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

Berlin Alexanderplatz

We're issuing a challenge to Popcorn & Candy readers this week: attend this week's featured film. Sound easy? Well, there's a catch. Our first pick this week is Berlin Alexanderplatz, the magnum opus of German filmmaking maniac Rainer Werner Fassbinder, an adaptation of Alfred Döblin's epic, Ulysses-esque 1929 novel about a small time crook's descent into the criminal underworld of Weimar-era Berlin. There are few things Fassbinder ever did without some degree of excess: he wrote and directed over 60 movies, plays, and television series in the less than 20 years of his career, which he ended in typically Fassbinder fashion with an overdose of cocaine and sleeping pills at the age of 37. And in adapting Döblin's daunting novel, Fassbinder's baroque tendencies were in grand flourish, as he made the book into a 15+ hour TV mini-series that is generally regarded more as one episodic film than a television series in any traditional sense.

The view of the work as a single, gargantuan film was supported by a theatrical release in the U.S. in the early '80s, where theaters would screen a number of episodes each night over the course of a week, and in some cases, marathon one or two day screenings, which quickly earned the film a cult reputation as an endurance test if nothing else. Not that it was a huge hit or anything, but considering that Steven Soderbergh's new Che Guevera biopic has found it nearly impossible in 2008 to gain distribution as a mere 4+ hour film, one wonders what this says about the deterioration of the collective attention span over the last quarter century. But the Goethe Institut is saying attention deficit be damned, and screening the entire film in just two days this weekend.

Of course, you could just add all six discs to your Netflix queue and watch them at your leisure, but where's the challenge in that? What do you get if you manage it? Well, we've been procrastinating on the production of official Popcorn & Candy T-shirts, and we thought giving away some genuine Berlin currywurst—which the Goethe Institut will serve along with other snacks at Saturday's 11-hour screening—would be too obvious an homage to David Letterman's old practice of doling out canned hams, so the prize will likely just be our undying admiration. Just what you were looking for, right?

View a clip.
Parts 1-9 on Saturday from noon-11pm, and 10-18 on Sunday from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. at the Goethe Institut. $12 per day or $20 for both, and some delicious Berlin currywurst will be served on Saturday to get you through that day's marathon 11-hour screening.

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XIX Latin American Film Festival

Once again this year, the AFI teams up with the Ibero-American Cultural Attaches Association and Inter-American Development Bank to present an impressive collection of films from all over Latin America. The festival has nearly 40 features from 17 countries from the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe, plus a collection of shorts. It's the most comprehensive collection of Latin American film that D.C. sees every year, and well attended, with nearly 10,000 people turning out for last year's festival. Check out the schedule to find something that strikes your fancy.

Opened last night and runs through October 7 at the AFI and Gala Hispanic Theatre.

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Towelhead

Most of the controversy so far for Alan Ball's Towelhead has swirled around the incendiary title. Alicia Erian's novel, on which the film is based, featured the same title, but when the film premiered last year at the Toronto Film Festival, the more audience-friendly moniker Nothing is Private had been attached to it. Since then, Ball has won his battle to keep the original name, thanks in large part to Toronto audiences who were more offended by the politically correct change than the racial slur. Now that that tempest has settled down, don't expect there to be any shortage of outrage over the rest of the movie's content, which includes an indictment of American racism, religious fundamentalism, and a U.S. military serviceman looking to take advantage of the 13-year old girl next door who has developed an interest in him. The movie centers on the girl (played by 19-year-old Summer Bishil, in case you were already feeling sketched out by a girl barely in her teens playing this part), an Arab-American sent to live with her strict Catholic father in small-town Texas, and her difficult assimilation into an environment that isn't very receptive to her presence. Ball's trademark dark satirical melodrama is never subtle—as anyone who's watched True Blood on HBO the last couple of weeks can attest—and Towelhead, from title to content, is no exception.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at E Street Cinema.

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The Short Films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Apichatpong Weerasethakul is a maverick of Thai cinema, a director who works outside of the tightly controlled filmmaking industry in that country, largely due to a subject matter that often falls outside of acceptability in his native land. His films have gained him international stardom in the world of serious art film for his experimentally-minded and often dreamlike filmmaking. While some his features have seen decent U.S. distribution (on home video anyway), the Freer is offering a rare treat this weekend to see a collection of the director's short films.

Sunday at 2 p.m. in the Freer Gallery's Meyer auditorium. Free.

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Hercules Returns

Fans of Mystery Science Theater 3000 may want to check out the Washington Psychotronic Film Society's feature this week, which uses a slightly skewed take on the familiar concept. Rather than heckling the existing audio of a bad old movie, in this case, they're making it up entirely. The framing device is that a movie theater schedules a showing of 1964's reportedly god-awful sword-and-sandals Hercules flick Ercole, Sansone, Maciste e Ursus gli invincibili. Problem is, their print is lacking an audio track or subtitles, forcing them to improvise all the dialogue from the projection booth.

Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. at the Old Arlington Grill. Free, $2 donation suggested.