Popcorn & Candy: From Such Great Heist
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
While the AFI has the corner on the film noir market this week, the one thing the Institute's otherwise fantastic festival is missing is some good foreign noir. For those looking for a little international noir flavor, the National Gallery has just the thing this weekend, with a screening of one of the best heist movies ever made. The film, about a team of crooks trying to pull off a complex job while dealing with the usual personal distractions of trying to manage a family and a life of crime, was highly influential on the budding French New Wave movement. And its director, Jules Dassin, was an American expatriate who, in what seems to be a running theme through a lot of classic film screenings this year, was a victim of the HUAC in the 50s.
The film's most memorable characteristic is the heist itself, a half hour sequence presented in complete silence, without dialogue or soundtrack. It's a masterpiece of constantly heightening tension, as well as a detailed how-to on the step-by-step commission of a crime. But if the heist itself was all Rififi had going for it, it would probably be little more than a footnote. The screenplay, by Auguste Le Breton from his own novel, is a beautiful piece of nuanced pulp fiction that perfectly straddles the line between high art and crowd-pleaser. Jean Servais, whose drawn and downtrodden face seems built for the tragic noir hero, turns in a brilliant performance as well.
View the trailer.
Sunday at 4:30 p.m. at the National Gallery. Free.
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FilmFest DC doesn't rest on its laurels during its off season. They're sponsoring, along with the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, the Arabian Sights Film Festival, which is in its 13th year. The 2008 program features 13 films from eight Arabian countries, as well as U.S. films from Arab and Arab-American filmmakers, including D.C.-based filmmaker Bassam Haddad. His film, The Other Threat is a documentary examining prejudices against Muslim immigrants in Europe. The festival opens tomorrow night with the Syrian film 33 Days, another doc, this one about life in Lebanon during Israel's 2006 bombing of Beirut.
Tonight through Nov. 2, with screenings at E Street and the Goethe-Institut. See the schedule for a full list of films.
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Few films are as lean and gritty as Detour, an early and prototypical film noir playing most of the next week in the AFI's Noir City DC retrospective. Cult director Edward G. Ulmer, who made his career on tight little genre pics that always were a cut above their modest budgets and pulpy plots, shot the entire 67 minute film in under a week for just $20,000, which was still peanuts even by 1940s standards. A grizzled Tom Neal is hitchhiking across country, and the guy giving him a ride dies while Neal is taking a turn behind the wheel. He panics, dumps the body, keeps the cash and the car and continues on, only to make the unfortunate mistake of picking up a hitchhiking femme fatale along the highway who ensures that things are going to spiral out of control. Detour is rough, and the low-budget is more than apparent. It's a B-movie, no question, but rates an A+ despite its modest means.
View the trailer.
Today through Tuesday at the AFI. Check the schedule for the rest of this week's noir offerings.
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The Unknown Woman (La Sconosciuta)
It's pretty rare that an Italian film finds American theatrical distribution these days, so what is it that makes The Unknown Woman so special? It could be that it’s by the director of one of the most well known pieces of world cinema from the past few decades, Cinema Paradiso’s Giuseppe Tornatore. Or it could be that producers think that the film's tone, which is said to border on classic Eurotrash with lots of seedy sex and crime, might have more appeal to a U.S. audience than the serious dramas that usually hit our shores. Or it could be the raft of awards it picked up at Italy's national film awards for 2006. The film is a complex and convoluted thriller about a former Ukranian sex slave who develops a strange fixation on becoming involved with an upper-class Italian family, taking jobs with them that progressively get her closer and closer to one of their daughters. What follows, a twisting web of dark secrets and taut thrills, has divided critics as to whether the movie is bracing and thought-provoking or just shock-value trash. We're inclined to ask, why can't it be both?
View the trailer.
Opens today at E Street.
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Consider Oscar season officially open, with this, Clint Eastwood's high-minded period drama about a single mother (Angelina Jolie) in late 1920s L.A. whose son is kidnapped. When a similar tyke is recovered and presented to her, she insists it's not her son, and is publicly humiliated and institutionalized by a society already predisposed to scorn single moms. Oscar buzz has been surrounding this one for months, and the clip from the trailer, with a tearful Jolie pounding her chest as she yells, "I want my son back!" might as well have the words "Oscar clip" flashing at the bottom of the screen. So which is it going to be? Truly powerful and poignant, or overwrought melodrama? Eastwood is quite capable of going either way (as is Jolie, for that matter). There's a fine line between inspiration and manipulation, and it'll be interesting to see which way The Changeling leans. We will say this: the fact that Ron Howard was originally attached to direct probably doesn't bode well.
View the trailer.
Opens today at Georgetown, in more theaters next week.
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The Incredible Psychotronic Scopiotone Psychedelic Horror Show
D.C.'s reliable source for the oddest, most cultish, and most downright strange films that the movies have to offer celebrates a remarkable milestone next week. Washington Psychotronic Film Society has been treating local audiences to off-kilter cinema since 1988, and they're celebrating with a collection of some of the most out-there clips from the hundreds of films they've screened over the years.
Wednesday at the Old Arlington Grill. Free, $2 donation suggested.