has been made about threesomes and sapphic liaisons between Scarlet Johanssen and Penelope Cruz in the lead-up to the film, but by all accounts from the film's Cannes premiere, the film is more sweet misanthropy than erotic sizzle. Prevailing opinion is that it's also a good, but not great, late-career work from Allen; so think not as good as Match Point, but worlds better than Anything Else. Which, if you're a fan of Allen—and chances are that at this stage of the game, you have a pretty firm opinion on the man's work—is plenty good enough for an enjoyable night at the theater.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Cinema.

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As Tears Go By

Wong Kar-Wai's debut feature was already awash in the stylistic signatures that have made him, in the two decades since its release, a visionary of Hong Kong art films. Dreamy visuals, languorous close-ups, and neon-studded noir were already firmly entrenched in the director's vocabulary in this otherwise fairly conventional tale of small-time gangsters and the complications love introduces to a life of crime. Wong's film borrows liberally from American filmmakers (Scorcese's Mean Streets being the most obvious touchstone) while still introducing the director as a singular and vital new voice. Long difficult to see on the big screen in the U.S., the film only this year had it's first limited theatrical release here. It screens this weekend as part of the Freer & Sackler Galleries' Hong Kong Film Festival.

Friday evening at 7 p.m. and Sunday afternoon at 2 p.m. at the Freer Gallery's Meyer Auditorium. Free, but tickets are required.

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And, of course, you really can't go wrong with Tropic Thunder, which we reviewed earlier today. Unless you're easily offended, in which case just about any film here (or anywhere) may be a roll of the dice.